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Life-Net Raw
January 2, 2003 |
CYCLONE SWEEPS AWAY ISLAND HOMES
From BBC News
Homes have disappeared into sand and seaSOLOMON ISLANDS (01/02/03)--Hundreds of homes on the Pacific island of Tikopia have been swept out to sea or buried by sand, according to disaster management officials. A much-delayed relief ship has finally set sail with emergency supplies five days after a cyclone smashed into Tikopia and the neighbouring island of Anuta.
But rescuers will not reach thousands of residents on the remote part of the Solomon Islands chain before Saturday.
The mission was first held up by a lack of money to buy fuel and pay a boat crew.
Once Australia donated the cash, the Solomon Islands Government decided to wait for a larger vessel capable of carrying more supplies.
The ship will give rescuers their first close look at the damage caused by Cyclone Zoe, one of the most powerful Pacific storms on record. It blasted the islands with winds estimated to have reached 350 kilometres per hour (220 mph).
Chilling sight
At least two villages have been destroyed, a Solomon Islands official said after studying photographs taken by an Australian reconnaissance aircraft.
Whole villages have been buried and I am still not sure how many people are dead
A correspondent for the AFP news agency who flew over Tikopia said the most chilling sight was not the trees snapped in half by the storm, but what was missing.
He said only a few people came out to signal the plane and where villages used to be there was only pristine white sand.
A New Zealand photographer raised the first fears of disaster when he flew over Tikopia on 1 January. Geoff Mackley said it would be a "miracle" if a huge number of deaths had been avoided.
Gabriel Teao, premier of the Temoto district of the Solomon Islands which was worst hit, told AFP: "Whole villages have been buried and I am still not sure how many people are dead." Dr Judith MacDonald, a New Zealand anthropologist who used to live on Tikopia, told the BBC that at least 15 villages had been washed away.
"The damage is tremendously severe and [the villagers'] chances of surviving will be pretty bad," Dr MacDonald told the World Today programme.
She said the islanders had no emergency supplies beyond a few root vegetables laid down for winter months.
"The water and the sand that's been swept inland will have covered up those storage pits and apart from the fruit that's been knocked off trees, they really won't have anything much to eat at all at the moment," she said.
String of delays
It is now estimated that 3,700 people live on the remote Pacific islands which form part of the Solomon Islands.
Both Australia and New Zealand say they are doing what they can to help.
Australia donated around $30,000 to fund the initial mercy mission and deployed an air force plane to view the damage.
The first rescue ship with food, clothing, shelter and medical supplies finally left the Solomons' capital Honiara on Thursday evening.
It was to have set sail on Thursday morning, local time, for the 1,000-kilometre (620-mile) voyage which will take between 36 hours and three days, depending on the weather.
Both Australia and New Zealand are now funding a second ferry set to leave on Friday.
Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said while a five-day delay to a disaster in an Australian city would be unacceptable, the islands were in a remote part of the world and part of a very poor country.
"I don't know how we could respond more quickly," he said on radio.
Crew on the Australian plane that flew over Tikopia on Wednesday said most metal structures appeared to still be standing, though houses built of trees and leaves had been destroyed.
They only had a few seconds to see each village, but photographs taken indicated that people were beginning to rebuild their homes, officials said.
See also the original article with photos and related stories at BBC News.
STARVATION IN ANGOLA, WARS IN CONGO AND COLOMBIA AMONG TOP 10 HUMANITARIAN STORIES UNDERREPORTED IN US IN 2002, AID GROUP SAYS
By Malcolm Foster, Associated Press writerNEW YORK (12/31/2002)--Starvation and disease in Angola and wars in Congo and Colombia were among the top 10 humanitarian stories underreported in the United States in 2002, the international medical group Medicins Sans Frontieres said Tuesday.
Scant attention also was paid to the severe food shortage in North Korea and to escalating violence in southern Sudan between the Islamic government and ethnic militias that has forced thousands to flee their homes, said the group, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999.
This is the fifth year the Paris-based aid group, also known as Doctors Without Borders, has issued its annual list of news stories it claims have been largely ignored by the U.S. media.
