brad brace contemporary culture scrapbook

October 19, 2009

ONE-THIRD OF DENGUE CALIFORNIA COFFEE CHILD BRIDES AND MASSIVE MADAGASCAR IVORY TEA FARMER COPS KILL SEVEN NEW GLOWING ‘FORCED ACQUISITION’ EARTHQUAKES, MONKEYS, MOSQUITOES, MUSHROOMS, TOBAGO MURDERS, SOUTH PACIFIC MALARIA, SECRETIVE RITUALS AND DERAILED PASSENGER TRAINS WITH BURMESE MIGRANT WORKERS HARASSED BY GANGS, PREFER HILTON HOTEL HORROR, ILLEGAL XINHUA FISHING, MALAYSIAN MALARIA MAYHEM, OVER BANGLADESH BORDER FENCING, POACHER BOATS, AND ALARMING NICARAGUAN CLIMATE CHANGE FOOD CRISIS AS RWANDA GENOCIDE’S GREENLIGHT RADIO STOCK EXCHANGE SURGES KILL THREE, WOUND 34 — HUNDREDS OF VENEZUELAN FOLK CORPSES TRAPPED FOR 100 YEARS IN KERMADEC, EASTER ISLANDS PONZI PRISON RAT-KILLING, ADMINISTRATIVE BUNGLED THAILAND TSUNAMI UNDERPANTS THIEF’S $60 MILLION PNG PATROL LOCK-UP

Kenyan authorities have seized almost 700kg of ivory worth millions of
dollars in a night-time raid at the country’s main airport. The Kenya
Wildlife Service says a similar amount was intercepted in the Ethiopian
capital, Addis Ababa. Both consignments – with a potential value of more
than $1.5m (£938,000) – were reportedly headed for Thailand. Poaching is on
the increase mostly owing to high demand for ivory in Asia. It is not yet
clear whether the ivory, recovered at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta Airport, had
been trafficked from other parts of the continent or was from East Africa.
Twenty years ago the world’s elephant population was plummeting and the
trade in ivory was banned. But over the past decade the ban has been
periodically relaxed and occasional supervised ivory auctions have been
allowed.

A powerful earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale struck the remote
Kermadec Islands region. The quake occurred at a depth of 62 km and its
epicentre was about 260 km north east of Raoul Island. There were no
immediate reports of any damage or injuries. No tsunami warning was issued
following the quake. The islands, which are often hit by severe quakes,
have no permanent population except a small New Zealand Department of
Conservation team on Raoul Island.

Madagascar’s rival political parties have agreed on key posts in a
transitional government. Andry Rajoelina, who led a military coup that
ousted President Marc Ravalomanana, will remain as president. However, Mr
Rajoelina will not be allowed to run for the post in Madagascar’s next
elections, which must be held by November 2010 under the deal. The newly
appointed prime minister is Eugene Mangalaza, who is a member of the same
political party as another former president, Didier Ratsiraka, who was
ousted himself by Mr Ravalomanana in 2002. The deal is expected to end the
political crisis that has enveloped Madagascar since Rajoelina took power.
The political struggle has led to the deaths of more than 100 people and
hampered the island’s tourism industry.

The disasters this week show people on Pacific shores still lack basic
protection from tsunamis The official responses to this week’s double
disaster – first, the Samoan tsunami, and then the Sumatran earthquakes –
again reveal worrying flaws in the early warning systems that are the
first, and usually only, lines of defence against the natural hazards that
regularly afflict the world’s most seismically unstable regions. When the
8.3 magnitude undersea earthquake struck, 190km south of the Samoan
islands, it was registered instantly at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre
on Ewa Beach, Oahu, which then issued tsunami warnings to a number of
Pacific island groups, including New Zealand and Samoa.

The fencing project of India – Bangladesh border is expected to complete by
March 2010. The development of fence had been put off due to issues like
harsh topography and pending land acquisition case, cites a home ministry
statement. The other factors which delayed the fencing of the India –
Bangladesh border include need for realignment of fencing, presence of
human life within 150 yards of border, objections from Bangladesh Rifles
for the development of fences within 150 yards etc. The working season
available for the construction of the fence was also a very restricted one.
Approximately 2,649.74 km of the total 3,436.56 km have been fenced till
now. The project is now expected to reach completion by March, 2010, it
said. About 3,326.82 km of border roads of the sanctioned 4,326.24 km have
also been constructed. The 2,840 km India – Bangladesh border will be
floodlighted, which is expected to cost about Rs.1,327 crore. This is
expected to get over by 2011-2012. The work is being carried out by CPWD,
NBCC and NPCC.

With no outside help in sight, villagers used their bare hands to dig out
rotting corpses, four days after landslides triggered by a huge earthquake
obliterated four hamlets in western Indonesia. At least 644 people were
buried and presumed dead in the hillside villages in Padang Pariaman
district on the western coast of Sumatra island. If confirmed it would
raise the death toll in the 7.6-magnitude earthquake to more than 1,300,
with about 3,000 missing. The extent of the disaster in remote villages was
only now becoming clear. So far, aid and rescue efforts have been
concentrated in the region’s capital, Padang, a city of 900,000 people
where several tall buildings collapsed. But the quake was equally
devastating in the hills of Pariaman, where entire hillsides were shaken
loose, sending a cascade of mud, rocks and trees through at least four
villages. Vice President Jusuf Kalla said there was little hope of finding
anyone alive. “We can be sure that they are dead. So now we are waiting for
burials.”

Police in Uganda have arrested and extradited a man who is among the most
wanted suspects from the Rwandan genocide. The 100-day killing rampage led
to the loss of an estimated 10 percent of Rwanda’s population. The 100-day
killing rampage led to the loss of an estimated 10 percent of Rwanda’s
population. IIdephonse Nizeyimana was picked up at a hotel in Rubaga, a
suburb of the capital, Kampala, by the National Central Bureau of Interpol.
He was transferred to a U.N. detention facility in Arusha, Tanzania, where
the tribunal is based. Top officials who allegedly took part in the
genocide, such as army generals and politicians, are tried by the tribunal.
Nizeyimana is one of the four top accused who are earmarked by the
prosecutor to be tried by the tribunal in Arusha after their arrest as part
of the ICTR completion strategy. Of a list of 13 fugitives, he is the
second to be arrested in less than two months.

Three major earthquakes struck within an hour and 10 minutes near Vanuatu
in the South Pacific, prompting a tsunami warning that was quickly lifted.
The quakes struck near Vanuatu in the South Pacific. They were part of
series of nine moderate-to-major quakes that rattled the region in just
over four hours. The first quake, with a magnitude of 7.8, struck at 9:03
a.m. at a depth of 35 km (22 miles) and an epicenter 295 km (180 miles)
north-northwest of Luganville, Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu. A second quake,
with a magnitude of 7.7, struck 15 minutes later at the same depth and an
epicenter of 340 km (210 miles) north-northwest of Luganville. The third
quake, with a magnitude of 7.1, struck at 10:13 a.m. at about the same
depth and an epicenter of 280 km (175 miles) north-northwest of Luganville.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued and then quickly lifted a
regional tsunami warning and watch for parts of the Pacific near the first
earthquake’s epicenter. The first data from a buoy at Luganville on Vanuatu
detected a tsunami wave of 4 centimeters (1.6 inches) at Luganville on
Vanuatu.

One of the suspects in the killing of two Tobago teenagers was shot dead by
police officers in Moruga. Gary Mohammed was killed around 10.15 p.m. A
party of police officers approached a wooden structure in a forested area
in St Mary’s, Moruga, and were fired upon, officers said. In returning
fire, Mohammed was shot several times and died at the scene. The
32-year-old, of Ste Madeleine, San Fernando, last lived in Tobago. The
search continues for a second suspect, who was also shot. The battered
bodies of Kolen Salandy, 16, and Rondell Thomas, 15, were found in French
Fort, Scarborough, Tobago. Their bodies bore marks of violence to the neck
and throat, and both were found with their underpants and trousers pulled
down to their knees. Autopsies revealed the teens died as a result of
broken necks. A manhunt was launched for the suspects after they were
spotted in Princes Town. The men fled to Trinidad by boat after the
teenagers’ bodies were found, investigators said. They believed the men
were seeking assistance to leave the island by sea. As officers search for
the second suspect, medical institutions have been informed to be on the
alert for anyone needing attention for gunshot wounds.

Stepping off the plane, tourists are welcomed to Easter Island with a
garland of flowers. They find themselves on a tiny dot in the Pacific
Ocean, 3,700km west of Chile, to which the island belongs, and 2,000km east
of Pitcairn Island. All around are the white-flecked waves of the Pacific.
“What perfect peace,” exclaimed Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian explorer and
author when he arrived in the mid-1950s. He might not say so today. Some
70,000 visitors now arrive each year, up from just 14,000 in the mid-1990s.
Apart from the island’s utter remoteness, what attracts the tourists are
the moai, the mysterious giant stone statues erected by the ancestors of
the indigenous Rapa Nui people. They are testament to a complex society of
up to 20,000 people which later shrank to a shadow as a result of
calamitous environmental stress and deforestation, a cautionary tale
narrated in “Collapse”, a book by Jared Diamond, a polymath at the
University of California, Los Angeles. Today Easter Island once again faces
environmental threats. Food comes from Chile, either by ship or on the
seven weekly flights from Santiago (there are also two from Tahiti). The
visitors “all pull the chain,” Luz Zasso, the mayoress, notes acidly. The
absence of a sewage system is threatening the cleanliness of the island’s
underground water sources. But it would be hard to install one without
damaging archaeological sites. Electricity comes from diesel-powered
generators. Power cuts are frequent. Rubbish is piling up. Many Easter
Islanders are worried. Tourists should be limited to 50,000 a year and be
preferably well-heeled, argues Marcelo Pont, the vice-president of the
Council of Elders, an advisory body. Visitors from the Chilean mainland
attract particular resentment. “They’re interested in sun, sand and
swimming pools, not the island,” says Edgard Herevi of the local chamber of
tourism. Tourism has brought migrants from the mainland, too. The
population is now 5,000, up from 3,300 in 2002, of whom only half are now
of Rapa Nui descent. Locals complain that the incomers are competing in the
handicrafts trade, carving wooden moai and selling shell necklaces.

Thousands of Venezuelans congregated for candlelit rituals on a remote
mountainside where adherents make an annual pilgrimage to pay homage to an
indigenous goddess known as Maria Lionza. Along with Santeria, Venezuela is
home to other folk religions, such as the sect surrounding the Indian
goddess Maria Lionza, an indigenous woman who according to tradition was
born on Sorte Mountain and whose cult has spread to Colombia, Panama,
Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and Central America.

The Global Hunger Index placed Kenya among the world’s most food deficient
countries. The report by International Food Policy Research Institute
(IFPRI), Concern Worldwide and Welt Hunger Hilfe ranks countries on a
100-point scale with 0 being the best score, but Kenya had only 20.1 per
cent. In ranking the country is placed 29th in the world among the
countries with poor food security. Kenya is a hotspot on hunger
vulnerability because of the perennial droughts and insecurity. The world
has been dealing with the food security since 1976. But today close to 900
million people are still food insecure and Kenya is placed among the dark
section of the report. Democratic Republic of Congo was ranked the worst
followed by Burundi, Eritrea, Sierra Leone, Chad and Ethiopia. Egypt,
Tunisia, Algeria and Libya were identified as the countries in Africa that
have shown consistency in food security.

In “Law Abiding Citizen,” a sociopath goes on a rampage, killing major
officials in Philadelphia and holding the entire city hostage. He
essentially is a character elevated out of the ranks of horror films who
instead of killing teenagers reacting to hormones or other socio-biological
imperatives destroys adults reacting to career dictates. As the title
insists, this is a law-abiding citizen who is irate with a justice “system”
that allowed one of the killers of his wife and daughter to get off with a
light sentence. Does a social message lurk within the context of rapes,
dismemberment, bomb explosions and political assassinations? No, of course
not. That’s just the cover for filmmakers F. Gary Gray and writer Kurt
Wimmer to indulge in calculated genre mischief that mixes horror elements
with a suspense thriller. The script does create sufficient tension and
intrigue to hook viewers, along with a photogenic, hard-working cast, so
“Citizen,” should stir some mid-October box-office action. Gerard Butler
(who also is a producer) plays a supposedly average guy who witnesses the
slaughter of his wife and daughter by home-invasion robbers. Curiously,
this pair seems more interested in being outrageously sadistic than in
grabbing anything worth fencing, but that’s so an audience will understand
these really are bad people who deserve to die. Jamie Foxx plays a Philly
assistant D.A. without much hard evidence who plea-bargains an agreement
with one sleaze ball to testify against the other to win at least a death
verdict against one and a murder plea from the other.

Incidents of Thai gangs harassing and robbing Burmese migrant workers in
Southern Thailand are on the rise, claim several migrant workers. A Mon
migrant worker, employed at a rural rubber plantation in Hat Yai district
in Trang Province in Southern Thailand, said that he and his wife were
robbed of by a gang of three Thai teenagers. The gang stole 440 baht and a
cell phone. Nai Myint Aung, aged 30, said that he and eight of his friends
are already paying 50 baht per month to a different Thai gang, and have
been doing so for the past eight months. Nai Myint Aung said that if he or
his friends fail to pay the monthly extortion fee, the gang follows them
back to their homes and harasses their families. Nai Myint Aung also said
that he left his boss’s home, where he had received his paycheck of 7000
baht, and entered the local market. The gang of Thai teenagers followed him
from the marketplace to his neighborhood. Nai Myint Aung claimed that the
gang stopped his motorbike and seized his wife who accompanied him,
threatening the pair with a knife. The gang then searched his wife’s body
and stole 440 baht and her cellular phone. A Thai neighbor of the pair,
a-35 year-old man, saw the Nai Myint Aung and his wife being attacked, and
phoned the police, causing the gang to scatter. Nai Myint Aung said that
his wife had luckily had the foresight to stow his paycheck in her
brassiere, and thus the pair managed to escape the attack without losing
the 7000 baht he’d just received.

Officials say the sales have fuelled demand for ivory in Asian countries,
especially China, contributing to a sharp increase in elephant poaching. So
far this year poachers in Kenya have killed 128 elephants for their ivory;
last year 98 were killed. In July, Kenyan authorities intercepted 16
elephant tusks and two rhinoceros horns being illegally exported to Laos
from Mozambique. Some wildlife experts have attributed the increase in
elephant poaching to the presence of Chinese workers in Africa. With demand
for ivory products increasing back home, some Chinese workers on low
salaries in Kenya are reported to have become middlemen in the ivory trade.
And because of the high demand for ivory across Asia, the price of ivory
has shot up and can fetch more than $1,000 a kilo.

A magnitude-5.8 earthquake struck central Italy, causing buildings to
collapse in the historic centre of L’Aquila and raising fears of
fatalities. Rome, Abruzzo and other parts of central Italy were hit by the
quake, whose epicentre was in the area of Abruzzo’s capital, L’Aquila, at a
five-km depth. L’Aquila residents were shaken from sleep and ran out in
panic onto the city’s streets. Emergency services authorities said the
quake struck at 3.32 a.m. with a magnitude of 5.8 on the Richter scale. The
US Geological Survey initially reported the strength of the quake at 6.7
before lowering it to 6.3. In the hours before the earthquake, two tremors
had occurred with magnitudes of 3.5 and 3.9.

Once such warnings are received, it is up to local authorities to pass them
on to their coastal inhabitants by whatever methods have been agreed, with
instant automated text messaging among the most widely used techniques.
Text messaging is of particular value in the event of locally generated
tsunamis, when the window of warning is usually a matter of minutes, rather
than hours. But those Samoans who felt the tremor and waited for the text
that would tell them whether to head inland waited in vain, for no message
was sent out. And had anyone turned down the radio or television so as not
to miss the incoming text alert, they would have missed the islands’ only
warning – given out on local radio just as the first of two giant waves
began battering the islands’ southern shores. On New Zealand’s North
Island, meanwhile, several hundred people received their “instant” text
alert some three hours late, by which time the tsunami warning had already
been cancelled. The messaging service has now been suspended, and an
inquiry is already under way. But technological failure is not the only
factor that contributed to the death toll, which currently stands at 169.
Many of those killed were caught by the morning’s second wave as they
headed to the beaches to pick up the fish that had been washed ashore by
the first wave. Given that tsunamis usually take the form of a series of
powerful waves, sometimes even hours apart, such a fatal lack of awareness
speaks of a wider failure to pass on even basic tsunami knowledge and
preparedness to the islands’ coastal inhabitants. Education remains the
only truly effective means of reversing the effects of disaster amnesia,
but the last island-wide safety drill took place in October 2007, in
response to a tsunami earlier that year that killed 22 people on the nearby
Solomon Islands. Ironically, a similar tsunami safety drill had been
scheduled for American Samoa but the real thing arrived unannounced
instead.

Where the villages once stood, there was only mud and broken palm trees —
the mountainsides appeared gouged bare as if by a gigantic backhoe. The
villages “were sucked 30 meters deep into the earth. Even the mosque’s
minaret, taller than 20 meters disappeared. In Jumanak village, some 200 to
300 wedding guests at a restaurant were buried alive, including the bride.
Ichi, 19, had come back to the village for her wedding. “When the landslide
came, the party had just finished. I heard a big boom of the avalanche. I
ran outside and saw the trees fall down,” said Iseh, who like many
Indonesians uses only one name. “I tried to get in front of the house with
my brothers. We were so afraid. Landslides started coming from all
directions. I just ran and then I waited,” he said. Iseh says he knows of
only 10 people from the village who survived. He doesn’t know the fate of
his parents or brothers. The adjacent villages of Pulau Aiya, Lubuk Lawe
and Limo Koto Timur were also swept away. Survivors in the area said no
government aid or search teams had arrived, even four days after the quake.
Only about 20 local policemen had come with a power shovel and body bags.
“My relatives were all killed, washed away by the landslide,” said Dola
Jambak, a 48-year-old trader, picking through the rubble of his house. “I
lost seven relatives. Now all I can do is wait for the search teams. But
they don’t come.” The landslides cut off all roads, and the villages were
accessible only by foot. Jumanak is reached after walking about four miles
(six kilometers) for 1 1/2 hours.

In the attacks that started in April 1994, Hutu militias and members of the
general population sought out Tutsis and moderate Hutus, and went on a
100-day killing rampage. Civilians and children got incentives to take part
in the atrocities, including promises of land belonging to their Tutsi
neighbors. It was one of the most brutal genocides in modern history. Some
figures put the number of dead at 1 million — 10 percent of the population
of the central African nation. Millions more were raped and disfigured. A
whole generation of children lost their parents. Nizeyimana was a captain
the Rwanda Armed Forces. He is accused of exercising authority over
soldiers and personnel through a chain of command, and allegedly sent a
section of soldiers to execute of Rosalie Gicanda, a former queen of Rwanda
who was a “symbolic figure for all Tutsis.” This marks the second time
Uganda has cooperated to make an arrest. The tribunal has commended the
Interpol and the Ugandan authorities for their close cooperation.”

Malaria in the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu has been dramatically reduced
through an effective control strategy. There were 50,000 fewer cases of
Malaria in the Solomon Islands in 2008 compared with 2003. An effective
prevention and control strategy comprising of long lasting insecticide
treated bednet distribution, focal point indoor residual spraying, early
diagnosis and treatment and active case detection has had dramatic impact
on the annual incidence rate of malaria in both the Solomon Islands and
Vanuatu. The annual incidence rate (which is a measure of number of
confirmed cases of malaria per 1,000 population) has been reduced from 198
/1,000 to 84/1,000 in the Solomon Islands over the five year period ending
December 2008, while in Vanuatu it has decreased from 74/1,000 to 14 /
1,000 in the same period. Both countries had now been able to move from
control to pilot elimination as a result of the success of the Global Fund
financed programs. The capacity of both countries to scale up interventions
has further been improved as a result of AusAID’s support to the national
malaria strategies, particularly in the area of elimination and treatment.
The measures in place resulted in a significant decrease in the number of
confirmed malaria cases in the Solomon Islands compared to 2003, easing the
burden on the national health systems and budget, and reducing production
time lost due to malaria, which is a contributing factor that constrains
economic growth. A particular emphasis will be on strengthening health
systems in Pacific Islands countries and territories (PICTs).

A second pulse of the wave was 10 centimeters. It looked like a very small
wave. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The two major
quakes that followed the first one were aftershocks. When there’s a big
quake, the pattern they follow is after the first quake, a second and then
a third. Those are obviously related. At the Hotel Le Paris in Noumea, the
capital of New Caledonia, the manager said that she felt the shake but had
not seen any damage. On Espiritu Santo Island in Vanuatu, dive-shop owner
Rehan Syed said he was aware of no reports of damages or injuries. “We have
the sun out and winds are pretty normal. Pretty cloudy skies but nothing
more than that.” “We felt the quake (my chair and my keyboard moved) but
did not take too much notice as we live with shakes every week,” said John
Nicholls of Vanuatu Hotels in an e-mail. At the New Caledonia Hotel, guests
were evacuated to higher ground, General Manager Torani George said, adding
that he had felt “nothing, nothing at all.”

Greenpeace today called for the arrest of the captain of the Japanese ship
Koyu Maru 3, which Greenpeace caught fishing illegally in the Exclusive
Economic Zone of the Cook Islands. “The Koyu Maru 3 and other pirate
fishing vessels are stealing fish for their own profit, depriving the
people of the Cook Islands of a vital source of income,” said Josua
Turaganivalu, Oceans Campaigner of Greenpeace Australia Pacific on board
the Esperanza. “These pirates of the Pacific must be stopped from
plundering ocean life and robbing local communities.” The Greenpeace ship
Esperanza, campaigning to end the destruction of the world’s oceans,
encountered the Koyu Maru 3 hauling in its longline and catching tuna
within Cook Islands waters, where they have no license to fish. Greenpeace
provided the Cook Islands Ministry of Marine Resources and the Fisheries
Agency of Japan with photographic evidence of the illegal activity.
Greenpeace demands the Japanese government order Koyu Maru 3, which is
owned by Tokyo-based World Tuna Co Ltd, to stop its illegal fishing
activities and sailto the nearest port for further investigation. Globally,
more than US $9 billion dollars is lost each year to pirate fishing fleets.
Pirate fishers, who reap their profits in European, American and Asian
markets, are threatening fish stocks as well as depriving Pacific
communities of much-needed income. Pirate fishing in the Pacific accounted
for an average of 36% of its total fisheries, much higher than the global
average of 19%. “The government of Japan must show leadership in tackling
illegal fishing by its vessels in the Pacific. Japan must also take the
lead among major fishing nations and support efforts by Pacific countries
to reduce fishing activities in the region by half and close all four
pockets of international waters to fishing to allow tuna stocks to
recover,” added Wakao Hanaoka, Oceans Campaigner of Greenpeace Japan.
Long-liners like the Koyu Maru 3 mainly target bigeye, yellowfin and
albacore tuna, destined for sashimi markets in Japan and other countries
where this food has become popular. Some Pacific tuna stocks, such as
bigeye and yellowfin tuna, are being fished beyond their limits.

There is almost no unemployment, and thanks to tourist revenues and
government spending, living standards are similar to those on the mainland.
But locals worry about the future. In response, Chile’s government is
proposing laws that would beef up the island’s government, give the Rapa
Nui more say in it and allow them to control immigration. It also plans to
raise the entrance fee to the Rapa Nui National Park, where most of the
main sights are, from $10 to $60 for foreigners. The Rapa Nui Parliament, a
radical group that split from the Council of Elders, is calling for
independence. Its supporters blocked the airport’s runway for two days in
August. It wants to expel Chileans, even those who have lived much of their
life on the island, unless they have a longstanding relationship with a
Rapa Nui or are the parent of a child with Rapa Nui blood. The group also
dreams of ditching Chile’s peso and forming a Polynesian currency union,
including Australia and New Zealand. Such claims are merely a sign of
economic frustration, argues Sergio Rapu, an archaeologist and former
governor of the island. Perhaps. But the question they raise is whether
greater autonomy to run their own affairs would help the Rapa Nui to avoid
a repeat of the ecological collapse they failed to prevent centuries ago.
Sometimes one has to take drastic steps in Chile (or elsewhere) to get
noticed. The protest entirely is about the Islanders wishing to control who
arrives and who does not, and their model is the Galapagos control, also
for eco reasons. The Interior Minister pushed through an on arrival
registration system after the protest, but the Supreme Court disallowed
that as unconstitutional. The problem is the number of Chileans from
poverty stricken – yes, very poor – Chile who see Rapanui as a place with
lots of money to be made. And it is. So, go to Rapanui, take up with a
local girl, produce a child and stay until things don’t work out and, then,
abandon the island, partner and child. Why would a local girl be interested
in a “roto chileno”, Chilean slang for any-old-common-bastard (rough
translation)? Simple: older islanders make it very difficult for Rapanui to
marry Rapanui since all are “related”, even if people really are not sure
what that kinship might be, which is when I get the odd pleading email for
advice. Not very nice what the Chileans do and you can see why the Rapanui
don’t like those “weeds”, as such Chileans are called. Normal tourists from
anywhere are fine, budget or rich: there is accommodation for all types.

Many smoked cigars in purification rituals, while others closed their eyes
lying face-up surrounded by candles and elaborate designs drawn on the
ground with white powder. Some calling themselves the “Vikings” pricked
their tongues with razor blades, drawing blood that ran down their chins
and chests. They said they could not reveal the esoteric secrets that
govern their traditions. The rituals are held every year in the name of the
indigenous goddess Maria Lionza, who according to legend came from the
mountain at Sorte, near the northwestern town of Chivacoa. Some repeated
the word “strength” while dancing atop flaming embers in a ceremony
honoring the goddess at the start of the annual rituals. Many camped in
tents while dedicating several days to the spiritual ceremonies. The
traditions centered on Maria Lionza are hundreds of years old and draw on
elements of the Afro-Caribbean religion Santeria and indigenous rituals, as
well as Catholicism. Believers often ask for spiritual healing or
protection from witchcraft, or thank the goddess for curing an illness.
Venezuela is predominantly Roman Catholic. The church disapproves of the
folk religion but has long since abandoned its attempts to suppress it. A
statue on a Caracas highway divider honors Maria Lionza, depicting her
naked and sitting astride a wild tapir. Followers of the sect regularly
leave offerings of flowers, liquor, coins or fruit at shrines honoring the
goddess or other folk saints.

Conflicts, climate change and poor policies are blamed for the hunger in
countries with food insecurity. The index ranks countries based on child
malnutrition, child death rates and calorie deficient population. High
rates of hunger are strongly linked to gender inequalities, especially in
terms of literacy and access to education. In Kenya, the report gives
special mention of the rural residents and the urban poor in the slums. Two
groups need nutritional interventions because of droughts and the global
financial crisis. There is no term to describe the water scarcity in Kenya
although it receives sufficient rains. Only four per cent of rainwater is
used while 96 per cent is left to flow to the ocean. The Government needs
to do much more to correct this. In Korogocho, about 150,000 people live in
an area of 1.5km2, making it one of the most densely populated slums in the
city. As a result, 3.5 per cent of children suffer from acute malnutrition
and 37.9 per cent from chronic malnutrition. Gender inequality In addition
to inadequate access to affordable foods, a poor health environment, and
low coverage of health services, the survey showed poor childcare practices
were underlying cause of malnutrition in the slum. Hunger is also related
to gender inequality. In rural Kenya, 75 per cent of women are doing much
work but with the ongoing drought, they have been weakened from looking for
water. Furthermore, men are able to move to towns leaving their wives
behind making them vulnerable. Women were encouraged to acquire education
and look for work to earn their own income. This would increase their
influence in making decisions about buying of food, health care, and other
essential needs for their children. The silent hunger crisis — affecting
one sixth of all of humanity — poses a serious risk for world peace and
security.

The audience is not allowed to understand much about the legal case — the
evidence or the pretrial rulings. Nor does one know much about either key
character, the attorney who agrees to the deal or the father and husband
who feels that justice is not served. But because the audience does witness
selected parts of the murder scene, they will understand that the greater
villain eventually will walk free. Tellingly, no judge, lawyer nor anyone
else — not even the husband who blacked out — has this God-like
perspective. Ten years roll by, and Butler’s revenge-minded victim is ready
for action. Oh, by the way, Butler is not an average guy, after all. He
actually is a secret weapon — no, better than that, he is a “Brain,” whom
U.S. spy agencies employ to kill people anywhere around the globe in a
ghostlike fashion. He’s going after anybody connected with the decade-old
case, which more or less means anybody who happened to be living in Philly
at the time. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen everything you need to
know about the murderous havoc this man rains down on the city. No attempt
is made to make either combatant credible. Foxx’s character goes along with
SWAT teams as they hunt bad guys. And Butler’s nut job couldn’t care less
about his dead wife and child. He’s having too much fun killing people. The
film is smoothly produced, though Brian Tyler’s score is too much like an
excitable cheerleader. Jonathan Sela’s photography and Alex Hajdu’s design
sustain a noirish Philadelphia that works well with the criminal mayhem.

