| LIFE-NET NEWS |
| by Ret Z. |
| Covering Poverty Widely in a Net of Many Voices |
| July 4, 2007 | No Profit; No Proceeds |
| Volume 11 Number 5 | All-Volunteer |
| "Give a family a fish, and they'll eat a meal; give them a Net, and they'll have fish for Life." |
| Darfur Heralds Era of Climate Wars |
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The conflict in Darfur has been driven by climate change and environmental degradation, which threaten to trigger a succession of new wars across Africa unless more is done to contain the damage, according to a UN report published June 22. "Darfur ... holds grim lessons for other countries at risk," an 18-month study of Sudan by the UN Environment Program (UNEP) concludes.
With rainfall down by up to 30% over 40 years and the Sahara advancing by well over a mile every year, tensions between farmers and herders over disappearing pasture and evaporating water holes threaten to reignite the half-century war between north and south Sudan, held at bay by a precarious 2005 peace accord. The southern Nuba tribe, for example, have warned they could "restart the war" because Arab nomads -- pushed southwards into their territory by drought -- are cutting down trees to feed their camels. The UNEP investigation into links between climate and conflict in Sudan predicts that the impact of climate change on stability is likely to go far beyond its borders. It found there could be a drop of up to 70% in crop yields in the most vulnerable areas of the Sahel, an ecologically fragile belt stretching from Senegal to Sudan. "It illustrates and demonstrates what is increasingly becoming a global concern," said Achim Steiner, UNEP's executive director. "[A]s the desert moves southwards there is a physical limit to what [ecological] systems can sustain, and so you get one group displacing another." He also pointed to incipient conflicts in Chad "at least in part associated with environmental changes", and to growing tensions in southern Africa fuelled by droughts and flooding. The UNEP study suggests the true genesis of the Darfur conflict pre-dates 2003 and is to be found in failing rains and creeping desertification. It found that:
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| Troubled Home Found to be Better than Foster Care |
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Children whose families are investigated for abuse or neglect are likely to do better in life if they stay with their families than if they go into foster care, says a pioneering study. The findings intensify a vigorous debate in child welfare: whether children are better served with their families or away from them.
Kids who stayed with their families were less likely to become juvenile delinquents or teen mothers and more likely to hold jobs as young adults, says the study by Joseph Doyle, an economics professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management who studies social policy. "The size of the effects surprised me, because all the children come from tough families." Doyle says his research, which tracked at least 15,000 kids from 1990 to 2002, is the largest study to look at the effects of foster care. He studied kids in Illinois because of a database there that links abuse investigations to other government records. To avoid results attributable to family background, he screened out extreme cases of abuse or neglect and studied kids whose cases could have gone either way. Studies, including those by Mark Courtney while at the University of Chicago's Chapin Hall Center for Children, show that the 500,000 children in US foster care are more likely than other kids to drop out of school, commit crimes, abuse drugs, and become teen parents. His research has shown that this holds true even when foster kids are compared with other disadvantaged youth. Doyle's study, however, provides "the first viable, empirical evidence" of the benefits of keeping kids with their families, says Gary Stangler, executive director of the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative, a foundation for foster teens. Stangler says it looked at kids over a longer period of time than had other studies. Smaller studies have found kids from abusive families do better in foster care. Source: USA Today |
| Landmark Convictions for Use of Child Soldiers |
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The war crimes court for Sierra Leone has handed down the first convictions by a UN-backed tribunal for the crime of
recruiting and using child soldiers. Human Rights Watch said that these convictions are a groundbreaking step toward ending impunity for commanders who exploit hundreds of thousands of children as soldiers in conflicts worldwide.
In Freetown on June 20, the Special Court for Sierra Leone handed down verdicts against three accused men from the rebel Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), one of three warring factions during Sierra Leone's 11-year brutal armed conflict, which ended in 2002. The judges found the three accused -- Alex Tamba Brima, Brima Bazzy Kamara and Santigie Borbor Kanu -- guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other serious violations of international humanitarian law, including the recruitment and use of child soldiers. "This use of child soldiers is a particularly horrific crime. These children should have been learning how to read, not how to shoot an AK-47," said Jo Becker, children's rights advocate for Human Rights Watch. "We hope that the Special Court's decision will protect children in other parts of the world from suffering what so many Sierra Leonean children were forced to endure." Thousands of children were recruited and used by all sides during Sierra Leone's conflict, including the Revolutionary United Front, the AFRC, and the pro-government Civil Defense Forces. Children were often forcibly recruited, given drugs, and used to commit atrocities. Thousands of girls were also recruited as soldiers and often subjected to sexual exploitation. The Special Court for Sierra Leone was established in 2002 to prosecute those "who bear the greatest responsibility" for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other serious violations of international humanitarian law, along with several domestic offenses, committed since 1996. All nine defendants being prosecuted by the Special Court have been charged with the recruitment and use of child soldiers. "Commanders in many conflicts deliberately prey upon children as recruits," said Becker. "Now that child recruiters are being brought to justice, their impunity is no longer so certain." Source: Human Rights Watch |
| Lack of Members Kills Camden YMCA |
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The Camden YMCA is closing, and the downtown building will be sold, though YMCA officials said Monday they hoped to continue some core programs elsewhere. "We will still be in Camden;" said Jeffrey J Land, president of the Camden County YMCA board of directors, "we're just getting out of the real estate business."