For the fourth year in a row, Doctors Without Borders included in its list the lack of access to medicines for diseases that kill millions of the world's poorest people. While the fight against AIDS is widely covered in the media, deaths caused by malaria, tuberculosis, the parasitic disease kala azar and sleeping sickness - all of which can be treated effectively - received little press attention, the report said.
"Tuberculosis rates are soaring to the point that, if left unchecked, 35 million people will die of the disease over the next decade," the group said, citing World Health Organization estimates.
And despite the fanfare over price cuts for AIDS drugs announced by pharmaceutical companies, the vast majority of the world's 42 million people with HIV have no access to any kind of treatment, the report said.
The humanitarian crisis emerging in Angola was probably the biggest emergency that Doctors Without Borders responded to this year, said Kris Torgeson, a spokeswoman for the group.
Although an April cease-fire ended the southern African nation's 27-year civil war between the government and UNITA rebels, 4 million people are displaced, and many are in desperate need of food and medical attention. The government has been largely indifferent to their plight, and the response of the international community has been slow, the group said.
"After the cease-fire was signed, the country opened up and we found severe pockets of malnutrition," Torgeson said.
In a May survey of a feeding center in the town of Malange, the group said it found that six out of 10 women had lost a child to hunger in the preceding four months.
Doctors Without Borders is providing medically monitored feeding to 20,000 severely malnourished people, primarily children, Torgeson said.
Two other stories included in the list for the fourth straight year were the humanitarian crises created by conflicts in Congo and Colombia.
Despite a tenuous peace agreement after four years of fighting in Congo, the conflict has exacted a chilling cost on its survivors. Some 2.5 million are homeless, the country's infrascture is in tatters and disease and malnutrition is rampant. In some eastern areas of the sprawling central African nation, one in four children dies before reaching age 5, the group said.
U.S. media organizations have also neglected the flare-up in violence in Colombia's 38-year civil war, the group said. Some 25,000 people are murdered and another 3,000 kidnapped every year.
WHY VEGANS WERE RIGHT ALL ALONG
By George Monbiot, The Guardian
Famine can only be avoided if the rich give up meat, fish and dairy(12/24/2002)--The Christians stole the winter solstice from the pagans, and capitalism stole it from the Christians. But one feature of the celebrations has remained unchanged: the consumption of vast quantities of meat. The practice used to make sense. Livestock slaughtered in the autumn, before the grass ran out, would be about to decay, and fat-starved people would have to survive a further three months. Today we face the opposite problem: we spend the next three months trying to work it off.
Our seasonal excesses would be perfectly sustainable, if we weren't doing the same thing every other week of the year. But, because of the rich world's disproportionate purchasing power, many of us can feast every day. And this would also be fine, if we did not live in a finite world.
By comparison to most of the animals we eat, turkeys are relatively efficient converters: they produce about three times as much meat per pound of grain as feedlot cattle. But there are still plenty of reasons to feel uncomfortable about eating them. Most are reared in darkness, so tightly packed that they can scarcely move. Their beaks are removed with a hot knife to prevent them from hurting each other. As Christmas approaches, they become so heavy that their hips buckle. When you see the inside of a turkey broilerhouse, you begin to entertain grave doubts about European civilisation.
This is one of the reasons why many people have returned to eating red meat at Christmas. Beef cattle appear to be happier animals. But the improvement in animal welfare is offset by the loss in human welfare. The world produces enough food for its people and its livestock, though (largely because they are so poor) some 800 million are malnourished. But as the population rises, structural global famine will be avoided only if the rich start to eat less meat. The number of farm animals on earth has risen fivefold since 1950: humans are now outnumbered three to one. Livestock already consume half the world's grain, and their numbers are still growing almost exponentially.
This is why biotechnology - whose promoters claim that it will feed the world - has been deployed to produce not food but feed: it allows farmers to switch from grains which keep people alive to the production of more lucrative crops for livestock. Within as little as 10 years, the world will be faced with a choice: arable farming either continues to feed the world's animals or it continues to feed the world's people. It cannot do both.