Nai Myint Aung claimed that he fears that the gang will continue to cause
problems for his family, as the group likely remembers his motorbike
number. His Thai neighbor, who came to his rescue the day of his attack,
allegedly urged him to report the incident to the police, but Nai Mynit
Aung says he fears that reporting the gang to the Thai police will only
result in more violence. Reportedly, his fellow workers at the rubber
plantation where he is employed have heard rumors of a Thai gang killing a
family in the area who reported them to the authorities, and he does not
want his family to meet a similar fate. Mi Hlaing, Nai Myint Aung’s wife,
said, “The Thai gangs know that most of the Mon migrant workers go to the
market [once a week] to buy goods. That’s why the gangs perform a robbery
every week on the way [to the market].” Mi Hlaing added that she and her
family previously lived in Thailand’s Phanga Province, but that after an
incident 2 months ago where a 50-year-old Thai man attempted to rape her,
she and her husband decided to move to the Hat Yai area. A Mon worker named
Mi Mee, from Pattaya, also in Southern Thailand, claims that during the
last ten days, Thai gangs have stolen a gold necklace, 2000 baht, and three
mobile phones from migrant workers in the Pattya area; the rape of a
migrant woman in the area has also been attributed to gang activity. Mi Mee
explained that migrant workers in Southern Thailand feel that they must
face the abuse of Thai gangs in the area with patience, because the Burmese
workers need their jobs in Thailand too much to cause trouble.

Bangladesh rewarded a farmer who killed more than 83,000 rats, and the
government launched a nationwide campaign to kill millions more in an
effort to reduce destruction by the rodents and thus cut food imports.
Mokhairul Islam, 40, won first prize of a 14-inch color television for
killing 83,450 rats in the past nine months in the Gazipur district near
Dhaka, the capital. Islam said he used mainly poison to kill the rats at
his poultry farm, collecting their tails for proof. “This is an exciting
moment,” he said. “I will continue to kill them.” Bangladesh imports 3
million tons of food annually, and the Ministry of Agriculture estimates
that rodents destroy 1.5 million to 2 million tons of food annually. The
import of food can be cut by at least half if this year’s campaign is
successful.

Geoscientists have said that the 2007 Solomon Island earthquake may point
to previously unknown increased earthquake and tsunami risks because of the
unusual tectonic plate geography and the sudden change in direction of the
earthquake. On April 1, 2007, a tsunami-generating earthquake of magnitude
8.1 occurred East of Papua New Guinea off the coast of the Solomon Islands.
The subsequent tsunami killed about 52 people, destroyed much property and
was larger than expected. This area has some of the fastest moving plates
on Earth. It also has some of the youngest oceanic crust subducting
anywhere. Subduction occurs when one tectonic plate moves beneath another
plate. In this area, there are actually three plates involved, two of them
subducting beneath the third while sliding past each other. The Australia
Plate and the Solomon Sea/Woodlark Basin Plate are both moving beneath the
Pacific Plate. At the same time, the Australia and Solomon Sea/Woodlark
Basin Plates are sliding past each other. The Australia Plate moves beneath
the Pacific Plate at about 4 inches a year and the Solomon Sea Plate moves
beneath the Pacific Plate at about 5.5 inches per year. As if this were not
complicated enough, the Australia and Solomon Sea plates are also moving in
slightly different directions. The earthquake crossed from one plate
boundary – the Australia-Pacific boundary – into another – the
Solomon/Woodlark-Pacific boundary. The event began in the Australia Plate
and moved across into the Solomon Sea Plate and had two centers of energy
separated by lower energy areas. Normally we think earthquakes should stop
at the plate boundaries. Seismologists do not expect young sections of the
Earths crust to be locations of major earthquakes, so the Solomon Island
earthquake was unusual from the beginning. Other places along subduction
zones had this type of geography in the past and might show up
geologically. At present, there are locations along the margins of Central
America and southern South America that could potentially host similar
earthquakes. A better understanding of earthquakes zones like the Solomon
Islands may help residents along other complex plate boundaries to better
prepare for localized regions of unusually large uplift and tsunami
hazards.

More than a third of the world’s child brides are from India, leaving
children at an increased risk of exploitation despite the Asian giant’s
growing modernity and economic wealth. Nearly 25 million women in India
were married in the year 2007 by the age of 18. Children in India, Nepal
and Pakistan may be engaged or even married before they turned 10. Millions
of children are also being forced to work in harmful conditions, or face
violence and abuse at home and outside, suffering physical and
psychological harm with wide-reaching, and sometimes irreparable effects,
the report said. A society cannot thrive if its youngest members are forced
into early marriage, abused as sex workers or denied their basic rights.
Despite rising literacy levels and a ban on child marriage, tradition and
religious practices are keeping the custom alive in India, as well as in
Nepal and Pakistan. More than half the world’s child brides are in south
Asia, which also accounts for more than half the unregistered births,
leaving children beyond the reach and protection of state services and
unable to attend school or access basic healthcare. Only 6 percent of all
births in Afghanistan and 10 percent in Bangladesh were registered from
2000-08, compared to 41 percent in India and 73 percent in the tiny
Maldives. Also, about 44 million, or 13 percent of all children in south
Asia, are engaged in labour, with more than half in India. Children in the
region have also been seriously affected by insurgency and instability, as
well as natural disasters. Especially in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal,
past or ongoing conflicts have broken down most child protection systems,
leaving children especially vulnerable. Trafficking of children for labour,
prostitution or domestic services is widespread, especially within
Bangladesh and India, and within the region, as well as to Europe and the
Middle East. Insufficient emphasis has been placed on protecting child
victims of trafficking and ensuring that any judicial proceedings brought
against them are child sensitive.

The situation in Indonesia is just as bad. Although neither of this week’s
Sumatran earthquakes proved tsunami–genic, the authorities have to work on
the assumption that any powerful undersea earthquake is liable to generate
tsunamis (the epicentre of the 7.6 magnitude quake was around 50km offshore
from the city of Padang). This is, after all, the same faultline that
caused 2004’s Boxing Day disaster, and produces regular local tsunamis
every year. But there are only 22 detection buoys to monitor all 6,000
inhabited islands in the Indonesian archipelago, and none of those cover
northern Sumatra, Indonesia’s most vulnerable region and the scene of the
highest loss of life in 2004, where the death toll in Aceh province alone
exceeded 130,000. And even where there is detection equipment in place,
there are no guarantees it will stay there. In July 2006 a local tsunami
off the Javanese coast killed nearly 700 people; it later transpired that
the two detection buoys that monitor that stretch of coast had been removed
from the sea some months before, and were awaiting repairs in a dockside
warehouse. Given that these buoys cost about $250,000 each, and require at
least $125,000 worth of annual maintenance per unit, tsunami preparedness
is proving a costly undertaking for developing nations such as Indonesia.
This week’s earthquakes were severe enough – the official death toll is
715, though estimates put it closer to 1,100 – but had either been
tsunamigenic, the city of Padang would have been as unprotected as it was
in December 2004, despite the $30m that has been spent in developing the
region’s interim warning system. Sumatra will have to wait until 2010 for
its own detection buoys to be installed, but as the pantomime across the
far wealthier south Pacific demonstrated, installing the equipment is one
thing; getting it to do its job is quite another.

In what is believed to be the longest sentence ever handed down in a
white-collar case in this district, the mastermind of a Riverside-based
Ponzi scheme that collected well over $60 million from hundreds of
investors—and caused more than $39 million in losses—was sentenced to 100
years in federal prison. Richard Monroe Harkless, 65, who lived in
Riverside when he ran the scheme through a company he called MX Factors
from 2000 until late 2003, was sentenced by United States District Judge
Virginia A. Phillips in federal court in Riverside. During today´s hearing,
Judge Phillips said that Harkless caused “every kind of grief and loss
imaginable” and that the defendant demonstrated that he “would commit his
crimes all over again if given the chance.” In addition the prison term,
Judge Phillips ordered Harkless to pay $35,479,310 in restitution to the
approximately 600 victims who lost money as a result of the scam. Harkless
was sentenced after being convicted in July of three counts of mail fraud,
three counts of wire fraud and one count of money laundering. Harkless and
a team of salespeople at MX Factors raised funds by telling potential
investors that MX Factors provided short-term loans to commercial
construction companies that had guaranteed, government-backed contracts.
Harkless created the company, controlled its bank accounts, hired and paid
agents to solicit investors and created MX Factors promotional literature.
Investors were promised returns of up to 14 percent every two or three
months, at which time investors could either receive their investments back
or roll over their investments into the next investment period. The vast
majority of MX Factors investors were “reloaded,” meaning that they were
convinced to invest money more than once. At trial, several victims
testified that Harkless and his co-conspirators encouraged potential
investors to try out the MX Factors program, investing in one 60- or 90-day
cycle and then withdrawing their money to see if it worked. Once victims
felt more comfortable with the program, Harkless and his co-conspirators
encouraged them to invest even more and to get their families and friends
to invest as well.

Villagers gathered as men used their bare hands to slowly and cautiously
pull corpses from a tangle of roots and grit. The bodies were bloated and
mutilated, some unrecognizable. One man’s body was found because his hand
was sticking out of the mud. Women wept silently as bodies were placed in
bright yellow bags. Aid also had not reached Agam district, which is much
closer to Padang. Laila, a villager in Agam district, said she and hundreds
of others had no food, clothes and clean water. “Our house is gone …
everything is gone,” she sobbed. She said a helicopter dropped some instant
noodle packets. “But we need clean water to cook it,” said Laila, who also
uses one name. She said the local river had become dirty as people were
using it to wash. In Padang, rescuers have all but given up hope of finding
any survivors in the rubble of the 140-room, Dutch-colonial style Ambacang
Hotel. Some 200 people were in the hotel when it collapsed. Search teams
have found 29 bodies so far, and no one alive. “After four days … to find
survivors is almost impossible,” said Lt. Col. Harris, the chief of the
50-member rescue team, which comprises military, police and Red Cross
personnel. “The smell of decomposing bodies is very strong,” said Harris,
who uses one name. According to the National Disaster Management Agency,
83,712 houses, 200 public buildings and 285 schools were destroyed. Another
100,000 buildings and 20 miles of road were badly damaged, and five bridges
had collapsed. Meanwhile, hundreds of doctors, nurses, search and rescue
experts and cleanup crews arrived Saturday at the Padang airport from
around the world with tons of food, tents, medicine, clean water,
generators and a field hospital. But with no electricity, fuel shortages
and telecommunication outages, the massive operation was chaotic.

Suspected insurgents killed three people, including a toddler, and wounded
at least 34 in a grenade, gun and car bomb attack on two restaurants and a
hotel in Thailand’s south. The brutal violence brings the death toll over
the past two days to four and the number of casualties to more than 50 as a
result of militant attacks in the troubled Thai south, which is gripped by
a bitter five-year uprising. The rebels, travelling by car and on three
motorcycles, hurled a hand grenade into a restaurant at lunchtime in Sungai
Kolok, a border town in Narathiwat province, wounding four people. They
then opened fire on customers, shooting dead a Buddhist police officer and
injuring another four people. A three-year-old boy who suffered gunshot
wounds later died at hospital. The gunmen then began shooting at another
nearby restaurant, killing the owner, a 45-year-old Buddhist woman, and
wounding four people. A car bomb exploded in front of one of the town’s
hotels soon afterwards, wounding 23 people.

Rates of sexually transmitted infections in the Pacific remain as high as
they were in 2004. A programme to prevent mother to child transmission had
substantially reduced the risk of an unborn child being infected with HIV
from his/her mother during delivery. The SPC public health team had
responded to the H1N1 pandemic in 2009 in partnership with the World Health
Organisation (WHO) and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC), and played a critical role in providing technical advice, services
and capacity building to Pacific Islands countries and territories (PICTs).
It was also involved in the response to the recent cholera outbreak in PNG.
TB control supported PICT’s in implementing the regional Stop TB strategy
in close collaboration with WHO and CDC. The HIV and STI section was
responsible for coordinating and monitoring the implementation of the
Pacific Regional strategy on HIV and STI’s in close collaboration with
multiple other agencies and countries. The very high prevalence of
noncommunicable disease risk conditions – diabetes, high blood pressure and
obesity – is amongst the highest in the world. Hypertension is the most
common condition leading up to cardiac arrest which is the leading cause of
death in the Pacific. The risk factors of smoking, alcohol, low levels of
physical activity and consumption of fruits and vegetables were the perfect
recipe for NCDs.

Climate change is already wreaking havoc on the livelihoods of small-scale
tea and coffee farmers in some of the world’s poorest countries. Research
across four countries – Kenya, Mexico, Peru and Nicaragua – showed that
growers are already being forced uphill to higher altitudes, at a rate of
three to four metres a year on average, as temperatures rise. A huge number
of growers are now experiencing increased instances of pestilence and
disease from rises in temperature. They are also facing prolonged drought
and changing weather patterns. The priority for developed countries should
be helping the world’s poor to protect themselves against climate change.
What’s crucial is that there’s an option of sustainable adaptation to
safeguard the supply chain. Climate change is affecting those least able to
deal with it. We can’t underestimate that. Smaller producers, who are
reliant on a single crop and often cannot afford to install costly
irrigation equipment as temperatures rise, are worst affected. Some farmers
could see their incomes fall by up to 90% in the next fifteen years;
worldwide 30 million farmers will be affected.

Lying injured in Vaiola Hospital, 65-year-old Sulifa Losalu mourns the loss
of her beloved husband Heneli Losalu (69) who died helping her to escape
the September 30 tsunami wave they saw rushing toward their Hihifo,
Niuatoputapu, home engulfing everything in its path. The mother of eight
children said the couple had just returned to their home after attending an
early morning church service when the earthquake struck around 6:00 am.
Sulifa heard her husband yelling for her to get out and she hurried out of
the house, but then remembered her little statue of Mary, the mother of
Jesus, and she ran back inside to get it with her handbag. Sulifa vividly
remembered she then heard a strong roaring sound “like a machine” and
Heneli shouting from outside to “run, there is a huge wave coming!” “My
husband waited for me and as I ran out I saw the wave, which was above the
coconut trees coming towards us. It was a horrifying sight and I ran, and
my husband kept yelling for me to run fast. As I looked back at him that
was the last I saw of him as the wave struck him, then me. “I was
underwater swallowing water and was thrown around like a thin stick,
hitting debris, trees that came in my way. I just remembered praying to
Mary to please help me.” Sulifa said she was then flung onto a rooftop and
held tightly onto it and managed to get up from below the surging wave to
breathe. “I felt the wave subsiding and I remained there until my son
‘Osika, who was in the bush when the tsunami hit, rescued me. “He carried
me down and the ocean was still up to our waist but the waves had subsided.
It was not until 4:00 pm that my husband was found dead, kneeling down, at
another area. I was shattered,” she said. “I feel this aching hole in my
heart after loosing my husband because I know he could have made it but he
waited for me to come out of the house before running. I love him so much
and being apart from him is devastating.” The village children later found
Sulifa’s statue of Mary and her handbag and returned them to her.

The primary objective of the people is to stage a peaceful sit in at the
Mataveri International Airport on Easter Island. No airplanes will be
allowed to depart or arrive to Rapa Nui until discussions are held and
resolutions are made. The parliament of Rapa Nui is asking for the
following: 1. To regulate the entrance of all Chilean persons from the
mainland as well as foreigners to the territory of Rapa Nui. 2. For Rapa
Nui to become an independent nation. The Rapa Nui people are asking for
these regulations due to a recent surge of immigration to the island
resulting in depletion of resources, weakening of the infrastructure and
rapid destruction of one of the world’s most treasured archeological sites.
The island is part of Chile’s national territory belonging to the
Valparaiso region which is over 3,500km away. Chile annexed the Polenesian
island in 1888 by way of some treaty at a time when a newly independent
Chile joined the fashion of having its own overseas colony. At this stage
there were very few Rapa Nui natives left, only a little over 100 as
between 1862 and 1871 some 97 per cent were either killed through smallpox,
TB and slavery or were moved off the island by Christian missionaries. Just
as well because that meant more room for sheep and so the remaining
survivors were herded into Hanga Roa, the only town on the island while the
Williamson-Balfour sheep company ran the show until 1953. (The Chileans
graciously allowed the natives walk their own island in the 1960s.)
According to Pamela Hucke, a native doctor, as late as the 1950s the
Chilean authorities actively discouraged contact with the outside world by
claiming the island was a leper colony, making this claim credible by
injecting some natives with the disease. This has never been reported in
the Chilean press as far as she knows. Locals also point out that the
airport was built by the US government while it was a Japanese firm which
resurrected the moais on the island which had been toppled. Perhaps as a
result of the general economic downturn or some other reasons, more
Chileans are coming to live on the island which is now only 60 percent
native. Islanders point to the increase in crime such as burglaries which
never happened before and the increase in hard drugs being smuggled on to
the island. Locals place full blame on the Chilean immigrants and they want
this regulated. Of course they stress that they have nothing against
tourists, Chilean or otherwise, who are welcome to stay temporarily and
enjoy the “open air museum” that the island is.

Cases of both hemorrhagic dengue and classic dengue have been on the rise
in Nicaragua. A total of 1,706 cases of classic dengue and 46 of the
hemorrhagic variety have been registered in the Central American nation.
The figures were up sharply from the 1,480 classic dengue cases and 25
hemorrhagic dengue cases detailed in an earlier report. Eight people have
died in Nicaragua from dengue so far this year. Dengue is a serious viral
disease transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito that is characterized by
high fever, intense headaches, muscle pain, gastro-intestinal problems and
rashes. Hemorrhagic dengue, in addition to having symptoms associated with
classic dengue, like fever, headaches and joint pain, can also produce
internal bleeding. Children between the ages of 5 and 14 have been the
group most affected by the disease, with the outbreak being especially bad
in Boaco, Leon, Managua, Masaya and Rio San Juan provinces. Public health
officials are working to prevent the mosquitoes that spread the disease
from breeding. A door-to-door dengue prevention campaign is being conducted
in Nicaragua’s 153 municipalities.

Another ship, the Alakrana, was recently captured in the Indian Ocean.
Somali pirates have seized a Singapore-flagged container ship in the Indian
Ocean. The MV Kota Wajar was headed to the Kenyan port of Mombasa when it
was commandeered 300 nautical miles north of Seychelles. Twenty one crew
are on board the 24,637-tonne container ship. At least five vessels are now
in the hands of Somali pirates. Pirate attacks around the world more than
doubled to 240 during the first six months of 2009 compared with the same
period in 2008. The rise in overall maritime hijacking is largely due to
the increase in Somali pirate activity.

A ground breaking ceremony to redevelop the Anuha Island resort in the
Central Province is being scheduled as well as announcing a tender for the
design and construction of a four star resort. “The island is a jewel of
the pacific and we want to build a resort that does Anuha and the Solomon
Islands justice,” the SITC said while working with local authorities,
international partners and key stakeholders to develop a resort that drives
tourism development and also takes into account local needs. As part of the
development, the runway on the island will shortly be cleared as the first
part of the early construction works process. Following on from the success
to date with developing a world class resort on Anuha Island, Solomon
Islands Tourism Company is now seeking an additional land site for its next
development in the Solomon Islands. Anuha Island is located 54 kilometers
or 12 minutes flying north-east of the international airport at Honiara.

The House of Representatives passed the fishery bill into law, effectively
allowing marine patrol boats to shoot at vessels poaching in Indonesian
waters. The ministry required the harsh law to legitimize a “shoot and
sink” policy against poachers to deter any future poaching. “*Shoot and
sink’ can now be ordered under certain conditions, and we will immediately
draw up standard operation procedures to enforce the measure,” said Aji,
who also chaired the government’s working committee for the fishery bill.
However, for human rights reasons, Marine patrols would only be allowed to
shoot at ships, not sailors, he said. Indonesian waters in North Sulawesi,
Maluku, Papua and West Papua have been prone to illegal fishing by foreign
fishing ships. “The implementation of the ruling should not breach human
rights or international laws,” Aji said at a press conference on the newly
endorsed law. The policy was needed to protect Indonesia’s sovereignty, he
said. Poaching has been a chronic problem for Indonesia, which loses an
estimated Rp 30 trillion (US$3.26 billion) to poaching each year. In the
past five years, Indonesia has seized more than 700 vessels, most of them
from Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia, with a few from
further afield, including Taiwan and China.

At least 1000 people were killed and hundreds were trapped under collapsed
buildings after a powerful earthquake struck Indonesia’s West Sumatra
province. Vice President Jusuf Kalla said the mayor of Padang, the capital
of West Samatra, told him that the quake left at least 75 people dead. “The
number may increase because many are still trapped in buildings and
hotels,” Kalla said. Rustam Pakaya, the head of the Health Ministry’s
disaster centre, said hundreds of people were trapped under rubble in
Padang, where a hospital among other structures had also collapsed. The
state-run Antara news agency reported that hundreds of people were believed
to have been trapped in collapsed buildings and shops in Padang’s business
district and Chinatown. A hospital official in nearby Pariaman district
said that eight people in the district had been killed and hundreds more
hospitalized with serious injuries. The quake, measuring 7.6 on the Richter
scale, struck off the western coast of Sumatra at about 1016 GMT. A 6.2
magnitude aftershock followed about 22 minutes later. A medical team was
being dispatched to West Sumatra, the region worst-hit by the quake.
Telephone communications to Padang and nearby Pariaman district were cut
off following the quake.

As the scheme began to collapse, Harkless diverted millions of dollars of
investor money to Belize and Mexico. In the final months of the scheme,
once Harkless knew that he was under investigation by various state
regulators, he accelerated his fundraising and accelerated the transfer of
funds to his own accounts in Belize. During the scheme, the bulk of the
money raised from investors was used to pay off earlier investors, to pay
agent commissions, to fund Harkless´ crabbing business in Ensenada, Mexico
and to pay for various personal expenses. Over the course of the scheme,
approximately 600 victims invested and lost money with MX Factors. Harkless
fled to Mexico shortly after the Ponzi scheme collapsed and federal
authorities executed search warrants in February 2004. Harkless was
arrested by special agents with IRS-Criminal Investigation two years ago
when he traveled to Phoenix. At this summer´s trial, Harkless represented
himself in court. Three of Harkless´ sales agents—Daniel Berardi, Thomas
Hawkesworth, and Randall Harding—pleaded guilty and received sentences of
up to six years in federal prison. The investigation into MX Factors was
conducted by IRS-Criminal Investigation, the United States Postal
Inspection Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Deliveries came on C-130 cargo planes from the United States, Russia and
Australia. Japanese, Swiss, South Korean and Malaysian search and rescue
teams scoured the debris. Tens of millions of dollars in donations came
from more than a dozen countries to supplement $400 million the Indonesian
government said it would spend over the next two months. The U.N. said
there are sufficient fuel stocks in the area for four days, but with the
road to a major depot cut off by landslides, gasoline prices had jumped
six-fold. Areas with “huge levels of damage to infrastructure were in need
of basic food and tents for temporary shelter,” it said. The quake
originated on the same fault line that spawned the 2004 Asian tsunami that
killed 230,000 people in a dozen nations. A 5.5-magnitude earthquake shook
the eastern province of West Papua. There were no reports of casualties.
The quake’s epicenter was 128 kilometers northwest of the provincial
capital of Manokawar, the only major center of inhabitation. The region is
about 3,500 kilometers from Sumatra.

The explosive weighed 30 to 50 kilograms and was hidden in a Honda Civic
with a fake licence plate, which had passed a screening by a bomb detection
machine. The bomb was hidden in the passenger car and detonated by radio
signal. Two of the wounded were in a serious condition. An explosive hidden
in a motorcycle went off in Pattani province close to where Buddhists were
attending a festival, wounding 17 — five of them seriously. Earlier in the
day, four gunmen on two motorcycles opened fire on a 34-year-old Muslim
rubber worker as he travelled to work in Narathiwat province. He died at
the scene. The bloody rebellion has claimed more than 3,900 lives since it
erupted in Thailand’s Muslim-majority southern provinces, bordering
Malaysia, in January 2004. The shadowy rebels, who have never publicly
stated their goals, target Muslims and Buddhists alike and both civilians
and members of the security forces, usually with shootings and bombings.
Recent attacks echoed a serious blast in August, which ripped through a
restaurant in Narathiwat packed with government officials, wounding at
least 42 people. Tensions have simmered since the region, formerly an
autonomous Malay Muslim sultanate, was annexed by predominantly Buddhist
Thailand in 1902.

The Healthy Pacific Lifestyle (HPL) section at SPC provides an integrated
approach in the promotion of tobacco and alcohol control, physical activity
and good nutrition. The SPC-WHO joint 2-1-22 (two organisations, one
programme, 22 countries) approach funded by AusAID and NZAID was being
implemented under the Pacific Framework for the prevention and control of
NCDs. In January to June 2009, grants amounting to 23 million CPF
(approximately US$270,000) were provided to three PICT’s in support of NCDs
national strategy implementation. It will feed into a high-level,
multi-sectoral regional food security summit in early 2010. Meanwhile,
relatively neglected diseases in the Pacific were dengue and other vector
borne diseases like leptospirosis (except malaria), rheumatic heart
disease, mental health and environmental health. There were also funding
gaps for secondary prevention for noncommunicable diseases such as
diabetes, cancer and high blood pressure. Gaps were also emerging in
maternal and child health, sexual and reproductive health, on the
consequences for health of climate change, urbanisation and poor housing,
and on infant diarrhoea, water and sanitation.

Small-scale growers in Peru have seen yields fall by 40% since last year,
compared to 30% across the country as a whole; small producers in Mexico
have seen yields halve, against a national decline of 7%. Tea and coffee
are on the climate change front line because they only grow in a relatively
narrow temperature range. All four of the countries involved would see the
quantity and quality of their crops decline sharply over the coming years.
In Kenya, growers diversify into new crops such as passion fruits; in Peru,
farmers were able to use their land to sell carbon credits; and elsewhere
they planted native tree species to help bind the soil and prevent
mudslides. The government said that it will donate £12m to the Fairtrade
Foundation, with the hope of doubling the number of developing country
farmers who are awarded the Fairtrade mark. Fairtrade products pay a
premium to relatively small-scale growers, helping to protect them from the
vicissitudes of global commodity markets and the buying power of vast
multinationals. The Fairtrade mark is celebrating its 15th birthday, and
now covers a wide range of products, from bananas to chocolate. Sales of
Fairtrade products were up by 43% in 2008. The Fairtrade market as a whole
is expected to treble, to £9bn, by 2013. In the current economic climate,
it’s the poorest communities who are hit the hardest, and so positive
business models like Fairtrade, which deliver increased development
benefits from trade, are more important than ever.

Sulifa was one of the first four patients that were first flown down to
Nuku’alofa for urgent treatment. “Most of my children live here in
Tongatapu and some overseas, they are all here now and we are having a
memorial for my husband tonight in Puke where my son lives.” The mother
said when she gets better she is going back to Niuatoputapu. “Although
there is nothing there with no house left, I want to be with my husband who
is buried there,” she said. Sulifa is doing very well in the hospital and
can manage to sit up and stand up on her own for a few minutes. But she
mainly uses the wheelchair to get around while her knees are healing.

Greenlight Radio is a pirate radio station that has been broadcasting in
Boulder for just over a year. G-Girl arrives at the interview. She looks
tiny with her arms so full: a laptop, a hand mic, a notepad and pen. She
leans over the keyboard and begins pecking the keys, her cell phone stuck
to her ear. She speaks with a relaxed, almost surfer-girl accent. She
doesn’t look like a criminal. And she’s not, as far as she’s concerned;
she’s one of the last free American radio journalists. But as far as the
Federal Communications Commission is concerned, she’s an airwave thief.
Unregulated and against the law. A pirate. “Connected,” G-Girl announces to
a mysterious voice on the other line. It’s a bit “Charlie’s Angels;” we’ll
never know who this voice is. We won’t know G-Girl’s real name either, or
the names of the other KGIR radio personality “Helix” interviews Ian Nissen
about unlicensed radio at Bart’s CD Cellar. They hope they don’t have to
hide forever. After all, they say the ultimate goal of their illegal
Boulder radio station is to connect the community, and that’s hard to do
when you’re a shadow. But for now, they hide. Greenlight is still young.
This month marks its first birthday. Boulder’s airwaves aren’t new to
poaching. Boulder Free Radio, KBFR, has been stirring up the scene since
2000, in between the FCC occasionally shutting down the signal. KBFR,
started by a notably more antagonistic voice known as Monk, touted “B.S.
Free Radio,” with unedited, uncensored — and uncommercialized — music and
opinions. KBFR’s radio waves are once again static. But Boulder Free
Radio’s ship hasn’t sunk. The station has a live stream at
boulderfreeradio.com, and active Myspace, Facebook and Twitter pages.
Greenlight Radio isn’t associated with KBFR — or Boulder’s third
occasional techno-music pirate who pops up occasionally on 103.9 FM.
Greenlight is also not connected with a Fort Collins-based religious pirate
— who sometimes steals Greenlight’s stolen airwaves during the day.

Tired of not being listened to, they occupied the airport runway to grab
the attention of Santiago, causing all flights between the mainland and
Tahiti to be postponed for two days. During the protest there were many red
and white Rapa Nui flags visible, symbolising their desire of independence
for the island. Whether the island could actually survive full independence
with a population of under 4,000 is open to debate. Listening to the
locals’ concerns but also seeing the standard of life on the island we are,
however, reminded of the Monty Python satirical comedy Life of Brian where
the character Reg, urging resistance against the Roman occupation, admits:
“All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine,
public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health,
what have the Romans ever done for us?” For a start the Rapa Nuis don’t pay
tax – so don’t expect a receipt for anything you buy. They also get
generous grants to study on the mainland at any university of their
choosing. The island also does not know poverty and the gap between rich
and poor is minimal. In part this is because almost all of them own land
(Chileans are not allowed buy land here), while the state provides a large
number of administrative jobs and wages are high. For example a Chilean
teacher said that she could make almost three times as much on the island
as in Santiago. But on the cultural front, they probably do have to worry a
little more. Their own language Rapa Nui is spoken about 50 50 alongside
Spanish and while most can speak the native tongue there are some younger
people who can not. Many of these people too prefer the sights and sound of
the mainland and prefer the new to the old. The island is also not immune
to the effect of globalisation which may be more of a threat than the
Chilean State in the long run. Plastered all along the main street is Coca
Cola’s image of the moais as part of its marketing strategy for the island
or the sight of Jennifer Tuku, a cultural ambassador for the island
sporting two mobile phones around her neck. Agriculture and fishing remain
strong on the island, although tourism provides some 80 percent of the
local economy and the sheer numbers of tourists arriving every day has
ensured that the modern world is firmly entrenched in Rapa Nui.

