| LIFE-NET NEWS |
| by Ret Z. |
| Covering Poverty Widely in a Net of Many Voices |
| 2005 November 2 | No Profit; No Proceeds |
| Volume 9 Number 14 | All-Volunteer |
| "Give a family a fish, and they'll eat a meal; give them a Net, and they'll have fish for Life." |
| Millions More Environmental Refugees in the Making |
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There will be as many as 50 million environmental refugees
in the world in five years' time, according to experts at
the United Nations University (UNU), who say that a new
definition of "environmental refugee" is urgently needed.
They believe that environmental degradation already forces
as many people away from their homes as political and social
unrest.
"There are many different environmental issues involved, and
there can be interactions between them," said Janos Bogardi,
director of the UNU's Institute for Environment and Human
Security in Bonn, Germany. "In poorer rural areas
especially, one of the biggest sources of refugees is land
degradation and desertification, which may be caused by
unsustainable land use interacting with climate change,
amplified by population growth."
"A second issue is flooding, caused I would say by increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere superimposed with probably some natural fluctuations." The projected figure of 50 million is derived from a number of previous reports, including the 1999 World Disasters Report from the International Red Cross, which calculated that natural disasters in the previous year had made more refugees than wars or other armed conflicts. It said that falling soil fertility, drought, flooding, and deforestation drove 25 million people from their homes, with many of these environmental refugees joining already fragile urban squatter communities. The UNU believes that environmental refugees need better protection than they have now, and in order for that to happen, there needs to be an accepted definition of their situation. The 1951 Convention relating to the State of Refugees defines refugees as people having a "... well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion". "We need to define what we mean by political, economic and environmental refugees," said the UNU's Rector Hans van Ginkel. "If we define the problem better, we can prepare for the level of need to be catered for." Source: BBC |
| Former Life-Net Radio Star Beaten and Kicked By Cops |
|
Not long ago, former Life-Net Radio regular Ernst Ford told
us he was beaten unconscious by Philadelphia cops. On
Monday we received from him in the mail an article from the
Original World News, dated August 19, which included his
story. Here's my adaptation:
A demonstration was happening on July 2nd at 51st & Market to stop "police terror" against Black people. Protesters were responding to the death of a young local man who'd been strangled under the train tracks there by Philadelphia police. Independent Haitian-American activist Ernst Ford was present to show support for the strangled man's family. He, with other demonstrators, was circulating flyers and informing passersby about the incident. Police officers were observing from a distance. At one point they moved in and began to harrass the demonstrators and threaten to attack them. The demonstrators stressed their knowledge of their rights. A swarm of police cars, carrying more than 100 officers, arrived. Outnumbered, the demonstrators began to retreat. The cops began to assail and taunt the demonstrators and spectators with nightsticks. A Black officer approached Ford and said, "I heard you started all this." The cop punched him in the face. More cops joined in beating on Ford and on International Peoples Uhuru Movement member Shubaka. A kick to Ford's temple knocked him out. An individual sympathetic cop verbally objected to the brutal assault. Another cop bashed his head with a nightstick. The bruised cop ran away; he would later report the crime to internal affairs and end up receiving harrassment and tire-slashing from his fellow officers. After the assault, Ford didn't want to go to a hospital. He was taken directly to the 18th district. The handcuffs caused extreme pain. For the next several days, Ford had a blood clot under his heart, which could have killed him had it not finally dissolved. Whenever he goes to the hospital, the nurses and physicians ask him how he got such injuries. When he tells them the injuries are a product of police brutality, they refuse him service. So Ford has resorted to keeping that information to himself. He still has bruises from the handcuffs, a dislocated thumb, memory loss, and neck whiplash from his head having been banged on concrete. On July 22, Ford and his wife went to a court hearing. She mistakenly sat on the prosecutor's side of the room and overheard two of the officers: "So where's the guy we beat up?" "He's over there in the blue." "We just beat his ass, and he acts like we killed him." Ford and Franklin Moses face a preliminary hearing at the Criminal Justice Center. Ford invites you to attend and lend your support: 13th & Filbert Streets, Courtroom 1003, November 15 at 8:30am. |
| Camden Copies Philly to Make Streets Clean Not Mean |
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Camden is getting a special services district that will aim to make central streets of the South Jersey city cleaner and safer. The district is similar to ones operating in
Philadelphia's Center City and University City areas. Those have been considered successful in helping reinvigorate streets by cleaning up trash and graffiti and by maintaining a presence that makes the areas safer.
Workers, called the Clean and Safe Team, took to the streets Monday and will be patrolling from 7am to 7pm weekdays. They will maintain clean streets, serve as hospitality officers for shoppers and guests, and enhance security by remaining in close contact with area law enforcement and security forces. Twelve Camden residents have been hired for full-time jobs with health benefits. The squad wears highly visible blue-and-gold uniforms and patrols an area bounded by Delaware Avenue, the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, and Martin Luther King Boulevard/Mickle Boulevard. The district includes Cooper University Hospital, the Coriell Institute for Medical Research, and a portion of the Broadway retail zone. The Greater Camden Partnership is launching the Camden Special Services District in an effort to create a well-maintained and safe downtown that will attract entrepreneurs and new investment to Camden and South Jersey. The GCP is a nonprofit organization founded in 2001 to help bring new resources to the community and assist in Camden's revitalization. Source: Philadelphia Business Journal |
| Under-$100 Personal Computer Design Unveiled |
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Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Labs, has been outlining designs for a personal computer that would sell for less than $100, called the Simputer. Negroponte came up with the idea for a cheap computer for all after visiting a Cambodian village. His non-profit One Laptop Per Child group plans to have up to 15 million machines in production within a year. A prototype of the machine should be ready
this month at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia.
