brad brace contemporary culture scrapbook

March 5, 2017

Solmali Famine

somalia-famine

After withdrawing from Mogadishu earlier this month, Al Qaida-inspired Al Shabaab is placing more restrictions on the movement of people, particularly men, in areas under its control.

In Somalia’s Al Shabaab-controlled Kismayu, witnesses said malnourished children were dying due to the lack of food aid.

Gulf of Aden: A dangerous gateway

Yemen is host to the second largest Somali refugee population, with nearly 192,000. About 15,000 of those have arrived since in January.

They cross the Gulf of Aden on what are often unseaworthy and overcrowded boats. Many do not survive the dangerous crossing.

The agency said it expected more refugees to arrive in Somalia over the next months, but thought they were waiting for calmer seas. The route is also often used by migrants who pay smugglers to get them to Yemen, seen as a gateway to wealthier parts of the Middle East.

At least 6.2 million people in Somalia — or just about half the country — are grappling with the prospect of an acute food shortage due to deepening drought. And on Saturday, Somalia’s prime minister made it clear that the conditions are exacting a stark human cost.

Over a two-day span, at least 110 people died of hunger in just a single region, Hassan Ali Khaire said Saturday during a meeting with the Somali National Drought Committee.

“I can confirm that Bay region in the south and other parts of Somalia are deteriorating rapidly,” Khaire said, “and my estimation is that half of the country’s population has felt the impact of this drought.”

The country already declared the drought a national disaster on Tuesday. As Somalia has dried up, Khaire says the lack of clean water has increased the risks of waterborne diseases, while the ability of malnourished people to fight off those diseases has plummeted.

“It is a difficult situation for the pastoralists and their livestock. Some people have been hit by [hunger] and diarrhoea at the same time,” Khaire’s office said in a statement. “The Somali government will do its best, and we urge all Somalis, wherever they are, to help and save the dying Somalis.”

The United Nations is putting out urgent calls for aid, saying as many as 5 million people need aid in the shadow of a looming famine.

“Thousands have been streaming into Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, in search of food aid, overwhelming local and international aid agencies,” the news service reports. “Over 7,000 internally displaced people checked into one feeding center recently.”

If a full-blown famine should descend on Somalia, the World Health Organization says it would be the country’s third famine in a quarter-century — and the second in less than a decade.

Citing a joint report by the U.N. and the United States Agency for International Development, famine killed about 258,000 people in Somalia between 2010 and 2012.

The U.N. is currently appealing for $864 million in humanitarian aid, while “the U.N. World Food Program recently requested an additional $26 million plan to respond to the drought.” The country has been hit by a severe drought that has affected more than 6.2 million people who are currently facing food insecurity and lack of clean water because of rivers that are drying up and recent years with little rain. Earlier in the week, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator for Somalia, Peter de Clercq, warned the drought could lead to famine. “If we do not scale up the drought response immediately, it will cost lives, further destroy livelihoods, and could undermine the pursuit of key state-building and peace-building initiatives,” he warned, adding that a drought — even one this severe — does not automatically have to mean catastrophe. According to the United Nations, “Somalia is in the grip of an intense drought, induced by two consecutive seasons of poor rainfall. In the worst-affected areas, inadequate rainfall and lack of water has wiped out crops and killed livestock, while communities are being forced to sell their assets, and borrow food and money to survive.” The United Nations adds that “the Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit (FSNAU) and the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET) — managed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) — have found that over 6.2 million, or more than half of the country’s population, are now in need of assistance, up from 5 million in September.”

“We estimate that almost half of the Somali population, 3.7 million people, are affected by this crisis and a full 2.8 million people live in the south, the most seriously affected area. It is likely that tens of thousands will already have died, the majority of these being children.”

The United Nations says a lack of rain over the past few years has created a famine in two areas in southern Somalia: Bakool and Lower Shabelle. Officials say the famine could spread to other areas.

This is the first time since nineteen ninety-one that the UN has declared a famine in Somalia. The Horn of Africa is experiencing its worst drought in sixty years. UN officials have said more than eleven million people are in need of food aid. Somalia has not had an effective central government since 1991, when the former government was toppled by clan militias that later turned on each other. For decades, generals, warlords and warrior types have reduced this once languid coastal country in Eastern Africa to rubble. Somalia remains a raging battle zone today, with jihadists intent on bringing down a transitional government which relies on African Union peacekeepers and Western funding for survival.

No amount of outside firepower has brought the country to heel. Not thousands of American Marines in the early 1990s. Not the enormous United Nations mission that followed. Not the Ethiopian Army storming into Somalia in 2006. Not the current peacekeepers, who are steadily wearing out their welcome.

Somalia continues to be a caldron of bloodshed, piracy and Islamist radicalism. There are currently 6,000 Ugandan and Burundian peacekeepers in Mogadishu, but they are struggling to beat back Islamist fighters, who are rallying around Al Shabab, a brutal group that is aligned with Al Qaeda and has turned Somalia into a focal point of American concerns on terrorism .

In 2011 Somalia experienced a full-blown famine in several parts of the country, with millions of people on the brink of starvation and aid deliveries complicated by the fact that militants control the famine zones.

The Islamist militants controlling southern Somalia forced out Western aid organizations in 2010, yanking away the only safety net just when one of the worst droughts in 60 years struck. When the scale of the catastrophe became clear, with nearly three million Somalis in urgent need and more than 10 million at risk, the militants relented and invited aid groups back. But few rushed in because of the complications and dangers of dealing with the militants.

American government rules banning material aid to the Shabab complicate aid efforts. Aid officials have worried that paying so-called taxes to the militants who control needy areas could expose them to criminal prosecution.

June 21, 2016

Global forced displacement hits record high

military
UNHCR Global Trends report finds 65.3 million people, or one person in 113, were displaced from their homes by conflict and persecution in 2015.

Wars and persecution have driven more people from their homes than at any time since UNHCR records began, according to a new report released today by the UN Refugee Agency.

The report, entitled Global Trends, noted that on average 24 people were forced to flee each minute in 2015, four times more than a decade earlier, when six people fled every 60 seconds.

The detailed study, which tracks forced displacement worldwide based on data from governments, partner agencies and UNHCR’s own reporting, found a total 65.3 million people were displaced at the end of 2015, compared to 59.5 million just 12 months earlier.

“At sea, a frightening number of refugees and migrants are dying each year. On land, people fleeing war are finding their way blocked by closed borders.”

It is the first time in the organization’s history that the threshold of 60 million has been crossed.

“More people are being displaced by war and persecution and that’s worrying in itself, but the factors that endanger refugees are multiplying too,” said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi.

“At sea, a frightening number of refugees and migrants are dying each year; on land, people fleeing war are finding their way blocked by closed borders. Closing borders does not solve the problem.”

Grandi said that politics was also standing in the way of those seeking asylum in some countries.

“The willingness of nations to work together not just for refugees but for the collective human interest is what’s being tested today, and it’s this spirit of unity that badly needs to prevail,” he declared.

The report found that, measured against the world’s population of 7.4 billion people, one in every 113 people globally is now either an asylum-seeker, internally displaced or a refugee – putting them at a level of risk for which UNHCR knows no precedent.

The tally is greater than the population of the United Kingdom – or of Canada, Australia and New Zealand combined.

To put it in perspective, the tally is greater than the population of the United Kingdom – or of Canada, Australia and New Zealand combined. It is made up of 3.2 million people in industrialized countries who, at the end of 2015, were awaiting decisions on asylum – the largest total UNHCR has ever recorded.

Also in the tally are a record 40.8 million people who had been forced to flee their homes but were within the confines of their own countries, another record for the UN Refugee Agency. And there are 21.3 million refugees.

Forced displacement has been on the rise since at least the mid-1990s in most regions, but over the past five years the rate has increased.

The reasons are threefold:

* conflicts that cause large refugee outflows, like Somalia and Afghanistan – now in their third and fourth decade respectively – are lasting longer; * dramatic new or reignited conflicts and situations of insecurity are occurring more frequently. While today’s largest is Syria, wars have broken out in the past five years in South Sudan, Yemen, Burundi, Ukraine and Central African Republic, while thousands more people have fled raging gang and other violence in Central America; * the rate at which solutions are being found for refugees and internally displaced people has been on a falling trend since the end of the Cold War, leaving a growing number in limbo.

“We’re stuck here. We can’t go on and we can’t go back,” said Hikmat, a Syrian farmer driven from his land by war, now living in tent outside a shopping centre in Lebanon with his wife and young children. “My children need to go to school, they need a future,” he added.

The study found that three countries produce half the world’s refugees. Syria at 4.9 million, Afghanistan at 2.7 million and Somalia at 1.1 million together accounted for more than half the refugees under UNHCR’s mandate worldwide. Colombia at 6.9 million, Syria at 6.6 million and Iraq at 4.4 million had the largest numbers of internally displaced people.

While the spotlight last year was on Europe’s challenge to manage more than 1 million refugees and migrants who arrived via the Mediterranean, the report shows that the vast majority of the world’s refugees were in developing countries in the global south.

In all, 86 per cent of the refugees under UNHCR’s mandate in 2015 were in low- and middle-income countries close to situations of conflict. Worldwide, Turkey was the biggest host country, with 2.5 million refugees. With nearly one refugee for every five citizens, Lebanon hosted more refugees compared to its population than any other country.