The Papua New Guinea stock exchange again surged, this time by huge 11 per
cent, as two big firms – probably responsible for the rise in confidence –
had big wins. Papua New Guinea’s biggest gold company, Lihir Gold, is
suggesting the precious metal could rise to $US1,500. And the Bank of South
Pacific took over Fiji’s 130-year-old Colonial National Bank and associated
firms.

The central bank of Bangladesh has relaxed its rules and allowed money
changers to sell a maximum US$350 to a Hajj pilgrim this year. Under the
existing regulations, each pilgrim, who will go to perform Hajj through
both public and private agencies, can take a maximum US$350 or equivalent
of other foreign currencies, if he wants. “The money changers, for the
first time, are allowed to sell the foreign currencies to pilgrims that
will help achieve their annual transactions limit, fixed by the central
bank earlier. The central bank re-fixed yearly transaction limit to
US$350,000 from $500,000 earlier for the money changers, which are
operating business across the country, excluding Dhaka and Chittagong
metropolitan areas. However, the annual transactions limit of money
changers, located in two metropolitan areas, remain unchanged at $500,000.
The money changers license will not be renewed for the next tenure if they
fail to fulfill the yearly transactions limit. Currently, 240 money
changers are operating across the country.

The fisheries ministry has been working with the Navy and the National
Police to keep poachers out of Indonesian waters. The ministry had long
sought legal endorsement for the “shoot and sink” policy, saying poachers
had shown a clear disdain for Indonesia’s outnumbered and poorly equipped
marine patrol boats. Aji added that shooting and sinking poachers’ vessels
while at sea would be more feasible than seizing their boats and towing
them to land. “Can you imagine these small, plastic patrol boats dragging
large fishing vessels to shore?” he said. “Sometimes the vessels are made
of wood and are in very poor condition, bringing with them diseases; the
locals protest against having them near their beaches.” The newly revised
law also authorizes the ministry’s civilian patrols to investigate alleged
poaching in Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone. That task previously fell
under the Navy’s authority. The need for fishing vessels to secure
operating permits before sailing is another new aspect of the law. While
lawmakers had previously rejected the policy fearing illegal fees, the
government had managed to convince them that the ruling was necessary to
control fishing activities in Indonesia’s sea waters, which were suffering
from declining fish stocks as are other parts of the globe. The law
provided clearer time limitations for investigation, prosecution and trial
processes for poaching cases, and allowed the ministry to make use of
confiscated vessels.

Fires also broke out in Padang. Padang’s Minangkabau airport was ordered
closed because roofs were damaged. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center
issued an Indian Ocean tsunami alert after the quake, but later cancelled
it. The quake was also felt strongly in North Sumatra, Riau in eastern
Sumatra as well as Bengkulu province in southern Sumatra, residents.
Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago, sits on the so-called Pacific
‘Ring of Fire’, the edge of a tectonic plate prone to seismic upheaval. A
major earthquake and subsequent tsunami struck in December 2004, leaving
more than 170,000 people dead or missing in Indonesia’s Aceh province and
half a million people homeless. This quake occurred along the same fault
line. Geologists have said that Padang, a low-lying city of 900,000 people,
risks being swallowed by a tsunami in the event of an earthquake similar in
size to the one that triggered the giant waves of 2004.

In a case of “serious administrative error”, an Australian resident was
locked up in a detention facility for three years. An egregious error
highlights the need for a revamping of federal laws, which have unlawfully
deprived this man of his liberty. Wrongful detention for over three years
is a matter of grave concern, and it is equally a matter of concern that
the legal framework does not confer powers necessary to address problems
and disadvantage of this kind. In 1989, Vietnamese-born Van Phuc Nguyen was
granted refugee status as an 18 year old, after fleeing Vietnam and
spending four years in a refugee camp in the Philippines. Sydney airport
immigration officials failed to recognize his visa in 2002. As a result,
he was detained from November 2002 to February 2006 in Villawood
Immigration Detention Centre. Nguyen’s residency was inadvertently
cancelled upon his return to Australia from a trip to Vietnam in 1995, when
an immigration official issued him a one month visa. Located in the suburbs
of Sydney, Villawood serves mainly as a facility for any individual who has
over-stayed his visa, failed to comply with his visa, or has been denied
entry to Australia. It has been at the center of controversy over human
rights abuses over the last several years. The Human Rights and Equal
Opportunity Commission found the Centre’s conditions deplorable and
“inhospitable” and recommended that it be closed immediately.

Malaria in the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu has been dramatically reduced
through an effective control strategy. There were 50,000 fewer cases of
Malaria in the Solomon Islands in 2008 compared with 2003. An effective
prevention and control strategy comprising of long lasting insecticide
treated bednet distribution, focal point indoor residual spraying, early
diagnosis and treatment and active case detection has had dramatic impact
on the annual incidence rate of malaria in both the Solomon Islands and
Vanuatu. The annual incidence rate (which is a measure of number of
confirmed cases of malaria per 1,000 population) has been reduced from 198
/1,000 to 84/1,000 in the Solomon Islands over the five year period ending
December 2008, while in Vanuatu it has decreased from 74/1,000 to 14 /
1,000 in the same period. Parr said both countries had now been able to
move from control to pilot elimination as a result of the success of the
Global Fund financed programs implemented co-jointly by both countries’
national vector borne disease control programs, WHO and SPC. The capacity
of both countries to scale up interventions has further been improved as a
result of AusAID’s support to the national malaria strategies, particularly
in the area of elimination and treatment. The measures in place resulted in
a significant decrease in the number of confirmed malaria cases in the
Solomon Islands compared to 2003, easing the burden on the national health
systems and budget, and reducing production time lost due to malaria, which
is a contributing factor that constrains economic growth.

Greenlight started as Internet radio, which is not regulated. The two
Boulder brothers who founded it eventually built their own transmitter and
figured out how to poach one of the few unoccupied frequencies in the area.
Their belief: The broadcast spectrum belongs to the public — not
corporations and media conglomerates shaped by strangers who know nothing
about Boulder. By nature, radio waves are only strong enough to span a
small geographic community. So the station founders said that it only seems
logical that each community has control over what appears on its waves.
They’re not talking about anarchy, or even about the desire to spout curse
words on the radio without being bleeped out. They’re talking about
“relocalization.” “Bringing resource and regulation control back to the
local community,” says one DJ and Boulder native who goes by the on-air
name Rocky Flats. He says a community radio compliments the trend of
increasingly more people growing their own food, shopping at local farmer’s
markets and co-ops and setting up online blogs and personal Web pages. “The
world is going through a huge shift right now. Boulder is doing well in
this recession because we localize a lot,” Rocky Flats says. “Localization
is the key to survival.” Rocky Flats thinks it’s also the key to overcoming
what he calls the current “media crisis,” where Paris Hilton gets
precedence over political turmoil in Pakistan, and a handful of
corporations control the news and views that Americans are fed. Rocky Flats
says he’s passionate about politics, as well as music and information. When
he’s not volunteering at Greenlight — none of the 30 DJs and members are
paid — he works in a customer service job. Rocky Flats looks clean-cut and
well put-together, and his tone is focused and professional. “Our direction
is for the community to believe the airwaves are a local resource,” he
says. “We try to provide an example of that. Eventually through enough
actions, we can take the airwaves completely back.”

Oceanic Airlines is the fictional airline that operated Flight 815 which
crashed on the Island. According to Oceanic Airlines’ website, the company
was founded in 1979 and served other destinations such as Costa Rica,
London, and Seoul. After the events of Flight 815, it ceased operations due
financial difficulties. But the company was returning to the airways. It
was established that Oceanic Airlines had cancelled all flights whilst
conducting an investigation into Flight 815’s disappearance. After failing
to find anything, the company was pushed to close the case so that they
could resume flights and recover from loss of business. This decision to
conclude all passengers dead with no solid proof resulted in opposition
from individuals such as Sam Thomas, the main protagonist in the second
Lost alternate reality game that focused specifically on Oceanic Airlines,
Find 815. A video advertisement aired at Comic-Con 2009 ostensibly stated
that Oceanic Airlines had been running since 1979 with a 30 year perfect
safety record. The canonical status of this video, and how it contradicts
all previously established fact, is presently unclear.

President Hugo Chavez’s government has begun taking over management of a
Hilton-run hotel on Venezuela’s Margarita Island. A 20-year concession
granted to the company had expired and the government “has taken legitimate
control of an asset that belongs to all the people of Venezuela”. Mr Chavez
issued a decree last week ordering the “forced acquisition” of the
Margarita Hilton & Suites and its marina. A Hilton Worldwide spokeswoman
said the company was analysing the move to determine how its interest in
the hotel would be affected.

It now seems that passengers flying in and out of Papua New Guinea are
being terrorized by an underpants thief. Women travelers who are flying
with the national carrier Air Niugini are fed up with one or more baggage
handlers taking their underwear. Four women, who do wish to remain nameless
due to the nature of the event, said that some of their best undergarments
have been stolen from their luggage while traveling on domestic flights
when leaving the capital Port Moresby. It may come at no surprise that some
reports point out that only “attractive” women have been hit by this so
called thief, and the ones that are hit only have their sexier
undergarments stolen. Another tourist that was on a brief stay in Papua New
Guinea said that her bag has a lock on it; however, when she got it back
the lock bad been broken. The only items that she found missing from her
bag were her lace hipster briefs and her g-strings. She went on to say that
she just could not believe it. She noted that she has traveled all over the
world, and this is the very first time something like this has ever
happened. In a different case, a woman that was visiting her mother in
Papua New Guinea was shocked to find that her favorite pair of pink panties
were missing. She went on to say that what is so weird about the whole
thing is that she had much more valuable items in her bag besides her
underpants, and those remained untouched. Despite all of this, Air Nigugini
said that they will get to the bottom of the women’s undergarments thief.
One spokesperson said that they were unaware that such particular items
were being targeted.

Travelers to Southeast Asia beware: there’s a new strain of malaria in
town. Researchers have recently figured out that the Plasmodium knowlesi
strain of malaria, which used to be confined to Malaysian macaque monkeys,
can kill humans too. The especially nasty part about this new human strain
of malaria is that doctors have a hard time recognizing it. Symptoms and
disease progression look scarily similar to other less serious forms of
malaria, so you might end up dead before the doctors realize they should’ve
done something differently. You can pick up this malaria from mosquito
bites across the region, but especially in Borneo and Malaysia. You should
be extra sure to use mosquito repellent in these areas to prevent bites,
and head straight to the doc if you get fever and body aches and pains.

The world’s eighth largest economy is still finding its feet after
suffering multiple economic shocks, including a housing slump, mortgage
crisis and recession. Employers in California, the most populous US state,
are expected to keep cutting staff in 2010 as the wider US jobs market
recovers. As industries in other US states prepare to rehire on signs of
recovery, firms in California are still waiting for their economy to
rebound. The state has 12.2 percent unemployment, above the national US
level of 9.8 percent, and at odds with California’s image as an oasis of
opportunity in hard times. California’s economic engines – Silicon Valley,
Hollywood and gateway ports to Asia – remain the envy of other US regions
but seem incapable of reducing Rust Belt-like unemployment rates. That is
largely because of the Golden State’s housing and home building crisis. In
the 12 months through August, California’s construction industry shed
142,000 jobs, or 18.5 percent of its work force, marking the largest
decline on a percentage basis over the period of surveyed industry groups.
Those workers are struggling to find new jobs in construction or other
trades, according to analysts. House prices soared higher in California
than in most other US states earlier this decade and have crashed harder
amid the credit crunch. Developers are trying to unload unsold new homes
and real estate agents are relying on selling foreclosures for a large
share of business. Tight credit and steep job losses have slimmed ranks of
prospective home buyers, with many waiting for prices to drop further. At
the same time, a number of other states are beginning to see home prices
stabilize.

Featuring old Papua New Guinea necklaces of human teeth and ivory
nose-rings as well as the extravagant designer suits paraded in poor Congo
by today’s “sapeur” movement, a show opening in Paris revisits men’s finery
through the ages. In Brazzaville and Kinshasa, as well as in the slums of
Paris and Brussels, men who barely eke out a living have been forking out
their savings since the 80s on the most luxurious, elegant and expensive
menswear on the market. The craze known as “Le Sape” was introduced by pop
star Papa Wemba’s throwback at the time to a look of 1930s elegance —
tapered trousers, brogues, trimmed hair and tweed hats worn at a rakish
angle — but in a wider brighter range of colours.

Nguyen’s is the longest case of wrongful detention in recent history. This
“bureaucratic bungle” caused Nguyen to suffer unnecessarily, as he is now
burdened with severe mental health issues. He witnessed many traumatic
events, from stabbings and suicide attempts to widespread drug abuse, while
inside Villawood. The situation was a “very bad event, a serious
administrative error and a terrible circumstance”. In its settlement
discussions, the government has offered Nguyen’s $70,000, a sum which would
be reduced to $58,000 once the Government’s legal fees are taken out. This
amount breaks down to less than $50 a day for each day that Nguyen spent in
Villawood. A attorney for this Sydney resident, has rejected the
Commonwealth’s offer as inadequate. The Government admits only that
officials made a mistake with respect to 108 of the 1137 total days that
Nguyen spent in detention.

Responding to the needs of Pacific Islands countries and territories and
recognising that there are wide social determinants in health, SPC’s health
division is modifying its strategy from a disease-based approach to a
whole-of-health approach. A particular emphasis will be on strengthening
health systems in Pacific Islands countries and territories (PICTs). Rates
of sexually transmitted infections in the Pacific remain as high as they
were in 2004 and a comprehensive review of the strategies was being
commissioned. A programme to prevent mother to child transmission had
substantially reduced the risk of an unborn child being infected with HIV
from his/her mother during delivery. The SPC public health team had
responded to the H1N1 pandemic in 2009 in partnership with the World Health
Organisation (WHO) and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC), and played a critical role in providing technical advice, services
and capacity building to Pacific Islands countries and territories (PICTs).
It was also involved in the response to the recent cholera outbreak in PNG.
TB control supported PICT’s in implementing the regional Stop TB strategy
in close collaboration with WHO and CDC. There is a very high prevalence of
noncommunicable disease risk conditions – diabetes, high blood pressure and
obesity – being among the highest in the world.

Pirating unregistered radio waves is surprisingly simple. All DJs need is a
microphone, Internet connection and computer. They broadcast their reports
and stream their tunes online, to greenlightradio.com, according to another
DJ, who goes by an especially pirate-y name, Treeson Bloodbeard. “Anyone
can do Internet radio. Anyone can listen to Internet radio,” he says. “In
our case, a separate computer is also listening, with a headphones jack
plugged into the transmitter.” Of course, he can’t disclose where this
transmitter is stationed. Rumor was that Boulder Free Radio used to
broadcast out of a van, but Treeson says that’s unlikely because the signal
would fluctuate too much. “We have a hot air balloon,” he says with a
smirk. Treason, who has lived in Boulder for eight years, calls himself a
“techno-shaman, actively trying to bring spirituality to the new punk,
now-apathetic generation.” Greenlight typically broadcasts FM 4 p.m.-4 a.m.
weekdays and wall-to-wall weekends, with no commercials. When the station
isn’t shut down, that is. In its first year, the FCC has already canned
Greenlight three times. When the FCC triangulates Greenlight’s signal, the
FCC leaves a warning saying Greenlight must shut down because it’s not
registered. But the DJs aren’t hostile about it. They say it’s part of the
game. “We don’t hate the FCC,” Treeson says. “The laws they’re going by are
just outdated, and they need help changing them. The FCC was created in
1934.” Treeson believes there should instead be a modern Boulder
Communications Commission, to distribute and protect the airwaves. DJ Rocky
Flats agrees there is a need for a radio regulation commission; the FCC
finds out what is wrong with signals and helps stations clean up. In fact,
the FCC has helped Greenlight improve its signal each time before shutting
it down. “Instead of fighting fire with fire (like Boulder Free Radio),”
Rocky Flats says, “when the FCC pushes, we pull and redirect their energy
where we want it to go.”

Photos and video clips of rival sapeurs doing battle, flashing labels and
stripping down to their silks socks and underwear, are on view at the show
at Paris’ Dapper museum, titled “The Art of Being A Man, Africa, Oceania.”
The sapeurs underline contemporary man’s taste for finery. They revisit the
western suit through African eyes. One non-sapeur fashionista visitor, a
tall poney-tailed African in a red tartan skirt carrying a helmet, was
stunned by an old Dinka corset from Sudan, a torso-sized piece made of red
beads, metal and fibre. “It just shows,” he said. “Men’s corsets are now
coming back in fashion yet existed long ago.” From corsets to penis sheafs
from the Pacific, as well as pendants, ear-rings, nose-rings and bracelets,
the exhibition brings together some 150 pieces from specialist museums from
across the world. These objects help show how men develop their male
identity. Some were used in sexual and social rituals or to provide
protection, others were worn to show a man’s status, or underline his
position through finery. The porcupine hat from Cameroon accessorises a
porcupine tunic, highlighting the sacred impact of different animals or
materials in different societies. Other show-stopper head-pieces include
hats in cat-teeth, tiny antelope horns or scaly anteater and leopard-skin.
Hair-cuts too vary from place to place as does body art practised to
accompany mutilation and circumcision rites.

In another instance of wrongful detention, the Commonwealth paid
German-born Australian Cornelia Rau $2.6 million. She was locked up in 2004
for 10 months. Even more recently, the Supreme Court of the Australian
Capital Territory last month awarded $55,000 to a man who was wrongfully
detained for 29 days. Nguyen’s situation has prompted officials to consider
an overhaul of the system, acknowledging there are major deficiencies with
current legislation. The Migration Act lacks a “safety net provision”.
Accordingly, the Department of Immigration lacks the express power to
remedy earlier decisions. In Nguyen’s case, the Department engaged in heavy
legal debate, thus causing significant delay in resolving the matter.

Hypertension is the most common condition leading up to cardiac arrest
which is the leading cause of death in the Pacific. The risk factors of
smoking, alcohol, low levels of physical activity and consumption of fruits
and vegetables were the perfect recipe for NCDs. The SPC-WHO joint 2-1-22
(two organisations, one programme, 22 countries) approach funded by AusAID
and NZAID was being implemented under the Pacific Framework for the
prevention and control of NCDs. Grants amounting to 23 million CPF
(approximately US$270,000) were provided to three PICT’s in support of NCDs
national strategy implementation. Meanwhile, relatively neglected diseases
in the Pacific were dengue and other vector borne diseases like
leptospirosis (except malaria), rheumatic heart disease, mental health and
environmental health. There were also funding gaps for secondary prevention
for noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes, cancer and high blood
pressure. Gaps were also emerging in maternal and child health, sexual and
reproductive health, on the consequences for health of climate change,
urbanisation and poor housing, and on infant diarrhoea, water and
sanitation.

The Greenlight DJs make great effort to present themselves in a
non-confrontational light. So why break the rules at all? Why not just be a
donor-funded community radio station, like Boulder’s KGNU, 88.5 FM? Beyond
simply the principle belief that the FCC needs reshaped, DJ Treason says a
station like Greenlight is even more independent than KGNU. A donor-funded
station can’t upset too many listeners, because the station needs their
donations. “They do a necessary part of the battle by playing by the rules,
so they can do things we can’t do because we don’t have money or
licensing,” Treason says. “But we are doing our part of the battle by not
playing by the rules, and there are things we can do because we don’t rely
on donors.” Like Greenlight’s newest show, “Reefer Madness,” all about the
positive aspects of pot. Plus, as another DJ who goes by The Hair puts it:
“There’s too much going on out there to not need multiple stations.” The
Hair gets his name because he has long blond hair. He says Greenlight has
its own unique music tastes and opinions. “And we’re pirates, so we have to
speak like sailors,” The Hair says with a laugh. It’s true, DJ Treeson
admits. Greenlight is “raunchier” than KGNU. “But there is a distinction
between free speech and responsible speech. Responsibility comes with the
consequences,” he says. And he accepts that. “There’s a level of danger in
what we do,” Treason says. “But no American has ever been sent to jail for
this.” The real crime is turning on the transmitter, he says. When the FCC
shut down Boulder Free Radio, the warning was shut down or be punished by
up to $11,000 per day and one year in jail. Greenlight has never been
fined. So Treason says he refuses to be clouded by fear. “Fear distracts
you from your ultimate goal,” he says. “If you define yourself in
opposition to something, you’re not defining yourself, period.” Yet still,
he hides.

Another home invasion, this time in Belize City. It is getting apparent
that burglars are getting more abrasive and their new trend is to invade
while the victims are still inside. There were home invasions in San Pedro
and another in Hattieville where an elderly Canadian woman was also raped.
Two African men living in Belize City were the next victims to experience
the terrifying ordeal. Twenty-six year old Samuel Benguna and twenty-four
year old Ismail Conteh, both of Nigeria, were at their apartment on the
Northern Highway when they were surprised by three men with rags covering
their faces. These two African gentlemen were at home when they heard a
knock on their door and they were accosted by three men who robbed them at
gunpoint. Stolen from them were computer accessories and cell phones and an
amount of cash in both US and Belize currency. There are no suspects yet as
police investigations continue into this matter. With the increasing number
of Aggravated Burglaries that we are witnessing is concerning and the
police will be delivering pamphlets shortly advising residents on measures
to protect themselves. The ultimate protection is the neighbourhood watches
and the community policing that the police department is trying to promote.
The cash stolen from the men totaled four thousand, two hundred dollars.

A passenger train bound for Bangkok derailed in Thailand’s Hua Hin coastal
resort district in heavy rain, killing at least five people and injuring up
to 50. About six of the train’s 16 cars went off the tracks and some people
were believed trapped.

Seven new glowing mushroom species have been discovered in Belize, Brazil,
Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Japan, Malaysia and Puerto Rico. Four of the
species are completely new to scientists, and three previously known
species were discovered to be luminescent. All seven species, as well as
the majority of the 64 previously known species of luminescent mushrooms,
are from the Mycena family. Within Mycena, the luminescent species come
from 16 different lineages, which suggests that luminescence evolved at a
single point and some species later lost the ability to glow. The new
discoveries might help scientists understand when, how and why mushrooms
evolved the ability to glow. Luminescence might attract nocturnal animals,
which would then help the mushrooms spread their spores. Mycena
silvaelucens (forest light) was collected in the grounds of an Orangutan
Rehabilitation Center in Borneo, Malaysia and was found on the bark of a
standing tree. The mushrooms are tiny with each cap measuring less than 18
millimeters in diameter. Mycena luxaeterna (light eternal) was collected in
Sao Paulo, Brazil and was found on sticks in an Atlantic forest habitat.
These mushrooms are tiny with each cap measuring less than 8 millimeters in
diameter and their stems have a jelly-like texture. The species’ name was
inspired by Mozart’s Requiem. Mycena luxarboricola (light tree dweller) was
collected in Paraná, Brazil and was found on the bark of a living tree in
old growth Atlantic forest. These mushrooms are tiny with each cap
measuring less than 5 millimeters in diameter.

The Solomon Islands police chief and his wife have been robbed in a
frightening home invasion by 12 young men in the capital Honiara, where a
spate of similar burglaries has occurred recently. New Zealander Peter
Marshall, the Solomon Islands police commissioner, and his wife Pamela
barricaded themselves in their bedroom after being woken by the thieves at
1am. They were not targeted for political reasons. “It was pretty
frightening,” he said. “We barricaded ourselves into the bedroom with a
cupboard and wardrobe against the door. There was a fair bit of commotion
and kicking against the door,” he said. “There has been four similar
robberies like this in the last six weeks,” he said. Laptops, cash, a
digital camera and other personal effects were taken but most of the goods
had been returned. “The suspects were arrested shortly afterwards and are
now in police custody.” The attack is part of a growing trend among
unemployed youth in the lead up to Christmas. “We’ve identified who it is,
there is a trend of robberies by the same unemployed youths who live in
squatter settlements.” Honiara mayor Andrew Mua said he feared rising crime
and unemployment was a threat to peace and security in the city. But
Marshall rejected those claims, adding that crime rates had dropped 12 per
cent during 2009 and most crime in the Solomons was petty. “We’ve had no
firearm incidents in two and a half years, we’ve had a scattering of
burglaries,” he said. The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomons Islands
(RAMSI) is made up of Australian, New Zealand and Pacific Islands police,
troops and public officials, who arrived in 2003 to restore law and order
and good governance following years of ethnic unrest.

August 18, 2009

AMID CHINA AIRPORT RIOTS 8,000 TONNES RED BANGKOK SCAM BLASTS 140 FISHING LENTILS KIDNAPPING 79 VENEZUELAN ONE-WAY HOMELESS TICKETS FOR SWINE FLU MOB ON RAMPAGE FROM INDIGENOUS POVERTY AS NEPALESE REFUGEES ARRESTED; SIX ISLANDS BECOME SEVEN WOUNDS KILLING 50 KENYANS IN HEAVY NICARAGUAN RAINFALL WITH BRITISH SIM CARDS FROM 828 TULELE PEISA TOBAGO MACHETES

A mob set ablaze eight buses and several shops after a schoolgirl was run
over by a bus at an unauthorized bus stand near Domjur police station. The
death of Riya Das, a Class-VII student of a local school, triggered mob
fury as locals alleged that the unauthorized bus stand was creating traffic
problems in the area and started setting ablaze buses and shops. Rapid
Action Force (RAF) had to be called in to control the situation.

Violent street battles killed at least 140 people and injured 828 others in
the deadliest ethnic unrest to hit China’s western Xinjiang region in
decades, and officials said the death toll was expected to rise. Police
sealed off streets in parts of the provincial capital, Urumqi, after
discord between ethnic Muslim Uighur people and China’s Han majority
erupted into riots. Witnesses reported a new protest in a second city,
Kashgar.

Venezuelan authorities found the bullet-ridden bodies of three Canadian
boys who had been kidnapped in the South American country, the justice
minister said. The bodies of 17-year-old John Faddoul, along with his
brothers Kevin, 13, and Jason, 12, were found near an electrical tower in
Yare, about 30 miles west of Caracas, Justice Minister Jesse Chacon said.
The body of the boy’s driver, 30-year-old Miguel Ribas, also was found with
them.

A total of 816 people died of swine flu worldwide, with most of the deaths
occurring in South America, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said. So
far, 707 people have died in the Americas, 44 in South-East Asia, 34 in
Europe, 30 in the Western Pacific region and one in the Eastern
Mediterranean region.

Many Strong Voices (MSV), unites indigenous peoples from the Arctic with
those from the tiny coral isles sprinkled throughout the globe’s oceans,
known in the parlance of climate change policy as Small Island Developing
States, or SIDS. MSV was spawned on the heels of a 2005 United Nations
climate policy meeting in Montreal and met for the first time in Belize two
years later. The grounds its constituents call home are as diverse as the
planet has to offer, but as the planet warms they share the same
catastrophe.

On many nights at sea off this Pacific port, Aaron Medina drops bombs that
cause dozens of fish to soar into the air. The 23-year-old fisherman
rubbernecks to ensure no police are around before pulling a 1-pound bomb
from his pocket. It’s an old sardine can wrapped in a cement bag filled
with gunpowder, sugar and sulfur. It is lit with a waterproof wick. “It’s
the only way to survive in fishing today,” said Medina, who has been
fishing with explosives off Corinto, Nicaragua’s largest port, since he was
12 years old.

Already poverty kills 50 children each day in the Pacific, Papua New Guinea
and Timor-Leste – a figure likely to rise as the global financial crisis
hits. Many countries in the Pacific are yet to suffer the full impact of
the global financial crisis but it is about to hit the region with all the
devastation and suffering of a tsunami. There is a critical ‘window of
opportunity’ to act in preparation for its impact but it is an opportunity
that is steadily slipping away. The central lesson learned from every
previous economic crisis is that the poorest people in developing countries
suffer the most and that not enough is done to help them.

Travelers to Thailand have braved a variety of hazards in recent years but
foreign governments are now warning about a new and different one:
duty-free shopping at the airport. Several European tourists say they were
falsely accused of shoplifting at the Thai capital’s main airport and some
recount being taken to seedy motels where they were shaken down for
thousands of dollars by a shady middleman. A British couple paid the
equivalent of $11,000 to secure their release five days after being accused
of stealing a Givenchy wallet that was never found, say police, who along
with airport authorities deny any wrongdoing.

A violent crowd went on the rampage at Jyoti Chowk in Kondhwa damaging
shops and vehicles which forced many shops and commercial establishments to
down their shutters. According to Kondhwa police, around 25 to 30 people,
carrying saffron flags assembled at Jyoti Chowk; first they asked all shops
to close down and started pelting at shops and hotels that were open. Four
two-wheelers, a few cars, a Pune Mahanagar Parivahan Mahamandal Limited bus
and an ATM centre were damaged in the incident. As the situation grew
tense, commercial establishments in the area closed down for an hour. Soon,
the Kondhwa police reached the spot. “We summoned two strike force to bring
the crowd under control,” said Deputy Commissioner of Police Jalinder
Supekar.

