| LIFE-NET NEWS |
| by Ret Z. |
| Covering Poverty Widely in a Net of Many Voices |
| March 14, 2007 | No Profit; No Proceeds |
| Volume 10 Number 15 | All-Volunteer |
| "Give a family a fish, and they'll eat a meal; give them a Net, and they'll have fish for Life." |
| Violence Against Girls Worldwide |
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Girls the world over confront an alarming array of threats to their safety, including physical and sexual violence in their schools, places of work, and in detention facilities, said Human Rights Watch (HRW) in advance of International Women's Day on March 8. Governments have largely failed to implement key measures preventing and responding to these abuses.
HRW recently released three background papers summarizing research on violence against girls. The reports are based on HRW investigations in Afghanistan, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Iraq, Malaysia, Morocco, Papua New Guinea, South Africa, Togo, the US, and Zambia. "Girls are at risk of violence on the streets, in schools, at home, where they work, and in government institutions," said Jo Becker, advocacy director for HRW's children's rights division. "In far too many cases, girls are betrayed by the very individuals who are supposed to protect them -- guardians, teachers, employers and the police." Schoolgirls may be raped, sexually assaulted, and sexually harassed by their classmates and even by their teachers. A medical research study found that among those South African rape victims who specified their relationship to the perpetrator, 37.7% said that a schoolteacher or principal had raped them. Students may also be targeted because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. In situations of armed conflict, attacks against schools and teachers may keep girls out of school altogether. In Afghanistan, from January 2005 to June 2006, HRW documented more than 200 incidents of teachers and students being killed or threatened, and schools being blown up or burned down. Such violence disproportionately affects girls, who are more likely than boys to be withdrawn from school. Employers may subject child domestic workers to verbal and physical abuse, including severe beatings, burning with irons, and death threats. These children are often confined to their employer's household, with little access to outside help. Child domestic workers are particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment and sexual violence from men and boys living in or associated with the household. More girls are employed in domestic work than in any other form of child labor. Girls in contact with justice systems are at risk of violence, particularly sexual abuse and rape, by police as well as staff in detention facilities. Police may target girls who live or work on the street for violence. Girls in detention may confront physical and sexual violence and humiliating treatment, particularly by male staff, and face violent or harmful disciplinary measures. Because of their smaller numbers, girls subject to detention are more likely than boys to be held in unsuitable and often dangerous conditions. "In some areas, girls are making enormous strides, but violence stops many from enjoying their basic rights," said Becker. "Governments need to back up words with action, and show that violence against girls won't go unpunished." Source: Human Rights Watch |
| Urban Indian Health Clinics Face Federal Axe |
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Congress should keep funding tribal clinics in cities across the country, rather than slashing a program designed to provide culturally competent health care for urban American Indians, said Sen Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on the Interior, which drafts federal spending bills for Indian health care programs, among other issues. For the second year in a row, President Bush's 2008 budget proposal calls for the Urban Indian Health Programs' $32.7 million allocation to be axed. Instead, taxpayer dollars would be redirected to fund Indian health programs in rural areas and on reservations.
