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Life-Net Raw
November 12, 2002 |
KABUL CAMPUS PROTESTS TURN VIOLENT
From CNN
Students were protesting against poor living conditions at Kabul UniversityKABUL, Afghanistan (11/12/02)--Student protests in Kabul that erupted into violent clashes with police and left at least one demonstrator dead have spilled into a second day.
Students were protesting against poor living conditions at Kabul University.
A violent clash with police on Monday night killed one student and wounded at least five others, according to sources within the Interior Ministry and international security forces.
CNN's Vivian Paulsen witnessed police talking with students following a raucous episode in which law officers were seen kicking and beating demonstrators.
Water cannons were also used to disperse the crowd of about 700 which had tried to march to the Presidential Palace to lodge their complaints.
Police in riot gear made repeated charges against student protesters who had scattered along the march route.
Journalists who were not behind police lines were also the subject of police beatings, said CNN's Diana Muriel.
While the death toll officially stood at one Tuesday, students said three more had been killed. They said number of arrests may number up to 150. Paulsen saw students carrying a limp, badly-beaten body. She was not sure of his fate.
One student protested the rough handling by police, saying there was no political agenda -- they just wanted better living conditions on campus.
Peacekeepers look on
Afghan leader Harmid Karzai condemned the violence that took the student's life. Details of how the student died were not immediately available.
The demonstrations began at 6 p.m. (1430HKT) Monday when about 2,000 university students gathered to air the grievances about short supplies of food, water and electricity in the dormitories.
As police moved to disperse the group, rocks were thrown and an altercation ensued between the police and students.
Members of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) watched as police and students battled, but took no action.
ISAF is multinational unit of 4,650 troops charged with helping to keep the peace in the Afghan capital. ISAF must be invited by local officials to intervene in traditional police operations.
See also the original article with photos and related story links at CNN.
ETHIOPIAN FAMINE 'WILL BE AVERTED'
From BBC News Africa
British minister says sub-Saharan food shortages are much more worryingETHIOPIA (11/12/2002)--The international community will prevent mass starvation in Ethiopia and the situation is not as serious as the situation during the 1984 famine, Britain's minister for international development has said.
On Monday, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi warned that his country faces a famine worse than that of 1984 which killed nearly one million people and sparked a big international relief effort.
Clare Short said the Ethiopian drought was serious this year but the food shortages were much more worrying in Southern Africa because so many people there were weakened by HIV/Aids and countries were less used to coping with food shortages.
A similar number of people - up to 15 million - are affected in each region.
She also said that the Zimbabwe Government was making the situation worse.
The European Union and the United States have accused Zimbabwe of diverting food aid to supporters of President Robert Mugabe - an accusation his government has denied.
... Ms Short told the BBC that about four million Ethiopians needed food aid every year.
"This is a well organised country that is used to handling food aid," she said.
But she pointed out that the only long-term solution to Ethiopian food shortages was to raise living standards.
"We will manage internationally to bring in the food needed, but Ethiopia will never be safe until we get its economy developed," she said.
See also the full story with photos.
TWO RIVER CITIES SHARE IN DREAM, NOT RESULTS
By Joseph A. Gambardello, Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer
Part two of a five-part series, 'The Lost Waterfront: Steps to reclaim Penn's Landing'CAMDEN/PHILADELPHIA (11/11/2002)--Two cities, one waterfront.
That's the vision for turning the Delaware River into a major tourist attraction.
A unifying name - Independence Harbor - has even emerged as a potential marketing tool.
But to anyone looking south from the Ben Franklin Bridge, it is clear that more is happening in Camden than in Philadelphia.
Thanks in large part to government support, Camden now has the New Jersey State Aquarium ($60 million), the Tweeter Center ($56 million), the Camden Children's Garden ($8 million), Campbell's Field ($22 million), and the Battleship New Jersey Museum ($20 million).
Up next are an Imax theater ($8 million), an expansion of the aquarium ($30 million), and conversion of the Nipper Building into luxury apartments ($60 million).
And the Delaware River Port Authority, the chief proponent of the "two cities, one waterfront" idea to lure tourist dollars to the region, is going ahead with plans to build a $40 million aerial tram linking the two cities. The probability, though, is that when it starts operation, the cable-car link will carry more people to do things in Camden than the other way around.
Unlike Philadelphia, which views its waterfront as a potential amenity, Camden sees waterfront development as a major force in the turnaround of the nation's third-poorest city of 50,000 or more.
About $400 million has been spent or is earmarked for developing the Camden waterfront, about half from government sources or the port authority, according to waterfront development officials.
But while the new attractions are drawing suburbanites to the struggling city, their visits have not yet had a ripple effect. No restaurants have sprung up to feed the new tourists. No retailers associated with an urban renaissance have opened shop.
In many ways, the waterfront remains separated from the rest of Camden - a gap now represented by giant parking lots.
Critics say the money being invested is not having an effect in the city's neighborhoods.
"One of the things we've been saying since they built the New Jersey Aquarium [a decade ago] is that there is an imbalance in the type of funding you see for waterfront development versus neighborhood and small-business development," said Roy Jones, a community activist and small-business consultant.
"Just walk off the waterfront and you'll see waterfront development has made no difference in our neighborhoods," he said.
Planners say it will take years for development to spread outward.