For some time now, Carteret Islanders have made eye-catching headlines:
“Going, going… Papua New Guinea atoll sinking fast”. Academics have dubbed
us amongst the world’s first “environmental refugees” and journalists put
us on the “frontline of climate change.” So perhaps you have heard how we
build sea walls and plant mangroves, only to see our land and homes washed
away by storm surges and high tides. Maybe you can even recognise the
tragic irony in the fact that the Carterets people have lived simply
(without cars or electricity) — subsisting mainly on fish, bananas and
vegetables — and have therefore not had much of a “carbon footprint”.

Columns of paramilitary police in green camouflage uniforms and flak vests
marched around Urumqi’s main bazaar — a largely Uighur neighborhood —
carrying batons, long bamboo poles and slingshots. Mobile phone service was
blocked, and Internet links were also cut or slowed down. Rioters
overturned barricades, attacking vehicles and houses, and clashed violently
with police in Urumqi, according to media and witness accounts. State
television aired footage showing protesters attacking and kicking people on
the ground. Other people, who appeared to be Han Chinese, sat dazed with
blood pouring down their faces.

“We lament, despite the efforts that were made 24 hours a day since this
started, we have not been able to prevent this abominable homicide,” Chacon
said. “The three boys were identified by a relative.” Police have said that
the brothers were abducted when unidentified men dressed as police stopped
their car at a roadside checkpoint in Caracas as the boys were on their way
to school. Authorities have not ruled out the possibility that the
kidnappers could in fact be police officers.

In addition, more than 20 countries such as Afghanistan, Belize, Bhutan,
Botswana, Haiti, Namibia, Sudan, Tanzania, and Solomon Islands, among
others, have confirmed swine flu cases. A total of 134,503 people worldwide
have been affected by the influenza A(H1N1) virus, also called swine flu,
so far. The actual figure may be much higher, as countries are no longer
required to report swine flu cases.

“We want to tell the world that the Inuit hunter falling through the ice
and the Pacific Islander fishing on rising seas are connected.” Four years
ago the United States was indicted in front of the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights for producing the greenhouse gas emissions that
were warming the Arctic homeland at rates twice as fast as elsewhere on the
planet. The warming hasn’t stopped but the network has increased, and the
world they inhabit has become even more tenuous. “This is the start of the
dying of a civilization” warned an economic advisor to the president of the
Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean just north of Madagascar.

Medina is part of the nation’s booming blast fishing industry, which is
quickly spreading across Central America’s Pacific coast. The practice is
also common in El Salvador and Honduras. Blast fishing is an illegal but
lucrative practice in which fishermen throw small homemade bombs into the
marine habitat, killing entire schools of fish and wiping out everything
else within the blast zone – including coral reef habitats – thus depleting
fisheries. “In a few years, blast fishing will be everywhere if it
continues like this,” said Reinaldo Bermuti of Nicaragua’s Fisheries
Institute in the capital, Managua. Other authorities fear the practice is
fueling a black market for increasingly potent explosives that could fall
into the hands of gangs or terrorist groups. “That’s why we’re constantly
working on intelligence,” said police investigator Lester Gomez.

Beneath the current financial crisis lies a development emergency with
catastrophic implications if we fail to respond effectively. And those in
the teeth of this economic storm are women and children. The Pacific
Islands countries are already burdened by poverty. One in four households
and almost one in three of the population are below the respective national
poverty lines. One in 10 Pacific Island children are underweight. Almost
one in five children do not enrol in primary school and of those who do
enrol, one in 10 do not complete their primary level schooling. Of course
the biggest sign of how well government action is protecting children is
the death rate of under-five-year-olds. If we add Papua New Guinea and
Timor-Leste, 18,000 Pacific Island children under five die each year – 50
children per day. Yet forecasts based on the impact of the global financial
crisis estimate the number of child deaths could rise by a further 800 each
year.

The Thai government has vowed a crackdown at Bangkok’s scandal-plagued
Suvarnabhumi Airport, which has barely recovered from its public relations
disaster when anti-government protesters shut it for a week and stranded
300,000 visitors. The airport opened in 2006 and has been dogged by
corruption allegations, taxi touts with “broken meters” and baggage thefts
— prompting a recent order for luggage handlers to wear uniforms without
pockets. But the allegations of extortion take things to another level. “We
are quite concerned about this,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Vimon Kidchob
said. “The government of Thailand is doing everything we can to ensure the
safety of tourists.”

Apparently, the incident occurred after some miscreants showed disrespect
to Shivaji Maharaj. The police have so far arrested five people in
connection with the incident and booked them for rioting and damaging
public property. The police are looking of Amar Dhawane, Maharashtra
Navnirman Sena vice president, Hadapsar Unit, and around 20 unidentified
people involved in the incident. Shrikant Surve (21), Nitin Kakde (23),
Ramesh Patlelu (24) of Wanwadi, Sunil Patil (21) of Kondhwa and Amol Kad
(23) of Katraj are the five arrested

You might know that encroaching salt water has contaminated our fresh water
wells and turned our vegetable plots into swampy breeding grounds for
malaria-carrying mosquitos. Taro, the staple food crop, no longer grows on
the atoll. Carterets Islanders now face severe food shortages, with
government aid coming by boat two or three times a year. However, the story
you have not likely read is the one of government failure and the strategy
we developed in response, so as to engineer our own exile from a drowning
traditional homeland. Carterets people are facing, and will continue to
face, many challenges as we relocate from our ancestral grounds. However,
our plan is one in which we remain as independent and self-sufficient as
possible. We wish to maintain our cultural identity and live sustainably
wherever we are.

Riya was returning home in Domjur’s Uttar Japardah locality and had barely
stepped down a private bus on route 63 when the driver accelerated the
vehicle to park it at the bus stand. At this, she fell and was crushed
under the rear wheels. Angry locals gathered at the spot within moments and
set the bus ablaze. The mob then targeted three other buses on route 63
parked at the bus stand. Then, the mob went on the rampage, setting fire to
five mini buses on the Domjur-Howrah route. The crowd also targeted all the
roadside shops, stalls and shade where bus drivers and conductors rest,
setting these ablaze.

There was little immediate explanation for how so many people died. The
government accused a Uighur businesswoman living in the U.S. of inciting
the riots through phone calls and “propaganda” spread on Web sites. Exile
groups said the violence started only after police began violently cracking
down on a peaceful protest complaining about a fight between Uighur and Han
factory workers in another part of China. The unrest is another troubling
sign for Beijing at how rapid economic development has failed to stem — and
even has exacerbated — resentment among ethnic minorities, who say they are
being marginalized in their homelands as Chinese migrants pour in.

“We really do not have words to express our pain to the Faddoul Diab family
and the Ribas Guerra family for the abominable and lamentable event today,”
Chacon said. Officials have not revealed exactly how much in ransom the
kidnappers demanded, but they have said it was more than $4.5 million — a
figure circulated in the Venezuelan media. A lawyer for the boys’ family,
Santiago Georges, said recently that the family was not in a position to
pay the sum. The boys’ parents were both born in Lebanon, and their father,
John Faddoul, is a naturalized Canadian who has been a businessman in
Venezuela for more than 20 years.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg defended a city program to send homeless
families out of New York on planes, trains and buses, saying it “saves the
taxpayers of New York City an enormous amount of money.” Speaking in the
Blue Room in City Hall to announce a new finance commissioner, Mr.
Bloomberg was asked if the program simply shifts the homelessness program
to a different place, as some critics of the program have suggested. “I
don’t know, when they get to the other places, whether they find jobs,” Mr.
Bloomberg said. “It may be an easier place for them. If we don’t — we
either have two choices. We can do this program or pay an enormous amount
of money daily to provide housing.”

Some islands in his homeland are composed of granite with spires that rise
into the clouds while others rest on a porous coral platform barely visible
above the ever-lapping waves. Should sea level rise just several feet, as
reports predict, these islands will be inundated. “Who will be prepared to
chuck away a 1,000 year-old album with the history of all their ancestors
overnight?” The near-term goal of MSV is to garner support for the greatest
emissions reductions possible at the UN Climate Conference.

Unlike many of Nicaragua’s coastal areas, Corinto’s rocky shoreline hasn’t
attracted international surfers or real estate investors. But over the past
decade, blast fishing has grown because poverty is rampant, homemade bombs
are increasingly available and law enforcement is lax. Local authorities
estimate fishermen drop 40,000 homemade bombs into the sea every week.
Often working undercover, police confiscated about 1,000 bombs last year,
most of which were seized at highway checkpoints. In 2007, Corinto police
confiscated 650 bombs from a clandestine bomb factory. The Nicaraguan navy
often cruises Pacific waters at night with no lights, hoping to catch
fishermen red-handed. Last year, naval officials say they caught five boats
blast fishing, and seized about 400 bombs. Navy Capt. Francisco Gutierrez
concedes that’s just a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of bombs used
each year.

This tragic ‘headline figure’ would coincide with increased poverty in the
region, falling school attendance, higher malnutrition and deteriorating
access to healthcare. Yet the fact that the full impact of the global
financial crisis has not yet hit the Pacific means there is an opportunity
to brace for its impact. There is time for governments to readjust fiscal
and monetary policy to create a social protection (a safety net) for the
most vulnerable. Investing in children and women is not just a moral
imperative, it is smart economics. Irrefutable evidence has now accumulated
to show the societal benefits of investing in children in good times, as
well as in bad times such as the current global economic downturn.

It’s hardly the image the self-proclaimed “Land of Smiles” wants to
project, particularly as Thailand’s vital tourism industry faces its worst
crisis in years after political instability, the global financial crisis
and swine flu scares. The scandal has spawned lengthy chatter on travel
blogs about other scams to watch for in Thailand and a string of overseas
travel advisories on the perils of duty-free shopping in Bangkok. Ireland
is warning its nationals to “be extremely careful” when browsing at
Suvarnabhumi (pronounced “sue-WANNA-poom”).

Seventy-nine undocumented migrants from Asia and Africa were arrested in a
Nicaraguan port off the Caribbean Sea, local police said. The migrants from
Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and Nepal said they had arrived by boat at the
eastern port of Bluefields, where their handlers led them to a hotel,
telling them to wait there for a train. But there are no trains in
Nicaragua.

While we call on the Papua New Guinea government to develop policy, we are
not sitting by. Instead, we now want to see the media headlines translate
into practical assistance for our relocation program. And we hope our
carefully designed and community-led action plan can serve as a model for
communities elsewhere that will be affected by climate change in the
future. Situated 86 km Northeast of Bougainville, the main island in the
autonomous region of which the Carterets form part, our atoll is only 1.2
meters above sea level. They say evacuation of the islands was inevitable
as for many, many years erosion has been doing its work. “King tides”, or
particularly high tides, are now doing worse. Originally the Carterets were
six islands, but Huene was split in half by the sea and so now there are
seven. In 1995 a wave ate away most of the shorelines of Piul and Huene
islands. Han island, has suffered from complete inundation.

The mob resisted fire brigade officials and chased them away. Flames spread
as oil tanks of the buses began exploding. Though the bus stand lies along
the boundary wall of Domjur police station, policemen were also prevented
from coming out to quell the mob. The crowd blocked the police station’s
entrance. Fire engines could be sent to the spot only after the RAF lathi
charged the crowd.

Thousands of people took part in the disturbance, unlike recent sporadic
separatist violence carried out by small groups in Xinjiang. The clashes
echoed the violent protest that rocked Tibet last year and left many
Tibetan communities living under clamped-down security ever since. Tensions
between Uighurs and the majority Han Chinese are never far from the surface
in Xinjiang, a sprawling region rich in minerals and oil that borders eight
Central Asian nations. Many Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gers) yearn for
independence and some militants have waged a sporadic, violent separatist
campaign.

The victims were found with gunshot wounds in the head and neck area, and
it appeared they had been shot to death at least two days before their
bodies were found, judicial police chief Marco Chavez said on state
television. “We’re certain that the evidence and the advancements already
made in the investigation will allow us to conclude this investigation,”
Chacon said. Relatives, friends and classmates of three boys had held
vigils and demonstrations in the streets to call for their release.

It costs the city about $36,000 a year to provide shelter for a homeless
family. The average stay in shelter is about nine months. But Mr. Bloomberg
appeared sensitive to the image of flying homeless families to far-flung
places, as the program is set up to do. In the past two years, families
have been provided one-way tickets to Haiti, Peru, Mexico City, St. Croix,
Trinidad and Tobago, Ukraine, Santo Domingo and Casablanca. (The most
popular destinations are Puerto Rico, Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas.)

It was a theme echoed by many MSV participants. Paul Crowley, of the
Climate Law and Policy Project, was nearly moved to tears as he relayed
news that President Obama has said he is willing to work towards a
successful outcome in Copenhagen. But for groups like the Inuits of Alaska,
even a miracle in Copenhagen can’t reverse the damage already done.
Patricia Cochran, an Inupiat Eskimo born and raised in Alaska and current
chair of the ICC, presented a harrowing slideshow of her homeland. In
Shishmaref, homes hug cliffs crumbling because of melting permafrost into
seas more likely to be beset by storm as rising temperatures reduce sea
ice. The media has publicized this town’s problems, but there are half a
dozen other villages just like Shishmaref, noted Cochran. Ice that hunters
have relied on for centuries is melting earlier and shifting in ways locals
don’t understand. Last year a convoy of more than 200 snow mobiles had to
be rescued by helicopter after sea ice unexpectedly broke up, said Cochran.
“There is not one of us without a friend who has taken their snow machine
out and not come back home again,” she said. “That’s what we face every
day. These, in my opinion, are climate related incidents.”

Blast fishing is considered an environmental crime under Nicaraguan law,
punishable by up to four years in prison. Prosecutors can increase jail
time by tacking on illegal weapons possession charges. But prosecuting
cases is difficult because evidence is easily destroyed at sea. Gutierrez
said five fishermen are currently being processed for alleged blast
fishing, but he couldn’t recall the last time anyone went to jail. “They
have a system. It’s almost impossible to arrest them. When they see us
coming, they just sink the bombs in the sea with rocks,” Gutierrez said.
Widespread corruption among local police officers hinders enforcement
efforts, police investigator Gomez said. Many fishermen say police officers
routinely take bribes from bomb manufacturers and their distributors.

Global research by UNICEF, the World Bank and UNESCO has shown we could not
only save a young child from death but we could also help him or her
complete basic education by the age of 13 by investing altogether no more
than $US2,200 per child. Likewise providing micronutrients for the world’s
children who lack essential vitamins and minerals would cost just $US60
million per year and yield annual benefits of more than $1 billion –
implying a 1,500 per cent rate of return. For Pacific leaders this
illustration of the high returns – both in human lives and economic
productivity – for relatively low financial outlays presents a strong case
for paying particular attention to children in economic policy and fiscal
budgets.

“We have received reports that innocent shoppers have been the subject of
allegations of suspected theft and threatened that their cases will not be
heard for several months unless they plead guilty and pay substantial
fines,” says an Irish government travel advisory. It tells shoppers to keep
receipts to avoid “great distress.” The advice was posted after a
41-year-old Irish scientist, who was visiting for an international genetics
symposium, was accused of stealing Bobbi Brown eyeliner. The embassy
declined to discuss details of her case. Britain and Denmark have updated
their online travel advice to warn that Suvarnabhumi’s sprawling duty-free
zone has hard-to-detect demarcation lines between shops and patrons should
not carry unpaid merchandise between them.

“We suppose they were brought from Colombia to the island of San Andres”
and were then transferred to Bluefields, Nicaragua’s main Caribbean port,
“from which they had hoped to continue their journey to the United States
to pursue the American dream,” Deputy Commissioner Rolando Coulson told
reporters. The Colombian island of San Andres, located off Nicaragua’s
Caribbean coast, is used as a transit point for undocumented migrants
headed toward the United States, but many are cheated of their money and
abandoned in Nicaragua, officials say. One of the undocumented migrants,
Lexman Khaatri Chhetri, told the authorities he had spent much of his
savings to reach the American continent.

What climate change’s exact role is, even experts are hard put to answer.
Debate has raged over whether the islands are sinking, if tectonic plates
play a role, and whether sea levels are in fact rising. We do not know much
about science, but we watch helplessly as the tides wash away our shores
year in and year out. We also know that we are losing our cultural heritage
just as the sea relentlessly wipes out our food gardens. To relieve the
land shortage caused by eroding shorelines, in 1984 the government
resettled 10 families from the Carterets to Bougainville, but they returned
to the atoll in 1989 in flight from what began as a protest by landowners
against a mining company and escalated into civil war. Since that time, and
despite many promises, very little has been done by the Bougainville or PNG
government to assist Islanders’ relocation efforts. Tired of empty
promises, the Carterets Council of Elders formed a non-profit association
in late 2006 to organise the voluntary relocation of most of the Carterets’
population of 3,300.

Locals have demanded the removal of the unauthorised bus stand repeatedly.
They say rows of buses are parked on either side of the road — one of the
main thoroughfares of Domjur. This, along with rows of unauthorised shops
and stalls have reduced the road’s width to that of a narrow lane. Locals
allege that in spite of repeated complaints, Domjur police have allowed the
menace to thrive right under its nose.

Uighurs make up the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, but not in the
capital of Urumqi, which has attracted large numbers of Han Chinese
migrants. The city of 2.3 million is now about overwhelmingly Chinese — a
source of frustration for native Uighurs who say they are being squeezed
out. About 1,000 to 3,000 Uighur demonstrators had gathered in the regional
capital for a protest that apparently spun out of control. Accounts
differed over what happened, but the violence seemed to have started when
the crowd of protesters refused to disperse. The official Xinhua News
Agency reported hundreds of people were arrested and checkpoints ringed the
city to prevent rioters from escaping. Mobile phone service provided by at
least one company was cut to stop people from organizing further action in
Xinjiang. Internet access was blocked or unusually slow in Urumqi. Videos
and text updates about the riots were removed from China-based social
networking sites such as Youku, a YouTube-like video service, and Fanfou, a
Chinese micro-blogging Web site similar to Twitter. A Fanfou search for
posts with the key word Urumqi turned up zero results while Twitter, which
is hosted overseas, yielded hundreds of comments in Chinese and English.
Major Chinese portals such as Sina.com, Sohu.com and 163.com relied solely
on Xinhua for news of the event and turned off the comment function at the
bottom of the stories so people could not publicly react.

The killings come just days after a prominent Italian-born businessman,
74-year-old Filippo Sindoni, was abducted and killed. That case prompted
Italy’s foreign minister to ask Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s
government to do everything possible to end the kidnappings of Italians in
the country. Officials in Italy said an Italian businesswoman and her
3-year-old son were freed two months after being abducted in Venezuela.
Four men were arrested for their roles in the crime, officials said.
Violent robberies, kidnappings and murders are frequent in Venezuela. There
were 9,402 homicides reported in 2005, slightly down from 2004, according
to government statistics.

“The average cost is trivial,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Most go by bus. Very
few go overseas, very few go long distances. Bus is the normal ways we pay
for transportation, rather than air.” In fact, the most common mode of
travel for families in the program is air, not bus. Forty-eight percent
travel by airplane; 37 percent by bus; and 15 percent by train, according
to city data.

“We will not assume the role of powerless victims, we will do everything we
can to ensure our people who have been here for centuries will be here for
centuries more.” Nick Illauq, deputy mayor of the remote Baffin Island
community of Clyde River, in Nunavut, an autonomous Inuit territory at the
top of Canada, voiced concerns about another type of visitor. “We know the
Earth is changing,” said Illauq, “everyone is rushing to the Arctic to get
our resources. To me, that’s my biggest fear. We are very poor, we ask for
money and we don’t get it. We know we are destroying [the Earth] and yet we
rush to find resources. It’s not just the Inuit anymore, it’s not just the
caribou, it’s the baby being born anywhere right now that is going to have
to face all this crap in the future. Imagine what they are going to have to
face! And it’s our fault.”

But Gutierrez is hopeful that a one-year program to educate fishermen about
the pitfalls of the practice is finally paying off. One month, for the
first time, fishermen turned in more than 311 bombs. “We’ve been trying to
persuade them in meetings,” Gutierrez said. But Medina believes blast
fishing is more widespread than authorities suspect. He says virtually
every fisherman he knows has traded in traditional nets, lines and hooks
for explosives. And the handful of clandestine bombmakers who sell
explosives for about $2 apiece are making more powerful explosives, he
adds. Most recently, Nicaraguan police caught two fishermen with 10-pound
bombs wrapped in cement bags – more destructive and risky than the usual
sardine-can-size bombs. Medina says even 15-pound bombs are now available
on the black market. Injuries and deaths Medina also says some bombs have
exploded while being handled by colleagues, causing loss of life and limbs.
In the past three years, Corinto authorities have reported two deaths, nine
cases of lost limbs and two men who were blinded by explosions.

Governments in the Pacific must not stray from their commitments to
children and women at this time of crisis. They must take all necessary
measures to enhance the role of women as economic agents and to protect
social sector budgets, especially to maintain and, if warranted, expand
essential social services for children and women. There are already
alarming signs that budget cuts have been made or are on their way. Budget
cuts are not necessarily bad, if there is greater efficiency and if the cut
does not impact on social protection measures, it can produce a benefit.
But social protection budgets are all too often a victim of the budget
razor.

British couple Stephen Ingram, 49, and Xi Lin, 45, technology experts from
Cambridge, took the alleged scam public. Their ordeal was pieced together
based on accounts from police, airport and embassy officials and an
interview the couple gave to British media. The couple was approached by
airport security before boarding a flight to London and told that security
cameras showed they had taken a Givenchy wallet. King Power, the company
that owns the duty-free store, has posted CCTV footage on its Web site that
appears to show Lin putting her hand in her bag while browsing a wallet
display. The security guards found nothing, but turned the couple over to
police, said Sombat Dechapanichkul, managing director of King Power Duty
Free Co. “We are not aware of what happened next. It was then the job of
the police to proceed with the case,” said Sombat. Ingram told The Sunday
Times of London that they were questioned at an airport police office and
then transferred to a nearby police station where their passports were
confiscated and they spent the night in jail. The next morning they were
introduced to a translator — a Sri Lankan named Tony — who said he could
arrange bail and get their case dropped, warning it could otherwise drag on
for months. Tony took them to a nearby motel, called the Valentine Resort,
Ingram said. The couple managed a visit to the British Embassy but then
returned to the hotel fearing Tony, who had warned they would be watched,
Ingram said.

The association was named Tulele Peisa, which means “sailing the waves on
our own”. This name choice reflects the elders’ desire to see Carteret
Islanders remain strong and self-reliant, not becoming dependent on food
handouts for their survival. After much hard work, the first five fathers
moved to Tinputz, onto land donated by the Catholic Church. These fathers
are already building gardens so that their wives and children can join them
later when there is food. “I have volunteered to relocate as I would like
my family to be able to plant food crops like taro, banana, casava, yams
and other vegetables that we cannot grow on the island,” said Charles
Tsibi. “I also want my family to grow some cash crops like cocoa to sustain
our future life here in Marau, Tinputz.” According to a recent Tulele Peisa
survey, 80 other families would like to move immediately and 50 wish to
move later on. Twenty families have already relocated on their own. Thirty
families remain unsure about relocating.

State-owned Trading Corporation of Bangladesh (TCB) has issued an
international tender to import 8,000 tonnes of whole, husked red lentils.
The tendered cargo should include 3,000 tonnes of category A and 5,000
tonnes of category B whole, husked red lentils. TCB classified lentil
grains measuring 1.50-3.00 mm commonly known as Nepali/Indian variety and
3.50-4.50 mm Turkish variety as category A and category B respectively. A
tenderer may offer for both or either of the two items to supply the cargo,
to Chittagong port. Most of Bangladesh’s population of nearly 150 million
eat lentils along with the country’s staple food, rice, every day. It is
now sold at 110 taka ($1.60) per kg. Commerce ministry officials said more
essential commodities would be imported to keep prices stable especially
during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. ($1=69.06 taka)

The demonstrators were demanding justice for two Uighurs killed last month
during a fight with Han Chinese co-workers at a factory in southern China.
Uighur activists and exiles say the millions of Han Chinese who have
settled here in recent years are gradually squeezing the Turkic people out
of their homeland. But many Chinese believe the Uighurs are backward and
ungrateful for the economic development the Chinese have brought to the
poor region. Wu Nong, director of the news office of the Xinjiang
provincial government, said more than 260 vehicles were attacked or set on
fire and 203 shops were damaged. She said 140 people were killed and 828
injured in the violence. She did not say how many of the victims were Han
or Uighurs.

The U.S. Coast Guard reported that it had seized 36 bales of cocaine valued
at $55 million off Venezuela’s coast during a routine Caribbean patrol. The
crew of a go-fast boat threw the drugs into the sea when they spotted the
Coast Guard personnel on board the British frigate HMS Iron Duke. The
British and U.S. forces had detected the boat some 40 kilometers (25 miles)
west of Curacao, an island north of Venezuela. The Coast Guardsmen managed
to recover the drug packets from the water and, after boarding and
inspecting the go-fast boat, arrested four men, according to a communique.
“This is an outstanding example of the partnership between the U.S. and our
regional and NATO colleagues to stem the flow of illegal narcotics to
Europe and North America,” said Capt. Steven A. Banks, the head of Law
Enforcement for District Seven.

Kenya will register SIM cards to fight crime. The problem of criminals
using unregistered numbers became apparent last year during post-election
violence. After several months of battling criminals who have been using
untraceable mobile-phone numbers, the Kenyan government has given a
six-month ultimatum to mobile service operators to streamline registration
of SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) cards. The challenge of criminals using
unregistered numbers became apparent last year during post-election
problems when people used SMS (Short Message Service) messages to instigate
violence. The police had no way of identifying the culprits because there
was no registration information linked to the phones used.

The heaviest rainfall in 53 years left at least 10 people dead and
thousands stranded in floods across Bangladesh’s capital. Dhaka residents
were still escaping the rain while traffic ground to a halt with 80 percent
of roads underwater. The national weather office said more than 33cm of
rain fell in the city within 12 hours – the most in a single day since
1956. Thousands in low-lying areas of the city were isolated, while 10
people were electrocuted by broken power lines in their homes. Some
residents are frustrated at the situation. [Shakina Begum, Resident]: “We
are now stuck in rain water. The whole area is flooded. We are facing a
serious shortage of drinking water, our children can’t go to school, and we
can’t go shopping. We are facing a serious problem and can’t go anywhere.”
Forecasts are for more rain in the next few days. Flooding caused by
monsoon rains is common in Bangladesh, a delta nation of 150 million
people.

Medina only works at night, where he and his colleagues stick a flashlight
into the water to attract fish – usually sardines – before dropping bombs
anchored by rocks. The explosion, which kills everything within a 10-foot
radius, sends a few dozen sardines into the boat that are later used as
bait to attract larger fish such as snapper. Fishermen jump in with snorkel
masks to net remaining fish that float around the boat. Bigger explosives
cause an even greater radius of dead or stunned fish and require scuba gear
to dive deep into the ocean. “They go out to sea with one bomb and bring in
400 kilos (880 pounds) of fish,” Medina said of fishermen who use larger
bombs. As the resource is depleted by blast fishing, fishermen are now
lucky to bring in 100 kilos of fish on a given trip instead of 400 kilos a
decade ago, Medina says. While Medina and other local fishermen claim they
have little choice but to use explosives, Helen Fox of the World Wildlife
Foundation says they are motivated by making a quick buck. “It’s a case of
greed rather than need,” said Fox. But Medina says he has little recourse
in a nation with the second-lowest annual per capita income in the Western
Hemisphere at $3,000. “We’re deteriorating the fauna,” he said. “But
there’s no other way to bring money home.”

Of course the budget of many Pacific countries lack the reserves to respond
fully to such an economic crisis. It is therefore important that donors
maintain their aid commitments to the Pacific and ensure investments
benefit those most in need. To the Australian Government’s credit it has
maintained, even slightly increased, its aid budget. It is now hoped
Australia – as host of this year’s Pacific Island Forum – can also
facilitate a policy response across the Pacific that is going to shield the
most vulnerable – children and women – from the ravages of this economic
crisis.

An investigation found that the couple transferred into Tony’s bank account
400,000 baht ($11,800) — half for bail and the other half for Tony’s
“fees,” said police Col. Teeradej Panurak, who oversaw the case. “Tony came
in to translate for us. We can’t control what the accused agree to with a
translator,” said Teeradej. He said the couple was released because there
was not enough evidence to press charges. A visiting British government
official recently raised the case with Thai authorities, and the British
Embassy was consulting other embassies about the alleged scam.

Turning to crime, home invasions: it’s the term for armed attacks on
families in the confines of their homes. And these types of crimes seem to
be getting more frequent throughout the country. There was the most recent
invasion upstairs of Tow Tow Grocery on Fairweather Street in Belize City.
The victims were elderly mother and her daughter – both Belizean Americans
vacationing from Los Angeles. The incident happened quite early in the
night, while seventy-two year old Olive Arnold was in her bed watching the
local news. Her daughter, Rose Holland, was on the front porch with a
cousin while the thieves entered through the back door. The mother and
daughter just arrived in town and have been returning to Belize every year
since 1985. Holland feels the culprits had been planning to pounce since
the day they arrived and the experience has shaken them up so much that
they are not coming back home in a hurry.

Tulele Peisa’s plan is for Carteret Islanders to be voluntarily relocated
to three locations on Bougainville (Tinputz, Tearouki and Mabiri) over the
next 10 years. Our immediate need is for funding so that we can accomplish
the initial 3-year phase of our Carterets Integrated Relocation Programme.
The list of objectives is long and challenging but our plan is holistic so
we have faith it will succeed. Firstly, the three host towns have a
population of 10,000 and we are cognisant of the many complexities involved
in integrating the Carteret people into existing communities that are
geographically, culturally, politically and socially different. Therefore
exchange programs involving chiefs, women and youth from host communities
and the Carterets are in progress for establishing relationships and
understanding. While this is going well, the next urgent steps include
securing more land and surveying and pegging site boundaries. Next comes
constructing housing and infrastructure for 120 families. With the help of
the Catholic Church in Bougainville, the relocation programme aims to
provide design and carpentry services and local materials for basic housing
for these families. We also need to get on with implementing agricultural
and income generation projects (like the rehabilitation of cocoa and
coconut blocks), as well as education, health and community development
training programmes.