The bulk of American Indians and Alaska natives nationwide live in urban areas, and eliminating the program would force many of the 33 clinics that serve them to close their doors, clinic directors said. Funded by the Indian Health Service, the nonprofit clinics operate under contract with the government in cities as large as New York NY and as small as Helena MT and offer everything from primary care to referral services. They serve an estimated 430,000 urban Indians. But some clinics have recently stopped admitting patients who can't document their federal tribal status, despite a federal law that entitles all patients of Indian ancestry to services, said clinic officials. Since last fall, a clinic in downtown Santa Barbara CA has turned away about 200 patients, leaving some elders no choice but to drive to a far-off reservation to get dental surgery. "There's a lot of elders who need the care, and now there's nothing," said Rosie Uribe, a former clinic manager and member of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation, a Santa Barbara-area tribe that lacks federal status. Clinic managers in Tucson AZ and Wichita KS also said federal officials instructed them to offer free health services to only patients who could prove they belonged to federally recognized tribes and nations. Workers at the North American Indian Center Boston MA said they were told not to treat the Mashpee Wampanoag of Cape Cod, whose ancestors shared Thanksgiving dinner with the Pilgrims. Federal officials say the facilities -- run by a small division of the US Department of Health and Human Services are appropriately managed. But certain "flaws" in the program forced a shift in priorities, said Sean Kevelighan, press secretary for the Office of Management and Budget. The president's proposal would direct taxpayer dollars to rural areas and reservations, where Indians have little access to other kinds of care, he said. "The focus of this is to make sure that the funds are targeted to those areas that need it most. Urban Indians have access to publicly and privately funded health care organizations like other Americans." Even if the urban funding is restored," said Senator Barbara Boxer, "the program's $32.7 million budget only funds about 22% of the clinics' projected need." Source: Associated Press |
| Shop-to-Aid Program Not So Helpful to Africans |
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This week, Vanity Fair -- the magazine of serious fabulousness -- announced that rock apostle Bono will guest-edit the July issue in an effort to, as the New York Times put it, "rebrand Africa."
As Bono puts it, "Africa is sexy and people need to know that." It says everything about our current climate, the sense of global connectedness through the gift of technology, plus the dependence of slick advertising and seriously styled celebrities, that (Product) Red's ambition is huge yet deceptively accessible and acquisitional: Shop so the unfortunate can live. A percentage of the proceeds go to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. A sense of connectedness, however, is not the same as sharing those experiences. There's a remove, literally and emotionally. Commerce is one route out of poverty, but only if the rewards find their way to the neediest. A year into the Red campaign sponsored by the Gap, Apple and Motorola, fundraising fell seriously short of the $100 million earlier projected, Advertising Age reported this week, ironically on the same day as the Vanity Fair issue was announced. Charitable proceeds total less than a fifth of that goal, only $18.5 million, while marketing costs are estimated to be as absurd as $100 million. When it comes to seeing Red, it's advertising and the publications that house those ads, publications like Vanity Fair, that are deeply in the black. "We are trying to deal with the Sally Struthers thing," Bono said, referring to the Christian Children's Fund's spokeswoman. "When you see people humiliated by extreme poverty and wasting away with flies buzzing around their eyes, it is easy not to believe that they are the same as us." Bono is correct when he says donors want to feel that whatever gesture they make, no matter how small, improves those lives, diminishing the AIDs, tuberculosis and malaria pandemics. Otherwise, people tend to turn away. "We need to be better at storytelling," the rock star said, and here he's correct, too. Compelling stories are the narrative that enrich life and spark compassion. Like music, they're how we connect, a verbal map transporting us to other locales, new ideas and people. But how to tell those stories of Africa? It's reductive to make blanket statements about a continent of 900 million people, many faiths, myriad tribes, and 53 or 55 nations, depending on which organization is counting. Communication is another barrier when Guinea, not to be confused with its northwestern neighbor Guinea-Bissau, is home to 33 living languages. Let Bono and Vanity Fair try telling better stories. The road to help is paved with good intentions. In the meantime, it seems prudent to forgo shopping Red for the T-shirt, the iPod, the Motorazr. Instead, give all the green directly to The Global Fund. Source: Philadelphia Inquirer |
| True Economic Security: Assets Not Income |
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Middle-class families often judge their well-being not just by the size of their paychecks, but by their assets -- homes, cars, business inventories. In many cases, development of these assets is underwritten by federal and state tax laws. Often the accumulation of these assets for middle-class families begins with help from parents. Low-income workers need similar help.