Distressingly, children made up an astonishing 51 per cent of the world’s refugees in 2015, according to the data UNHCR was able to gather (complete demographic data was not available to the report authors). Many were separated from their parents or travelling alone.

December 24, 2012

Filed under: somalia,weather — admin @ 4:45 am

March 8, 2011

RWANDA PIKININI GENOCIDE EXTRADITED ARMED SEX CHANGE CHILD-CANNIBAL BRIDES FROM JAPAN, UNLUCKY THAI TYPO DESERTIFICATION REBELS, SUPERBUG SMUGGLED STORM GENES, TOBAGO DEMON VACCINE STATUES, BHAGVAD GITA GREENHOUSE RECRUITED GAS EMISSIONS, LOST COCAINE-CLIMATE RAMPAGE MONEY, AND IVORY COAST EX-MANGA-COP KILL THREE BLOODY RIDGE GUINEA PIGS, WOUND 34 ROLL YOUR OWN INDIAN BILLIONAIRES, AS ARMOURED, ALLAHU AKBAR, PUBLIC DISSENT VEHICLE ROBBED AFTER TWO-MONTH PACIFIC EARTHQUAKE DOUBLE DRIFT PUPPET SATIRE TORMENTS FOOD CRISIS CORAL-DRUG GIANTS FROM SMOKED SOMALIA GOLD MINES OVER VENEZUELAN INDIGENOUS GANG RAPED MANAHUNE BORDER BRIDGES

The Late Pleistocene (approximately 141,000 years ago) glacial period came to an end because of changes to the obliquity, or tilt, of the earth. This is a possible climate change hypothesis “because of the relatively large and persistent increases in summer energy reaching the high latitudes of both hemispheres during times of maximum Earth tilt”. The warming of oceans, exacerbated by melting glaciers that flow into them, is causing “horizontal mass redistribution” of the world’s seas. Essentially, the weight and position of the world’s oceans have shifted, and this has literally caused the earth to shift its position on its axis! Indeed, Inuit observations seem tied to the technical science of long-term climate change, specifically the theory of the Milankovitch Cycles, which seem to predict natural planetary warming and cooling periods based on the position of the earth and its axis in relationship to the sun.

An estimated two-thirds of Papua New Guinea’s six million people cannot read or write – but the “Buk Bilong Pikinini” movement hopes to make a positive difference. In pidgin, it means children’s book. Some branches of Papua New Guinea’s public library system do not even have books. Many education institutions and schools have no libraries, and children find it hard to learn to read and write.

In recent decades, coral reef ecosystems around the world have declined dramatically. One-fifth have died, and human activity directly threatens another 24 percent. As atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide increase, higher temperatures and ocean acidification could kill 70 percent of the world’s coral reefs by 2050. By century’s end, they could be gone entirely.

A traditional indigenous practice is being taken up by different communities to fight a food crisis in the Chittagong Hill Tracts region. Bengalis and other ethnic groups have adopted the practice of the Mro tribe, of creating a Rice Bank, in their own communities. They say the Rice Bank can give them the chance to prepare as rodents threaten another spell of destruction of crops including paddy in the coming season.

Violence has broken out all over the country of Nicaragua. Armed again, but this time organized by Sandinista thugs. Beatings and brutal physical attacks against intellectuals, journalists and civil rights group members are frequent here now. There is currently no legal opposition allowed in the country against the policies of the Nicaragua government (FSLN), controlled by the Sandinistas. It was illegal for any opposition to the Sandinistas to paint anything on poles or walls, which is what students have been doing for weeks to declare the elections stolen. During the early hours of the morning vehicles carrying armed gangs erase any opposition on walls in the country’s capital, Managua.

A look at some other pests that are benefiting or could benefit from global warming: Ticks that transmit Lyme disease are spreading northward into Sweden and Canada, once too cold for them.

The Trinidad and Tobago police have found pages of the Hindu holy book Bhagvad Gita soaked in millions of dollars worth of liquid cocaine in a laboratory in Couva, Central Trinidad. A Venezuelan national and four citizens of Trinidad and Tobago – two men and two women – were arrested and investigations are now on into this innovative way to traffic cocaine.

Thailand has issued rules making sex change surgery more difficult — including a requirement that potential candidates cross-dress for a year — over fears that some patients are rushing into the operation. Transsexuals and transgender men are a common sight in Thailand, appearing
on soap operas and working at all levels of Bangkok society, from
department store cosmetics counters and popular restaurants to corporate
offices and red-light districts. A national transgender beauty pageant
draws thousands to the beachside town of Pattaya every year. But over the past two years, a rash of castrations, especially among young
men, has alarmed the medical establishment and prompted the new rules.

Giant Humboldt squid have reached waters as far north as British Columbia,
threatening fisheries along much of the western North American coast.

Battling with one of the world’s highest murder rates, Venezuela crushed more than 30,000 guns seized from the streets during police raids this year. Policemen used blow-torches to chop up some of shotguns and pistols. They compacted weapons including home-made pistols into a 5 ton block.

A typo tragically sent Queens firefighters barreling to the wrong address – as three men died in a fire a mere three blocks away. As trapped residents desperately tried to escape an illegally converted boardinghouse on 65th Street in Woodside, the nearest fire companies found themselves on “a wild goose chase” on 62nd Street – because a 911 operator had mistakenly entered a 2 instead of a 5. Two crucial minutes were lost during the rerouting of Engine Co. 292 and Rescue Co. 4. They got to the scene four minutes and 55 seconds after the 911 call.

The African version of “Spitting Image” has delighted big audiences by ridiculing corrupt politicians. A rapping president describes himself as “a real bad dude”; a prime minister and vice-president fight over lavatories; and a set of parliamentarians suffer from a brain disease called “corruptophaelia”. Welcome to Kenya, as seen and portrayed by Africa’s version of Spitting Image, a daring puppet satire that is steadily pushing the boundaries of free expression and outraging the Nairobi elite. The XYZ Show, now preparing for its second series, proved a huge hit. Its well-aimed barbs delighted a devoted and growing audience, while scandalising the politicians who are the show’s main target.

Nicaragua’s navy seized 2,400 kilos (5,286 lbs.) of cocaine in Caribbean waters and arrested five people linked to the consignment.This has been a heavy blow against drug trafficking, The five Hondurans were carrying in their boat more than 2,400 kilos (5,286 lbs.) of drugs, as well as fuel; the five in custody are of Honduran nationality. They were arrested 45 miles east of Puerto Cabezas.

Numerous accounts of rapes show a similar pattern at the Porgera Joint
Venture (PJV) mine in Papua New Guinea, partly owned by Toronto-based
Barrick Gold Corp. The guards, usually in a group of five or more, find a woman while they are patrolling on or near mine property. They take turns threatening, beating and raping her. In a number of cases, women reported to me being forced to chew and swallow condoms used by guards during the rape.

Malaria-carrying mosquitoes are now found in South Korea, the Papua New
Guinea highlands, and other places previously not warm enough for them.

A British tourist in Thailand had been raped after being dragged off the
street by two men. She was taken  to a hotel where she was raped and then robbed of her belongings. The woman, aged 25, said the attack happened early morning in the Thai resort of Pattaya, twenty metres from a police sentry box. The attack happened after she had been separated from friends.

Seven Papua New Guineans adrift in the Pacific Ocean for more than two months have been rescued but two have since died. A helicopter from the US-based fishing vessel “Ocean Encounter” spotted a 22-foot boat drifting near Nauru in the central Pacific. Seven men were onboard, they left Tabar Island in the New Ireland area of Papua New Guinea  to return home to Lihir Island, a distance of about 50 kilometres (30 miles). But they ran out of fuel during what was expected to be a daytime trip and drifted to the northeast.

Unusually heavy rain fell during the period needed to dry the land before burning, says a Bidayuh from Sarawak, Malaysia. New weeds grew quickly over the farms, making it impossible to burn and threatened to ruin the year’s harvest. In response, a Bidayuh-Krokong village held Gawae Pinganga, an almost-forgotten ritual to ask the ‘Pinyanga’, the village’s spirit guardians, for a dry season. The last time such assistance had been asked of ‘Pinyanga’ was during World War II and the elders were uncertain as to the exact composition of the offering.

Organized citizen gangs, called the CPC or Consejo del Pueblo Ciudadana work closely with some of the most dangerous criminal delinquent gangs in the city and region, mostly young disenfranchised and uneducated men, to prevent any opposition to Daniel Ortega and his government policies, while rumors fly that Ortega flies to Cuba for blood transfusions.

The number of Indian billionaires has almost doubled, from 27 to 52 in the
last year, despite one of the worst global recessions in history, In the last year the Indian stock market has gained more than 75 per cent and the economy has grown by almost seven per cent. Yet 42 per cent of the population still live below the poverty line.

The meaning of the Arabic phrase “Allahu Akbar”, shouted by the Fort Hood killer Major Nidal Malik Hasan before he opened fire, is known as the takbir and is used by Muslims to express a wide range of emotions.

The number of tobacco smokers currently in Thailand has reached 14.3
million. Meanwhile, the Public Health Ministry is considering a proposal to the Finance Ministry to increase the tax level on hand-rolled cigarette
products after finding over 7.4 million people smoke this style of
cigarette. The remainder smoke manufactured cigarettes.

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.

A corrupt former Philadelphia cop who used his badge to rob drug dealers
was sentenced yesterday to 30 years in a federal lockup. Malik Snell’s criminal acts had so tarnished the badge that he wore for 12 years that it would be removed from service and destroyed.