Xinhua said several hundred people had been arrested in connection with the
riot and police were searching for about 90 other “key suspects.” It also
quoted a local police chief as saying the death toll was expected to rise.
Uighur exiles condemned the crackdown. “We are extremely saddened by the
heavy-handed use of force by the Chinese security forces against the
peaceful demonstrators,” said Alim Seytoff, vice president of the
Washington, D.C.-based Uyghur American Association. “We ask the
international community to condemn China’s killing of innocent Uighurs.
This is a very dark day in the history of the Uighur people,” he said. The
association, led by a former prominent Xinjiang businesswoman now living in
America, Rebiya Kadeer, estimated that 1,000 to 3,000 people took part in
the protest. Xinjiang Governor Nur Bekri said in a televised address early
Monday that Uighur exiles led by Kadeer of caused the violence, saying,
“Rebiya had phone conversations with people in China in order to incite,
and Web sites such as Uighurbiz.cn and Diyarim.com were used to orchestrate
the incitement and spread propaganda.” A government statement quoted by
Xinhua said the violence was “a pre-empted, organized violent crime. It is
instigated and directed from abroad and carried out by outlaws in the
country.”

Later, the government also admitted defeat in an SMS scam believed to be
perpetrated by death-row inmates. The scheme tricked unsuspecting
subscribers into thinking they had won prizes and were required to send
money through the mobile M-Pesa service in order to collect the winnings.
The police recovered phones believed to be used in the scam in a
maximum-security prison, but could not pin down who the owners were due to
a lack of registration information. “To guard against these tendencies, I
am directing the Ministry of Information and Communication to put in place
an elaborate databank that will ensure all mobile telephone subscribers are
registered,” said Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka. Mobile service providers
Zain and Safaricom embraced the idea but noted that registration is not a
panacea to fighting crime. “The issue of subscriber registration has been
oversimplified by the political class and, in itself, it is not a panacea
for addressing rising incidents of crime,” said Michael Joseph, Safaricom
CEO.

Blast or dynamite fishing stuns or kills fish for easy gathering. This
illegal practice indiscriminately kills large numbers of fish and other
marine organisms and can damage or destroy surrounding ecosystems such as
coral reefs. Although outlawed, the practice remains widespread in some 40
nations in Central America, Southeast Asia, the Aegean Sea and Africa,
environmental groups say. In the Philippines, blast fishing dates to before
World War I. During World War II, dynamite-wielding Japanese troops
popularized the practice in Indonesia. Nicaraguan fishermen say the
practice was introduced by bomb-wielding rebels of El Salvador’s Farabundo
Marti Liberation Front seeking a new livelihood after a 12-year civil war
in that country ended in 1992. Fishermen typically use commercial dynamite
or homemade bombs with glass bottles or cans layered with powdered
potassium nitrate and pebbles or ammonium nitrate and a kerosene mixture.

But one lawyer has taken issue with the directive, arguing that the
government’s approach is wrong because registration of subscribers is all
about capturing personal information, which is one of the most vexing legal
issues in the information technology sector. “What we need is very clear
law governing the collection and use of personal information. We failed to
include such a law in the Kenya Communications Amendment Act, and now we
want to patch it up with a presidential directive,” said Michael Murungi, a
Nairobi lawyer. Murungi says there is need to identify the subscribers of
mobile phones in order to deter phone-aided crime, but there is an even
more compelling need for a clear legal framework for the collection, use of
and management of personal information.

A husband and wife from Britain were seriously wounded in a machete attack
in Tobago, police said, comparing the home invasion to a similar one last
year that killed a Swedish couple on the Caribbean island. Authorities
identified the victims as Peter Greene, 65, and his wife, Marion, 59, but
declined to provide details about them or the attack on an island that has
been considered the safer part of the twin-island nation of Trinidad and
Tobago. “It’s a matter of serious concern, this is another serious attack
on tourists,” police superintendent Nadir Khan said. The couple were
airlifted to a regional medical center in Trinidad, but authorities did not
release details about their condition.

Olive Arnold, Victim of Home Invasion “This person come over me and tell me
be quiet. Now I’m not going to be quiet, then he go like – I couldn’t see
his face, he have on a brown cap and a brown shirt and ih gun. And ih tell
me be quiet and I tell him I’m not going to be quiet and I scream. I holler
for them out there and by the time they come to the door, one in a white
t-shirt follow the other one and they all run downstairs.” Rose Holland,
Victim of Home Invasion “I heard my mom screaming so I thought maybe she
fall so I ran in here and when me and Ms. Carol get to the door the guy
standing here and point the gun so we took off back. And they ran behind us
and start chasing us. All three of us fall down on the ground and they jump
on me and say give me everything you got. They tried to pull my bracelet
off and they scratched my hand. When they couldn’t get this off they popped
my Rolex chain off my neck. And they tackled my girlfriend. And she tell
them do you guys know who I am. I’m the mother of so and so. And they say
they don’t care and they popped her chain off too. And then they hopped the
fence back and they left.” Olive Arnold “First, I was gonna come back home
and live, now I tell them no I cannot because the younger generation them
is scandalous. I cannot come back home to live. They take guns like you’re
birds in the air – pop, you know, I’m scared for my life. I’m not coming
back in a hurry right now but I have to come back, but not to live.”

“The plan is slow to achieve but covers all areas dealing with human
relations and has adaptation alternatives, such as small cash income
activities for relocated families,” said elder Tony Tologina, chief of the
Naboin clan. On the long term, we want to build the capacity of Tulele
Peisa to be certain it can carry out its objectives and also develop it as
a resource agency for the Carterets and host communities on Bougainville.
“Tulele Peisa is our own initiative and will continue to co-ordinate and
facilitate the relocation of our island people. After the relocation, TP
will continue to provide monitoring and evaluation skills and further focus
on development options available to our people,” said Rufina Moi, woman
chief. An important part of the programme is that it will also set up a
Conservation and Marine Management Area that will let Carteret Islanders
make sustainable use of our ancestral marine resources. To keep the links
between the relocated Carterets people and their home island, sea resources
and any remaining clan members (who are not yet relocated), the plan
includes developing an equitable sea transport service for freight and
passengers. “In the future, we will keep coming to these reefs and manage
them as our fishing ground,” explained community youth leader Nicholas
Hakata. “When our children come back, they will have a connection to their
heritage.”

Ilham Tohti, a Uighur economics professor at Central Nationalities
University in Beijing and founder of Uighurbiz.cn — one of the implicated
Web sites — said “the relevant authorities” were questioning him about his
Web site. His site has become a lively forum for many issues about Chinese
rule in Xinjiang. Xinjiang’s top Communist Party official, Wang Lequan,
called the incident “a profound lesson learned in blood” and said
authorities “must take the most resolute and strongest measures to deal
with the enemies’ latest attempt at sabotage.” “We also must expose Rebiya
and those like her … we must tear away Rebiya’s mask and let the world see
her true nature.” Seytoff dimissed the accusations against Kadeer. “It’s
common practice for the Chinese government to accuse Ms. Kadeer for any
unrest” in Xinjiang, he said.

Trinidad & Tobago’s Newsday reported that Marion Greene was in serious but
stable condition and that her husband was in critical condition after being
placed in a medically induced coma to treat severe head injuries. Deputy
British Commissioner Jeff Patton described the attack as a “horrible crime”
but declined to discuss it further. Originally from Reading, England, the
couple had been living in the town of Bacolet along Tobago’s southern coast
off-and-on for 10 years. Khan told reporters that robbery has not been
ruled out as a motive and said it was similar to the unsolved killing in
October of Anna Sundsval, 62, and Oke Olsoon, 73, at their home in the Bon
Accord area of Tobago, about 7 miles (10 kilometers) from where the latest
incident occurred. Authorities detained a suspect in that case but released
him for lack of evidence. Khan said his department is “working assiduously”
on the case, but complained of a lack of leads.

Rose Holland “I came in and I guess when they saw me came in, they saw my
car and saw my jewelry and stuff cause I usually wear a lot of jewelry when
I come to Belize. But for one time this year I decided only to wear a few.
And one of my neighbours told me be careful because they are watching you,
be careful. She told me that the morning, which was yesterday morning. Then
in the night, that’s what made me went on the porch, they called me again,
be careful because I guess they hear the plot of what’s going on, so
they’re advising me. How could they have the audacity to just walk in a
person’s home with a gun and look and an ageable lady, be quiet. That is
wrong.”

“We have fully documented our process since beginning our plan and will
continue to, for the sake of developing a model relocation programme,” said
Thomas Bikta, a chief from Piul Island. “At the same time, we are
developing and formulating a Carterets relocation policy that we will
advocate to the Autonomous Bougainville Government and the rest of the
world,” Bikta added. We also intend to build an alliance of vulnerable
Pacific communities impacted by climate change who can lobby and advocate
for justice and policies that recognise and support those affected. We
think the Papua New Guinea government must set an example of such policies
by re-developing the Atolls Integrated Development policy and beginning a
recognized financing mechanism similar to REDD (Reducing Emissions from
Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries). The
committee or board of which must include all relevant stakeholders,
including community representation and other expertise, not just government
officials.

The clashes in Urumqi echoed last year’s unrest in Tibet, when a peaceful
demonstration by monks in the capital of Lhasa erupted into riots that
spread to surrounding areas, leaving at least 22 dead. The Chinese
government accused Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, of
orchestrating the violence — a charge he denied. Seytoff said he had heard
from two sources that at least two dozen people had been killed by gunfire
or crushed by armored police vehicles just outside Xinjiang University.
Mamet, a 36-year-old restaurant worker, said he saw People’s Armed Police
attack students outside Xinjiang University. “First they fired tear gas at
the students. Then they started beating them and shooting them with
bullets. Big trucks arrived, and students were rounded up and arrested,”
Mamet said. Wang Kui, an official with the Foreign Affairs Department at
the university, said she aware of no such incident. She said no students
from the university were among those killed or injured. “We are not
allowing students to come and go because the situation is chaotic at the
moment,” Wang said. “All the students are at school, and we are taking care
of them. But we are not clear about what’s been going on outside.”

A renowned Scottish gemstone expert was brutally murdered in Kenya by a mob
armed with machetes, clubs, spears — even bows and arrows — in what police
believe was the final fight in a years-long mining dispute. A group of at
least 30 men attacked Campbell Bridges, 71, his son Bruce, and four Kenyan
employees near the Tsavo National Park, a popular tourist site in the
Kenyan bush known for its lions. “My men were cut to ribbons and I took a
panga [machete] to the neck. It was an ambush.” said Bruce Bridges. The
murder was the bloody culmination of a three-year battle between squatters
and Bridges — a senior jewel consultant with Tiffany and Company in New
York. The squatters have reportedly stolen rare tsavorite gems from
Bridges’ team in the past. Bridges’ son charges the local miners with
illegally digging for gems on the family’s 600-hectare property. He also
adds that the Bridges family has received repeated death threats, the most
recent one coming just two weeks ago. “As we drove towards our mining camp
we found huge thorn trees blocking the road. Eight men with machetes,
spears, clubs, knives, bows and arrows appeared shouting ‘We’re going to
kill you all!’ Then more people came down the mountain like ants, 20 or 30
of them,” Bridges said. According to his son, Campbell Bridges was attacked
by two men and was stabbed in the side.

Four Uighur detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba were
recently released and relocated to Bermuda despite Beijing’s objections
because U.S. officials have said they fear the men would be executed if
they returned to China. Officials have also been trying to transfer 13
others to the Pacific nation of Palau. The men were captured in Afghanistan
and Pakistan in 2001, but the U.S. later determined they were not “enemy
combatants.” Previous mass protests in Xinjiang that were quelled by armed
forces became signal events for the separatist movement. In 1990, about 200
Uighurs shouting for holy war protested through Baren, a town near the
Afghan border, resulting in violence that left at least two dozen people
dead. In 1997, amid a wave of bombings and assassinations, a protest by
several hundred Uighurs in the city of Yining against religious
restrictions turned into an anti-Chinese uprising that left at least 10
dead. In both cases pro-independence groups said the death tolls were
several times higher, and the government never conducted a public
investigation into the events.

The women say they don’t know who their attackers were but they feel they
were held up by two men in their twenties who live in the same area.
Holland said the thieves also stole her cell phone which was in her bedroom
near the back door. While police have not yet retrieved any of the stolen
items, they have detained four suspects. Police believe that while only two
committed the robbery, it was planned by the four suspects. And while they
are in custody now, they are concerned that there will be retaliation
because the other victim who was visiting the home at the time is the
mother of a notorious George Street character.

June 6, 2009

INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE AID RISING, BUT EXTREME POVERTY DESTROYS CASH SCAM, LOOTING, KWASO, TARGETING CHINESE WITH OPERATION HIGH VISIBILITY AND 13FT CROCODILE WITH NEW INFLUX OF MYANMAR MUSLIMS AND PAPUA PRISONERS’ WATER MARK LAW AMID CORAL TRIANGLE FISH POISONING

The National Council of Women in Papua New Guinea says people of all ages
are dying from starvation, despite the government’s comments that nobody is
lacking food or water.

A haul of skulls and other body parts has been linked to five shipping
containers on the sea bed off the southern Chon Buri province.

A central bank worker in the Solomon Islands may have netted millions of
dollars by depositing old currency notes he was responsible for destroying
into his own bank account. Philip Bobongi was to destroy old and dirty
banknotes but instead had used them to fill his own accounts and accumulate
property and other assets.

A huge crocodile responsible for the deaths of at least seven people has
been caught and put on display on the front of a car in a small Papua New
Guinea town.

The Royal Solomon Islands Police have warned they will be targeting the
illegal trade and drinking of kwaso as well as people going armed in public
without lawful cause.

Bangladesh stepped up vigilance at its border with Myanmar after a fresh
influx of Rohingya Muslims was reported.

US-based Human Rights Watch called on Indonesia to look into the reported
torture and abuse of prisoners in a jail in the province of Papua. Human
Rights Watch singled out brutality by prison guards at the state jail in
Abepura, near the Papua capital of Jayapura.

Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare stated that people in Papua New Guinea
are not short of food or water. The President of the National Council of
Women Scholla Kakas disagrees, saying Catholic Bishops, who work closely
with the community have spoken of how people are actually dying from
starvation. “This is spreading all over the country where there is urban
drift from the rural villages into the urban areas into the towns of Papua
New Guinea. And what is happening in Port Moresby is true; there are people
dying of poverty.”

Some believe the containers hold the bodies of pro-democracy protesters
killed by the army in 1992. Police have said that their divers will examine
them. Rumours have suggested that the bodies were scattered by aircraft
over the jungle or buried at a remote army camp. According to the official
tally, 52 people died when troops opened fire on protesters in Bangkok
during “Black May” in 1992. But victims’ groups say that 357 people are
still missing.

Although police were unable to determine how much had been stolen, the scam
occurred over three years and the total could amount to millions of
dollars. Police also seized cash from the home of Mr Bobongi, who has been
charged with larceny, false pretences and money laundering.

The astonishing ‘trophy’, secured to the vehicle by ropes, was driven
through the town of Madang after it was caught by a team of local youths.
But while the bizarre trip around the town, amid a carnival atmosphere, was
intended to put at ease locals who feared more attacks, the warning went
out that the croc’s mate was still at large.

The commissioner said Operation High Visibility will run again this
weekend. “This operation will feature traffic management, foot and mobile
patrols with a strong focus on black market outlets in Central Honiara,
Point Cruz, the Ba’hai and White River areas. General duties officers and
supporting personnel from other Police units will continue to routinely
target disorderly and criminal behaviour, drinking in public and illegal
trading in kwaso.”

Rohingya refugees have presented problems for several other countries in
the region in recent months, with reports of Thailand putting those who
come by boat back to sea, and others reaching Malaysia and Indonesia and
trying to work illegally. Local residents and media said about 1,000
Rohingya Muslims entered Bangladesh in just the past three days, alleging
increased persecution by Myanmar’s military junta.

“How can the government turn a blind eye to beatings and torture in one of
its prisons? Jakarta needs to put an end to this disgraceful behavior,
punish those responsible and start keeping a close eye on what is happening
there.” Reports of more than two dozen cases of beatings and physical abuse
since Anthonius Ayorbaba, became the prison warden.

The government should send out officers to investigate people’s living
conditions and confirm for themselves that people really are starving to
death. The land below high and low water mark are the beaches or
foreshores, reefs and seabed. “This area of land is significant because it
is where many developments like wharfs and tourist facilities are taking
place.”

“Seventeen years on no significant progress has been made in searching for
the people reported missing,” The military government responsible was
forced to step down but the issue of the killings remains extremely
sensitive in Thailand because they were never fully investigated. “The
person who ordered the mass killing has not been punished, nor have the
others involved … who are still living a happy life, playing golf,
sipping wine and making comments to the media.”

The case was uncovered after central bank workers noticed that large
numbers of old notes were still in circulation. Police are applying to the
courts to freeze Mr Bobongi’s bank accounts and seize several vehicles and
properties. Chinese nationals in Papua New Guinea have been subjected to
attacks and protests for a third straight day, leading police to use tear
gas against rioters.

It is known that seven people have been killed by the 13ft captured croc
but there are fears there were other victims who have vanished from their
villages without trace. The latest victim was a 17-year-old girl who was
grabbed by the crocodile from the banks of the Gum River. Her body was
never found. Fearing that the attacks would continue unless the man-eater
was captured, Madang businessman Samuel Aloi called together a group of
youths whose families had learned the art of capturing crocodiles from
earlier generations.

Police officers will also be checking people they suspect to have concealed
weapons and identifying if they are going armed in public without lawful
cause. “Under existing Statute Law, officers of the RSIPF already have the
right to confiscate weapons from people and seize on suspicion on unlawful
activity, at any time. This is not a new power, our officers will simply be
reinforcing their focus on street crime.”

“They forced us from our homes and threatened to treat us even worse if we
go back,” said Syed Alam, who crossed the Naf river on the border in a
small boat with five family members. “The eviction of Muslims in Rakhine
state … increased in recent weeks after the (Myanmar) military started
clearing space to build an army garrison.” Rakhine borders Bangladesh’s
Cox’s Bazar district. Alam said about 120 families were evicted from his
village, and more were being forced out. “I chose to leave my country as a
last resort.”

The government should replace the prison administration, open the
penitentiary to international monitoring and set up an independent team to
probe the reports of abuse in Abepura prison, which currently has about 230
prisoners, including more than a dozen incarcerated because of their
political activities. Human Rights Watch cited cases that included the
alleged beatings of prisoners for trivial offenses often with the offending
prison guards in a drunken stupor and sometimes leading to serious
injuries.

“Equally because of the significance of this area of land, it is one of the
most contested lands among people. The law that applies to this area of
land is not clear. The ownership and other rights that the people and the
Government may have over this area of land is not clear.”

Relatives presented a letter to the prime minister, who has promised to
investigate. “We ask that the government act quickly on this for the sake
of clarity, We don’t hope for much apart from claiming the bones of our
relatives.” The fishermen have reportedly been making their grisly haul for
several years but were initially reluctant to report it for fear that
organised criminals were involved.

Chinese-owned stores were ransacked in the capital Port Moresby and then in
PNG’s second largest city, Lae. Police intervened in another anti-Chinese
protest in Port Moresby, using tear gas to disperse a riot in a popular
market directed at Chinese businesses. Chinese nationals and businesses in
Port Moresby have beefed up security, some hiring off-duty police as
guards, while many have shut their shops as advised by their embassy. The
trouble in the capital began when an anti-Chinese march attended by 100
people ended in violence and looting.

The team of young men attached a large piece of lamb to a hook and hung it
about 2ft above the surface of the river. Then they lay in wait. At 5am the
crocodile suddenly leapt from the water to grab the meat  – and was snared
on the large hook. The youths hauled it to shore where they managed to kill
it, before it was tied to a four-wheel-drive vehicle. “We decided to put it
on display to show everyone that this big crocodile which has killed so
many people has finally been caught,’ said Mr Aloi as he posed for
photographs with the trophy. It’s a very unusual icon to have on the front
of my car, but I wanted the whole town to see it.”

“Weapons are any item capable of causing injury to another person and
include any small knives, bush knives, clubs, firearms or explosive.
Wrecking implements, screwdriver, iron bars, stones and timber qualify as a
weapon if misused on another.” The punishment for going armed in public – a
misdemeanour offence – was up to the courts but generally fines or prison
terms up to 2 years can apply depending on the circumstances. Long jail
terms apply when serious assaults are proven by the courts.

Bangladeshi officials said some of the Rohingyas stated they feared torture
as they supported the democracy movement of Aung San Suu Kyi, charged with
allegedly harbouring a U.S. citizen in her home while under house arrest.
Bangladesh and Myanmar share a 320 km (200 mile) border, partly demarcated
by the Naf, with frontier guards on both sides keeping an eye on illegal
immigration. Yet the flow of Myanmar refugees has been unabated. The army
had pushed back nearly 300 new entrant Rohingyas recently, increasing
vigilance at the border to prevent the influx of Rohingyas.”

Although the country has the 1995 Law on Rehabilitation, setting out
procedures for prisoners to complain about mistreatment in prison, efforts
to lodge complaints so far have been fruitless and Ayorbaba has been
unwilling to address any abuse complaints. Prisoners and their relatives
often reported incidents of abuse by guards to the Ministry of Justice and
Human Rights, but no action was ever taken. Prisoners say they have stopped
reporting abuses because they lack faith in the system and because they
fear retribution.

Laws introduced and court decisions made before and after independence have
not clarified the position. Neighbouring countries in the region have
diverse laws relating to this area of land. In Samoa this area of land
belongs to the Government. In Vanuatu this area of land is customary land.
In some countries of the region like Fiji, Kiribati, Tuvalu and New Zealand
this area of land belongs to the Government except where customary rights
can be proved to have existed.

Although there are about five containers on the sea bed, they may simply
have fallen off a passing ship. “We have the same curiosity. Why doesn’t
somebody open up these containers and do away with this myth?”  The
director of the National Forensic Science Institute, has been ordered to
investigate but required official clearance before beginning her work.

The Port Moresby police chief has been criticised for allowing the protest
to go ahead, blamed the violence on hooligans. “It was just hooligans
taking advantage of the situation with an emotional build-up. There is
nothing to worry about, as we will continue our patrols and increase
presence on the streets.” In Lae, on the northwest coast, hundreds of men
attacked Chinese nationals and their small businesses across the city.
There were unconfirmed reports of one death and serious injuries to several
looters.

‘We’re planning to operate on it to check for the remains of the young girl
who was killed recently, but we’ll also be sending tissue samples to
Australia for DNA testing in the hope of determining how many other people
it has eaten over the years.’ Mr Aloi said that the crocodile had been seen
in various parts of the Madang waterfront in recent times but no-one had
been able to catch it. ‘This one’s a female and we know that the “husband”
is still at large. We’ve got a warning out to people to remain vigilant and
not to rest on their laurels just because this one’s been caught.’

“Police seek the public’s cooperation and understanding in these random
searches for weapons and enquiries. We are trying to reduce the risk of
drunken fights turning into fatalities. If someone has fair cause to be
carrying a bush knife around town and are not intending harm to others,
they have nothing to fear from police. If you are out to cause trouble,
that’s another matter.”

The Rohingyas might be trying to use the recent turmoil in Myanmar over Suu
Kyi’s trial as a pretext to leave. More than 21,000 Rohingyas have been
living in two Cox’s Bazar camps, run by the U.N. High Commissioner for
Refugees, since early 1992, when some 250,000 Rohingyas fled to Bangladesh.

“The Indonesian government needs to replace the Abepura prison management.
But this is not just a failure of one prison warden. It’s a failure of
Jakarta to set proper standards and enforce them.” Access to Papua has been
strictly limited. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has also ordered the
International Committee of the Red Cross to close its field office in
Jayapura. The ICRC ran sanitation projects in Papua and also visited
detainees, including political prisoners, in Abepura prison.

The review will consider how the law could deal with the competing rights
of land owners and the public benefits that any sustainable development
will bring to the people. The Commission encourages people, offices, and
institutions to make submissions or have their say on how the law should
change to deal with this area of land.

Australia’s foreign aid program will focus on health, education and food
security in the region to alleviate the “enormous human cost” of the global
financial crisis. The Government affirmed it would raise aid levels to 0.5
per cent of gross national income by 2015-16, though next year’s rise will
be minuscule, from 0.33 to 0.34 per cent – amounting to spending of $3.8
billion. These levels keep Australia in the bottom half of aid donors among
developed countries and fall far short of a long-held promise to raise aid
to 0.7 per cent of GNI.

Unnamed youths involved in the Lae attacks complained Asian small-business
owners were “ripping us off”. “Who is allowing these Asians to come into
our country and own small businesses which should be owned by Papua New
Guineans? They are ripping us off and investing their money in their
country.” Earlier in the week, PNG workers clashed with management at the
Chinese-run Ramu nickel mine in Madang Province, on the northeast coast,
after a tractor injured a worker. PNG’s Chinese community began with
immigration in the late 19th century, but local resentment has grown as an
influx of “new Chinese” have slowly taken over small businesses like trade
stores and food shops in the past 15 years. Many in PNG feel squeezed out
and complain about working for ruthless Chinese bosses who impose tough
conditions. Allegations of a rise in Chinese organised crime and corruption
involving PNG officials has also added to community anger. It is estimated
the Chinese population in PNG now outnumbers Australians by more than two
to one.

Scientists have come up with a theory that attributes the historic
migrations of the Polynesians from the Cook islands to New Zealand, Easter
Island and Hawaii in the 11th to 15th centuries, to fish poisoning. Based
on archeological evidence, paleoclimatic data and modern reports of
ciguatera poisoning, some theorize that ciguatera outbreaks were linked to
climate and that the consequent outbreaks prompted historical migrations of
Polynesians.

Threatening violence, challenging another person to a fight, fighting in a
public place, and going armed in public are all existing offences under the
Penal Code of the Solomon Islands. The Police officers would continue to
work closely with government and community leaders to reduce kwaso-related
crime in Honiara and other communities. “Recent stabbings at the weekend
are not an indication that crime is one the rise in the Solomon Islands.
Statistics on reported crime to the RSIPF actually show a significant drop,
with crime down 20% across the Solomon Islands.”

The Rohingyas allege persecution by the military in what was then Burma,
but the UNHCR managed to send most of them back within a short time. The
rest refused to return and the U.N. agency says they cannot force anyone to
go back against their will. Cox’s Bazar officials say more then 200,000
Rohingyas live outside the camps, mixing with local Muslims who have an
almost common language. Muslims are a minority in Myanmar, where most of
the population is Buddhist.

Human Rights Watch said that international monitors such as the ICRC and
independent human rights groups should be able to visit prisoners in
Abepura to investigate reports of abuse. Papua has seen a low-level
separatist movement since the 1960s but pro-independence sentiments have
been on the rise in the face of perceived injustice in the economy and
alleged abuses by security forces in their drive to rid the province of
separatism. The UN special rapporteur for torture visited Indonesia and
found that police used torture as a “routine practice in Jakarta and other
metropolitan areas of Java.”

About 100 million people living on Australia’s doorstep could be forced to
leave their homeland due to climate change this century. Australia will
have a key role in avoiding ecological and humanitarian disaster in what is
called the Coral Triangle – the marine area including Indonesia, Malaysia,
the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and East Timor.
Failure to take effective action on climate change will diminish the food
supply drawn from the area’s coasts by up to 80 per cent.

The federal budget paper on aid, A Good International Citizen, said the
economic slowdown would reverse a four-year reduction in the number of
people living in extreme poverty. An extra 90 million people – including 62
million in Asia – are expected to live in extreme poverty this year.
Countries that will receive the largest aid allocations are Indonesia ($453
million), Papua New Guinea ($414 million) and the Solomon Islands ($246
million). The Pacific will surpass East Asia as the biggest regional
recipient as the Rudd Government focuses on assisting the neighbourhood and
preventing an outbreak of failing island states.

The Indigenous Resistance dub attitude can be, by turns, either a
burn-down-Babylon fiery dub or a self-reflexive, meditative dub. The label
releases Bogota’s DJ Rodrigo’s new take on crucial tracks from the IR
archive in two formats; the full 48 minute head-tripping mix and as
individual tracks-all available through iTunes and Believe digital of
France.

Ciguatera poisoning is a food-borne disease that can come from eating
large, carnivorous reef fish, and causes vomiting, headaches, and a burning
sensation upon contact with cold surfaces. It is known that the historic
populations of Cook Islanders was heavily reliant on fish as a source of
protein, and the scientists suggest that once their fish resources became
inedible, voyaging became a necessity. Modern Cook Islanders, though
surrounded by an ocean teeming with fish, don’t eat fish as a regular part
of their diet but instead eat processed, imported foods. In the late 1990s,
lower-income families who could not afford processed foods emigrated to New
Zealand and Australia. Past migrations had similar roots. The heightened
voyaging from A.D. 1000 to 1450 in eastern Polynesia was likely prompted by
ciguatera fish poisoning. There were few options but to leave once the
staple diet of an island nation became poisonous. This approach brings us a
step closer to solving the mysteries of ciguatera and the storied
Polynesian native migrations. It will lead to better forecasting and
planning for ciguatera outbreaks.