Building assets is crucial to long-term self-sufficiency. Just as the GI bill helped veterans pay for college and homes, today's asset-formation programs hold the promise of helping vulnerable working families achieve real economic security. One such initiative is the Earned Income Tax Credit, a component of tax policy focused on helping those who work in low-paying jobs. For 2006, the maximum combined state and federal Earned Income Tax Credit benefit (in Massachusetts) is $5,216, a very significant sum for a family earning less than $20,000. When the credit is combined with help in managing a bank account and other basic financial skills -- often referred to as financial literacy education -- it can create a foundation for long-term economic security; participants in such programs develop effective savings habits. There are other promising options: "Matched" savings accounts -- through which families gain access to money contributed by community groups or government if they save enough of their own money -- can be used for first-time home purchase, higher education, and business development. First-time home buyer training can also help, and so would guidance on starting a small business or improving an existing one. Lawmakers in Massachusetts and other states have begun to recognize how crucial asset development is to fighting poverty. For example, in 2006, the Legislature and Governor Mitt Romney approved a line item creating an individual development account program. Source: Boston Globe |
| The Village Health Promoter |
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For a teenager, the responsibility of looking out for the health concerns of 29 families might be daunting. For Gladys Kuarasi of Bolivia, the role of being her community's health promoter has instilled in her an ambition to be a doctor. It gives her the motivation to complete secondary school and go on to college.
Gladys keeps her eye on the health of all 120 people who live in her community, Pananti. As a trained health promoter, she can also use first aid supplies. Gladys is a vital link in monitoring the health care in her community. The nearest health clinic is a 10-kilometer walk away. Others in the area are trained in traditional medicine, and they treat illnesses when the sick cannot see a doctor. Midwives assist with most births in the community. Church World Service partners in the Chaco region of South America are working together with indigenous communities to improve health and well-being, defend and promote indigenous rights, gain titles to ancestral lands and territories, and gain access to governmental policymaking and development initiatives. Source: Church World Service |
| Don't Cripple Eminent Domain |
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New Jersey is so built up that long-term economic growth
will depend on the revitalization of its cities with new
industry, housing and stores. But significant redevelopment is unlikely to occur if the current campaign to demonize eminent domain and restrict its uses is allowed to succeed.
Joseph Maraziti Jr, a prominent land use lawyer and a driving force behind the effort to steer developers to the cities, argued at a conference in Trenton last month that eminent domain is an essential tool if urban land is to be cleared for redevelopment and that without it a handful of holdout property owners could block almost any redevelopment project. If that were to happen, he suggested, New Jersey’s economy would eventually suffocate since the state -- already the most densely populated in the country -- is running out of open land. The New Jersey Legislature is nearing final approval of a measure that would tighten the standards for eminent domain and increase significantly what cities and towns would have to pay unwilling sellers. Approved by the Assembly but stalled in the State Senate, the bill arises in part from the negative reaction to a 2005 US Supreme Court decision in a Connecticut case that upheld the use of eminent domain for private development, even if the land is not blighted. It also stems, however, from a well-founded reaction against politicians in a few New Jersey towns who have invoked the threat of eminent domain to pressure owners of viable small businesses to sell to favored developers. Redevelopment advocates agree that legislation is needed to stop heavy-handed tactics and to make compensation reflect today’s prices. But they also fear that by providing incentives for property owners to hold out for exorbitant prices, the bill would make it difficult, if not prohibitively expensive, for cities to invoke eminent domain. The sponsor, Assemblyman John Burzichelli, a Gloucester Democrat, says this is not his intention and that he only wants to insure that residents and owners are paid fair prices and are given adequate advance notice of plans to take their property, and that only truly blighted areas are condemned. But one section of the bill is especially troublesome. It would base payments to owners on a combination of fair market value and estimates of the income that the redeveloped property would generate. While that approach might have merit in the case of long-term owners and residents, it would be an outrageously high price to pay slumlords, speculators, and owners who leave toxic waste on their property. Mr Burzichelli says there is no way his bill could constitutionally distinguish between good owners and bad owners. But the state’s public advocate, Ronald Chen, who supports Mr Burzichelli’s bill, says the flaw can be "fixed in a minute." If so, the Legislature should fix it. Equally important is that the Senate take whatever time it needs to review this complicated issue. Changes in the law may be required in the interest of fairness, but they should not reward speculators or be so crippling as to jeopardize the future health of New Jersey’s cities and its economy. Source: New York Times |
| Why Do Good? Brain Study Offers Clues |
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Experts note that altruism doesn't seem to provide individuals with any survival edge. How and why did it evolve?