Camden Y membership has plummeted over the years from a peak of 1,200 in the early 1990s to its current 25, Land said. He said many only have membership to take advantage of the Y's $35-a-month fee that allows them to park in the downtown lot at 250 Federal St, just blocks from the waterfront. That membership cost was cheaper than the $65 a month charged for parking elsewhere in that area. The Y continued to operate some programs, such as day care and summer camp, Land said, but he did not say what plans were being made for their future. Land was unclear when the Y officially would close. The Rev Harold Sutton, pastor of the Assembly of God church across from City Hall in the Parkade Building, said his church expected to purchase the Y building in the next 30 days. He did not disclose the price, but said the church would pay market value. "We had to compete with everybody for the building at market value," he said. "No one gave us anything." Sutton said his congregation planned to use the Y gymnasium for church services and would use the swimming pool for its own fitness facility, one that would be similar in scope to YMCA programs. Sutton had directed a YMCA in Philadelphia, he said, and was familiar with Y operations. The Camden YMCA received a $530,000 grant in 2006 from the Economic Recovery Board, which oversees the distribution of money for Camden revitalization. Land said that a major cause of the financial problems was that Y officials underestimated the costs of building renovation for which the ERB grant was used. He said the Camden YMCA's unappealing location just across from the Camden County Jail had long been a problem. A projected increase in business from the state aquarium and the Tweeter Center never happened. Instead, traffic congestion from the Tweeter Center during concerts helped choke off access to the Y. Other nearby enterprises, such as the Victor Building and L3 Communications, have their own fitness centers. He said Campbell Soup is now planning a fitness center. The 127-year-old YMCA at one time served hundreds of families in the city and presented programs for children and families, including a special Abbott school program, from which five people were laid off last month. At one time it even offered midnight basketball to keep Camden youth off the streets. Source: Philadelphia Inquirer |
| America Off Track |
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Adapted from a piece by Robert E Kay MD:
We seem to be a great nation for others who still want to emigrate here. But many of us feel that, while we've achieved much, we're also a bit arrogant and ought to be ashamed of ourselves because:
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| Southeast Asia Battles Dengue Surge |
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Southeast Asian nations are battling a surge in dengue
cases amid signs that climate change could make 2007 the worst year on record for a disease that often gets less attention than some higher-profile health risks. The spread of dengue, which is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito and is endemic in much of the region, has accelerated in recent years, say experts, due to increasing urbanization and travel or migration within the region.
Efforts to develop a vaccine are proving difficult because dengue can be caused by four viruses. So the only real method to fight the disease at present is to eliminate likely breeding spots for mosquitoes from discarded tires to plant pots. "The threat of dengue is increasing because of global warming; mosquitoes are becoming more active year by year;" said infectious disease expert Lo Wing-lok, "and their geographical reach is expanding both north and south of the equator. Even Singapore, which is so affluent and modern, can't exercise adequate control." Dengue cases in Hong Kong usually involve people returning from hotter parts of Asia. Lo warned that warmer temperatures meant the disease could ultimately become endemic in southern China. Dengue sufferers often describe the onset of high fever, nausea, and intense joint pain. There is no real treatment, apart from rest and rehydration, and in severe cases it can be fatal. In Indonesia, where concerns over bird flu more frequently grab headlines, dengue saw a dramatic peak earlier this year after much of the Jakarta area was flooded. "It's not so much the rise in temperature that affects dengue," said Wiku Adisasmito, a dengue expert at the University of Indonesia, "rather the rising rainfall has lengthened the lifespan of the epidemic each season." The Asian Development Bank developed a model suggesting that dengue might rise three-fold in Indonesia due to climate change. By May there had been 68,636 cases and 748 deaths so far this year, according to Health Ministry data. Although cases were slowing at the end of the wet season, experts warn that 2006's record 106,425 cases could easily be overtaken. Thailand had more than 11,000 cases of dengue fever and 14 deaths by June, up 18% from the same period of 2006. The number of dengue cases in Singapore in May was nearly three times that in the same period a year ago, according to the government, which says warmer weather was partly to blame. In Malaysia, 48 people died from dengue during the first five months of the year, health officials said, up roughly 71% from 2006. Source: Reuters |
| 'Food Desert' Dwellers Get Some Relief |
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Full-service supermarkets have long since fled poor
neighborhoods, forcing residents to rely on canned,
expensive foods from nearby corner stores or to trek as much as an hour away to get halfway-decent produce at a mega-grocery store. The rising epidemics of diabetes and obesity have given an added urgency to the problem of these "food deserts" -- the countless vast, poor communities without ready access to fresh food. Finding fresh food has been a decades-long struggle for millions of low-income Americans. Thankfully, there seems to be some momentum building behind the healthy food access movement.