The Japan Meteorological Agency is planning to start monitoring levels of ‘’super’’ greenhouse gases, which have an enormous effect on global warming compared with carbon dioxide, at two observatories as part of efforts to combat global warming under the Kyoto Protocol.

Bark beetles reproducing more quickly in warming climates and expanding
their ranges have devastated forests across western North America. In
British Columbia they have laid waste to an area twice the size of Ireland.

Thailand’s main airport is to relocate 12 giant “demon statues” to boost the morale of staff who thought the figures brought bad luck. The statues at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport will move from the arrivals
area to the check-in zone at a cost of around 1.7 million baht (51,000
dollars.)

A gunman went on the rampage in the Northern Mariana Islands in the western Pacific, killing at least four people and wounding six,
including five Korean tourists. An Asian gunman killed four local people, including two children aged four and three, and critically injured a four-year-old girl in an apparent random shooting spree at a local shooting range. The man then drove in a van to Last Command Post Park, a popular tourist destination and opened fire on a group of South Korean tourists.

Before any pill reaches the pharmacy shelf, it must first pass through a
gauntlet of human guinea pigs: the ‘clinical subjects’ paid to take trial
drugs so specialists can observe their symptoms. But like call centers and high-end hospitals, drug trials too are rapidly shifting to India and Asia with Thailand as the region’s favored frontrunner.

Tokyo has banned the sale and lease of anime films and manga comics
depicting rape, incest and other sex crimes to under-18s. A bill,
introduced by the metropolitan assembly, calls on the industry to self
regulate by toning down graphic comics and films on general release.
Publishers and retailers breaking rules face fines up to JPY 300,000. A
group of publishers, complaining of censorship, have threatened to boycott
Tokyo International Anime Fair.

Students are now putting together El Libro Negro, the black book that proves the elections of 2008 were stolen. With this in mind coupled with the increasing pressure on the Ortega government, after one week of peaceful opposition protest met by brutal Sandinista violence, Daniel Ortega finally admitted there had been fraud in the elections.

The recruits assembled by moonlight at a watering hole. Hundreds of boys and young Kenyan men were herded onto trucks, which were covered with heavy canvas and driven through the night. It was so hot inside they could hardly breathe. One recruit, said they banged the sides of the truck for water but got none. Some had to urinate where they stood. Their destination: a secluded training camp deep in the Kenyan bush.

Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast faced a battering by high winds and heavy rains Friday, as remnants of hurricane Ida wrecked homes and officials warned as many as 40,000 could be affected by the storm. Despite being downgraded to a tropical depression, heavy rains from Ida swelled rivers, destroying an estimated 530 houses and decimating remote communities in one of Central America’s poorest nations.

When it comes to American policy in Pakistan or, for that matter, Afghanistan. It’s just the norm on a planet on which it’s assumed that American civilian and military leaders can issue pronunciamentos about what other countries must do; publicly demand various actions of ruling groups; opt for specific leaders, and then, when they disappoint, attempt to replace them; and use what was once called “foreign aid,” now taxpayer dollars largely funneled through the Pentagon, to bribe those who are hard to convince.

An armoured vehicle travelling between Wewak and Maprik has been held up by robbers armed with two AR15 rifles, a pistol, a Winchester and an axe.  The thieves escaped with an undisclosed amount of money.

The thousands of refugees arriving in Liberia had fled violence perpetrated by rebels who support Ouattara. At least 14,000 people have fled the violence and political chaos in Ivory Coast, some walking for up to four days with little food to reach neighboring Liberia. At least one child drowned while trying to cross a river.

“I had parked next to the Japanese Memorial and two of us went down the hill to the Pigs Tails with the Barbwire to record a video promoting the Solomon Islands, and left a female at my vehicle. Whilst we were down there recording, a person of Local Features walked past the vehicle and eyed the vehicle to see if anybody else was around, and just as he disappeared over the hill, 4 Youths, WITH BUSH KNIVES, approximate age of 20-25, approached the vehicle and DEMANDED MONEY, when they were told that she had no money, they went into the vehicle and STOLE THE TWO BACKPACKS from out of the vehicle and then ran down the hill towards the accommodation areas near the Lunga River…”

In the latest sign of deteriorating relations between the Andean
neighbours. Soldiers destroyed the walkways because they were being used by illegal militia and drug traffickers. They are two foot bridges that paramilitary fighters used, where gasoline and drug precursors were smuggled, subversive groups entered. They are not considered in any international treaty.

“The Head Shaman called for the spirits to come and show us if and how they wanted us to conduct the ceremony to ‘bring them home’. Sure enough they came and showed us. Of course I could not see because I am not the ‘sighted one’, but Aturn saw everything in a flash and told us exactly what the altar and offerings should look like. The ceremony was then held. After the Chief Priest finished, we sat and waited for the response. Within a minute, there was a sound from the east like an old man crying. It was a bird circling the small altar and then above the main altar three times. It is supposed to be a night bird but now it was in broad daylight. It was simply amazing!!! The omen is interpreted as saying ‘We thought that you have forgotten us … but now you come … we are happy. How nice for you to come.’ The rains stopped for seven days within the week after the ceremony.”

A microscopic parasite is spreading a deadly disease among salmon in
Alaska and British Columbia. Researchers say rising water temperatures are
partly to blame.

Thousands of people, including children, are being secretly recruited and
trained inside Kenya to battle Islamic insurgents in neighboring Somalia,
according to deserters, local officials, families of recruits and
diplomats. Most recruits are Somalis living in crowded refugee camps and
Kenyan nationals who are ethnic Somalis living nearby.

A magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck off the coast of Japan. A Pacific-wide tsunami is not expected. However, the Japanese Meteorological Agency has issued tsunami warnings for the Ogasawara Islands and a tsunami advisory for southern Japan. The quake, which occurred 3:19 a.m., is about 95 miles (155 km) from Chichi-shima, Ogasawara Islands. It is also 210 miles from Iwo Jima in the Volcano Islands, and 650 miles from Tokyo.

A Sri Lankan was arrested by the Solomon Islands police after he had
escaped from the airport where he was to be deported. The man, who had been illegally residing in the country, was allegedly at the departure lounge when a group of armed men had helped him escape the police. He had been arrested again while four others have been linked to the incident.

Gases such as sulfur hexafluoride and dinitrogen monoxide, which
respectively have 20,000 and 300 times more global warming effects than
CO2, will be monitored at the meteorological observatory in Minamitori
Island, Japan’s easternmost island, and the atmospheric environment
observatory in Ofunato, Iwate Prefecture.

A little loop of genes that give bacteria the power to resist virtually all known antibiotics is spreading quickly and likely to cause doctors headaches for years to come. They come on the equivalent of a genetic memory stick – a string of genes called a transmissible genetic element. Bacteria, unlike higher forms of life, can swap these gene strings with other species and often do so with wild abandon.

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.

Kenya has long feared that the conflict in Somalia, which has been bloodied by civil war since warlords overthrew dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991, will spill across the border into its own neglected northeastern region.The area is home to hundreds of thousands of ethnically Somali Kenyans.

Sixteen countries, home to more than half the world’s smokers and bearing
the highest tobacco use, were involved in the study: Bangladesh, Brazil,
China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland,
Russian Federation, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay and Vietnam.

Five armed men robbed the Big Rooster outlet in 4-Mile but three were captured by police as they tried to get away with an undisclosed amount of money. They were all armed with pistols as they entered the fast food outlet and held up the company employees, customers and security guards at about 9am. As they exited the building and made for their getaway vehicle, police closed in and captured three – two in front of Freeway Motors and one in front of Big Rooster while the other two managed to escape on foot.

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.

Thousands of would-be fighters, some as young as 11, have been lured into the militia by promises of up to $600 a month, but many fled after they were not paid, were beaten or went hungry. Many recruits remain in the ranks and see the secret militia as their only way out of overcrowded refugee camps and the dusty, poor towns around them.

The U.S. government warns that such invasive plants as the common reed,
hyacinth and purple loosestrife are likely to spread to northern states.

Translated as “God is great”, it can be used to express delight and
euphoria or as a war cry during battles. It is also said during each stage of both obligatory prayers, which are supposed to be performed five times a day, and supererogatory prayers, which are said at will. The Muslim call to prayer, or adhan, and commence to the prayer, or iqama, also contains the phrase, which is heard in cities all over the Muslim world.

Directives have been given to homicide detectives to charge a man with the
murder of German national Peter Taut. The suspect is expected to appear before a Tobago magistrate tomorrow. Taut’s body was discovered on in a shallow grave at his Bacolet Crescent home where he lived. Taut, 56, an engineer, died as a result of asphyxia, an autopsy performed revealed.

For Western pharmaceutical giants such as Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, Asia
offers a glut of people willing to accept less money for testing out trial
medicines. Softer regulation is another big draw, as are improvements in
Asian hospitals’ facilities and an increase in Western-educated doctors. Just eight years ago, only 6 percent of the world’s drug trial patients were tested in Asia and India. The figure is now 11 percent.

The gunman, believed to be aged in his late 30s to early 40s, apparently
killed himself following the shooting spree but his motive was unclear.
The injured South Korean tourists included a 39-year-old man critically
wounded when he was shot in the back, and two other men aged 38 who were
reported to be in a stable condition. Two Korean children aged eight and five were treated and released after receiving minor cuts during the rampage. After shooting the tourists, the gunman drove to the nearby Bonzai Cliffs area on the northern tip of Saipan island. Police found the gunman’s van with smoke pouring from it and three rifles inside. The body of the shooter was found nearby with a gunshot wound to the head and another rifle.