Scott Huettel -- an associate professor of psychology at Duke University Medical Center, in Durham NC -- and his team had a group of healthy young adults either engage in a computer game or watch as the computer played the game itself. In some sessions, the computer and participants played for personal gain, while in other sessions, they played for charity. The researchers used high-tech functional MRI (fMRI) to observe "hot spots" of activity in the participants' brains as they engaged in these tasks. Participants were also asked to complete a questionnaire aimed at assessing their personal levels of selfishness or altruism. Huettel said he was surprised by the study results. "We went into this experiment with the idea that altruism was really a function of the brain's reward systems -- altruistic people would simply find it more rewarding." Instead, a whole other brain region, called the posterior superior temporal cortex (pSTC), kicked into high gear as altruism levels rose. The pSTC is located near the back of the brain and is not focused on reward. Instead, it focuses on perceiving others' intentions and actions, Huettel said. "The general function of this region is that it seems to be associated with perceiving, usually visually, stimuli that seem meaningful to us, he explained, "for example, something in the environment that might move an object from place to place." This type of perception would have allowed humans' more primitive ancestors to quickly pick out a potential threat -- a crouching lion, for example -- from amid a mass of less important stimuli. It's much less clear why pSTC activity gets ramped up in the brains of altruistic people, however. "That was really surprising to us." The researchers found that pSTC activity was highest when study participants were observing the computer play the game on its own -- not when they were playing themselves. "That gets to this idea of agency -- watching somebody else play the game," Huettel said. "You are thinking, 'Oh, the computer pressed the button -- somebody else did that.'" The bottom line, he said, is that altruism may rely on a basic understanding that others have motivations and actions that may be similar to our own. "It's not exactly empathy," he said, but something more primitive. Source: HealthDay News |
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| His Domain To The End |
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Though he could barely walk, Albert Viviano ambled to protest meetings and rallies in and around Long Branch NJ. Later, when he couldn't walk at all, he rolled to them in his motorized wheelchair, a little American flag in one hand, a placard in the other. At 93, with his heart slowly giving out, Viviano was motivated by one thing: the right to die in his home.
The city of Long Branch wants that home, one of two dozen converted bungalows local officials have been trying to seize for three years to make way for new development. The battle continues, but not for Viviano. On Sunday, he died in his bed, two blocks from the boardwalk he cherished, in the neighborhood he had known for 75 years. "He won," said Viviano's daughter, Estelle Toscano. "My father won because he died in his own house." It's a refrain heard repeatedly in Viviano's tiny neighborhood, which has become something of a symbol in one of the most closely watched disputes over eminent domain in the nation. Viviano, who spent his teenage years fitting wheels onto horse-drawn wagons in Newark, was the oldest among the homeowners who have refused to sell to the city. And while it was clear his health was failing, he insisted on attending meetings and rallies, creaky body be damned. "He just uplifted everyone," said neighbor Lori Ann Vendetti, 45, a member of the coalition opposing Long Branch's plan. "You have some bad days in this fight, and then you'd see Al coming out with the little flags on his wheelchair and the button on his jacket and his poster. It was an inspiration." What drove Viviano is what drives most of his neighbors: a deep love of Long Branch and a firm belief that government should not have the right to take a home indiscriminately. "He couldn't believe this could happen in America, how someone who fought in the war, had a business and gave back to his country could just lose his home," Vendetti said. "He was fighting with all his might against that." "All my life, he's been a fixture there," said William Giordano, 42, whose back yard faces Viviano's home on Marine Terrace. "The neighborhood will never be the same without him." "He loved Long Branch, and he loved his home, and he couldn't see letting anyone take it away from him," said Anna DeFaria, 81, a friend and neighbor. "This fight meant everything to him. He was our rock." The death of Mary Viviano two years ago coincided with Viviano's own decline in health. Over time, he traded a cane for a wheelchair and accepted in-home help on a 24-hour basis. Still, the fight to save his home consumed him. "He would say, 'This is my home. I want to die here,'" DeFaria said. No one would have blamed Viviano for taking it easy, letting the younger residents take on the city. But Viviano wouldn't have it. "He could have just given up, but he didn't," said Fifi Vendetti, 77, Lori Vendetti's mother. "He fought hard for our cause. We hope we don't let him down. We hope we win, and we hope he looks down upon us when that happens." Source: Newark Star-Ledger |
| Home Improvement Program Expands in Camden |
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The Camden Home Improvement Program is ready to move into the neighborhoods of Beideman in Cramer Hill and the Dudley and Rosedale neighborhoods of East Camden, according to the Cooper's Ferry Development Association. Public information meetings were held in the neighborhoods on Monday and Tuesday for people interested in learning how to apply.