Children in Brazil, China, Egypt, Thailand, and South Africa will be among the first to get the under-$100 (£57) computer, said Negroponte at the Emerging Technologies conference at MIT. The following year, Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney plans to start buying them for all 500,000 middle and high school pupils in the state. Negroponte predicts there could be 100 million to 150 million shipped every year by 2007. The Simputer will be encased in rubber to make it more durable, and its AC adaptors will also act as carrying straps. The Linux-based machine is expected to have a 500MHz processor. It will have flash memory, which can stand up to more shakes and shocks than a hard disk drive. It will have four USB ports, connectivity to the Net through wi-fi, and easy-to-use data-sharing capabilities. It will also have a dual-mode display to enable it to cope with varying outdoor light conditions. It will be a color display, but users will be able to switch easily to monochrome mode so that it can be viewed in bright sunlight, at four times normal resolution. When Professor Negroponte saw the benefits of donated notebook PCs that Cambodian children could carry around with them, he immediately set about planning the sub-$100 machines. The project has big-name supporters, including Google. Making them so cheap will enable developing nations to buy them in bulk, although, Negroponte thinks, even $100 will exceed the reach of some. He said he is committed to the idea that children all over the world should be equipped to tap into the educational and communications benefits of the Net. Electricity is a big issue for developing nations, so the Simputer will have a hand crank to supply extra juice when needed. By using new technologies such as electronic ink displays, the MIT team thinks it can reduce power consumption even further. Source: BBC More: Hundred-Dollar Laptop (at MIT Media Labs) More: Simputer |
| Special-Needs Schools Badly Overseen, Say Watchers |
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The NJ Department of Education division responsible for improving performance in special-needs (Abbott) districts is plagued by major shortcomings despite a $17 million budget, advocates for poor and minority students charged last Wednesday. Trenton, Pemberton Township, and Burlington City are among 31 poor, mostly urban districts overseen by the division, which was created in 2002 after decades of court confrontations.
Gordon MacInnes, assistant commissioner for the division, conceded difficulties but said officials are doing a solid job with available resources. He said the division is doing the best it can to improve early literacy and math throughout the 31 districts: "We play with the cards we're dealt." The Newark-based Education Law Center, which advocates for students in the Abbott districts, seized upon problems cited by MacInnes in a court-ordered report. The report said most division staff lack "experience working on teaching and learning issues in urban schools" and need "considerable retraining." It said the division lacks sufficient staff qualified to adapt to the challenges of Abbott districts. And it said efforts to expand enrollment in Abbott preschool, available to all 3- and 4-year-olds, have lost steam because there are not enough facilities nor agencies willing to meet the program's tough standards. "The problems with the Abbott division are quite stunning," said law center attorney Koren Bell in a statement. The center successfully sued last summer to force the department to issue the Abbott report. The law center urged a more concrete, coherent plan, including a line-item spending plan, for the division and its $17 million budget. Source: Trenton Times |
| North Korea Pushes for Less Dependence on Foreign Food |
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It was early on a sunny Sunday, but Roh Buk-chong, a 39-year-old postman, was already striding down the road leading north from Pyongyang. "I am a volunteer," he said.
"I am going to help the farmers with the harvest -- full of patriotic enthusiasm."
In a scene strangely reminiscent of a 1950s Soviet propaganda film, pedestrians and cyclists clogged the road, heading for the nearby rice fields. A government van passed by with loudspeakers on the roof, playing a rousing tune: "They call me the girl who works well. They call me the girl who works faster than the fastest horse." All this is part of what observers say is a concerted push by North Korea's isolated regime to boost domestic food production. A third of the North Korean population is chronically malnourished. It may be working. According to some predictions, this year's harvest will be 10% larger than in 2004. But that will not be enough, warned the UN World Food Program's country director, Richard Ragan. "North Korea is chronically food insecure, so it's unlikely in the near term that it will ever produce enough food." For the past decade, international food aid has helped bridge the gap for millions of North Koreans, many of whom starved to death during a mid-1990s famine. The WFP now has 19 food processing plants in the country, helping to feed 6.5 million people; a team of foreign monitors keeps track of malnutrition rates. But all that is about to change. North Korea's heavily politicized drive for a bigger domestic harvest has been coupled with a new and more controversial move to end international food aid and restrict the number of foreign aid workers in the country. Although the details are being negotiated, all the WFP's food plants are due to close within the next month. North Korea's most vulnerable groups now face a period of uncertainty. A key concern is how food will be distributed, and whether the army's needs will be put ahead of the rest of the population. Source: BBC |
| Gulf Coast Wage Protection Restored |
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Working families across the nation were outraged when President Bush slashed wages for workers in Gulf Coast hurricane reconstruction areas. A huge victory was won Thursday when Bush was forced to restore the protective wage requirements on November 8.