In Sacramento, Senate Bill 107 would create the Healthy Food Retail Innovation Fund to spur dramatic improvements in access to fresh produce and meat in low-income communities and communities of color. The program would give corner-store owners, grocery chains, and farmers markets the help they need to make providing fresh food profitable and sustainable. Grocery stores would be eligible for low-interest loans or grants to help with the initial financing, making it affordable to take a risk on a new store in an industry where 1%-to-2% profit margins are the norm. Corner-store owners also could receive support to purchase refrigeration units -- a significant up-front cost that is often prohibitively expensive for shopkeepers who want to offer more fresh foods. The California bill builds off the ongoing successes of a similar program in Pennsylvania. In the four-year history of Pennsylvania's Fresh Food Financing Initiative, 14 historically underserved communities have welcomed new grocery stores -- and the 2,200 new jobs that came with them. Source: World Prout Assembly |
| # LNN # Small # Hauls # |
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| Life-Net News Extras |
| The End of Cheap Food |
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For the first time in generations agricultural commodity prices are surging with what analysts warn will be unpredictable consequences. They call it "agflation". Beneath this piece of jargon lie two main drivers that suggest that cheap food is about to become a thing of the past. Agflation, to those that believe that it is really happening, is an increase in the price of food that occurs as a result of increased demand from human consumption and the diversion of crops into usage as an alternative energy resource.
On the one hand the growing affluence of millions of people in China and India is creating a surge in demand for food -- the rising populations are not content with their parents' diet and demand more meat. On the other, is the use of food crops as a source of energy in place of oil, the so-called bio-fuels boom. As these two forces combine they are setting off warning bells around the world. Rice prices are climbing worldwide. Butter prices in Europe have spiked by 40% in the past year. Wheat futures are trading at their highest level for a decade. Global soybean prices have risen by half. Pork prices in China are up 20% on last year and the food price index in India was up by 11% year on year. In Mexico there have been riots in response to a 60% rise in the cost of tortillas. So far in Britain, consumers have been insulated from the early effects of these price rises by the competitive nature of the country's retail system. But the supermarkets cannot shield consumers for long. The European Commission no longer has reserves to help cushion its citizens. Its mountains of unsold butter and meat and its lake of powdered milk have disappeared after reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy. Then there is corn. While relatively little corn is eaten directly, it is of pivotal importance to the food economy as so much of it is consumed indirectly. The milk, eggs, cheese, butter, chicken, beef, ice cream and yogurt in the average fridge is all produced using corn, and the price of every one of these is influenced by the price of corn. In effect, our fridges are full of corn. In the past 12 months the global corn price has doubled. In six of the past seven years, we have used more grain worldwide than we have produced. As a result world grain reserves -- or carryover stocks -- have dwindled to 57 days. This is the lowest level of grain reserves in 34 years. The reason for the price surge is the wholesale diversion of grain crops into the production of ethanol. 30% of next year's grain harvest in the US will go straight to an ethanol distillery. As the US supplies more than two-thirds of the world's grain imports this unprecedented move will affect food prices everywhere. In Europe farmers are switching en masse to fuel crops to meet the EU requirement that bio-fuels account for 20% of the energy mix. Ethanol is almost universally popular with politicians as it allows them to tell voters to keep on motoring, while bio-fuels will fix the problem of harmful greenhouse gas emissions. But bio-fuels are not a green panacea, as the influential economist Lester Brown from the Earth Policy Institute explained in a briefing to the US Senate last week. He said, "The stage is now set for direct competition for grain between the 800 million people who own automobiles, and the world's 2 billion poorest people." Source: The Independent UK |
| Iraqis Flee, Find Safety and Little Else |
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Iraq's escalating sectarian violence is pushing whole families out of their homes. Fleeing men, women and children will pay steep fees for undercover, safe transport out of the country. Iraq's neighboring states are trying to seal off common escape routes but the tide is still rising. The United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) estimates as many as 2.2 million Iraqis have fled their country as refugees since the latest war began.