Since returning to the presidency in 2007, 17 years after being voted out
of office at the end of the Sandinista revolution in 1990, Ortega has
created a network of private businesses that operate under the auspices of
the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), an opaque cooperation
agreement of leftist countries bankrolled primarily by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Ortega’s “ALBA businesses” — known by an alphabet soup of acronyms, including ALBANISA, ALBALINISA, and ALBACARUNA — have cornered Nicaragua’s petroleum import and distribution markets, become the country’s leading energy supplier and cattle exporter, turned profits on the sale of donated Russian buses, and purchased a hotel in downtown Managua, among other lucrative investment moves.

It was unclear whether police had recovered the money and the firearms used in the robbery. They said that any information on this would have to come from their superiors. Cooperate Executive Guards’ Tom Vele was manning the door when the robbers burst in, beat him up and pointed their pistols at him. A shaken Vele, with blood on his head and face, said that he thought they were customers wanting to buy food but they were actually robbers trying to rob the company. They arrived in a blue Toyota RAV4 sports utility, believed to have been stolen. The robbery came two days after police superintendent of operations warned the public to be wary of criminals during the festive season as they were targeting owners of Honda CRV and Toyota RAV4 sports utility vehicles.

In the past the Nyando River basin experienced long rains from March to
June with very short rain spells in November. This trend has been rather irregular in recent years with floods occurring in August instead of April. Dry periods have increased in length and farm harvests are dwindling. The Wakesi community traditionally offers sacrifices to the gods for rain. These offerings are made under trees such as the Baobab, as they are associated with rain. The community revealed that they are increasingly offering sacrifices to the gods for rain. It appears climate change is catalyzing these practices.

Refugees are supposed to find safety in the camps, not a government that is trying to trick their sons into going back to fight in Somalia. The recruitment of children violates the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Kenya is a signatory. Kenya is eager to counter the influence of insurgents in Somalia who preach the spread of a pan-Islamic state into Kenya and Ethiopia, where many Somalis live due to borders drawn by former colonial powers. Somalia’s al-Shabab insurgents — some of whom have ties to al-Qaida –already cross into northern Kenya.

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.

Only six out of every 10 smokers said they planned or are thinking about
quitting, while five in 10 smokers had tried to quit in the last 12 months. The survey found that 3.3 million workers are exposed to tobacco smoke at the workplace and 20.5 million adults to tobacco smoke in their homes.

Fishermen are ruining Semporna’s rich heritage with fish bombing. During their 1,000 hours of diving, the scientists heard 15 fish bombs going off and came across four unexploded bombs. They have warned that conservation action is urgent because of high threats from overfishing, destructive fishing and pollution.

Two women who were walking along the road, after leaving their respective
vegetable gardens, were approached to enquire as to whether they had seen four youths running, and, they said that they had seen some youths running down the hill towards the river, but didn’t take any notice of what they were wearing. In the TV Crew Backpack was a 4 THOUSAND ENGLISH POUND (SBD$40,000), VIDEO CAMERA, and their HERITAGE PARK HOTEL ROOM KEY. And the immediate concern was for the Tens of Thousands of Dollars worth of Equipment in their room. So the chase had to be suspended to go to the Hotel and move rooms and to make sure nothing else was stolen.

40,000 people will be directly or indirectly affected by the hurricane in preliminary damage projections. Nineteen communities are expected to be affected by the storm, which was gusting at up to 35 miles (55 kilometers) per hour.

The shopkeepers are blaming the ‘demon statues’ for the problems they have faced at the airport, which was seized late last year by demonstrators and supporters of the People’s Alliance of Democracy” (PAD).The guardian spirit statues will be shifted from the inner zone of the passenger terminal to the check-in area to ‘improve morale’ of people working at the airport. The anti-government PAD seized two of the Thai capital’s airports in a crippling eight-day blockade late in 2008, which badly dented the kingdom’s tourist-friendly image.

Recruiters started openly operating in Kenyan towns and in nearby huts and tents of the refugee camps. Some recruiters even worked from a hotel fronting a heavily fortified U.N. Compound in the northern town of Dadaab, home to three overcrowded camps of about 275,000 refugees, most from Somalia. More than a dozen deserters said they were promised positions in the Kenyan or Somali armies or jobs with U.N. Security by men acting as recruiters. Some said they were told they would patrol the Kenya-Somalia border, but upon arrival at the training camp, they were told they were going to Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, or Kismayo, a key southern city under Islamist control.

President Obama said of Pakistan: “We want to respect their sovereignty, but we also recognize that we have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don’t end up having a nuclear-armed militant state.” When it comes to U.S. Respect for Pakistan’s sovereignty, this country has more important fish to fry. A look at the historical record indicates that Washington has, in fact, been frying those “fish” for at least the last four decades without particular regard for Pakistani sensibilities.

Residents of the Ogasawara Islands are urged to evacuate coastlines
immediately. Evacuate from the seashore immediately to the safe places
near the above coasts. Scores of villagers on a remote Japanese island chain in the Pacific scrambled for higher ground after a major 7.4-magnitude offshore quake sparked a tsunami alert.

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.

In the Islamic world, instead of applause, often someone will shout
“takbir” and the crowd will respond “Allahu Akbar” in chorus.
It can also be used as a protest. In the aftermath of the 2009 Iranian
presidential election many people shouted it for an hour between 10pm and
11pm every day for nine days to show their anger at the result.

Desertification and land degradation is the greatest environmental
challenge of our time and a threat to global wellbeing. People must be paid via global carbon markets for preserving the soil. The top 20cm of soil is all that stands between us and extinction. Conflicts and food price crises all stem from the degradation of land.

The Cook Islands Health Ministry has announced the first HIV infection in
the country. Nothing is known about the person who has been diagnosed for privacy reasons, but follow-ups will be made with their previous sexual partners, to ensure the virus has not spread. With the large number of
tourists who arrive in the country each year, it’s no surprise that this
has finally happened.

The survey found that 74.4 per cent of adults noticed anti-cigarette
smoking information on television. Only one in 10 adults were aware of
cigarette marketing in stores where cigarettes are sold; seven in 10
smokers considered quitting because of warning labels; and 98.6 per cent of adults believed smoking causes serious illness. Most people mistakenly believe smoking hand-rolled cigarettes is less dangerous than manufactured cigarettes.

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.

She said she was unable to resist the two men who, after raping her, took
her Natwest bank and credit cards and 60 pounds in cash and a bracelet
worth 100 pounds. Last night police in Pattaya charged two men with rape and theft. They were named as Krajon Senkam, 29, and Surasak Kovekasan, 20, who were described as local ‘maeng da’ a Thai expression, literally translating as cockroaches, describing men who live off the earnings of local prostitutes. The men were arrested quickly as they were known in the area.

We naturally grasp the extremity of the Taliban – those floggings, beheadings, school burnings, bans on music, the medieval attitude toward women’s role in the world – but our own extremity is in no way evident to us. So Obama’s statement on Pakistani sovereignty is reported as the height of sobriety, even when what lies behind it is an expanding “covert” air war and assassination campaign by unmanned aerial drones over the Pakistani tribal lands, which has reportedly killed hundreds of bystanders and helped unsettle the region.

One typical test, which measures the speed of blood stream absorption, can require volunteers to consume a pill and submit to more than 35 blood draws throughout a weekend. Two weekends of testing, in the United States, would pay approximately $1,000. Volunteers in Thailand would more likely receive less than $50. Other disease-specific trials test experimental drugs on patients over a series of weeks or months. The ‘payment’ in these studies typically isn’t cash but rather the promise of cutting-edge treatment.

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.

The police was informed so if you see any of the following items up for
SALE, please ring me on +677 747 6372, after you have detained, or delayed
the person offering it to you. I will come as soon as you have rang and
then they will be handed over to the police to face the consequences.
The list of items that were stolen and what they were contained in was:
One (1) Dark Blue Backpack belonged to the Film Crew, Jamie & Kim,
contained the following: 1 x Very Expensive Digital Video Camera containing a Digital Tape for Recording, 1 x Room Key to Room
112 of the Heritage Park Hotel, and 1 x some other items that I can’t
remember at the time of writing this statement.

The average amount of sulfur hexafluoride, frequently used as an insulator
in electronic devices, found in the atmosphere is relatively small at 6 to
7 parts per million compared with 380 ppm of CO2, but the level has doubled from the 1990s, mostly due to man-made emissions.the National Institute for Environmental Studies has been taking
samples and analyzing them four times a year on Hateruma Island in Okinawa
Prefecture. The agency plans to start monitoring levels once a week at the
observatories in Minamitori Island and Iwate.

The deserters all said they were taken to Manyani, a training center for
the Kenya Wildlife Service outside the port of Mombasa. They said their
cell phones were confiscated upon arrival and Kenyan citizens had to
surrender their identity cards. Kenyans of Somali descent can easily pass for Somalis. They share with Somali nationals the Islamic religion, a common language, and a tall, slender appearance, looking distinct from members of other ethnic groups from farther south.