The impending crisis will be accelerated by the depletion of both phosphate fertiliser and the water used to grow crops. Every kilogram of beef we consume, according to research by the agronomists David Pimental and Robert Goodland, requires around 100,000 litres of water. Aquifers are beginning the run dry all over the world, largely because of abstraction by farmers.
Many of those who have begun to understand the finity of global grain production have responded by becoming vegetarians. But vegetarians who continue to consume milk and eggs scarcely reduce their impact on the ecosystem. The conversion efficiency of dairy and egg production is generally better than meat rearing, but even if everyone who now eats beef were to eat cheese instead, this would merely delay the global famine. As both dairy cattle and poultry are often fed with fishmeal (which means that no one can claim to eat cheese but not fish), it might, in one respect, even accelerate it. The shift would be accompanied too by a massive deterioration in animal welfare: with the possible exception of intensively reared broilers and pigs, battery chickens and dairy cows are the farm animals which appear to suffer most.
We could eat pheasants, many of which are dumped in landfill after they've been shot, and whose price, at this time of the year, falls to around £2 a bird, but most people would feel uncomfortable about subsidising the bloodlust of brandy-soaked hoorays. Eating pheasants, which are also fed on grain, is sustainable only up to the point at which demand meets supply. We can eat fish, but only if we are prepared to contribute to the collapse of marine ecosystems and - as the European fleet plunders the seas off West Africa - the starvation of some of the hungriest people on earth. It's impossible to avoid the conclusion that the only sustainable and socially just option is for the inhabitants of the rich world to become, like most of the earth's people, broadly vegan, eating meat only on special occasions like Christmas.
As a meat-eater, I've long found it convenient to categorise veganism as a response to animal suffering or a health fad. But, faced with these figures, it now seems plain that it's the only ethical response to what is arguably the world's most urgent social justice issue. We stuff ourselves, and the poor get stuffed.
See also the original article with related stories at The Guardian.
THE UNENDING SCANDAL OF WHYY (A PBS AFFILIATE)
From Green Delaware Alert #181
'Unpublic Broadcasting' at its worst, in Delaware/PennsylvaniaDELAWARE (12/24/2002)--
ACTION: Ask Gov. Minner to end state funding for WHYY (gminner@state.de.us, 1.800.292.9570)
For years we have been trying to convince our readers NOT to contribute to WHYY, and Delaware legislators to stop giving hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to WHYY (about $700,000 in the current fiscal year). Why? Because WHYY promotes the interests of developers and polluters and provides almost no hard news coverage or exposure for independent voices. Fat-cat industrial lobbyists like Joe Farley (representing utility Conectiv) and "Bobby" Byrd (representing Delaware’s Chemical Industry Council) are far more likely to be heard on WHYY’s local programming than any advocates for the environment, public hearth, or democracy. For example, on Dec 23rd, (last night) the talking heads from Delaware were Farley (Conectiv is seeking a permit for it’s Edge Moor Power Plant, accused of poisoning its neighbors), Dennis Rochford (loudest proponent of a discredited river-dredging scam) and John Taylor (editorial page editor of Gannett’s Wilmington "Stooge" Journal).
Many people, numbed by propaganda and for lack of context, have trouble seeing WHYY for what it is. (Just as they have trouble seeing the differences between the "Stooge" Journal and a real newspaper.) The techniques of bias and misrepresentation can be subtle and effective.
Recently the Philadelphia Daily News has reported on WHYY’s bought-and-paid-for "environmental" reporting:
NEWS ETHICS IN QUESTION WITH DEP FUNDING
By Bob Warner, Philadelphia Daily News
Agency bucks backed radio reports(12/10/2002)--"Today's coverage of the environment is brought to you by the state Department of Environmental Protection."
As far as we know, that line has never been used at any of Pennsylvania's public radio stations. But dozens of times over the past year, it would have been accurate.