Under the worst-case scenario the ecology of the region would be destroyed
by rises in ocean temperature, acidity and sea level. Poverty increases,
food security plummets, economies suffer and coastal people migrate
increasingly to urban areas. Tens of millions of people are forced to move
from rural and coastal settings due to loss of homes, food resources and
income, putting pressure on regional cities and surrounding developed
nations such as Australia and New Zealand. Even under a best-case scenario,
the region will lose coral and have to deal with higher seas, more frequent
storms, droughts and less food from coastal fisheries. Large cuts in
greenhouse emissions and international financial support for the region’s
environment are needed. It is in Australia’s interest to invest early to
help avoid the worst-case scenario.

Woven throughout this new mix you will hear indigenous voices and chants
collected by Indigenous Resistance from all over the world: the Malaitai
from Solomon Islands, the Krikati indians from Brasil, traditional Cree
chants from Turtle Island, traditional instruments from Sosolakam and
Solomon Islands embedded into tracks recorded in Jamaica, the U.K, Germany,
Solomon Islands, Sosolakam, Brasil, Colombia, Cuba & Turtle Island. IR’s
eclectic production techniques pulls together producers with different
styles and methods to create their releases. This is especially evident on
the full IR18 where DJ Rodrigo deftly maneuvers successfully through the
many genres, which include: Drum N Bass, Jungle, Detroit Techno, Electro,
Big Beat, Dub, Reggae, House and the multi-ethnic stew (breakbeat, dub,
dancehall, ragga) of Dr Das and Asian Dub Foundation (which some pile
together into the term of World Beat) and the punk and hardcore sound of
knob-twirler extraordinaire, Ramjac. As a matter of course, IR travels the
globe working with pockets of Indigenous Resistance in the Fourth World to
get their messages out from behind the propaganda machines that deny them
the freedom of the press. Through free releases and downloads, and funded
by sales of albums through CD Baby, iTunes and Believe Digital, IR has set
up a campaign to send these tracks back into the indigenous communities as
well as back out to the world to fall on sympathetic ears. IR utilizes any
means necessary to get the music and messages heard passed the restrictive
regimes that keep the indigenous down and disenfranchised.

$464 million will be spent over the next four years on food security to
alleviate the impact of shortages, volatile prices, increased consumption,
climate change and the use of crops to produce bio-fuels. Programs will
focus on helping communities to improve their farming and fisheries
management. The biggest boost is to education, which will receive $690
million this year and focus on improving participation rates and teaching
quality. The Government will also extend links between aid and the
performance of partner countries.

Four looters were shot as Papua New Guinean (PNG) police was on high alert
to clamp down on the Anti-Asia sentiment across the country. Since the
weekend, four men were shot as police tried to stop the ongoing violence
directed at Asian-run stores in the Highlands region. One Southern
Highlands man was shot in Mount Hagen. Another Southern Highlander, who was
shot by police, could lose one of his legs after being smashed by a bullet.
Police in Goroka shot a 20-year-old man who was also likely to lose a leg,
as police tried to control thousands of people that went on a rampage and
looted several shops in the town. In Lae, one man was shot in the leg by
police. Police in the Highlands have gone on full alert, keeping
surveillance over Goroka, Mount Hagen, Kainantu and Wabag as hundreds of
people converged in the region and broke into shops operated by families of
Korean and Chinese origins. Most Asian-run shops remained closed in the
Highlands with armed security guards. Meanwhile, trouble makers on streets
attempted to loot those shops again.

April 25, 2009

SOLOMON TSUNAMI SOMALI PIRATES’ LONE GUNMAN LEAVES 13 DEAD IN LAWLESS PAPUA BEGGARS’ LONGEST CROP WAR

Papua was on high alert as a range of incidents, including attacks on
police stations, claimed 11 lives to mar voting day in the country’s
easternmost province, still plagued by separatist threats.

Kenya, with nearly a quarter of its 38 million people facing severe hunger,
is now reporting a rapid spread of diseases affecting the country’s vital
wheat and banana crops. The crisis is being exacerbated by plummeting
public confidence in the country’s year-old coalition government.

To wage today’s battles against pirates who took control of 42 ships and
captured 815 sailors last year, the Royal Navy is combining machines and
methods forged during the Cold War with centuries-old naval warfare skills.
The Royal Navy is also hitting back at pirates by using some of the
pirates’ own tricks.

A lone gunman shot and killed at least 13 people in a “premeditated” attack
at an immigrant centre in upstate New York, before turning his weapon on
himself. The gunman first used his car to barricade the back door of the
American Civic Association in Binghamton, 140 miles north of New York City.

The South Asian nation of Bangladesh wants to do something about the
increasing number of beggars migrating into its cities from the
countryside. Legislation has been approved that could send many of the
country’s most destitute to jail for openly asking for charity. Some aid
agencies are skeptical this approach will solve the problem.

Mobile-phone users in Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, and Nakuru will be able to
access Google Maps and search up-to-date online maps, look up businesses,
advertise free via Google Maps Local Business Centre, create their own maps
and even check locations while on the move.

It began with British betrayal after the Second World War and has
stubbornly outlived every other conflict. But now, as it marks its diamond
jubilee, the world’s longest-running war is nearing its endgame. The
guerrilla army of the Karen ethnic group, which has been fighting since
1949 for independence from Burma, is facing the greatest crisis in its
history. If Karen resistance collapses, as some believe is likely, it will
be a triumph for the Burmese junta as it consolidates its hold on power.

The incident is, by Port Moresby standards, neither here nor there. Coming
off an overpass and you notice people scattering in light rain. Blocking
traffic is an urban response-style light police truck, with a two-sided
troop seat in the back. A woman is running, followed by two police. One of
the officers punches her hard in the face, then she doubles over from what
appears to be a truncheon in the guts.

Now tsunamis won’t be able to catch you unaware, thanks to a mathematics
formula worked out by scientists that will give advance warnings and an
idea of their destructive might.

The incidents, however, did not prevent most Papuans from voting on
election day. According to National Police data, 75 percent of Papuans
voted at more than 6,000 polling stations across the province. The polls
had to be delayed in Yahukimo and Paniaki, with bad weather obstructing the
delivery of polling material to the two regencies.

Recent reports from Kenya’s breadbasket region of the Rift Valley have
confirmed what the country can ill-afford – the spread of a deadly strain
of a parasitic fungus called stem rust that is threatening to wipe out the
country’s wheat fields.

Most of the other warships deployed to fight pirates in the region are
concentrated north of Somalia, close to the Suez Canal, through which 10
percent of the world’s sea trade passes. Northumberland was the first
warship on the scene from a new European Union task force, charged with
patrolling the southern flank of the 2-million-square-mile piracy zone,
near Mombasa. It was here that pirates scored their biggest victory seizing
the supertanker Sirius Star, laden with $100 million in crude oil.

He calmly walked into the front of the building armed with two pistols and
began shooting, killing one receptionist and wounding another. Moments
later he marched into a nearby classroom and began spraying bullets into
people reportedly undergoing citizenship tests.

Ragged beggars are a common sight on the streets of Dhaka and other cities
in Bangladesh. The government wants to make their presence a rarity, if not
eliminate it totally. To that end, a new law curtailing begging in the open
and on crowded streets will be strictly enforced. Violators will face up to
three months in jail.

Google has maps for Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda, but the level of detail is
not what it is for Kenya. “Google Maps is not just searchable digitized
maps helping you to find a local place, service or product. Our goal is to
make information with a geographical dimension available to everyone and to
allow users to update the maps and develop.”

After a three-year offensive by the junta, the Karen National Liberation
Army (KNLA) has been forced into increasingly small pockets of resistance.
Deprived of funds and equipment, it is able to do little more than slow the
advance of the Burmese Army as it lays waste to hundreds of villages,
driving thousands of terrified civilians before it.

We go through a roundabout and come back. The woman is running now, arms
crazy above her head as the police truck pursues her over gutters. Soon
after, we find the woman and a group of her friends standing by the
roadside, panting and bleeding heavily. One man has a deep gash running
across his left cheek. The bashed woman is half-laughing, half-crying. They
are drunk on “steam”, the local metho-rated liquor cooked in secret stills,
flavoured with orange cordial and sold dirt cheap in the markets.

The research, led by a maths professor, was prompted by the 2004
post-Christmas tsunami that devastated coastal communities in Indonesia,
Sri Lanka, India and Thailand. In this instance, an earthquake in the ocean
depths triggered a long surface wave which resulted in six massive wave
fronts, one after the other.

The disruptions began when homemade bombs exploded under a bridge on the
border between Papua and Papua New Guinea. No one was killed, but police
found two unexploded bombs while sweeping the area. Unknown assailants
stabbed five ojek (motorcycle taxi) drivers in Wamena, leaving four of them
dead and one in critical condition. A fuel storage tank at a state oil
company depot in Biak exploded during refilling, instantly killing a
bystander.

The strain was first detected in East Africa a decade ago. But it has
spread to other wheat producing areas in the world, largely because poor
farmers here have not been able to afford the fungicide needed to combat
the problem. “It started spreading very fast. We have it in Kenya. We have
it in Ethiopia, spreading toward the north [to] Egypt and it probably
reached India. It is a serious concern. Stem rust, of course, is
controllable with chemicals, but it is damn expensive. The only solution is
to bring in new varieties that are resistant to stem rust. We are at a
quite advanced stage.”

Somali sea bandits hijacked more than 40 large vessels last year, ransoming
about 30 of them for a million U.S. dollars or more. Sirius Star was
released in January after an estimated $3 million ransom was paid, but the
other ships, and about 200 crew, remain in pirates’ hands. The rise in
piracy, and consequent rise in the cost of shipping insurance, drove up the
cost of shipping petroleum, electronics and food.

In seconds, a dozen people were dead, another five were wounded, and more
than 30 had fled amid pandemonium. The gunman, believed to be a 42-year-old
Vietnamese American from nearby Johnson City, had recently lost his job
with IBM in his home town. “It was premeditated,” said the Binghamton
police chief. “The suspect had put a car against the back door blocking any
exit for victims.”

Parliament approved a bill cracking down on beggars and it will take about
a month to draft guidelines on how authorities will enforce the new law.
They note that some beggars seek pity by pretending to be ill or displaying
a disability. Sympathizers say most of those in such a condition on the
streets really have no alternative.

“We believe more accurate, representative local information can greatly
improve the breadth of information available about a given area, and in
turn can help efforts to bolster tourism and business investment.” Google
Maps is available in 23 African countries, but the company is providing
more detailed maps that go beyond the capital cities and include other
aspects of life. The company will divulge more information once the team
finalizes its plans.

Most serious of all, the Karen leadership is losing the support of
neighbouring Thailand, where it was formerly able to organise, arm and –
when necessary – retreat. Trapped between the Burmese Army to the west and
an increasingly unfriendly Thailand to the east, with hundreds of thousands
of their people in wretched refugee camps, the Karen are experiencing a
humanitarian and military catastrophe.

The man with the cut face is leaning through the window, spraying bloody
protestations of innocence. Asked why they didn’t just run away, all they
can repeat is: “It wasn’t our fault; we didn’t do anything.” Papua New
Guineans will stand before they fall. “The trouble is, they are Goilala,
which means they probably did do something, anything from holding up a car
to illegally selling betel nut by the side of the road.”

Of these waves it was the third and largest one that caused the most
devastation, hitting the beaches with terrifying speed. Reaching a height
of 20 metres or 65 feet, it hefted a train from its tracks as it travelled
along the Sri Lankan coastline, killing almost 1,000 people.

Police security posts at the Skaw Wutung border between Indonesia and Papua
New Guinea were attacked by unknown gunmen, with no casualties reported.
About 50 men armed with homemade bombs, spears, cleavers, bows and
cassowary bones attacked the Abepura Police station in Jayapura. The police
shot into the crowd, killing one attacker and injuring eight others.

In Kenya, most of the fields affected by the stem rust strain belong to
small-scale farmers, who grow 20 percent of the wheat consumed annually.
Although maize is the staple among most Kenyans, wheat flour has grown
crucial to the country’s overall food supply. Drought and post-election
violence in maize-producing areas of the country prevented many farmers
from planting crops. Domestic maize production was so poor, the government
had to begin importing corn to help feed some 10 million Kenyans facing
starvation.

To beat pirates in potentially violent showdowns, the Navy has adopted the
pirates’ tactics of using “mother ships” carrying fast boats to spring on
opponents. In the early days of Somali piracy, pirates ranged only a few
miles from their hometowns and threatened just a few thousand square miles
of ocean. The reason was simple: Most pirates were former fishermen and had
only the tools of a typical fishermen. Their personal firearms and their
small, motor-propelled wooden fishing boats, called skiffs. The skiffs were
too slow and too flimsy to catch anything but the most rickety of vessels.

The surviving receptionist, lying bleeding on the floor, alerted police
with her mobile phone and survived the ordeal. “After he shot her she
pretended she was dead. As he exited down the hallway she crawled
underneath the desk and sometime after that she called us.” Some of those
fleeing hid in the basement. More than a dozen hid in a cupboard. At least
five were wounded.

The Bangladesh Finance Ministry says it wants to emulate some neighboring
countries that have implemented plans to rehabilitate urban beggars by
providing them with employment training programs. Imprisonment and brief
training schemes will not solve the problem.

The company has boosted the popularity of the maps by including content
from local celebrities such as Wangari Maathai (Nobel Peace Prize winner),
Julie Gichuru (TV presenter), Churchill (comedian) and Humphrey Kayange
(Kenya Rugby 7’s team captain). Google Maps will help create a greater
understanding of the socio-economic situation in different regions.

“The military situation is as bad as it’s been at any time in the past 60
years. The Karen have less territory, fewer soldiers and fewer resources to
sustain resistance. The Burmese have them more and more surrounded, and
their backs are up against the wall.” A Karen leader on the Thai border
said that the KNLA and Burmese Army were fighting near the town of
Kawkareik, close to the Thai border. All year there have been reports of
Karen villagers being driven into the jungle by marauding soldiers.

Goilala are conspicuously short street dwellers originally from the Central
Province. They are branded Moresby’s most prolific troublemakers, first
suspects in any crime. Programs to rid PNG’s capital of crime are earnestly
afoot. It won’t be easy because criminal behaviour is not confined to
street people. Moresby’s police wield a brutal form of shoot-first,
ask-later justice, and some people see PNG’s politicians as notorious
pork-barrellers. When street people are asked to clean up their act, they
ask: What about them?

If we could understand more about how these long waves behave we could
predict where they might hit and how devastating they might be. The number
and height of the tsunami waves hitting the shoreline depends critically on
the shape of the initial surface wave in deep water.

At daybreak, the rector’s building at Cendrawasih University – about 5
kilometers from the Abepura Police station – was set ablaze by unknown
people. The fire razed important documents and badly damaged one of the
building’s three floors, but claimed no casualties. All the incidents,
except the explosion at the Pertamina depot, were intended to disrupt the
elections in Papua. The depot explosion was simply an accident.

Meanwhile, residents in western Kenya’s Nyanza province, hit hard by last
year’s poor maize harvest, are now reporting the outbreak of a disease that
is destroying banana trees there. Many Kenyans rely on bananas to
supplement their diets. But the once-plentiful fruit is prematurely
ripening and rotting on trees infected with a disease called banana
bacterial wilt. On some plantations, yield losses of 90 percent are being
reported.

Then the pirates innovated. They began capturing trawlers and small
freighters for use as motherships. When about a dozen armed Somalis
intercepted a ship, the pirates had no interest in its cargo. Instead, they
commandeered the harmless-looking freighter to launch their next attack. It
was more than three months before the pirates released the ship and her
crew.

Police arrived within two minutes and surrounded the centre, deploying FBI
hostage negotiators and a heavily armed Swat team. They established mobile
phone contact with 27 survivors barricaded in the basement and relayed
instructions about how to block the door against their attacker.

Every day thousands of beggars are coming to Dhaka city and other cities.
So it is not the solution by putting them in jail for three months or a
rehabilitation center for one month, two months. It is not the solution.
The government should focus on creating jobs in rural areas to stem the
internal migration by the poor into the cities.

One local company, KenyaBuzz, a community events, business and tourism
site, is already making use of the Google Maps API (application programming
interface), on its Web site. “Google Maps serves as a great platform
helping to provide accurate, comprehensive, location-based information for
our audience.”

“It’s a cat-and-mouse kind of struggle. The Burmese burn down villages and
relocate the people close to their own camps.” The Karen conflict has its
origins in the Second World War, when many Karen fought alongside the
British Army against the invading Japanese. The seven million Karen were
promised their own state by the British but when independence came in 1948
the promise was forgotten. A year later, in January 1949, the Karen began
the armed struggle that has continued ever since.

Trust between the citizens of PNG and the authorities is broken. That
explains why almost half of Australia’s annual $358 million in aid to PNG
goes to improving law and justice. Reinstating trust is crucial. Yumi
Lukautum Moresby (“You, me, look out for Moresby”) is making a difference
by building a bridge between the people of the notorious crime-breeding
urban settlements – in which there is no electricity, no toilets, and a few
shared taps for up to 5000 people – and the authorities.

From this it is possible to work out whether a ‘trough’ or a ‘peak’ is the
leading wave. In the case of a trough then the familiar sight of the tide
suddenly going out is the precursor to an approaching tsunami.

The Vice President said he had received a report from Papua Police
indicating efforts and a conspiracy to disrupt the elections. But the
National Police chief said the attack on the Abepura Police station had
nothing to do with the polls, adding it was a random attack aimed at
undermining security officers.

Wheat and banana farmers say they need the government to urgently release
funds to help fight the diseases threatening to impoverish them and to
leave east Africa’s largest economy in even greater need of food aid.
Middle-class workers say they, too, are struggling to put food on the table
because of persistent high inflation, mostly due to rising food costs.

It appears the killer turned one of his guns on himself. Police took nearly
an hour to search the building, amid concerns there may have been more than
one gunman, and then had to persuade 27 immigrants that it was safe to
leave the basement. A total of 37 people were hidden in various sections of
the building. The American Civic Association is a charity that helps
immigrants with naturalisation applications.

It is believed that several hundred thousand Bangladeshis live off begging.
A survey several years ago in relatively prosperous Dhaka found that the
average beggar there managed to collect about $1.5 a day. Approximately 40
percent of Bangladeshis get by on less than $1 per day.

The tourism sector, which has faced a slump because of the worldwide
economic crisis, is also looking to Google Maps for a boost. “Adding
tourism locations on Google Maps creates a free marketing channel and will
drive more people to our Web site and ultimately to the tourist locations.”

In the early decades of the war, the KNU dominated the Irrawaddy Delta,
close to the former Burmese capital Rangoon, as well as areas north of the
city and all of Kayin State. But in the 1990s an increasingly well-armed
Burmese Army made steady gains and in 1995 the KNU was driven out of its
capital, Manerplaw. Buddhists in the Christian-dominated KNU broke away to
form the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), which now fights alongside
the Burmese Army. Formerly, the KNU had operated as a quasi-government,
providing schools and clinics and receiving income from tax, as well as
from a profitable trade through Thailand in timber, gold, zinc and
antimony.

Overcrowded Moresby routinely features in top 10 lists of the world’s most
dangerous cities. These rankings are decided by business or travel
magazines, which see Moresby through the prism of tourists or expats, who
live safely guarded in hotels or behind razor wire with all-night security
guards. The real test should be whether Moresby is safe for locals.

‘If a peak is the leading wave, there is no warning except a
fast-approaching wall of water. Potentially this could provide vital
information for areas facing an impending disaster.’

“This was purely an act of violence committed by armed guerillas.” Police
have named six people as suspects in the attack and are questioning eight
others as witnesses.

The country’s growing crisis comes on the heels of allegations that top
politicians on both sides of the coalition government have been involved in
scandals aimed at enriching themselves at the expense of Kenyan taxpayers.

Warships assigned to piracy patrols rarely engage pirates on their own.
They deploy specialized search-and-seizure teams, which consist of marines
armed with rifles and machine guns, traveling in raider craft.

Two women and a man suffering gunshot wounds were being treated at Wilson
Medical Centre in nearby Johnson City. Binghamton, a quiet university town
with a population of 47,000, is the home of IBM and has a low crime rate,
enjoying the nickname Parlour Town for the handsome front parlours of its
elegant villas.

An official report from the Commission of Inquiry into the Solomon Islands
riots found there was no conspiracy behind the violence, blaming police
incompetence instead. Riots erupted after Snyder Rini was elected prime
minister by legislators. Dozens of Chinese-owned businesses were looted and
burned in the riots. Chinese businesses were targeted at least partly
because of allegations they had helped fund the unpopular Mr. Rini to bribe
legislators for support. The damage was estimated at $180 million Solomon
Island dollars but a commission warned that compensation would only trigger
more anger against the Chinese community.

Google is also working with local software developers by providing APIs for
Google Maps to help programmers, Web masters and designers to incorporate
the functionality of Google Maps on their sites and develop new services
based on local information.

The loss of territory brought a loss of funds, which made it harder to arm
and equip itself. The KNU claims to have 10,000 soldiers, including village
militia men, but the number of active fighters is probably between 3,000
and 5,000.

It is women who suffer most. Domestic and sexual violence is described by
Amnesty International as endemic. Women fear reporting domestic violence
partly because of their husbands, partly because police have a reputation
for raping female complainants.

Later the same day, a small aircraft operated by a local airline crashed in
Wamena, killing all six crew on board. The cause of the crash is currently
being investigated.

An opinion poll was released showing that 70 percent of Kenyans believe
that the coalition government, formed to help the country heal from the
ethnic bloodletting that followed the disputed presidential elections, has
achieved nothing since it took power.

A naval engagement with pirates often begins with a commercial ship
reporting an attack, using a radio frequency set aside for emergency calls.
Other times, a maritime patrol plane, usually flying from Djibouti, spots a
potential mothership or pirate skiff, identifiable not by its appearance,
but by its vector. A trawler speeding away from Somalia, toward a
slow-moving tanker ship, just might have hostile intentions.

President Barack Obama said last night: “Michelle and I were shocked and
deeply saddened to learn about the act of senseless violence. Our thoughts
and prayers go out to the victims, their families and the people of
Binghamton.”

The Royal Solomon Islands Police had failed to do its duty in containing
the violence. There was confusion between local police and Regional
Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) police, who have access to
superior resources. RAMSI police and Solomon Islands police were not clear
on who was to take responsibility for containing the violence. It
catalogued a series of failures by the police that resulted in a security
breakdown, including a lack of credible intelligence information,
equipment, and organizational ability.

The KNU suffered another blow when its respected and charismatic leader,
Pado Mahn Shar, was assassinated at his home in Thailand by unidentified
gunmen. Among many Karen there was a suspicion that the ease with which the
killers escaped, and the failure to apprehend them, reflected a cooling of
the welcome afforded by Thailand. Last month Karen military commanders were
ordered out of Thailand and back across the border. This probably reflects
the Thai Government’s increasing dependence on Burma for raw materials and
energy – the two governments are jointly planning ambitious hydroelectric
dams along the Salween River which forms part of their border.

Chamber of Commerce members are encouraged to give street people jobs. They
go through short skills courses and are placed with companies for work
experience. AusAid, pays the wages. “Some are the kids straight out of jail
and we’re always up-front with employers. But it doesn’t seem to bother
many of them. Last year we found 70 per cent of them were retained.”

Naval commanders, in touch with each other by phone, e-mail and satellite
network, sort through the roster of warships in the region to figure out
who might respond fastest. They call this “deconfliction.” When the
responding ship is close enough, it launches a helicopter to scout ahead
and confirm that the suspect seafarers are indeed armed, while preparing to
lower the boarding teams’ boats into the water.

The New York State governor called it a “senseless killing”, adding: “When
are we going to be able to curb the kind of violence that is so fraught and
so rapid? We all have a profound sadness.”

A spokesperson from the RAMSI police force in the Solomon Islands says the
policing problems in the report have been fixed. The Assistant
Commissioner, Commander of the Participating Police Force in RAMSI says his
officers acted professionally and properly in discharging their
responsibility. The Royal Solomon Islands Police Force has improved their
capacity to deal with riots, has more trained officers and equipment, and
has developed a call out system.

The border is a valuable conduit not only for the Karen but for Burmese
struggling to overthrow the military dictatorship. After the junta cracked
down on large pro-democracy demonstrations of monks and activists, many of
them escaped into Thailand.

Measures such as this are making Moresby safer. “We definitely think so.
There are perceptions and everyone’s got them. But right now as we drive
through one of the roughest areas of Port Moresby, Kaugere, and we don’t
see any rocks coming towards us. A safe place is good for all of us. It’s
incumbent upon us to get involved.”

The ship’s presence alone was often enough to prevent pirate attacks.
Beyond that, the helicopter might deter pirates simply by “flying close to
demonstrate the aircraft’s machine gun and giving the pirates warning of
their serious intentions.”

The attack is the third massacre in the US in a month. A gunman in Alabama
killed ten people and then himself. Another lone gunman killed eight in a
North Carolina nursing home.

“It’s a crucial route for information. If that’s closed down the whole
country will become much more isolated.” The United Nations has ruled that
the continued detention by Burma of the pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu
Kyi violates domestic and international laws. The latest one-year detention
period of Ms Suu Kyi, who has spent 13 of the past 19 years under house
arrest, expires in May.

YLM (Yumi Lukautim Mosbi) hunts corporate sponsorship, runs awareness
campaigns, gets kids playing sport and works with government. It has
organised a toll-free number to evacuate women and children from violent
situations using a private security company. In PNG, people can’t rely on
police to respond to 000. In Australia, this would be seen as a spectacular
failure by police. Two private companies, Protect Security and phone
company Digicel, donated the service, so we are not interested in exploring
the point. In PNG, do it however you can.

If the pirates persist, the boarding teams deploy, flanking the pirates’
boats to approach from both sides, moving fast with weapons at the ready.
If the pirates lay down their weapons, they are taken into custody without
a shot fired. If they shoot, the boarding teams fire back, then climb
aboard.

Not all art is strictly about the aesthetic, some pieces provide an
important function in the community like the large black and white
photographs installed this week on rooftops across Kibera, Kenya. The
intimate photos, taken by photographer JR, act as a second roof, protecting
the village’s delicate structures from water damage, a vital job in one of
Africa’s worst slums.

Everyone is saying Moresby is safer than five years ago, but you’ll still
hit the accelerator hard through the several well-known trouble spots. One
explanation for the lessening crime rate is that so many leading criminals
– they don’t much call them raskols these days, it’s seen as too cute – are
dead.

March 31, 2009

PRISON JUMPING SPIDERS BANKRUPT STRANGLED PARADISE WAR APPAREL AID AMID INDEPENDENT CYCLONED TREE PLANTATIONS

South Asia’s export based apparel industry is reeling under the impact of
the global recession as demand for clothing from Western countries slows
down. The industry is one of the biggest employers in this region.

Burmese people beg for food in the rain as aid begins to arrive following
cyclone Nargis. International aid for cyclone victims in Burma was
deliberately blocked by the military regime.

One in every 31 adults, or 7.3 million Americans, is in prison, on parole
or probation, at a cost to the states of $47 billion in 2008.

Police found the body of a strangled woman in a suitcase dumped at
Bangladesh’s Zia International Airport. Security officials alerted customs
and police after the suitcase was found on a trolley outside the airport’s
departure door late yesterday.

It began with British betrayal after the Second World War and has
stubbornly outlived every other conflict. But now, as it marks it diamond
jubilee, the world’s longest-running war is nearing its endgame. The
guerrilla army of the Karen ethnic group, which has been fighting since
1949 for independence from Burma, is facing the greatest crisis in its
history. If Karen resistance collapses, as some believe is likely, it will
be a triumph for the Burmese junta as it consolidates its hold on power.

A British man is allegedly killed by thieves in a raid on his yacht during
a boating holiday off the southern coast. Malcolm Robertson and his wife
Linda were sailing their boat off the coast of southern Thailand when he
was allegedly beaten with a hammer and thrown overboard by a group of men
trying to steal a dinghy.

The Seychelles, the idyllic archipelago in the Indian Ocean off the coast
of Africa, is best known as an island paradise playground for celebrities,
royalty and the ultra-wealthy. These days, it’s better known for something
else: bankruptcy.

The junta’s wilful disregard for the welfare of the 3.4 million survivors
of cyclone Nargis – which struck the Irrawaddy delta last May, killing
140,000 people – and a host of other abuses amount to crimes against
humanity under international law. The storm surge coupled with intense
winds swept away homes, fields, livestock and rice stores, leaving little
or nothing for survivors. But the military regime, which was at the time
preparing for a national referendum on its plans to hold elections in 2010,
insisted it could cope with the disaster despite its scale and shunned most
international relief for weeks.

Criminal correction spending is outpacing budget growth in education,
transportation and public assistance, based on state and federal data. Only
Medicaid spending grew faster than state corrections spending, which
quadrupled in the past two decades. The increases in the number of people
in some form of correctional control occurred as crime rates declined by
about 25 percent in the past two decades.

Customs officials scanned the luggage and found the body of a 35-year-old
woman dumped inside. She was strangled by a rope. She is a married woman
with two children and her husband lives in Malaysia.

After a three-year offensive by the junta, the Karen National Liberation
Army (KNLA) has been forced into increasingly small pockets of resistance.
Deprived of funds and equipment, it is able to do little more than slow the
advance of the Burmese Army as it lays waste to hundreds of villages,
driving thousands of terrified civilians before it.

Executions around the world increased by more than 90 per cent last year.
2,390 people were executed last year. China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the
United States were responsible for 93 per cent of the executions. China had
the highest figures, carrying out 72 per cent of all executions. Fifty-nine
countries retain the death penalty worldwide but only 25 of them carried
out executions in 2008. In Europe only Belarus carried out the death
sentence. Africa, Botswana and Sudan were the only countries to have
carried out executions. The fact that fewer countries carried out
executions shows we may slowly be moving toward a world that is free of the
death penalty.