Uniformed men, apparently from the Venezuelan army, arrived in trucks on
the Venezuelan side at two pedestrian bridges that link communities on both sides and then proceeded to dynamite them. The row renewed tensions that have bubbled for weeks, with Venezuela’s
president, Hugo Chavez, recently telling his armed forces “to prepare for
war” with their neighbour in order to ensure peace. Colombia’s decades-long civil war has for years spilled across its 1,375-mile border with Venezuela in the form of leftist guerrillas, right-wing militias and drug traffickers, a nexus made even murkier by contraband and corrupt local authorities.

Seventy thousand H1N1 vaccines valued at US$675,000 will be here in time
for this country’s hosting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. And while the safety and the efficacy of the vaccine is still being questioned,these vaccines have
been used in over 20 countries over the past several weeks and have proven
to be very safe. While the vaccines are a welcomed move in light of the
215 confirmed swine flu cases and five related deaths, they hope the
ministry has a plan to deal with the chaos that can ensue.

A jury convicted Snell of conspiracy, attempted robbery and a
weapons offense in connection with a botched home-invasion robbery in
Pottstown. Snell, 37, was also convicted of taking $40,000 in cash from a South Philadelphia drug kingpin during a bogus police car stop

The seabed tremor struck at 2:19 am local time jolting people out of bed as loudspeakers blared across the Ogasawara islands and authorities warned of the risk of a two-metre (six-foot) high local tsunami. The tsunami alert was later downgraded and all warnings were lifted five hours after the quake hit near the islands, some 1,000 kilometres (600
miles) south of Tokyo. No injuries or damage were reported.

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 takbir is also included on the flags of many Arabic nations. It is
written on the centre of the flag of Iraq, 22 times along the borders of
the central white stripe on the flag of Iran, and beneath the Shahadah in
the 2004 draft constitution of Afghanistan in white script on the central
red background.

The Chinese government has abducted and unlawfully detained large number of Chinese citizens in illegal prisons. State-run hotels, nursing homes and psychiatric hospitals in Beijing are being used as so-called “black jails”.  Many people
detained in these illegal prisons are citizens from rural areas who travel to Beijing and other provincial capitals to file complaints for abuses such as illegal land grabs, government corruption and police torture. In these “black jails” they are subjected to physical violence, theft, extortion, threats, intimidation, and deprivation of food, sleep and medical care,

The other Backpack, belonged to myself, was a Columbia Brand Backpack,
being a unique Backpack within the Solomon Islands as it was given to me by Patricks Defence Logistics whilst I was employed with them and told that it was a Prototype Backpack, which had a main pouch, a zipped opening at the top near the handle and a smaller front semi-attached pouch at the front with a zip for the main pouch and a smaller zip for an internal pouch at the front, and, was of sentimental value as it was the only thing that I got out of Patricks that I have left.

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, many governments around
the world are forced to support their private economy in the face of weak
global demand. The combination of higher spending and lower revenues
results in the deterioration the government’s fiscal health. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has such concerns for several Pacific
Island countries.

Hand-rolled cigarettes also cause serious illness for smokers such
as oral cancer and cancer of the aesophagus. In India, about
100,000 died from smoking hand-rolled cigarettes each year.
Most cigarette manufacturers are now producing more smokeless
cigarettes after noting an increasing trend in smokeless tobacco use among
teenagers worldwide.

New Delhi metallobeta-lactamase 1 or NDM-1 for short, will cause more trouble in the coming years. What makes this enzyme so frightening is not only its intrinsic ability to destroy most known beta-lactam antibiotics but also the company it keeps. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are nothing new — virtually all strains of the common Staphylococcus bacteria are now resistant to penicillin. Almost as soon as penicillin was introduced in the 1940s, bacteria began to develop resistance to its effects, prompting researchers to develop many new generations of antibiotics.

Tiny rations of dirty food, beatings and failure to pay promised salaries
caused widespread desertion, recruits said. Some who tried to flee were
caught and beaten, but many managed to return home through Tsavo, a vast
national park filled with dangerous animals that surrounds the training
camp. At least one boy who fled at night with a group of nine others was attacked and killed by lions, another group of deserters was chased by elephants. Some recruits called their families on phones smuggled into the camp and whispered tearful pleas for help.

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.

A spike in violence on the Venezuelan side, including the abduction and
murder of an amateur football team, and the drive-by shooting of two border guards, prompted authorities to reinforce the border. Destroying the bridges was a “necessary and sovereign act to curb border
infiltration and drug smuggling,” the economy minister said. Colombian media reported that villagers on their side of the border
remonstrated and threw stones at the Venezuelan troops in a vain
effort to save the walkways. They were sighted at two rural spots, Las Naves and Chicoral, near the Colombian municipality of Ragonvalia.

One cabinet minister denounced the programme as “weird”, while another
complained that villagers were mistaking the puppets for the real-life
equivalents. But to the relief of viewers, the government decided not to
order it off the air, even after a clip entitled “What if Kenya was
perfect?”, which depicted President Mwai Kibaki and the prime minister,
Raila Odinga, in jail in The Hague for crimes committed during last year’s
election violence.

The cholera outbreak in Papua New Guinea’s Madang is still worsening with more than 300 people now being treated for the illness. Cholera is a diarrheal infection caused by ingesting bacteria in water or
food, and can kill healthy people within hours.

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.

Thailand’s people are largely healthy and eligible for testing thanks to a
90-cents-per-visit public healthcare scheme. Its hospitals are staffed by
English-speaking physicians and specialists educated abroad. There’s also no single Thai regulatory body responsible for approving
trials — both a convenience and source of frustration for pharmaceutical
firms. In a departure from Western standards, trial supervisors don’t have to report what the industry calls “Unexpected Suspected Adverse Drug
Reactions” — meaning worrisome side-effects of prototype drugs don’t have
to be documented.

Rains could produce flash floods and mudslides, as Nicaraguans waited for Ida to head north out to sea. One of the first areas affected were the Corn Islands, a tropical paradise popular with backpackers. Around 300 tourists were evacuated from the islands by civil defense forces.

But about 120 people temporarily evacuated to higher ground on Chichi-shima island and some 50 people on Haha-shima island overnight. “It was the biggest earthquake I have ever felt,” said Masae Nagai, a hotel
owner on Chichi-shima, part of the remote archipelago also called the Bonin islands, which has a population of about 2,300.

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.

The contents of my backpack at the time were a follows: 1. In the Main Backpack Pouch: a) 1 x Yellow Coffee Table Insert Book with Coastwatchers Posters, Pricelist and other advertising material, including a Coastwatchers Memorial Information Sheet from the Coastwatcher Memorial Trust, and, other Coastwatchers Paperwork related to SCUBA Diving, approximate Value of SBD$1,500, and 2: In the Top Main Backpack Pouch near the Handle: a) A packet of Sinus Tablets, approximate Value of SBD$80. 3: In the Front Smaller Pouch: a) 1 x DC500 Sealife Underwater Camera with Land & Sea Underwater Program (unique and the only one (1) in the Solomon Islands) containing a 1 Gigabyte SD Memory Card in a Camera Case designed for the Camera approximate Value of AUD$1,500; b) 2 x DC500 Sealife Underwater Camera Batteries (unique to the camera) approximate Value of AUD$200; c) 1 x Solomon Islands Tourism Industry Association (SITIA) ANZ Cheque Book with either 20 or 40 Unsigned Blank Cheques in it, approximate value of SBD$10 or SBD$20; d) 1 x SITIA Receipt Book with approximately 70 blank receipts, approximate Value of SBD$12; e) 1 x Coastwatchers ANZ Cheque Book with 22 Unsigned Blank Cheques in it, approximate Value of SBD$11; f) 1 x Reading Glasses Case containing: i) Reading Glasses, approximate Value of AUD$250; ii) Writing Pen, approximate Value of SBD$5; iii) A laminated Honiara Recompression Chamber Contact Numbers Checklist, approximate Value of SBD$100. iv) 5 Coastwatchers Business Cards, approximate Value of SBD$100. v) 1 x Packet of Pall Mall Blue Cigarettes, approximate Value of SBD$22.

Land conflicts in Somalia, dust storms in Asia and the food price crises of recent years all stem from the degradation of land, due to overuse by humans and the impacts of global warming. Since the early 1980s, a quarter of the planet’s land has been despoiled and 1% a year continues to be lost.

“Ocean Encounter” was expected to arrive in Majuro, capital of the Marshall Islands, to get medical treatment for the survivors, who are suffering from “overexposure and aggressive signs of
malnutrition.” After being picked up, crew spoon-fed small amounts of water and a rice-and-water mix to the survivors because “their systems could only accept small amounts under their condition.” It was not immediately known what the men had to eat or drink during their
two-month ordeal. The survivors said they saw several fishing
vessels during their two months at sea, but these “ignored their gestures
(calling for) assistance.”

Research on a “brain-eating tribe” may hold the key to understanding and
even treating mad cow disease: A genetic study of the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea has shown that certain members carry genetic mutations that protect them from a disease called kuru, which can be contracted by eating prion proteins in brain matter. The disease, which kills tribe members lacking the mutation, is similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), sometimes erroneously referred to as “mad cow disease.”

The better known issues of climate change and loss of biodiversity are both rooted in the global loss of fertile soil, as the soil
harbours a huge stock of carbon and the health of creatures living in the
soil underpins global food production and forest growth. The reason
desertification has not been a priority is because 90% of the 2.1 billion
people who live in drylands live in developing countries,

Also, about 44 million, or 13 percent of all children in south Asia, are
engaged in labour, with more than half in India.