The newsroom at Philadelphia's leading public-radio station, WHYY (90.9-FM), is reeling over what staff members view as a serious ethical lapse - the airing of environmental news reports that were indirectly funded with Pennsylvania tax dollars by the state Department of Environmental Protection.
WHYY news director Bill Fantini told the Daily News that the radio station maintained final editorial control over everything that aired, and he defended the quality of the reports, running several times a week from December 2001 until mid-October.
But a Syracuse University journalism professor dismissed the reporting as little more than "public-service announcements masquerading as news" and described the situation as "outrageous."
"One of the fundamental ethical rules is, we are supposed to preserve our independence," said Dow Smith, associate professor of broadcast journalism at Syracuse's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. "When we are paid by an outside source to do news stories, that's wrong...Ultimately, it's a state agency buying good coverage."
The state's role in funding the environmental reports was not mentioned in the underwriting credits that WHYY aired during its newscasts.
And WHYY's partnership agreement with a state-funded environmental nonprofit, known as GreenWorks, gave the outside organization unusual influence on what got covered and how.
The agreement - signed by WHYY's news director and GreenWorks' executive director - specified that a reporter based at WHYY would work with the GreenWorks staff "to identify and plan the content" of his reports.
The reports were supposed to take "a solution-oriented approach using as a reference the GreenWorks philosophy of environmental reporting," the agreement said.
David B. Hess, outgoing secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection, said that meant that the reporting was supposed to focus on ordinary people and businesses, doing "good works" to help the environment.
Hess defended the radio reporting subsidies as an appropriate use of state tax dollars.
"Our business is promoting environmental protection and restoration," the state cabinet secretary said. "What better way to do that than to find stories about people who are doing just that, holding them up as examples of what other people could be doing?"
Through a Washington, D.C., public relations firm, ICF Consulting, the state provided $466,000 to GreenWorks to fund the radio reports. GreenWorks paid $93,830 to WHYY to hire a 24-year-old reporter, Brad Linder, and pay related expenses for administration, benefits, travel and equipment. Linder's annual salary was $35,000. The bulk of the state money stayed with GreenWorks, to hire three other staff members who were supposed to help Linder with his research and post relevant material at a GreenWorks Web site (www.greenworks.tv), funded by the state for several years.
The state-funded radio reports were offered to and sometimes aired by other public radio stations around the state. The reports continued until mid-October, when Gwen Shaffer, a former GreenWorks staffer and occasional on-air contributor to WHYY, prepared a critical, first-person account of the situation for the Columbia Journalism Review.
"I was horrified at the thought of reporting on environmental issues while being paid by the state agency charged with environmental policy and enforcement," Shaffer wrote.
Just before Shaffer's CJR article was published, WHYY officials decided to end their relationship with GreenWorks.
In an interview, Shaffer alleged that GreenWorks' executive director, Tim Schlitzer, discouraged her and Linder from covering major controversies, such as oil drilling in Allegheny National Forest, or a legislative effort to cut off state funding for environmental lawsuits. Instead, Shaffer said, Schlitzer pushed for "positive" stories, sometimes of dubious merit, including several small projects that had received state DEP funding.
Linder, who continues to work for WHYY as a free-lancer, acknowledged occasional difficulties because he was working for people with different agendas. "I had a lot of people I was trying not to piss off," he said.
But Linder said he generated most of his own story ideas and did virtually all his own research. "In general, I feel I did good work," he said.
"I think everybody went into it with the best intentions," said Schlitzer, 40, whose organization won a regional Emmy award in 2000 for a state-funded series of television documentaries, broadcast mostly on small cable channels.
He said his goal with the radio program was to bring more "balance" to environmental reporting.
"You read about what's going wrong," Schlitzer said, "but not the good stuff, the kids building an environmentally friendly house on school property and stuff like that. That's what I wanted us to cover."
DEP "had no role at all suggesting content," he said.
Shaffer was fired by Schlitzer last May. She said she suspects it was tied to her efforts to document state funding of the reporting project.
Schlitzer said the firing was based on her general job dissatisfaction, coupled with some free-lancing on GreenWorks' time.