The tiny country’s debt burden may be tiny compared to Iceland, which
needed a $2.1 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund last
fall, but the Seychelles’ problems illustrate the degree to which the
global economic crisis has leveled some economies altogether. And because
of its small size, with just 87,000 people, the Seychelles now has the
unenviable stature of being perhaps the most indebted country in the world.
Public and private debt totals $800 million – roughly the size of the
country’s entire economy.

For the last three years, 40-year-old Phekan sewed buttons on cotton shirts
in a small factory in Gurgaon, on the outskirts of New Delhi earning about
$100 a month. But she lost her job earlier this month after the European
retailer buying the shirts slashed orders. Phekan is worried how she will
continue to live in the city while searching for another job. Phekan says
her landlord will demand rent on the first of the month, and she does not
know how she will pay the money.

The Burmese army obstructed private cyclone relief efforts even among its
own concerned citizens, setting up checkpoints and arresting some of those
trying to provide help. Supplies of overseas relief materials that were
eventually allowed into Burma were confiscated by the military and sold in
markets, the packaging easily identifiable.

As US states face huge budget shortfalls, prisons, which hold 1.5 million
adults, are driving the spending increases. States have shown a preference
for prison spending even though it is cheaper to monitor convicts in
community programs, including probation and parole, which require offenders
to report to law enforcement officers. A survey of 34 states found that
states spent an average of $29,000 a year on prisoners, compared with
$1,250 on probationers and $2,750 on parolees. The study found that despite
more spending on prisons, recidivism rates remained largely unchanged. As
states trim services like education and health care, prison budgets are
growing. Those priorities are misguided.

Three new case studies and a video have been released on the impacts of
monoculture tree plantations on women in Nigeria, Papua New Guinea and
Brazil. These tree plantations provide rubber for car and bus tires, palm
oil for processed foods and pulp for toilet paper – all items being used in
the west. They are also destroying local communities.

Most serious of all, the Karen leadership is losing the support of
neighbouring Thailand, where it was formerly able to organise, arm and –
when necessary – retreat. Trapped between the Burmese Army to the west and
an increasingly unfriendly Thailand to the east, with hundreds of thousands
of their people in wretched refugee camps, the Karen are experiencing a
humanitarian and military catastrophe.

Conservationists searching through the undergrowth of a remote mountain
region have identified up to 50 new species of jumping spiders. Medical
science could benefit from the discoveries through the study of the
chemicals contained in their venoms. Insights into how to develop vision
for robots and how to miniaturise could also be made by the study of the
jumping spider eyes.

Last year, as tourism and fishing revenue began slowing, the Seychelles
defaulted on a $230 million, euro-denominated bond that had been arranged
by Lehman Brothers before its own bankruptcy. The IMF came in in November
with a two-year, $26 million rescue package, and the country has since
taken a series of emergency steps: It laid off 12.5% of government workers
(1,800 people), floated its currency (the Seychelles rupee, which has
fallen from eight to the U.S. dollar to 16, effectively doubling the prices
of imports), lifted foreign exchange controls and agreed to sell state
assets.

Bigger manufacturers are able to absorb the impact of the slowdown, but
many smaller units are badly hit. “The bigger people, because economies of
scale and cost pressures are important, are still going to grow, but it is
small companies which don’t have economies of scale, they might go out of
business.”

The researchers were repeatedly told that surviving men, women and even
children were used as forced labour on reconstruction projects for the
military. “[The army] did not help us, they threatened us,” said one
survivor from the town of Labutta. “Everyone in the village was required to
work for five days, morning and evening without compensation. Children were
required to work too. A boy got injured on his leg and got a fever. After
two or three days he was taken to [Rangoon], but after a few days he died.”

States are looking to make cuts that will have long-term harmful effects.
Corrections is one area they can cut and still have good or better outcomes
than what they are doing now. Focusing on probation and parole could reduce
recidivism and keep crime rates low in the long run. But tougher penalties
for crimes had driven the crime rate down in the first place. One of the
reasons crime rates may be so low is because we changed our federal and
state systems in the past two decades to make sure that people who commit
crimes, especially violent crimes, actually have to serve significant
sentences.

In the case of Nigeria, in 2007, the French tire maker Michelin came in to
the Iguóbazuwa Forest Reserve, a biologically diverse region supplying food
for around 20,000 people. Michelin bulldozed the forest and local farm
lands to convert them into rubber plantations. Women living there lost
their subsistence farms and the local forest which provided medicinal herbs
and plants.

The military situation is as bad as it’s been at any time in the past 60
years. The Karen have less territory, fewer soldiers and fewer resources to
sustain resistance. The Burmese have them more and more surrounded, and
their backs are up against the wall. A Karen leader on the Thai border said
that the KNLA and Burmese Army were fighting near the town of Kawkareik,
close to the Thai border. All year there have been reports of Karen
villagers being driven into the jungle by marauding soldiers.

Along with spiders, which can leap 30 times their own body length,
researchers discovered three previously unknown frogs, two plants and a
stripy gecko. The great age of discovery isn’t over by far. Spider venom
has evolved for millions of years to affect the neurological systems of the
spider’s insect prey and each species of spider gives us another
opportunity to find medically-useful chemicals.

The IMF has given a thumbs-up to the initial progress, but it warned that
the economy would contract 9.5% this year. The government of Australia is
sending tax experts to help overhaul the revenue collection system and
audit local companies. Now the Seychelles is negotiating with the
governments of Britain, France and other Western countries including the
U.S. – the so-called Paris Club – to reschedule $250 million in debt it
owes them. It is asking for 50% of it to be forgiven – a rate it hopes its
commercial creditors will then apply to its remaining $550 million
outstanding.

The industry is impacted slightly less in India, where strong domestic
consumption is providing a market for manufacturers. But the export
dependant industries in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have been impacted more
severely by shrinking retail sales in the West. An estimated 25 percent of
orders have been cancelled by Western buyers.

The Burmese regime’s response to the disaster violated humanitarian relief
norms and legal frameworks for relief efforts. The systematic abuses may
amount to crimes against humanity under international law through the
creation of conditions where basic survival needs of people are not met,
intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to
mental or physical health.

Over all, two-thirds of offenders, or about 5.1 million people in 2008,
were on probation or parole. The study found that states were not
increasing their spending for community supervision in proportion to their
growing caseloads. About $9 out of $10 spent on corrections goes to prison
financing (that includes money spent to house 780,000 people in local
jails). One in 11 African-Americans, or 9.2 percent, are under correctional
control, compared with one in 27 Latinos (3.7 percent) and one in 45 whites
(2.2 percent). Only one out of 89 women is behind bars or monitored,
compared with one out of 18 men.

In Papua New Guinea, monoculture oil palm plantations provide palm oil
which is used to produce soap, cosmetics, processed foods and agrofuels for
the European Union (EU) and other western countries. These plantations,
however, also destroy forests, biodiversity, and local community
livelihoods. Small farmers were promised the opportunity to benefit
financially from the palm plantations and have been using much of their
land for palm oil production, depleting the soil, but earning less than was
promised. Women living near these plantations don’t have enough arable land
to farm and are exposed to toxic pesticides. “Health is a very big concern
in our place right now we breathe in the chemicals… I’m pretty sure we are
inhaling dangerous substances and definitely are dying every minute. Some
women had babies who developed asthma when they were just one or two months
old.” said a woman from the community of Saga.

It’s a cat-and-mouse kind of struggle. The Burmese burn down villages and
relocate the people close to their own camps. The Karen conflict has its
origins in the Second World War, when many Karen fought alongside the
British Army against the invading Japanese. The seven million Karen were
promised their own state by the British but when independence came in 1948
the promise was forgotten. A year later, in January 1949, the Karen began
the armed struggle that has continued ever since.

Jumping spiders with their remarkably miniaturized yet acute eyes could
help us understand how to push the limits of vision. In addition to filling
in the gaps in our planet’s natural history, exploring spider biodiversity
and evolution could potentially inform fields as diverse as medicine and
robotics. Jumping spiders have better vision than other types of spider and
two of their eight eyes are especially well developed for high resolution
vision. In effect, they have evolved a design that has deconstructed the
eyeball and put it together, with modifications, section by section in
miniature. The retina of the spiders could be of particular interest
because instead of the three-dimensional hemisphere in the human eyeball it
has developed like a flat scanner.

“We borrowed more than we can repay. This was wholly irresponsible.”

Heavily reliant on tourism, the Seychelles is desperately searching for
ways to raise capital – at a time when tourism is forecast to drop
precipitously this year. The country has already seen a drop of 15% in
visitor arrivals from the start of 2009; tourism revenue for the year could
drop by some 25% more as a result of the global recession.

The industry was hoping to exceed last year’s exports which totaled over
$10 billion, but is unlikely to meet the target. “The export goal initial
in this year was $13 billion, and we are little scared whether we will be
able to achieve that goal. Buyers are delaying the goods because of falling
demand. We are struggling for survival in these bad days.”

Georgia had 1 in 13 adults under some form of punishment; Idaho, 1 in 18;
the District of Columbia, 1 in 21; Texas, 1 in 22; Massachusetts, 1 in 24;
and Ohio, 1 in 25.

In Brazil, Eucalyptus plantations provide pulp for paper that is used for
toilet and facial tissue, as well as other disposable paper products in the
west. These Eucalyptus plantations, push out local agriculture, deplete the
soil and are water-use intensive, devastating local flora and fauna. One
woman, anonymously interviewed in Southern Brazil, explains that “the
companies only give work to men. The few jobs they give to women are the
ones that pay the least.” Even in the case of men, the companies tend to
hire workers from outside the region, and this influx of strangers
invariably leads to a rise in sexual harassment cases.

In the early decades of the war, the KNU dominated the Irrawaddy Delta,
close to the former Burmese capital Rangoon, as well as areas north of the
city and all of Kayin State. But in the 1990s an increasingly well-armed
Burmese Army made steady gains and in 1995 the KNU was driven out of its
capital, Manerplaw. At this time, Buddhists in the Christian-dominated KNU
broke away to form the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), which now
fights alongside the Burmese Army. Formerly, the KNU had operated as a
quasi-government, providing schools and clinics and receiving income from
tax, as well as from a profitable trade through Thailand in timber, gold,
zinc and antimony. The loss of territory brought a loss of funds, which
made it harder to arm and equip itself. The KNU claims to have 10,000
soldiers, including village militia men, but the number of active fighters
is probably between 3,000 and 5,000.

The 30 to 50 new species of jumping spiders were spotted and caught during
a survey of a region of Papua New Guinea. Among the new spiders were types
that came from particularly unusual evolutionary branches and zoologists
hope that these will offer new clues into how jumping spiders evolved, a
question that remains a puzzle. There are 5,000 species of jumping spider
yet to be discovered around the world. They evolved much more recently that
other spiders.

Seychelles officials have another idea though: to promote the country’s
longstanding virtue of being an off-shore business haven, with no corporate
tax, no minimum capital requirements, only one shareholder or director
required, and an annual licensing fee of just $100. It also hopes to grow
revenue from fishing licenses in its territorial waters, and soon it will
present a proposal to the United Nations to expand its exclusive rights to
the surrounding seabed, potentially increasing prospects of revenue from
underwater minerals, oil and gas.

The textile and garment factories in the region provide jobs to tens of
millions of people, especially women, and are the biggest employers in the
region after agriculture.

States started spending more on prisons in the 1980s during the last big
crime wave. Basically, when we made these investments, public safety and
crime was the No. 1 concern of voters, so politicians were passing all
kinds of laws to increase sentences. Now, crime is down, but we’re living
with that legacy: the bricks and mortar and the politicians who feel like
they have to talk tough every time they talk about crime.

The impacts of these monoculture plantations are not gender neutral. As
much attention should be placed on gender equality in the nations supplying
the raw materials to support the western lifestyle as they do within their
own borders. They argue that consumers need to understand the impacts of
their consumption on both environmental and social justice, and consider
reducing consumption rates. At the same time, benefitting countries must
push for policies and protections for the environment and the people that
live there. The current monoculture plantation system is not
environmentally or socially sustainable.

Last year the KNU suffered another blow when its respected and charismatic
leader, Pado Mahn Shar, was assassinated at his home in Thailand by
unidentified gunmen. Among many Karen there was a suspicion that the ease
with which the killers escaped, and the failure to apprehend them,
reflected a cooling of the welcome afforded by Thailand. Last month Karen
military commanders were ordered out of Thailand and back across the
border. This probably reflects the Thai Government’s increasing dependence
on Burma for raw materials and energy – the two governments are jointly
planning ambitious hydroelectric dams along the Salween River which forms
part of their border.

Instead of building webs or responding to the motion of prey they have
learnt to distinguish between different animals and their attack techniques
depends on what they are tackling. Instead of sitting at the centre of a
web, jumping spiders found a new way to make a living by wandering around
their habitat and pouncing – like cats – on their prey. Some of them are so
cute. There is a whole lot of beauty in these small spiders if we look
closely enough.

And hopes for expanding tourism remain high. In addition to the usual
roster of luxury-seeking royals and high-spending celebs, the middle-tier
traveler is now being heartily courted, too. The government in early March
announced an “Affordable Seychelles” campaign – what would have until
recently been an oxymoron – with the motto: “Once-in-a-lifetime vacation at
a once-in-a-lifetime price,” based on lower prices caused by the halving in
value of the currency.

The border is a valuable conduit not only for the Karen but for Burmese
struggling to overthrow the military dictatorship. After the junta cracked
down on large pro-democracy demonstrations of monks and activists in 2007,
many of them escaped into Thailand.

March 7, 2009

KIRIBATI FISHERMEN DOWNGRADE MUTINUOUS KANGAROO DEATH SQUADS WHILE PRESERVING LEATHERBACK GRISI SIKNIS

Three fishermen from Kiribati who went missing at sea for nearly five weeks
have been found alive on an island in Papua New Guinea.

Some 50 people were killed when Bangladesh paramilitary troops fought among
themselves during a mutiny in their headquarters over a pay dispute.
“Nearly 50 people have been killed in sporadic fighting in the headquarters
of Bangladesh Rifles (BDR).”

The outlook on Fiji’s long-term sovereign credit rating has been revised
down from stable to negative by the international rating agency Standard
and Poors. The sovereign credit rating indicates the level of risk in
investing in a specific country, and takes political risks into account.

Papua New Guinea has created a nearly 190,000-acre preserve to protect tree
kangaroos and other endangered species, after years of criticism for
turning a blind eye to environmental issues. The Pacific island nation,
where illegal logging is rampant, has recently tried to overhaul its image
in the conservation community, taking the lead on such issues as getting
tropical forest protections included in a U.N. climate pact.

A team of traditional indigenous healers and regional health authorities
from the North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN) trekked out to visit three
rural Miskito communities along the Río Coco to investigate reports of an
outbreak of a mysterious collective hysteria, known as grisi siknis, or
crazy sickness.

The fishermen were taken adrift by rough seas until they were discovered by
Papua New Guinea villagers. Authorities in Kiribati thought they drowned,
but the men survived on fish and sea water for weeks.

Rank and file soldiers in the Bangladeshi military has staged a nationwide
insurrection. The mutineers seized control of 12 military bases across the
nation, as officers and military commanders were unable to halt the mutiny.
The nation’s new prime minister warned the mutineers they faced stiff
punishment if they continued their violent insurrection and ordered heavy
artillery and armored divisions to move against them.

Fiji’s sovereign credit rating remains at B. Standard and Poors has
downgraded the outlook for the rating’s future because of what it describes
as a “quite dramatic fall in Fiji’s international reserves” -from $US618
million at the end of 2007 to $431 million in December 2008.

The plan for a conservation area stemmed from an unusual agreement between
the government and 35 indigenous communities to protect the 187,800 acres
of remote tropical forest, coastal reefs and mountains on the island of New
Guinea. Leaders representing the 10,000 villagers living in the YUS
Conservation Area, named for the Yopno, Uruwa and Som rivers that run
through it, have agreed to prohibit hunting, and development such as
logging and mining. In exchange, US conservation agencies will provide as
much as $2 million for health and education programs.

The regional health coordinator for the RAAN, said that 34 people have
reportedly fallen ill with grisi siknis in the river community of Santa Fe,
seven people in the nearby community of Esperanza and two in the
neighboring community of San Carlos. The outbreak of grisi siknis, which
has no scientific explanation, is the largest case of collective hysteria
since a massive outbreak in the RAAN community of Raití in 2003.

Villagers in PNG’s New Ireland province found the men and took them to a
medical centre run by the Lihir Gold Mine for treatment. A docotor says the
men were treated and are well. “Medically-wise they’ll need to be observed
24 hours at least and they are starting to eat well.”

The mutineers did lay down their arms, after 18 members of the government,
including ministers of parliament, went to meet with the leaders of the
uprising, putting their own lives at risk. The official death toll stands
at 11, with reports of up to 100 civilians and military personnel believed
dead. Corruption is thought to have been the cause that spurred the rebels
to outrage sufficient for mutiny.

Standard and Poor’s Sovereign Ratings Analyst, said weak growth prospects
especially in tourism, sugar and garments also contributed to Fiji’s
downgraded outlook. The outlook on Papua New Guinea and Cook Islands,
remains unchanged. At this stage, Papua New Guinea and Cook Islands have
weathered the financial crisis better than many countries, but warns they
remain vulnerable to low commodity prices and tourist numbers.

By creating the country’s first national conservation area, the PNG
government and people have established a much-needed safe zone for the
irreplaceable biodiversity it contains. Other researchers said the
agreement would go a long way toward ensuring the survival of the
Matschie’s tree kangaroo, a leaf-eating mammal the size of a raccoon that
looks like a cross between “a bear, kangaroo, koala and monkey.”

Though doctors, anthropologists and sociologists have all studied previous
cases, no one has been able to explain the phenomena. Traditional healers
and witches have explained the mysterious illness with different theories
ranging from a curse to incomplete witchcraft.

“They’ve lost some weight obviously. But otherwise they’re in very good
condition.” The fishermen need a week to fully recover before they could be
re-united with their families back in Kiribati.

The mutineers were from the paramilitary border guard units knows as the
Rifles. Corruption in Bangladesh is rampant, and the impoverished nation of
144 million is listed 147th out of 180 nations on the corruption index kept
by Transparency International, a watchdog group. The Rifles have
experienced problems with pay and equipment for years, reportedly due to
corruption.

The leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea) is the world’s oldest and largest
turtle. Having witnessed the extinction of the dinosaur and the development
of mankind, this magnificent sea creature is now facing extinction in our
Pacific Ocean.

The strange illness apparently affects young people more than old, putting
people in a strange trance and apparently giving them super-human strength.
A 15-year-old girl with siknis can overpower six or seven men. The men
can’t detain her, and have to tie her up in bed sheets.

“They are completely adapted to living in the rain forest and trees, which
is not what you think of when you think of kangaroos.” This kangaroo is
found only on the island but is related to tree kangaroos found in
Australia. Other rare species in the area include the long-beaked echidna
— an egg-laying mammal that looks a bit like a hedgehog — and the Huon
Astrapia, a bird of paradise.

Kenya police ‘ran death squads’and have a reputation for brutality. A UN
investigator has called for the removal of Kenya’s police commissioner and
attorney general over a wave of alleged extrajudicial killings. “Kenyan
police are a law unto themselves. They kill often, with impunity.”

A leatherback turtle nesting beach survey was conducted on Bougainville
Island in Papua New Guinea. The survey recorded 46 leatherback turtle nests
and one false crawl. Of the 46 nesting sites found along the beaches of
Bougainville, there were also 12 unidentified turtle nests, which were
determined to belong to green and hawksbill species.

Among the Rifles mutineers’ demands was the right to participate in UN
peacekeeping operations, which reportedly pay significantly more than
regular operations. The stand down and release of dozens of hostages
followed a warning today by Prime Minister Sheik Hasina that the
paramilitary Bangladesh Rifles must return to the barracks and surrender
their weapons or face unspecified consequences.

Until now, their habitat was under significant threat. Nearly a quarter of Papua New Guinea’s
rain forest has been damaged or destroyed between 1972 and 2002 — mostly
due to illegal logging to extract timber that is made into flooring and
furniture in Chinese factories and sold in the United States and Europe.
But many of Papua New Guinea’s forests, including the new reserve, are
still untouched, and researchers have hope the unique arrangement will find
success.

The illness doesn’t necessarily make people violent, but it does make them
hysterical. Many of the affected will take off running madly, and other
villagers can’t stop them. Sometimes, however, grisi siknis can turn
violent. In the case of Raití in 2003, some of the affected people ran
around town with machetes trying to cut others.

Security forces went on a killing spree against rebel militias in Mt Elgon
in western Kenya, and against some 500 suspected Mungiki members. The
attorney general was “the embodiment in Kenya of the phenomenon of
impunity. There is overwhelming testimony that there exists in Kenya a
systematic, widespread and well-planned strategy to execute individuals,
carried out by the police.”

Some had feared the mutiny could spread to the regular military or
represent the beginnings of a politically motivated coup d’état, and that
PM Hasina’s government could be in jeopardy if the rebellion was not
swiftly put down. There will be angry calls for punishment of the
insurgents, but there will likely also be angry calls for tough action to
combat corruption, perceived to be pervasive in politics and public life.
More mass graves have been found at a military base where soldiers staged a
mutiny this week. At least 100 people are reported to have been killed,
mostly army officers.

This survey also served to verify nesting sites recorded during an aerial
survey. Bouganville lies between Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands,
with all three having nesting populations of the leatherback turtle. The
researchers traveled around Bouganville by dinghy interviewing, surveying
and sharing turtle awareness with the local communities as well as
measuring turtle nests along the shore. “There was a high density – close
to 43% of all the nests were in a 5.4 km stretch of beach between the
villages of Papanoa and Naboi. This would be the most likely spot for
conservation work along with some educational outreach about turtles, as
these nests will likely be harvested for eggs.” Communities in Bouganville
frequently harvest the eggs of the turtles for food.

Unlike government-run parks that often exist in name only in many parts of
Asia, the land committed for the project is all owned by local clans.
Conservationists are counting on the locals to bring a unique commitment to
protecting their homes. The reserve is also a good first step toward
reducing global emissions: the trees in the reserve absorb 13 million tons
of carbon each year while deforestation globally represents about 20
percent of carbon emissions.

The mysterious illness has existed in the indigenous communities since the
1960s, but had disappeared for years until the 2003 outbreak. The illness
apparently only affects indigenous Miskito and Mayagna populations. In
2004, the illness was cured by a local healer who treated it with herbs and
other natural medicines. The three local healers sent to the communities
will employ the same techniques.

Some 1,500 people died in the violence after the December 2007 poll. There
were horrifying witness accounts of how young men and defenceless women
were executed by Kenyan police, apparently for being in the wrong place at
the wrong time.

The country has suffered several military coups since independence in 1971.
The army maintains this week’s mutiny by border guards was over pay and
conditions and was not politically motivated.

“For villagers this has been part of their diet for a long time, their
cultural resource and part of their biodiversity. Like fisheries, you want
to manage it well, you don’t want to catch all your fish or you will have
no more in the future, just like turtles. We need to help conserve them or
they will disappear as a species on earth. The leatherback turtle
population in the Western Pacific has declined by 95 per cent in the last
30 years.

“Hopefully, other tropical forest nations will follow this example of
simultaneously combating climate change and conserving the ecosystems on
which people depend.”

February 25, 2009

SEA TURTLE SLUMP FLOODS POVERTY BORDERS AS ELEPHANTS PLAGUE CROPS AND DIVERSE ANTS DROWN RATS

Hundreds of dead turtles were found washed ashore along the coastal lines
from Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar to St Martin’s island with bruises all over
their bodies.

A herd of 70 to 75 elephants of the Dalma forest have strayed into five
villages of West Midnapur district and damaged large tracts of crops and
destroyed several houses.

The World Bank warned that up to 53 million more people around the world
could fall into poverty in 2009 as a result of the global economic slump,
and up to 400,000 more children could die each year as a result of rising
infant mortality. The statistics highlight the worldwide character of the
social catastrophe being caused by the deepening crisis.

Armies of ants from Solomon Islands have invaded Papua New Guinea and are
threatening to wipe out the economy in at least one part of the country. A
report from Bougainville says the ants from across the border in the
Solomon Islands are destructive to plants and human beings.

Tonga’s Government has elected to renew emergency powers in parts of capital city.
The acting chief secretary and the secretary to the cabinet, confirmed that the Public
Safety and Public Security Regulations had been extended. The regulations were
renewed based upon the recommendation by the Minister of Police.

More than 700 people in Papua New Guinea’s Western Highlands province have
been left homeless after a river burst its banks following weeks of heavy
rain.

Over 400 female dead turtles have floated ashore over the last two weeks
alone, locals claimed.

A District Forest Officer said the pachyderms damaged
paddy and sugarcane in about 45 hectres in Tarrui, Gopalbar, Pundra, Sinda,
Mohanpur villages. They also destroyed five mud houses.

The rescuers recovered at least 27 bodies and over 10 people still remained
missing as a passenger launch capsized in the country’s southern Barisal
district. The incident took place in Kirtonkhola River when a sand-laden
cargo ship SM-Selim hit the Mehendiganj-bound launch ML-Happy from Barisal,
with over 100 passengers on board, locals and survivors said.

In Vanuatu, a volcanic archipelago in the South Pacific, root and tuber
crops ensure the subsistence and self-sufficiency of the islands’
inhabitants. Be they taro (Colocasia esculenta) or the greater yam
Dioscorea alata, which are traditional crops introduced by the first
sailors to have travelled to the islands some 3500 years ago, or other
plants that have been grown for some time or were introduced more recently,
root and tuber crops, which are propagated vegetatively, replanted and
propagated by cuttings, are the mainstay of the Melanesian diet. However,
it is the maintenance of the diversity of these plants that lies behind the
food security strategy adopted by the islands’ inhabitants. Melanesian
gardens are a prime example of this: by mixing crops, they provide
protection against pathogens, ensure better use of soils and sunlight, make
certain plants more drought-resistant, allow harvests to be spread over
time, and provide a more varied diet.

“I don’t think the government has understood the gravity of the crisis or
figured out how to tackle such an unprecedented situation.” A British
rodent ecologist — in Bangladesh studying the impact of the rat
infestation — said the rodent population was doubling in size every three
weeks. This means, of course, they must spread into new areas in search of
food. “In addition to destroying nearly all field crops in the region, the
rats get into people’s houses, eating stored food and damaging all sorts of
personal possessions and biting people while they sleep.”

The ants are believed to have transferred during the Bougainville crisis
when there was no quarantine service. The ants from Solomon Islands are
attacking and killing the local PNG ants, vegetables and cash crops.

The World Bank released its forecast to coincide with the Group of Seven
(G7) summit of finance ministers and central bank governors in Rome.
Anti-poverty organisations from the UN Millennium Campaign joined the bank
in lobbying for the establishment of a “Vulnerability Fund” in which each
developed country would devote 0.7 percent of its stimulus package to aid
impoverished “developing” countries.

The body of a woman named Dipti Dey, 30, was first recovered shortly after
the disastrous ferry accident. Later, bodies of 26 other launch passengers
were retrieved from inside the sunken launch after it was salvaged, raising
the death toll to 27, officials confirmed. The Prime Minister has
condoled the death of people and asked the officials to take necessary
steps for treatment of survivors.

The root and tuber species grown in Vanuatu were inventoried in ten
villages representative of the communities in the archipelago. Five
primarily grow taro, the other five yam, for both cultural and climatic
reasons. With more than 1000 varieties of thirteen species, the inventory
confirmed the varietal diversity of the crops grown. The archipelago’s
agro-biodiversity comprises three types of plants: plants that arrived
naturally, for instance on the wind, those imported by the first immigrants
– taro and greater yam in this case – and those introduced recently, also
by man, in particular cassava.

“The whole region has been affected by localised famine, forcing people to
depend on food aid. Food shortages will be a permanent feature here for
many years. We have captured 2,000 big rats from one hectare (2.47 acres)
of land. I can tell you the situation is worsening as rats are invading new
territories.” The WFP will begin a 2.6-million-dollar programme to help the
thousands of people who have lost their livelihoods because of the rats.

Even this utterly inadequate proposal received short shrift from the G7
ministers. In their final communiqué, a single one-sentence reference to
poorer economies said: “The G7 also stresses the need to support emerging
and developing countries’ access to credit and trade financing and resume
private capital flows, and is committed to explore urgently ways, including
through multilateral development banks, to enhance this support.” In other
words, the plight of hundreds of millions of destitute people must be left
in the hands of the same financial system and “private capital flows” that
have broken down, producing the worst global collapse since the 1930s.

A worried cocoa farmer on Buka Island, Aloysius Sammy, said the ants were
also attacking people and the victims were developing swollen bodies from
the ant bites. The ants were found in decaying biscuits and other food
items on cargo storage compartments on banana boats.

The bank’s new estimates for 2009 suggest that lower economic growth rates
will force 53 million more people to exist on less than $2 a day than was
expected prior to the downturn. This is on top of the 130-155 million
people pushed into poverty in 2008 because of soaring food and fuel prices.

An estimated 25 hectares of land was inundated when the Waghi River
flooded, swamping vegetable gardens, cash crops and livestock.

Experts said these turtles met their death as they travelled the stretch of
nearly 120km from Sonadia Island in Cox’s Bazar to St Martin’s island to
lay eggs on the shore.