Local authorities on the Ogasawara islands, near Iwo Jima, said they had
set up five shelters for residents but had closed them before sunrise in
the absence of damage reports. The jolts were relatively stronger than those we have felt in the past. But there was no panic as people acted in an orderly manner.

Children in the region have also been seriously affected by insurgency and
instability, as well as natural disasters. We were worried about our students as the jolt was quite strong and lasted very long. But we were relieved to confirm that none of our students were injured and no facilities were damaged. We were quite lucky, considering the size of the quake. The quake hit at a shallow depth of 14 kilometres, 153 kilometres (95 miles) east of Chichi-shima, and was followed by a series of aftershocks measuring between 5.3 and 5.6 which continued into the morning.

Kenyan politicians are not the only people to have suffered ridicule. A
jug-eared, foul-mouthed Barack Obama was shown debating with Osama bin
Laden, who wore a Nike turban and drank Pepsi while pledging to end western civilisation. After the death of Michael Jackson, his puppet equivalent was questioned by God about why he changed his skin colour and about “those little boys”. “Because I’m bad,” Jackson replied.

The Japanese government plans to tighten management of its mineral resources by demanding exploration permits and overhauling the granting of
mining rights.

Especially in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal, past or ongoing conflicts
have broken down most child protection systems, leaving children especially vulnerable.

As it turns out, reefs are quite valuable. Inferring from more than 80
studies, the economists found that, on average, 2.5 acres of coral reef
provide $130,000 worth of goods and services, and sometimes as much as $1.2 million. Here’s the monetary breakdown: Food, raw materials, ornamental resources: average, $1,100 (up to $6,000). Climate regulation, moderation of extreme events, waste treatment/water purification, biological control: average, $26,000 (up to $35,000). Cultural services (e.g., recreation/tourism): average, $88,700 (up to $1.1 million). Maintenance of genetic diversity: average, $13,500 (up to $57,000).

The vast bamboo growing areas, spreading over parts of India, Bangladesh
(taking in the hill tracts) and Myanmar, have been facing acute food
shortages since 2007 due to a rat plague, which occurs on regular basis
every 47 to 50 years. According to government, around 1.1 million people live in the hill districts of Rangamati, Khagrachari and Bandarban, with an area of over 13,000 square kilometres. Half belong to different indigenous groups and half are Bengalis who settled in the 1970s and 80s. Chakma, Bengali, Marma, Mro, Tenchunga, Pankho are the major communities. Mro farmers have traditionally deposited rice in a ‘bank’ during the
harvest period. Community members can take grain from it when necessary.
Non-farmers can also take food from the bank so the whole community
overcomes hunger together.

That’s why we see tanks full of bearded dragons at every shop (and not blue tongues) because bearded dragons have clutches and clutches of eggs many times during the year while the BTS only has 5-15 babies (on average) every 1-2 years. If you’re trying to make money in a reptile business or pet store, blue tongues are not the way to go! It’s much easier to snatch BTS out of the wild and sell them than wait on babies for months and years on end.

Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, and Tuvalu are maintaining their
government expenditures even as tax revenues have declined because of their weakened economies. The Cook Islands and Fiji Islands have expansionary fiscal policies because they are still subsidizing key industries, building their infrastructure, and trying to soften the impact of the global recession. The Samoan government has to cope with tsunami damages on top of the typical challenges that face Pacific Island countries.

About three hours after the quake, a 60 centimetre (two feet) wave was
monitored 700 kilometres away at Hachijo-jima, part of the Izu island chain that runs south of Tokyo. Waves of up to 20 centimetres also reached the southwestern Japanese main islands.

Full-scale war between Colombia and Venezuela was “unlikely” but there
remained the potential for a bloody border clash. Things are so tense it’s definitely possible. Alarm bells should
be ringing. Chavez, who says he is leading a socialist revolution against US hegemony, has protested against a deal that will extend US access to Colombian military bases. He accused Colombia’s conservative president, Alvaro Uribe, of being a Washington pawn. Venezuela has cut the $7bn annual bilateral trade between the two countries, sparking protests from businesses on both sides of the border.

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.

The world is driven by city dwellers: political leaders are setting agendas to satisfy people who live in the
cities, we therefore tend to perceive soil as just dust, or mud, or a
dumping place. But if we don’t preserve that first 20cm of soil, where will we get our food and water from? Half the world’s livestock are raised on drylands and a third of crops, especially wheat.

The impacts of climate change — rising temperatures and more erratic
rainfall — are here already from Latin America to the Sahel.
Adding to the pressure on land is rising global population, which is
expected to pass the 7 billion mark next year and reach 9 billion by 2050.
As well as the consequences for food and water, violent conflicts and
migration will also increase, affecting those living outside
drylands.

Last Command Post Park was the site where the Japanese military commanders
were based during the final advance of American troops during World War II. The nearby Bonzai Cliffs site is also popular with tourists and was where thousands of Japanese civilians living on the island threw themselves into the sea as the Japanese defeat loomed. The Northern Mariana Islands has a population of about 89,000 people, and
is a self governing commonwealth in union with the United States, lying
about three-quarters of the way from Hawaii to the Philippines.

Inequality is increasing and nothing has been done to curb “grotesque”
amounts of wealth building up in India. Mukesh Ambani, the head of Reliance Industries, remains the richest person in India with a net worth of 32 billion US dollars. India’s 100 richest people have a combined wealth of 270 billion US dollars.

Soldiers who witnessed the shooting rampage that killed 13 people at Fort
Hood military base in Texas have reported that gunman Major Nidal Malik
Hasan shouted “Allahu Akbar” before opening fire. Islamic groups have prepared for a public backlash after it emerged that
Hasan was a Muslim and have expressed fears about inter-faith relations,
already strained by the September 11, 2001 attacks, and wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan.

Most infections that people get while in the hospital resist at least one
antibiotic. For example, half of all Staphylococcus aureus infections in the United States are resistant to penicillin, methicillin, tetracycline and erythromycin. Methicillin-resistant staph aureus or MRSA killed an
estimated 19,000 people in the United States alone in 2005.

The Ogasawara chain, made up of more than 30 subtropical and tropical
islets some 240 kilometres north of Iwo Jima, were put under the control of the United States after World War II, and returned to Japan in 1968.
The remote islands have preserved their unique biological habitats and have been dubbed the Galapagos of the Orient. After sounding the
initial alert there was no threat of a destructive widespread tsunami and
no nearby islands were thought to be in the tsunami danger zone.

All villagers, irrespective of their livelihoods, would
get rice from the buffer stock during crisis periods. Rangamati inhabitants can cultivate rice during periods when the lake
waters recede from December to April. Their land goes under water during
the rainy season starting in May every year. They also depend on fishing, but for only eight to nine months a year as
the government bans fishing in Kaptai lake during the rainy season. Fishermen will be able to take rice from the bank provided that they give
more to the community stock when they earn more. About 300 villages throughout the hill tracts had accepted the Rice Bank concept.

Insufficient emphasis has been placed on protecting child victims of
trafficking and ensuring that any judicial proceedings brought against them are child sensitive.

According to 2009 data, Cook Islands and Fiji Islands had
their highest budget deficit as a percentage of GDP at 11.7 percent and 6.3 percent, respectively. The Cook Islands and Kiribati had the highest trade deficits at 92.7 percent.

Japan has abundant supplies of methane hydrate in deep-sea regions off its
coast. And sea floor hydrothermal deposits that contain copper, zinc, gold
and other metals are distributed off the coast of the Ogasawara Islands.

The situation is critical. Coral reefs are showing signs of stress from local pressures at the same time that climate change is starting to have a bigger and bigger impact on reefs. Overfishing has reduced the quality of many reefs. The people of Sabah should be very proud that they own such a top marine eco-system in the world. Semporna is not only a world-class diving spot. The expedition, encountered 844 species of fish,
including 756 species of reef fish, more than 90 coral shrimp species and
more than 100 algae species. The scientists also discovered some coral shrimp and gall crab species that were new to science and a rare mushroom coral species, the lithophyllon ranjithi.

Suspected insurgents killed three people, including a toddler,
and wounded at least 34 Tuesday in a grenade, gun and car bomb attack on
two restaurants and a hotel in Thailand’s south.

The two-family home had been converted to at least seven single-room units, according to the Department of Buildings, which yesterday issued three violations. The house had 10 residents, including the
owners and their two children. There were no smoke detectors in the
basement, and two elsewhere in the house had no batteries, fire inspectors
found. “I heard a huge bang; I heard screams, so I looked through the window and saw flames coming out of the basement. Blue, red – it was raging.”

4) In the Front Smaller Pouch Front Zippered Area: a) 1 x Bendigo Bank (Australia) Internet Banking Key Code Machine with “The
light is on but nobody is home” Neck Holder, approximate Value of AUD$50.
b) A plastic bag containing the following keys from my Laptop Keyboard
approximate Value of AUD$200: i) Shift Key, ii) Letter ‘A’ Key, iii) Letter ‘Z’ Key, and iv) Caps Lock key. c) Toe Nail Cutters attached by an Elastic (Rubber) Band to Finger Nail Cutters, approximate Value of AUD$25,
d) 1 x one (1) Gigabyte Memory Stick with World War II Photos on it (a
Folder name of “Extras for Jaime” on it, approximate Value of AUD$200, e)
2 x Parker Pen without ink sticks, approximate Value of AUD$12, f) 1 x
Nokia Phone Headphone Attachment, approximate Value of AUD$25, g) 1 x
Infra-red Mouse Pouch (with possible instruction sheet inside), approximate Value of AUD$15, h) Another battery for the Sealife Underwater Camera, approximate Value of AUD$100, 5) In one of the Mesh Side Pockets was the SITIA & Coastwatchers Post Office Box Keys on a series of Key Rings and Tags approximate Value of SBD$200.