News director Fantini said that when he initially asked about funding last year, Schlitzer told him that GreenWorks got only 30 percent of its money from the state, the rest from foundations and private donations. It was months later, Fantini said, before Schlitzer disclosed that the state was indirectly paying all the bills for the radio report itself.
Fantini now says he made two mistakes--not finding out earlier that the state was paying for the newscast, and agreeing to look for particular kinds of stories.
"I don't like the fact that I allowed anyone to put any kind of slant on where we were going," Fantini said.
Inside and outside the WHYY newsroom, journalists questioned why it took so long for Fantini and his boss, station manager Paul Gluck, to figure out how much of the money was coming from the state and decide that the GreenWorks arrangement threatened the station's independence.
Public radio stations in both Pittsburgh and Harrisburg questioned the funding for WHYY's new environmental coverage as soon as it began, a year ago.
"I am very much concerned about ties to GreenWorks and the DEP," Kevin Gavin, the news director at Pittsburgh's WDUQ, told Fantini in a Dec. 3, 2001, e-mail. "Plus, the story offered today stopped just short of being a commercial."
Assured by Fantini that WHYY would control content of the reports, WDUQ used several pieces during the first half of 2002, Gavin said. But then he heard from Fantini that the state appeared to be the principal source of funds, Gavin said, and he stopped considering the reports for airtime.
Dissatisfied from the beginning with the vague information about funding, Harrisburg's WITF never carried a single report.
But top management at WHYY did not begin a close examination of the GreenWorks relationship until last May, when urban affairs reporter Mhari Saito, a friend of Shaffer, sent a critical letter to Fantini, expressing "serious reservations" about the GreenWorks partnership.
"Not only is a funder intimately involved in editorial decisions within this news department," Saito wrote, "but that funder has a symbiotic relationship with the state agency responsible for environmental policy and enforcement."
That letter and other complaints led station manager Gluck to initiate an investigation, he said.
Schlitzer was cooperative. In a June 7 letter to Gluck, Schlitzer made clear that the state was the primary funding source for the program and suggested that given their differences, they should consider dissolving the partnership.
But it was four more months before WHYY pulled the plug.
"I'm sure in hindsight a lot of things are obvious," Gluck said. "Beyond the money and the editorial control, there were a lot of different things going on there. I was deliberate about it...I don't know how to evaluate whether I was too deliberate." "I think people should really be outraged," said Syracuse's Dow Smith, a former TV news director in Miami, Washington and Detroit, who agreed to review the situation for the Daily News.
"It's analogous to a newspaper or a commercial TV station selling time for an advertiser to present its point of view, without identifying it as advertising," Smith said.
Gluck acknowledged that the controversy - publicized in both CJR and Current, a publication that follows public broadcasting - had seriously hurt the station's morale.
"I don't think anybody takes this lightly," Gluck said. "Any decent, honest group of journalists who work together in this situation would be hard hit by an event like this."
You can e-mail the writer of this story at warnerb@phillynews.com.
Further coverage in PRWatch:
AGENCY UNDERWRITING SLANTS NEWS COVERAGE
From PR Watch(12/10/2002)--The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection funneled money through a non-profit organization in order to underwrite environmental reporting on Philadelphia's leading public-radio station, WHYY, reports the Philadelphia Daily News. The radio stories were supposed to take "a solution-oriented approach"according to an agreement between WHYY's news director and GreenWorks, which received $466,000 from the state agency via a Washington, D.C., public relations firm. GreenWorks paid $93,830 to WHYY to hire a reporter, who was to work with the GreenWorks staff "to identify and plan the content" of his reports. "The bulk of the state money stayed with GreenWorks, to hire three other staff members who were supposed to help [the reporter] with his research and post relevant material at a GreenWorks Web site," the Daily News writes. "The reports continued until mid-October, when Gwen Shaffer, a former GreenWorks staffer and occasional on-air contributor to WHYY, prepared a critical, first-person account of the situation for the Columbia Journalism Review."
More web links related to this story are available. You can also discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum.
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