From his pulpit in St Ephraim's Syrian Orthodox Church in Amman, Fr Emmanuel Al Bana has watched his congregation grow significantly since US forces invaded Iraq in 2003. The church has about 5,000 members, the core of whom at one time were native Jordanians. Now, around 3,000 Iraqi Christians have joined St Ephraim's, many within the last two years. Steve Weaver, who serves as Middle East coordinator for international humanitarian organization Church World Service (CWS), recently visited St Ephraim's as part of a delegation examining how the faith community should respond to the Iraqi refugee crisis. CWS is working with other faith-based charities to coordinate a broader response supporting displaced Iraqis. In Amman, St Ephraim's is helping refugees as it is able, distributing blankets, clothing and kits to help families with small children. "Iraqis here are not allowed to work," said MECC-Jordan director Wafa Goussous. "90% of Iraqi refugees are poor and only depend on our donations, and relatives abroad." The poorest refugees are frequently female, widowed by violence and excluded by a patriarchal society. The struggle to leave Iraq often separates family members. A bus ride out of the country can cost a family the price of all their belongings. Working in Jordan, illegally, often means a miserable pittance. Jordanian law keeps displaced youngsters out of public schools. "The larger story for Iraqi families is that there is no foreseeable resolution to this situation," said Weaver. "Iraqis routinely say it will take five to ten years for this to play out. So the two million Iraqis living in neighboring countries will not be returning home, voluntarily, anytime soon." Seeking refuge in neighboring states is about the only option for Iraqis in peril. Jordan and Syria are determining the best legal means to accept refugees through their borders. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is constructing a $7 million high-tech fence to keep Iraqis from wandering into its territory. The US State Department plans to resettle officially only around 7,000 Iraqis by September. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Iraqis have been officially welcomed by Scandinavian nations. Yet processing official requests is not keeping pace with the demand for resettlement. For the first time in five years, the UNHCR reports an increase in the number of refugees worldwide, largely a result of the Iraq crisis. Source: Church World Service |
| The Solution: A Commons Sector |
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The problem, according to the book, Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons: The structure of the economy and society leaves too much power in the hands of corporate capitalism. Even if all the CEOs and boards of directors and politicians were replaced with kind-hearted souls, we would still face pretty much the same issues of environmental decay, economic inequality, and other social ills -- the logic of capitalism and the legal structure of private property rights force the leaders of corporations to do what they currently do.
Barnes learned this from personal experience as co-owner and manager of several business ventures. "I’d tested the system for twenty years, pushing it toward multiple bottom lines [that consider social and environmental impacts in addition to profit concerns] as far as I possibly could. I’d dealt with executives and investors who truly cared about nature, employees, and communities. Yet in the end, I’d come to see that all these well-intentioned people, even as their numbers grew, couldn’t shake the larger system loose from its dominant bottom line of profit." While the government is necessary, in Barnes’ view it is incapable of successfully addressing these big problems because "most -- though not all -- of the time, government puts the interests of private corporations first. This is a systemic problem of a capitalist democracy, not just a matter of electing new leaders." "Is there, perhaps, a missing set of institutions that can help us?" Barnes has been thinking about it for ten years, and he has a positive answer: the commons, which Barnes defines "as a generic term, like the market or the state. It refers to all the gifts we inherit or create together .... The commons designates a set of assets that have two characteristics: they’re all gifts, and they’re all shared. A gift is something we receive, as opposed to something we earn. A shared gift is one we receive as members of a community, as opposed to individually," for example, "air, water, ecosystems, languages, music, holidays, money, law, mathematics, parks, the Internet, and much more." In his previous book, Who Owns the Sky?, Barnes was already on this track. He then argued that the solution to global warming is to establish the atmosphere as a legally recognized commons, owned by all of humanity, now and into the future, and managed by trustees, a Sky Trust, which would be legally obligated to protect the atmosphere on behalf of those innumerable future generations. It could do so by establishing sustainable limits on the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere by human activity, and then auctioning off these permits. Because all people share the atmospheric commons equally, the money from this auction would be distributed on an equal basis. The result would be a slowing and eventual halt to global warming and a simultaneous reduction in economic inequality. This time Barnes has widened his vision beyond any particular social problem. His hope is that the establishment of an entire commons sector, alongside the government and private, corporate sector, will create an institutional framework that makes it possible to address a wide array of social problems that result from capitalist profit-seeking and government’s systemic inability to be fully representative. Source: Center for Popular Economics |
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