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.

Increased aridity is making the drylands the most conflict prone region of the world. If you really want to look at the root causes of the conflicts in Somalia and Darfur, and drylands of Asia, you will understand that people in their quest to have access to productive land and water for life, they end up in conflict. In nothern Nigeria, where increased aridity means lack of fodder is driving herders south into the areas farmed for corn. Conflict is almost inevitable.

With 13,000 murders in 2007, the last time figures were published, violent crime consistently registers as Venezuelans’ main concern in opinion polls.
Gun laws are lax in the South American oil exporter. The government estimates there are 6 million firearms circulating among the population of about 28 million. Venezuela’s murder rate is about 8 times that of the United States. Crime has risen under President Hugo Chavez, who has focused on poverty reduction to tackle violence in poor city neighborhoods.

But it warned in a bulletin shortly after the quake: Earthquakes of this
size sometimes generate local tsunamis that can be destructive along coasts located within 100 kilometres of the earthquake epicentre. When a massive 8.8-magnitude quake, one of the most powerful on record,
struck off Chile’s coast in February, Japan issued its top tsunami alert
and ordered more than half a million people to evacuate seaside areas. Authorities later apologised after a wave of 120 centimetres hit and caused no injuries.

After missing work for several days, Jose Emilio Galindo Robles, the
regional director for Radio Universidad de Guadalajara in Ciudad Guzmon,
was found dead inside his home. Authorities have given little information about the case but have confirmed that the journalist
was killed. A motive had not been confirmed. Galindo, 43, known as “Pepe Galindo,” had experience as a reporter and
researcher of environmental topics, especially environmental legislation.
He won the Second Biennial of Latin American Radio for a report about
political crimes in Mexico, El Informador adds. In 2004 he won first prize
in the Biennial of National Radio for a report about pollution of the
Santiago River caused by private companies.

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.

NDM-1 resists many different types of antibiotic. In at least one case, the only drug that affected it was colistin, a toxic older antibiotic.
Thus far, the majority of isolates in countries throughout the world can
be traced to subjects who have traveled to India to visit family or have
received medical care there. However, the ability of this genetic element to spread rapidly among Enterobacteriaceae means that there will almost certainly be numerous secondary cases throughout the world that are unrelated to travel to the Indian subcontinent.

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.

Around 20 percent of the world’s most powerful earthquakes strike Japan,
which sits on the “Ring of Fire” surrounding the Pacific Ocean. In 1995 a magnitude-7.2 quake in the port city of Kobe killed 6,400 people. But high building standards, regular drills and a sophisticated tsunami
warning system mean that casualties are often minimal.

“The most obscene thing I came across was a copy of the Bhagvad Gita,
the pages torn and soaked in liquid cocaine.” This oil-rich nation continues to be the transhipment point for cocaine coming from South America to the US and Canada. Special anti-drug officers have been trained both at home and abroad in the government’s fight against drugs. The accused are to appear in courts shortly. Trinidad and Tobago is home to a large Indian diaspora sourced from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar between 1845 and 1917. The immigrants were brought here during the British rule to work on the sugar and cocoa plantation.

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.

Desertification and rising aridity were the ultimate cause of the food
price crisis of 2007-8, as it began with a drought in
Australia. This year’s price spike started with a drought in Russia.
Another example of desertification’s impact was the loss of land bordering
the Gobi desert leading to record dust storms that damage the health of
people in Seoul in South Korea, thousands of kilometres away. Combating
desertification and soil degradation requires better land management,
better equipment and new technology to manage water, drought resistant
seeds and payment to communities for preserving the soil.

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.

In the early morning the little broadcasting center of the community radio
station “Radyo Cagayano” was being burned
down completely. At about two in the morning, eight mummed soldiers
infiltrated the premises in the small town of Baggao in the Northern
Philippines, captivated and gagged the employees and ignited the entire
radio station with petrol. Radyo Cagayano had just started broadcasting a
few weeks ago and had especially stood up for the interests of local
farmers.

Experts have been warning for years that poor hospital practices and the
overuse of antibiotics spread dangerous bacteria, but practices are
changing only slowly. The fact that there is widespread nonprescription use of antibiotics in India, a country in which some areas have less than ideal sanitation and a high prevalence of diarrheal disease and crowding, sets the ideal stage for the development of such resistance.

The Tongan people were acquainted with the Manahune under the name Haa-Meneuli. but The Haa-Meneuli appear to be Tongans. The Mana’une people of Mangaia Island, Cook Group,are stated by Taniera, their chief, to have come originally to Mangaia from Rapa-nui or Easter Island, and that in appearance they resemble the people of the Tokerau Islands.

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. The 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.

While biodiversity is extremely high, the downside is that the population is glaringly low due to over-exploitation. Coral reefs provide a haven for fish and other creatures, and larger fish tend to congregate around reefs because they are good places to feed. Bleaching — a whitening of corals that occurs when symbiotic algae living within coral tissues are expelled — is an indication of stress caused by environmental triggers such as fluctuations in ocean temperature. Depending on many factors, bleached coral may recover over time or die. Semporna is within the 5 million sq km of sea straddling the waters of Sabah, the Philippines, Indonesia, Timor Leste, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.

Irian Jaya Blue Tongue Skinks are from Indonesia, and are often what you see in the pet stores for $199.99. They are snatched from the wild and sold to pet stores for about $25. Irian Jaya’s are truly terrific BTS that are capable of shades of orange, brown, and red. These babies 100% captive bred. Irian Jaya (and Indonesians) are the easiest type of BTS to find, but keep in mind, finding a truly captive bred bluey can prove to be very difficult. Nearly ALL pet store blue tongues are wild caught. Very, very rarely do you see Northerns in pet stores because it’s simply not cost-efficient for reptile businesses to breed them.

A cheque, for over K1 million belonging to the Telefomin people in West
Sepik, lost in a taxi by a politician, has been found. The cheque was
returned to Telefomin MP Peter Iwei’s parliament office following
widespread publicity and public appeal. Telefomin has a population of about 40,000 people who share a common border with Indonesia.

The idea is one of the ways of sharing poverty in the villages. Their spirit is: they will eat together and starve together. A cyclical plague of rats was likely to continue destroying crops in the region in the coming season. The hill tracts are experiencing a severe infestation of rats, which occurs every 50 years or so, as bamboo flowers produce seeds high in protein, and rats breed four times faster than normal during this time. The rats destroy the paddy and vegetable fields resulting in severe food crisis among the communities. The rat infestation grew over the last two years and may continue for another two to three years. The rodent plague is also affecting at least 25,000 people in six villages along the Indian state of Mizoram.

The Inuit believe our world has tilted on its axis and this contributes to climate change. The elders in  Pangnirtung, Iqaluit, Resolute Bay and Igloolik – all believe this phenomenon to be true. It’s been very interesting to see elders and hunters across Nunavut make the same observation about the world having shifted on its axis. Elders across Nunavut have noticed that the sun and stars have changed their position in the sky. The sun is now rising higher and staying longer than it used to. Importantly, in the far north, you must remember that the sun goes below the horizon for a large part of the year, and therefore Inuit are very familiar with its celestial pattern. Indeed, Inuit are telling stories about how in the old days, during the dark months, they would travel the land by dog team using stars as their navigational tools. So, when Inuit talk about the sun and stars, they do so with an intimate knowledge of these systems.

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.

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.

October 6, 2008

How human cargo is trafficked through Kenya

Immigration Police have identified routes used by human traffickers and smugglers to move their cargo in and out of Kenya.

The most active route was discovered in northern Kenya in Moyale.

Immigration Police say that from Moyale, human cargo is ferried to Garissa, Isiolo then Nanyuki and Voi from where it is taken to Tanzania through Taveta border town.

Another route starts from Moyale to Isiolo and Nanyuki and to Nairobi’s Eastleigh.

Some of the human cargo, comprising girls and boys hidden in trucks carrying beans, is sold into slavery in this sprawling suburb, while the rest is taken to Mombasa destined for South Africa or to Busia for transportation to Burundi or South Africa.

South Africa is the launch-pad to Europe and Canada.

Panya routes

While there are three border points between Mombasa and Lunga Lunga, on the border with Tanzania, there are 820 ‘panya routes’ used by traffickers to transport their human cargo to Tanzania, according to an immigration officer in Lunga Lunga.

The route from Moyale is ideal because the vast expanse of land in Kenya’s north is poorly secured.

“There are only 20 immigration officers in northern Kenya, an area bigger than many European states,” said an immigration officer.

“But there are 4,500 policemen, mostly locals eager to see their people secure jobs in foreign lands and a good number of them collude with cartels.”

Sri Lankans, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis come through Mombasa disguised as ship crews because sailors are not required to have passports.

Ship docks

Once the ship docks, they are moved to Nairobi to await Kenya passports, genuine or otherwise, to move to Europe and North Africa.

The traffickers are reported to poison those who fail to secure jobs in Kenya or passage out of the country to avoid confrontation with victims’ relatives back in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh who would have paid dearly for the service.