The CHIP, whose pilot phase was launched in December in five South Camden neighborhoods, was first conceived by community-based organizations Camden Churches Organized for People and Concerned Black Clergy as a means to provide funding for Camden homeowners seeking to implement home improvements. It provides up to $20,000 for each eligible homeowner to make health, life safety and facade improvements to their homes. The second phase, administered by Cooper's Ferry Development Association, will bring an additional $1.125 million in home improvement work to Camden. Phase I of the CHIP was launched in December in the neighborhoods of Liberty Park, Whitman Park, Centerville, Gateway, and Waterfront South. Home improvement work is set to begin for participating households in early April. Camden based contractors and tradespeople are encouraged to apply to become pre-qualified to work on these homes. Once Phase II is under way, the Camden Home Improvement Program will be expanded to include the remaining neighborhoods in Camden. When complete, approximately 250 Camden households will have participated in the CHIP. The CHIP is funded with $5 million from the Camden Economic Recovery Board , $2.5 million from DCA and $500,000 from the City of Camden for a total of an $8 million program. (The City of Camden's contribution will be available for eligible households who will require more than $20,000 in urgent life safety improvements.) Source: Courier-Post |
| Include Nonprofits in NJ Pay-to-Play Rules |
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All organizations, including nonprofits, should be subject to rules governing campaign donations to lawmakers. The state Election Law Enforcement Commission (ELEC) was right to include nonprofit organizations in pay-to-play disclosure rules that will take effect in May.
The idea of having pay-to-play rules is to stop the practice of companies and organizations from making large campaign contributions to politicians, then having those same politicians ignore the clear conflicts of interest and steer lucrative government contracts to the organizations that gave them campaign money. It's one of the most fundamental problems with how New Jersey government operates because it's unethical and it's costly for taxpayers. "Assuming a nonprofit is doing millions of dollars in state contracts, doesn't that further the goals of the legislation to disclose contributions made by that entity?" ELEC Vice Chairman Peter J Tober said. He's right. There's no good reason why nonprofits' political donations shouldn't be subject to the same public scrutiny and rules for private companies and individuals. Linda M Czipo, executive director of the Center for Non-Profits in Trenton, opposes the measure because nonprofit organizations could be at risk of losing their tax-free status if members of the charity's executive board or their spouses made past campaign contributions to politicians. This is an understandable concern, and one the ELEC should address in the implementation of new rules. The outcome of these rules shouldn't be that many nonprofits start losing their tax-free status and are forced to dissolve. Nonprofits do important charity work that benefits all New Jerseyans, and overly heavy-handed rules shouldn't serve to stop the good work they do. However, there are nonprofits, large and small, that get money from the state. ELEC shouldn't turn a blind eye to a nonprofit and its executives giving thousands of dollars to a politician, and that politician turning around and casting a key vote that gives the nonprofit millions of taxpayer dollars. There's an inherent conflict of interest there, and ELEC is right to craft new rules that reflect that reality. Source: Courier-Post |
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