Bush reversed his decision after a public outcry and bipartisan opposition in the House and Senate. Over 350,000 letters went to Congress from AFL-CIO activists alone. From day one, 37 House Republicans urged the White House to reverse the suspension. Congressman George Miller led unanimous opposition by Democrats to the President’s suspension. Senator Edward Kennedy led the charge in the Senate. It was fundamentally wrong for the Bush Administration to hit workers when they were down by slashing wages, exacerbating the very poverty that the hurricanes exposed. Workers deserve protections that guarantee a living wage, especially for work done with America’s tax dollars. Reinstating community wage standards will bring stability to the contracting process. All contractors -- in state and out of state -- will have to compete on factors other than how low they can cut wages for their workforce. It will also reinstate certified payroll requirements, which provide key data on what workers are being paid and if the proper wage is being paid, making sure there are not ghost employees, and making sure that workers are not being misclassified as independent contractors and thus being robbed of benefits. Source: People's Weekly World |
| # LNN # Small # Hauls # |
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| Life-Net News Extras |
| Government Neglect, Water-Contamination Disaster |
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Deplorable. That is what Premier Dalton McGuinty called conditions on the remote Kashechewan Reserve near James Bay, Canada, as he ordered an emergency airlift of 1,100 of the community's 1,900 native residents to ensure they get the medical treatment they need because they are sick from contaminated water. McGuinty could not have chosen a more fitting word to describe the tragedy that Ottawa could have prevented but did not.
Although the federal government knew at least two years ago that Kashechewan was another Walkerton water tragedy just waiting to happen, it did nothing to stop it. Despite a warning from the Ontario Clean Water Agency in 2003 that the intake pipe for the reserve's water treatment plant was just downstream from the lagoon where the community's raw sewage goes, Ottawa failed to remove the threat. Now Kashechewan's water is contaminated with the same deadly E. coli bacteria that devastated Walkerton. But unlike Walkerton, Ottawa -- not Queen's Park -- bears responsibility for the conditions because it is responsible for First Nations natives living on reserves. Even as McGuinty took the initiative to evacuate the residents of Kashechewan, federal Indian Affairs Minister Andy Scott made excuses for his appalling neglect. Claiming Ottawa was "working on a response to deal with what is a long-standing, serious problem," Scott said, "unfortunately, the events of last weekend simply overtook that work." Balderdash. Ottawa had two years to fix the problem and failed to do so. Having shown himself to be incompetent or, even worse, indifferent to the plight of native Canadians, Scott should resign. If he refuses, then Paul Martin should dump him. Kashechewan is not the only native community with unsafe water. There are 150 native communities in Canada where the water must be boiled before it is safe to drink. This despite the lofty language in the Liberals' Speech from the Throne in which the government talked about "the intolerable consequences of the yawning gaps that separate so many aboriginal people from other Canadians -- unacceptable gaps in ... basics like housing and clean water." What is even more deplorable and intolerable than the plight of the natives is the failure of Ottawa to live up to the promises it has made to aboriginal Canadians in throne speech after throne speech. Source: Toronto Star |
| 'A Billion Will Die' from Smoking |
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A billion people will die from tobacco-related diseases such as cancer this century unless more are encouraged to quit, a UK expert warns. In the last century the death toll was about 100 million, including 7 million in Britain.
Professor Sir Richard Peto told a cancer conference in Birmingham developing countries were likely to be suffer the most. Many nations are cutting smoking, but rates are increasing in countries such as India and China. Smoking currently kills about five million adults a year globally. Each year, about 30 million people take up smoking around the world, Peto said. He added, "If more than 20 million of these continue to smoke and half are killed by their habit, then we are going to have more than 10 million tobacco-related deaths a year. So in the present century, if we keep on smoking the way we are we will have about 1,000 million deaths," warned the Oxford University professor. That is equivalent to about a sixth of the world's current population. In China, a third of young men are dying from smoking-related diseases already. Hungary is now the country with the worst tobacco death rate in the world. Professor Peter Boyle, Director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) from Lyon, France, said, "Part of the problem is where we are going to see the big impact, with population growth and population aging over the next 20 to 50 years." He said that to a certain extent, these countries were the least able to cope with the extra disease burden of smoking on top of existing disease issues. "The impact of tobacco is going to be absolutely enormous unless we do something about it now." Boyle said more effort was needed to help smokers quit, to restrict tobacco advertising, and impose smoking bans in countries. He said the experience of countries that have focused on such measures showed they could work. "I think the message is beginning to get across," he said, "but there is a long way to go." He said it was now essential to "get the facts turned into policy." But Simon Clark, of the smokers' rights group Forest, said, "This seems like a suspiciously round figure. Such ludicrous estimates and calculations are so over the top that people are switching off, and the serious message underlying this type of estimate are being lost because a lot of people aren't listening." Source: BBC |
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