“These things happen,” says Immigration spokesperson John Njehu.

International press reports indicate that key suspected traffickers, Nagaratnam Thavayogarajah, popularly known as Thavam, and Satkunarasan Satkunasingam (aka Rajan), used Nairobi as a base to ferry hundreds of Sri Lankans to the West.

Their offices were situated in a travel agency and a popular Nairobi restaurant where they charged $12,000 in the late 1990s for passage from Sri Lanka through Kenya and Malawi.

Most baffling

According to police and immigration officials at Busia, the most baffling route is from Somalia to Kenya through Uganda.

Hundreds of Somalis charter planes to Entebbe International Airport from where they get to the Busia border where their passports are stamped.

Instead of crossing into Kenya immediately, they return to Uganda to await nightfall when they cross over into Kenya using ‘panya’ routes.

“We don’t understand why they should go through Uganda immigration and then use ‘panya’ routes to get into Kenya,” says a Busia police spokesman. “We have arrested a number.”

Terror suspect

As these investigations were carried out in Busia, a Canadian of Somali descent was arrested for having inexplicably travelled through Uganda. “He is a terror suspect. We are interrogating him,” police said.

Three in every four foreigners arrested in Busia between May and August entered Kenya through ‘panya’ routes despite their travel documents being stamped in Uganda.

Authorities are convinced that the cartels use Uganda because it does not have sophisticated equipment to detect fake travel documents.

Somalis don’t require visas to travel to Uganda, which is not the case with Kenya. However, Ethiopians don’t require visas to get into Kenya, yet they are required in neighbouring Tanzania.

And to get around this, they come to Kenya and take up new citizenship to allow them passage through Tanzania to South Africa or elsewhere.

About 800 Ethiopians who passed through Kenya are languishing in Tanzania jails. The Indian Ocean has been a free-for-all gateway to and out of Kenya.

Recently, Kenyan authorities rescued a group of Somalis attempting to cross into Kenya by sea from drowning.

“They almost drowned,” said an officer at Lunga Lunga border post.

September 26, 2008

Pirates hijack ship off Kenya coast in a Multipolar World

Somali pirates on Thursday afternoon seized a ship carrying more than 30 military tanks in a dramatic hijacking that sent ripples in the maritime industry.

The Ukrainian vessel flying the flag of Belize was expected to dock in Mombasa Friday morning with its cargo that was believed destined to Southern Sudan according to maritime sources.

The ship was on its last two of a 10-day voyage and was hijacked between Kismayu and Mombasa, Seafarers Assistance Programme Coordinator Mr Andrew Mwangura said.

“The ship, whose design is that of a vehicle carrier, had 17 crew members and 38 military tanks on board,” he said on the phone adding: “This was to be the third ship to dock in Mombasa with military equipment from Ukraine.”

Mr Mwangura said that although the destination of the tanks was not immediately known, they were likely destined to Southern Sudan where the previous ones had been delivered.

Somali waters are considered the most dangerous in the world, with each militia group controlling their own sections of the ocean.

Ships carrying food aid to the war ravaged country have to be escorted by navy war ships, with the most recent being Canadian Navy which ends its escort mission on September 27.

News agency reports quoting Ukraine’s foreign ministry, had earlier reported that the ship was carrying T-72 tanks and had a crew of 21 on board. The captain contacted the ship’s owner by telephone and reported that armed men were boarding, shortly before losing communications.

The country has not had an effective national government for 17 years, leading to a collapse of law and order both on land and at sea.

Multipolar World

The international financial crisis has suddenly accelerated a tendency that has been manifest since the United States’ first setbacks in Iraq: American hegemony, and, one should say, Western hegemony, which seemed to settle over the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Communist system at the end of the 1980s-beginning of the 1990s, has seen its heyday.

Already since the beginning of the 21st century, Western claims to impose a Western conception of human rights and to promote democracy as the best guarantor of security and prosperity have been challenged. The so-called emerging states, notably in Asia, preach another kind of modernization. The poor countries commonly called “third world countries” during the Cold War, denounced the unkept promises of development aid. As it benefited from the economic globalization it sought to insert itself into, China, joined by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, challenged Western pretensions to fixing the rules of the game.

The United Nations General Assembly, before which Nicolas Sarkozy spoke Tuesday, September 23, emphasized the birth of this multipolar world. It’s what French diplomacy has advocated for decades. However, contrary to what was imagined, multipolarity is not presenting itself as an orderly construction based on several power centers maintaining well-codified relations among themselves.

The multipolar world that is brewing is, quite the contrary, disorganized, almost anarchic. No organizing principle seems to preside over its constitution. Russia may well attempt to find new allies in Latin America, China and Africa against the United States; their interests diverge when Russia changes borders in the Caucasus by force. Both have reasons to rejoice over the decline of the American ex-“hyperpower,” but, in fact, their dependence on the global economy makes them as much victims as beneficiaries of the international financial crisis.

Everyone, or almost everyone, demands new rules. Nonetheless, before new equilibria emerge from the present disorder, it would be wise to expect some dangerous squalls.

Secret tank deal shows poor priorities

A secret tank deal by Kenya’s Army would have gone unnoticed if Somali pirates hadn’t hijacked a Ukrainian ship ferrying the 33 tanks to the port of Mombasa.

The Russian built T-72 tank can run on three types of fuel: diesel, benzene and kerosene.

Its not clear when the Department of Defence placed an order for T-72 tanks from Russia. The Army has not explained how much it spent on the equipment, neither has it explained the role of the 33 tanks in Kenya’s security strategy.

Apart from tanks, Somali pirates found tons of ammunition and auxiliary equipment within the ship, which they have threatened to offload for use in their country’s civil war. The pirates are demanding US$35 million in ransom before they release the vessel and its cargo.

Typical of most African governments, Kenya’s leaders are spending billions of dollars on security while ordinary people die of hunger, disease and poor shelter. Kenya ranks at the bottom of international social and economic indicators.

A growing population is putting pressure on neglected infrastructure. Public hospitals lack drugs as thousands of Kenyans perish each year on a road network broken to the point of tatters. Kenyan cities are going without fresh water due to lack of investment in water production.

The capital city of Nairobi is getting less water today than it was receiving a decade ago after a colonial era dam collapsed at Sasumua. The port city of Mombasa gets water from a supply system built by the British when the town’s population was less than a third of current figures.

Lack of investment in electricity production has made Kenya’s electricity tariffs the highest in Africa. Industries suffer from constant power blackouts which have undermined economic growth, leading to massive losses and job cuts.

Agricultural production in Kenya is far below demand. The country is producing less coffee, maize, tea, wheat, millet and everything else compared to twenty years ago. Sugar milling companies in Western Kenya, stuck with 19th century technology, are creaking out low quality sugar in significantly less quantities than when Kenya was a British colony.

Amidst all these, the Kenyan government has seen it fit to invest billions of shillings in military equipment. As stated earlier, if it wasn’t for Somali pirates, majority of Kenyans would never have known that tanks were about to get imported into the country. But, lack of priority in government procurement appears to be the norm these days.

Its been announced that Kenya will spend about $23 million in the purchase of second-hand fighter jets from the Kingdom of Jordan. The F-5 fighter that the Kenyan Airforce is so fond of went out of production in 1989, meaning that the jets Kenya is buying are at least 19 years old. Kenya will also pay Jordan to train its pilots in using the junk aircraft.

Meanwhile, other branches of the security forces are on a shopping bonanza. Regular and Administration police have enhanced their recruitment drives to boost numbers. They are receiving modern equipment, weapons, 4-wheel drive trucks, uniforms and riot gear. Considering the conduct of police during the post-election violence, its obvious that this enhanced expenditure is not for the benefit of ordinary men and women.

The Kenya Police has just finished rehabilitating giant Russian-built helicopters fitted with night-vision equipment, gun detectors and communications technology. The helicopters will carry a team of quick response officers assisted by highly trained dogs.

Just this week, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights – a government body – blamed police for the execution of 500 Kikuyu youth and the disappearance of scores of others. According to survivors, the dead and the disappeared were all abducted by people identifying themselves as police officers. A man whose dramatic arrest in Nairobi was shown on the front page of the Daily Nation, was later found dead in the city mortuary.

For most Kenyans, the acquisition of helicopters, night vision equipment and vicious dogs can only portend doom as far as personal freedoms are concerned.

By purchasing bigger weapons to arm a greater number of police and soldiers, the Kenyan government is treading a path set by authorities in situations of high wealth inequality. Kenya is among the top three most unequal societies on earth.

On one hand there is an extremely wealthy minority whose standard of living can comfortably secure them a place among the world’s rich and famous. On the opposite extreme is a majority of people without access to adequate food, housing, health care and education. These are people whose future is so bleak that the only options are crime, prostitution, alcoholism and violence.

Amidst this depressing scenario, authorities seek to preserve the status quo by unleashing greater surveillance of the disadvantaged majority. The objective is to make life safer and easier for the rich minority.

The fruits of economic growth are used to buy guns instead of building roads. Public funds are used to buy tanks instead of medicines for government hospitals. In an unequal society, the government will find it better to employ soldiers and police rather than employing doctors and teachers. Instead of facilitating constructive engagement between the rich and the poor, the system is designed to keep them apart.

Such trends have happened elsewhere and Kenya is blindly going down the same path. Unfortunately, that particular path usually ends up in self-destruction, for the human spirit cannot tolerate oppression forever.

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