Villagers alleged that the forest department, despite repeated requests,
did not take any steps to drive out the elephants. Four “Hulla Parties” had
been deployed to push the elephants to the Nayagram forest.

The bank’s extremely low benchmark for poverty—$2 a day—suggests that its
figures vastly underestimate the actual number of people around the world
who are barely able to feed, clothe and house themselves.

Under these renewed powers the police have the authority to stop and search
any vehicle without a warrant, as well as to seek evidence inside of any
vehicle. The powers also allow officers wider authority to make arrests.
These powers have been criticized by international rights organizations
for being an abuse of power and an attempt to frustrate the pro-democracy
movement.

Mr Sammy, who owns a two-hectare cocoa block, said half of his crop had been
destroyed by the ants. He said in south and central Bougainville, there
were no longer any signs of Papua New Guinea ants. Mr Sammy said he placed
some PNG tree ants on his cocoa trees and in just five seconds they were
attacked by Solomon ants.

The country’s National Disaster Centre committed $50,156 to the Western
Highlands provincial government to help more than 700 displaced villagers
in the Dei region, it said. The works department and two local construction
companies were partly to blame for failing to build adequate drainage.

The turtles get entangled in the fine fishing nets used indiscriminately by
fishing trawlers. The fishermen, instead of releasing them back to the sea,
beat them to death with sticks and dumped their bodies in the sea, experts
alleged.

Bangladesh’s remote Chittagong Hill Tracts region faces a serious risk of
prolonged famine and bubonic plague unless a ballooning rat population is
brought under control, experts say.

Preliminary estimates for 2009 to 2015 forecast that an average 200,000 to
400,000 more children a year, a total of 1.4 to 2.8 million over the
six-year period, may die if the crisis persists.

The emergency powers were originally put into place in November 2006 after
a riot broke out in the heart of the capital city of Nuku’alofa. The riot
began when a group broke away from a political reform rally and began
looting local businesses. Throughout the course of the riot 150
businesses, mostly owned by people of Chinese origins, were destroyed.

A disabled gunsmith has been arrested in Papua New Guinea for manufacturing
guns and ammunition in his backyard shed. The 39-year-old wheelchair bound
man known as “Harzem” was also reportedly found with numerous books on
Islam, terrorism and war.

Some fishermen from Sonadia, preferring anonymity, confirmed this saying
it’s a tedious task to release the turtles back into the waters.
Organisations working for the protection of sea turtles have recovered 62
carcasses from Cox’s bazaar area. They have expressed
concern about the environmental pollution caused by such large number of
carcasses.

The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) began distributing three million
dollars of emergency food supplies to some 120,000 people in the
southeastern tribal area bordering India and Myanmar, after the rat
population exploded.

This is a very serious problem and the Autonomous Bougainville Government,
especially the Department of Primary Industry (DPI) and Agriculture, should
do some serious research on how to get rid of these ants, Mr Sammy said.
With the absence of mining on Bougainville the economy was predominantly
agriculture-based, which meant cash crops like copra and cocoa were the
ones driving the economy. And without control, the Solomon Islands ants are
destroying cash crops, the farmer said.

In addition, millions of people already living in poverty “will be pushed
further below the poverty line,” according to the World Bank policy
note,”The Global Economic Crisis: Assessing Vulnerability with a Poverty
Lens.” The note states: “Almost all developed and developing countries are
suffering from the global economic crisis. While developed countries are
experiencing some of the sharpest contractions, households in developing
countries are much more vulnerable and likely to experience acute negative
consequences in the short- and long-term.”

People residing at Shortland borderline between Papua New Guinea and
Solomon Islands have raised grave concern over increased border crossing by
foreigners into Solomon Islands and vice versa. The people fear this might
lead to allowing terrorists to enter Solomon Islands illegally or drug
smuggling.

Most of the turtles found in this area are of the Olive Ridley, one of the
smallest species of sea turles. This species weighs between 10 to 20kg, 63
to 70cm length and 60 to 67cm in breadth.

Police made the arrest at Dami village in PNG’s West New Britain Province,
an island region in northern PNG, as part of an operation to reduce gun
proliferation. The area has been experiencing ongoing local clashes fuelled
by homemade weapons and firearms. Harzem is believed to be the main weapon
supplier in the tribal conflict.

The rats — some weighing as much as 1.5 kilogrammes (3.3 pounds) — feed
on bamboo forests in the hilly region. A Dhaka University zoology professor
recently visited the hill tracts and sounded the alarm over the
“devastating” impact of the year-long rat plague.

Almost 40 percent of 107 developing countries are “highly exposed” to the
poverty and hardship effects of the crisis and the remainder are
“moderately exposed,” according to the report. The bank warns that three
quarters of these countries will be unable to raise funds domestically or
internationally to finance job-creation, the delivery of basic
infrastructure and essential services—including health, education and core
public administration—and safety net programs for the vulnerable.

Borderline representatives appearing before the Committee alleged that
foreigners illegally entered Solomon Islands through Bougainville. Recent
past crossings happened because Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea did
not have borderline check points where Immigration, Customs and Quarantine
officials manned the posts.

The West New Britain Police Commander said Harzem was in police custody and
would appear in court as soon as possible. “I have given instructions to
fast track his case because of his condition,” he said. Police confiscated
several weapons and ammunition and are continuing their operation in a
neighbouring areas.

The root and tuber crop panel of ten villages in Vanuatu comprises more
than 1000 varieties of thirteen species. the primary aim of farming in this
volcanic archipelago in the South Pacific is to ensure food
self-sufficiency.

The threats of a famine-fuelled conflict are real as the rats are
destroying everything in the hills. Adding to the urgency of the situation,
authorities must act fast to avoid an outbreak of deadly bubonic plague.

The statistics provide only a pale outline of the impoverishment,
malnutrition and misery caused by the global recession. These outcomes are
an indictment of the anarchy of the private profit system. First, the
speculative escalation of food and fuel prices of 2007-08 threw up to 155
million people into poverty; and now the financial crash is threatening
many millions more. These forecasts make a mockery of the United Nation’s
Millennium Development Goals, which set targets to overcome poverty by
2015.

Solomon Islands and PNG have cross-border entries like a traditional
practice before, but people from other countries who came with yachts
abused this privilege. The Foreign Relations Committee also met with
people of Choiseul in Taro.

In most of the villages, notably those attached to their traditions,
ancestral crops are predominant. However, in villages subject to severe
environmental constraints (acid rain or ash showers due to active
volcanoes, cyclones, etc), there are more either local or newly introduced
crops. These crops bolster food security by making the cropping systems
more resilient. In other Pacific archipelagos, such as New Caledonia and
the Solomon Islands, the introduction by the Europeans of new root and
tuber species, combined with the arrival of a market economy, has totally
disrupted the existing systems. Ancestral species have disappeared and food
crop production has become uniform, making the production systems more
fragile and reducing the quality of the local diet. Conversely, in Vanuatu,
while the local populations are increasingly accepting and growing new
plants, those plants have had to fit into the existing agro-biodiverse
systems without adversely affecting the other species grown. In the most
fragile zones, they even help to overcome the shortages resulting from the
seasonal nature of traditional crops. The food production strategy in
Vanuatu is not yet under threat, as culturally speaking, owners set great
store by their Melanesian gardens, which is continuing to maintain their
characteristic agro-biodiversity, despite the growing role played by cash
crops grown for export.

“I have approached certain people in the DPI division and reported this
case but my case has fallen on deaf ears.” Mr Sammy also said when a border
post was set up, every boat whether traditional border crossers or not,
must still be quarantined and customs checks should be enforced. A lot of
ants have also been brought into Bougainville by plant hunters or
collectors, especially for flowers like roses and orchids from Solomon
Islands, which are regarded as some of the most beautiful and rare in the
world. Bougainvilleans are appealing to the Government to do something
before cash crops are wiped out in Bougainville.

February 12, 2009

ANAGRAM WITCHCRAFT TORTURE ROBBERS DECLINE COCA-COLA

The government of Papua New Guinea must act now to end a rash of more than
50 killings related to allegations of sorcery, Amnesty International said.

It was a black day for the Nigerian Police Force as seven policemen met
their untimely deaths in three separate incidents as bandits went on the
rampage in Benin City, Edo state and in Abeokuta, Ogun State. The first
incident occurred along the Benin-Lagos road, with two policemen shot dead
while two others sustained gunshot injuries in a gun battle with armed
robbers.

Two rights commissions jointly called for the government to take steps to
halt torture in the country, including ratifying an international
convention against the practice.

Coca-Cola Amatil Ltd., Australia’s biggest soft-drink maker, increased
second-half profit 26 percent on higher soda sales and new drinks such as
Glaceau Vitamin Water.

The murder of a father and son in Ban village, a few kilometres from Mount
Hagen is the latest sorcery-related killing to come to light.

But the Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), in charge of Zone 5, Benin
City, said that only one policeman died; however an eye-witness said that
two policemen were shot dead on the spot by the robbers who caught them
unawares.

“It has been 10 years since Indonesia adopted the Convention against
Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment [CAT]
but there has not yet been any significant progress,” said the National
Commissions on Human Rights, or Komnas HAM.

Net income rose to A$213.7 million ($140 million) in the six months ended
December from A$169.8 million a year earlier. The result was calculated by
subtracting first-half earnings from the A$385.6 million full-year profit
the Sydney-based company reported.

Local men shot dead 60-year old Plak Mel Doa and threw his body into a fire
whilst his son, Anis Dua, was dragged from his home and burnt alive. Local
people accused them of causing the death of a prominent member of the
community by sorcery.

His commission and the National Commissions on Violence Against Women, or
Komnas Perempuan, said in a joint statement that they were now waiting for
the government to ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention against
Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, or
OPCAT, because it represented a more effective way to prevent torture in
the country.

The robbers who were said to be armed with AK-47 rifles also escaped with
gunshot injuries, but it was learnt that the policemen who were on patrol
could not withstand the firepower of the armed robbers when they attacked
the patrol van.

Takeover talks with brewer Lion Nathan Ltd. ended, raising prices by 5
percent as record summer temperatures in southeastern Australia stoke
demand. New drinks in Australia and revamped packaging in Indonesia are
boosting sales and limiting the impact of a recession in New Zealand.

When dozens of people have been killed after literal witch hunts, it’s
clear that the government is not doing enough to protect its own citizens
and maintain the rule of law.

They were on patrol to the Benin-Lagos express road after they got a
distress call that robbers were operating. They exchanged fire with the
robbers, who escaped with bullet wounds. One of the men was shot dead while
others sustained injuries and are currently receiving treatment at an
undisclosed hospital.

The country’s many human rights violation cases are well known, especially
those involving torture in areas far from public view, such as prisons,
state detention centers and social rehabilitation centers.

The result highlighted the underlying defensiveness of Coca-Cola Amatil’s
business, which is further characterized by strong domestic performance.
All segments delivered profit growth, with Indonesia a stand out, rating
the stock “hold.”

The police and judicial authorities have to step in immediately before
another person faces this kind of vigilante violence.

But we are on the trail of the robbers because we know they will still be
around with the wounds. It is a sad day for us but we are happy that our
men put up a spirited fight and we must get all of them.

Torture mostly happens in closed areas, and it is hard to prove it.

Coca-Cola Amatil shares rose 1.6 percent to A$8.51 at the close in Sydney.
The company is 30 percent owned by Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Co., the world’s
biggest soft drink maker.

The Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary (RPNGC) is often unable to enforce
the law. For instance, after the killings, police reported they wanted to
visit the crime scene and confirm the men’s deaths, but heavily armed
locals prevented them from removing the bodies to hospital for autopsies.

Four police officers attached to the Ikpoba Hill Police Station were shot
dead when armed robbers attacked a bullion van along Ugoneki, Benin-Asaba
road, Benin City. Their rifles were also taken away by the dare-devil
robbers.

“We’re concentrating on torture of political detainees in some areas of
Papua [Province], such as Manokwari and Jayapura, and in Maluku. There are
a lot of political detainees in those areas, and torture is even more
intense against these types of detainees.”

Lion Nathan scrapped its A$7.5 billion offer after Coca-Cola Co., which has
the capacity to block the offer, ended talks on a deal. The offer valued
Amatil shares at A$10.21 each based on closing prices.

People often don’t trust the police or the judiciary and instead blame
events on supernatural causes and punish suspected sorcerers.

“Torture like physical and mental abuse, such as intimidation, have been
common practice in many prisons in Indonesia. It is difficult to control
unless the government pays more attention to this human rights violation.”

It was another case of a distress call, but the robbers laid an ambush for
them. We are in a mourning mood; we know that it is a syndicate. We must
get them. They are trying to get rifles to carry out other operations but
no matter what they do, we must get them.

“The price was unrealistically low. The CCA board was presented with a
proposal that was just not capable of being accepted.”

The Constabulary, the Public Prosecution Office and other relevant
authorities should step up efforts to curb vigilante violence and raise
awareness in communities about ways in which people can legitimately seek
justice.

CAT was an effective tool for responding to torture cases, while the OPCAT
was more of a preventive tool.

Meanwhile, the office of the Assistant Inspector-General of Police (AIG),
Zone 5, has described the day as a dark day for the police in the state.

Earnings before items totaled A$404.3 million, beating the A$400.9 million
average of ten analyst estimates. The company boosted its second-half
dividend to 22 cents from 20 cents earlier.

Amnesty International calls on the RPNGC to vigorously pursue
investigations of all cases and ensure that the perpetrators are brought to
justice.

It was learnt that the officers who were escorting a bullion van ran into
the robbers who attacked the bullion van with three vehicles, armed with
sophisticated weapons.

The government should list torture as a punishable crime in the Criminal
Code.

Earnings before interest and tax in Australia, where Coca- Cola Amatil gets
almost two-thirds of sales, rose 9.1 percent to A$269.3 million in the
second half after adding Vitamin Water and relaunching its Mother energy
drink.

There has been an increase in reports of sorcery related killings in Papua
New Guinea. A village court, comprising church pastors and local officials,
found a 40 year old man from a village in Unggai-Bena district in the
Eastern Highland province guilty of sorcery and sentenced him to death. A
group of local men then hacked him to death with bush knives. A group of
men stripped a woman naked, gagged and burned her alive at Kerebug rubbish
dump in Mount Hagen after she was suspected of practising witchcraft.

“There are many kinds of torture that the commissions should explain
further, such as ethnic cleansing, the cleansing of anti-social
individuals, military terror and discrimination against minority religions.
There is a lot of torture at several detention centers and prisons. But we
have no exact number regarding the cases. We only investigate some of the
important cases.”

“Our men are on the red alert now and we are advising everybody to be
careful. Some people are on a mission but we must stop them. You will
recall that some police officers were shot early this morning. One died
while others were hospitalized. This makes it five police officers to be
killed in one day. That is sad for us but we must get the killers no matter
where they run to.”

The company’s pre-mixed spirit drinks, which include Australian rights to
Jim Beam & Cola, had a “material decline” in sales as higher government
taxes pushed the retail price up more than 20 percent. Coca-Cola Amatil’s
nearest soda rival in Australia is Cadbury Schweppes Plc., the domestic
bottler of Pepsi. Asahi Breweries Ltd., Japan’s top-selling beer maker,
agreed to buy Schweppes in Australia. The purchase is subject to a
so-called right of negotiation granted to Coca-Cola Co., which gives the
world’s biggest soft-drink maker rights to negotiate a purchase of the
unit.

February 9, 2009

FLOODED POPPIES MINIMIZE SECURITY DROUGHT CRISIS

The Solomon Islands declared a national disaster after torrential rain and
flooding in the South Pacific nation killed eight people and left another
13 missing, destroying homes and bridges.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC)
is reporting that populations in large areas of Kenya and the Horn of
Africa are now facing an exceptional humanitarian crisis that requires
urgent food assistance. The combined effect of high worldwide food prices
and a crippling drought are seriously jeopardizing the lives, livelihoods,
and dignity of up to 20 million people in rural and urban communities.

Opium poppy cultivation inched up by 3 percent last year in Myanmar,
according to a United Nations report, the second consecutive annual
increase that appears to signal a reversal of years of declining opium
production in the so-called Golden Triangle.

Indonesian security forces attacked a group of one hundred tribal people
who were peacefully protesting about delays to local elections in Nabire,
West Papua.

“Containment of the problem is under threat. Opium prices are rising in
this region. It’s going to be an incentive for farmers to plant more.”

Twelve communities on the Solomons’ main island of Guadalcanal had been
assessed as disaster-hit and appealed for international assistance.
Australia and France have already promised emergency aid.

Papua New Guinea’s law and order problem is set to get worse if a
recommendation to increase the national minimum wage is approved by the
government.

The Golden Triangle, the area where the borders of Thailand, Laos and
Myanmar meet, once produced two-thirds of the world’s opium, most of it
refined into heroin. But pressure by the Chinese government to eradicate
opium in Myanmar helped lead to steep declines, with a low point of 21,500
hectares, or 53,000 acres, of poppies planted in Myanmar in 2006. Since
then, opium cultivation has bounced back by around 33 percent, to 28,500
hectares last year.

For the past 17 years Papua New Guinea’s lowest income earners, like
security guards, have brought home just $US13 a week. Government plans to
increase that to $US43 has business owners worried.

When police began attacking the crowd, the demonstrators called for Mr
Yones Douw, a respected human rights worker, to document the violence. When
Mr Douw arrived, the police attacked him – witnesses said he was kicked,
beaten on the side the head and punched in the face before being arrested,
along with seven protesters. The police also beat other protestors, and
fired rubber bullets into the crowd. Five people were seriously wounded,
and many others received minor bullet wounds.

Since December, flooding has also hit the Pacific island nations of Fiji,
Papua New Guinea, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands, with tens of
thousands of islanders abandoning homes.

UN officials warn that the global economic crisis may fuel an increase in
poppy production because falling prices for other crops may persuade
farmers to switch to opium. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said corn
prices had fallen by half over the past year. The price of opium, by
contrast, has increased 26 percent in Laos and 15 percent in Myanmar over
the same period.

Heavy rain and flooding on Guadalcanal and nearby Savo Island has caused
widespread damage and forced the evacuation of more than 70 villagers to
the capital Honiara.

The PNG Manufacturers Council said the economy cannot accommodate a higher
salary. “It’s not the fact that the private sector doesn’t want to pay, its
whether the economy can accommodate that high level of salary.”

“In Kenya 80 percent of the territory is affected, with the northern and
lower eastern Kenya the most affected. We’re talking of a target population
of 1.6 million for the Red Crescent.”

Farmers in the isolated highlands of the Golden Triangle are also hampered
by bad roads and difficulties getting their crops to market. They often
find that small parcels of opium are easier to carry across the rough
terrain.

The Solomon Islands Red Cross had sent emergency staff and volunteers to
distribute relief supplies to communities in West Guadalcanal and Longu, in
the island’s east. The Solomon Islands is a nation of about 500,000 mainly
Melanesian people, spread across hundreds of islands, which gained
independence from Britain in 1978.

The global economic crisis is only just starting to short-change Papua New
Guinea, with the wage set to further undermine the local economy. “We
become less competitive, our prices go up and we don’t sell any goods.” It
could lead to thousands of workers being laid off, adding to the country’s
already high unemployment and crime rates.

Other areas are Djibouti with 50 thousand people in dire need. Ethiopia is
affected with an estimated 5 million need of food. The Red Cross is moving
in to start assisting the first 150 thousand people. The Red Cross and the
Red Crescent are also active in southern Somalia, as well as Somaliland and
Puntland.

Although opium is still grown in parts of Laos, Vietnam and Thailand, UN
officials say that about 94 percent of the region’s opium comes from
Myanmar. Most of the Golden Triangle heroin is sold within the region, but
small amounts also reach the United States and Australia. Recent seizures
of heroin thought to come from the Golden Triangle have been made on the
Thai resort island of Phuket, Ho Chi Minh City and Yangon, Myanmar’s
commercial capital.

“The key issue for PNG is more people working and that basically improves
the lifestyle of people and that without a doubt helps law and order
because when people can put food on the table there is harmony, you take
that opportunity away and you have unrest. Or, employers could head to the
labour black market, choosing instead to pay workers their current wage
under the table.”

Eyewitnesses say that a range of security forces were involved in the
attack, including Brimob, Indonesia’s notorious para-military police, plus
soldiers and Indonesia’s Intelligence Service.

The alarming spread of HIV by heroin users in southern China several years
ago persuaded the Chinese authorities to crack down on opium and heroin
trafficking. Western intelligence officials say Chinese spies are active in
anti-narcotics operations in Myanmar, especially in northern areas where
central government control is weak. “There’s strong collaboration with
Chinese intelligence.”

Last month 11 Fijians died and more than 9,000 people were forced into
evacuation centres after the worst floods in decades. Sugar is Fiji’s
second major industry following tourism and sugar farms in the west have
been devastated by the flooding, with damages estimated to be in the tens
of millions of dollars.

The UN report on opium poppy cultivation is based on surveys taken from
helicopters and on the ground. The United States relies more heavily on
satellite images to calculate opium cultivation, and its reports are
sometimes at odds with those of the United Nations. The UN report did not
cover methamphetamine production and distribution, which among some
criminal syndicates has displaced opium and heroin in the region.

“We have launched an appeal seeking 95 million dollars, now we have
received only 6 percent in the two months since we launched and this is not
enough to run an operation.”

In Thailand, methamphetamines remain a problem but longstanding efforts by
the royal family to substitute opium production with vegetables, coffee and
macadamia nuts have virtually wiped out opium production among the northern
hill tribes.

Floods ravaging northern Australia have washed crocodiles onto the streets,
where one was hit by a car. More than 60 per cent of the vast northeastern
state of Queensland has been declared a disaster area, and flooding after
two recent cyclones has affected almost 3,000 homes. The army has been
called in to help with rescue and recovery efforts, while three reports of
large crocodiles washed up from flooded rivers have come in from homes in
the Gulf of Carpentaria region.

The incident fuels concerns that repression and violence against the Papuan
people is increasing.

“Many employers are doing the right thing, but there are many unscrupulous
employers who will exploit their workers to gain maximum profit out of the
cheap labour.”

Afghanistan remains the world’s premier source of opium, producing more
than 90 percent of global supply. Afghan soil is also remarkably more
fertile than the rocky, unirrigated opium fields in the Golden Triangle.
The UN estimates in its 2008 report that one hectare of land yielded an
average of 14.4 kilograms, or 31.7 pounds, of opium in Myanmar but 48.8
kilograms in Afghanistan.

“The damage bill is estimated at $76 million and growing. But we won’t
really know the full extent of the damage until the water subsides, so that
figure could double, it could treble.” It was the worst flooding seen in 30
years. Fresh food supplies were flown into the westerly townships of
Normanton and Karumba, which had been cut off by flood waters. The flooding
comes amid a heatwave over in south-eastern Australia.

The situation has been exacerbated by the global and financial crisis.
However a small fraction of the billions of dollars being spent by
governments to bail out banks and financial institutions could help save
millions of lives in the Horn of Africa.

The death toll in Australia’s worst-ever bushfires has risen to 128 people,
as hundreds more flood community shelters after losing everything they own.
The state government in Victoria, where the fires have raged since
Saturday, is being advised to prepare for 230 fatalities. Police confirmed
128 deaths from the fires, many which officials suspect were deliberately
lit.

January 30, 2009

CLINICAL SLUMDOG KWASO GOLD TRIALS

Lihir Gold has reported a 26% rise in annual gold production to 882,000
ounces and forecast output this year would exceed 1 million ounces as new
mines in Africa and Australia are fully developed.

Armed police guarded cinemas in eastern India after slum dwellers ransacked
a picture house showing Slumdog Millionaire because they didn’t like the
use of the word “dog” in the title.

Seven officers were hurt in an attack and the blame is being attributed to
the illegal home-brew alcohol known as kwaso.

Expectations for a higher gold yield come despite a landowner wrangle over
royalties at the company’s main mine in Papua New Guinea that brought it to
a standstill.

Several hundred people rampaged through the cinema in Patna, capital of the
eastern state of Bihar and tore down posters advertising the film. They
said the title was humiliating and vowed to continue their protests until
it was changed.

Around 1500 litres of the brew was seized but that is considered to be only
a tiny drop in a very big ocean.

Lihir chief executive Arthur Hood said he was hoping for a quick resolution
that would enable the mine to restart but conceded he did not know how long
it would take. “I’d like to think we could get back to work in the next day
or so, but I’ve worked in Papua New Guinea a long time and these things are
always a little bit unpredictable,” he told reporters.

The protest was organised by Tateshwar Vishwakarma, a social activist who
filed a lawsuit over the title against four Indians involved in its
production – a lead actor, the music director and two others.

The explosion of the illegal trade, which results in potentially volatile
situations, is not easy for the police trying to contain it.

The dispute involves local islanders in the province of New Ireland, about
700 kilometres north-east of the capital Port Moresby, who want a bigger
share of the mine’s revenues.

Mr Hood said the company was already paying a 2% royalty to islanders on
all gold produced at the mine as well as awarding supply contracts worth
millions of dollars to local firms.

“Referring to people living in slums as dogs is a violation of human
rights,” said Mr Vishwakarma, who works for a group promoting the rights of
slum dwellers. We will burn Danny Boyle [the film’s British director]
effigies in 56 slums here.”

“The police can only do so much. We have a licensing squad of about 12
members and the community, chiefs and religious people have to get stuck in
too,” says Peter Marshall, Solomons Acting Police Commissioner.

“Last year we were looking at about $US130 million ($195 million) worth of
our supply contracts going to Lihirians,” he said.

The case will be heard in a Patna court, according to police. Kishori Das,
another activist, said: “We are in touch with like-minded organisations
across India to take the issue on a large scale.”

Prime Minister John Key visited Honiara to assess New Zealand’s role in the
regional assistance mission and he says it will be some time before NZ
assistance in the islands can be pulled out. “At least three to five years
and it could in all probability be longer than that,” Key says.

The overall increase in the company’s gold production was boosted by a
record yield of 315,000 ounces in the fourth quarter, Mr Hood said. It cost
on average $US400 to mine each ounce in 2008 but only $US353 per ounce for
the fourth quarter, he said. “This is exactly where we want to be,” he
said.

Social, political and religious activists in India often organise violent
protests over films to try to win publicity for their cause. In 1996, Fire,
a film about lesbianism, enraged Hindu fundamentalists who burnt down
several cinemas. In 2000, production of Water, a film about Hindu
widowhood, was moved from India to Sri Lanka after violence by Hindu
nationalists.

An organised gang member who agreed to talk on the condition of anonymity
says the gangs sell 60-70 litres of kwaso a day. The sellers, mostly in
village based gangs, take a quarter of the takings.

Gold currently sells for around $US900 an ounce. The Lihir mine produced
247,000 ounces in the last quarter, taking full year production to 771,000
ounces.

Slumdog Millionaire, which recently opened in India has been generally well
received, especially since it won four Golden Globes and 10 Oscar
nominations – including one for AR Rahman, the veteran composer.

Police believe the potent home-brew is fuelling violence and crime.

In the fourth quarter some 22% of the company’s gold was derived from
newly-developed mines in Australia and Ivory Coast, reflecting efforts to
geographically diversify operations, according to Mr Hood.

However, some reviewers, commentators and film industry insiders have
criticised it as “poverty porn” which glamourises the squalor of slums and
perpetuates Western stereotypes of India.

A carton of beer costs around 165 Solomon dollars but for the same effect
you can buy a bottle of kwaso for just $10. A small joint of marijuana
costs 50 cents (NZ$).

There had been no violence against employees or vandalism at the Lihir mine
site stemming from the dispute, he said.

About 40 Mumbai slum dwellers, organised by another social activist, held
up banners reading “Poverty for Sale” and “I am not a dog” outside the home
of Anil Kapoor, one of the film’s stars.

Many sellers say they do so for survival as the Solomon Islands are filled
with a lot of young unemployed people.

Lihir’s shares were up 4% at $3.15 in early afternoon trade, outpacing a
gain of 1% in the benchmark S&P/ASX 200 index. Analysts expect Lihir to
report 2008 net profit of $US135 million, against a $US24 million loss in
2007.

Amitabh Bachchan, the veteran Bollywood star, also caused a stir when he
accused the film in his blog of portraying India as a “third-world, dirty,
underbelly developing nation”. Mr Bachchan has since apologised to Mr
Boyle, but was conspicuously absent from the film’s star-studded premiere
in Mumbai.

“Money is very hard to come by and the making of kwaso is an easy way of
making money,” says Marshall

After selling $1.2 billion in shares in 2007 to close out an unprofitable
gold hedge book, Mr Hood said the company was now benefiting from exposure
to rising prices of gold, one of the few commodities not ravaged by the
financial crisis.

Mr Kapoor, who grew up in a Mumbai slum, has denied that “slumdog” is
offensive, saying that children from the slums are called many worse things
in India. Simon Beaufoy, the screenwriter, said last week: “I just made up
the word. I liked the idea. I didn’t mean to offend anyone.” Two hours
after opening, the pediatric waiting room at All India Institute of Medical
Sciences is like the anteroom to hell. Families, anxious, restless, sweaty
in the soupy air, cram into plastic chairs, crouch in corners, crowd
doorways, clog up aisles. Cries jangle off the ceiling. Feces litter the
floor. Signs in the corridor attempt to impose order on the chaos:

Don’t spit.

Don’t feed the monkeys.

Don’t pay bribes.

“I think gold will remain very strong,” he said, adding that a weak US
dollar and the requirements for a flight to quality were keeping the yellow
metal from falling.

This overstretched government hospital and medical college treats about
4-million people a year. It’s also one of a growing number of Indian
hospitals that use their patients to gather data on experimental drugs
destined for Western markets. It recently was revealed that 49 children
have died during clinical trials at the institute.

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