Judi London, executive director of the Camden Waterfront Marketing Bureau, said the transformation of former industrial wasteland was never intended to be the cure-all for Camden's ills. "It was meant to be a catalyst for change," she said.
Mayor Gwendolyn Faison said making the waterfront a family-friendly destination was good for Camden's image and would generate jobs, especially if it succeeded in attracting hotels and restaurants.
She also wants to see Penn's Landing developed so that Camden and Philadelphia can work together to make the river a destination.
"We could all share in the waterfront," she said.
Camden's waterfront development has been overseen by the nonprofit Cooper's Ferry Development Association, a counterpoint to the Penn's Landing Corp. on the Philadelphia side of the river.
Cooper's Ferry has not used a public process to come up with a vision for the waterfront, as some other cities have. Its board includes state, city and county officials, the port authority, and seven companies, as well as community and religious leaders.
Thomas Corcoran, its longtime executive director, said the success of the Camden waterfront has been due to several factors, including financial backing from the state and from the port authority, which uses some of its revenue from bridge tolls to support regional economic development.
The 90-acre waterfront also is seven times larger than Penn's Landing, giving Camden more flexibility.
Cooper's Ferry has drawn up a master plan for the site that, Corcoran notes, is "always evolving" and now includes hoped-for offices, marinas, restaurants, a hotel-conference center, apartments, and a museum of recorded sound.
The new projects would cost another $400 million, he said, and the aim is to accomplish it with $300 million in private investment.
"If we're doing our job right, that's what's supposed to happen," he said.
"We've concentrated on each separate project as it came on line," Corcoran said. "Because we had that approach, we never had our eggs in one basket with one developer."
That's counter to what has happened at Penn's Landing, with its history of single developers coming in with plans to transform the site but then walking away years later.
Still, for every project to reach completion on the Camden waterfront, there is another one that never got done. The might-have-beens include Campbell Soup Co.'s world headquarters, a Chamber of Commerce office tower, an early attempt at a hotel-conference center, and a festival market.
Corcoran said that while Penn's Landing has the physical obstacle of being cut off from Center City by Interstate 95, the Camden waterfront has had to deal with the psychological barrier created by the city's story of crime and decline.
But that barrier has been coming down as more and more people go to Camden to visit the aquarium and the battleship, attend concerts, or watch Camden Riversharks baseball games.
"We'll have two million people come to the waterfront this year," Corcoran said. That beats the 1.6 million who went to the Phillies' home games this year.
Although that's just a fraction of the 12 million to 15 million people who visit Baltimore's Inner Harbor each year, waterfront promoters believe that 10.8 million people would come to a fully developed Camden waterfront and a tourist-friendly Penn's Landing by 2006.
Next year, a light-rail line between Trenton and Camden will begin operation and terminate at the Tweeter Center. The line has the potential to take more people to the waterfront directly and serve as a connector to the PATCO High-Speed Line's Broadway Station.
But because the light rail will stop operating at 10 p.m., its usefulness for getting home from nighttime events, including concerts and baseball games, is doubtful.
There is no obstacle, however, to running the light rail in downtown Camden after 10 p.m., and PATCO is talking to NJ Transit about running a special shuttle service between Broadway and the waterfront when there are nighttime events.
Corcoran said that while Camden could complete its projects without Penn's Landing, development on the Philadelphia side of the river was still needed, especially if tourists were going to want to stay overnight.
"The more they do, the more we can do," he said.
The port authority also would like to see more happening at Penn's Landing, or its planned aerial tram runs the risk of operating in the red.
The Philadelphia-Camden waterfront could surpass Baltimore's Inner Harbor as an attraction, but Penn's Landing is the missing link needed to connect the river to Old City and Independence Hall, said Michael S. Rubin, president of MRA International, a Philadelphia consulting firm involved in entertainment-based development.
The port authority has a $395,000 contract with Rubin's firm to design a strategy for transforming the Delaware River waterfront into a powerful tourist attraction. Last week, Rubin presented his plan, which would brand the area from the Liberty Bell to the Camden waterfront as "Independence Harbor" and do intensive marketing.
In the meantime, Camden's waterfront has a more immediate role in the city's revival. That includes $25 million to expand the aquarium in the McGreevey administration's $175 million Camden recovery bill. The money will be loaned to Steiner + Associates, an Ohio developer, for its $30 million plan to double the size of the Camden aquarium, including adding a shark tank, a hippo exhibit, and a restaurant.
Steiner also plans to lure other restaurants to the site.
Roger Dennis, the provost of Rutgers University's Camden campus, said an attractive, activity-filled waterfront with easy connections to Philadelphia would encourage more students to consider living on campus. About 12 percent of the university's 5,500 students now live on or near the campus.
More residents, in turn, should spur more business opportunities around the campus, which is on the northern edge of Camden's downtown.
Msgr. Robert McDermott, president of the St. Joseph's Carpenter Society, which builds low- and middle-income housing in Camden, and a member of the Cooper's Ferry board, takes a long view of things.
"This city has been broken for so long, it's not going to be fixed overnight."
Contact Joseph Gambardello at 856-779-3868 or jgambardello@phillynews.com
See the original article with photos and related story links at the Philadelphia Inquirer.
ETHNIC MEDIA SECTOR IS GROWING
By Terence Smith, a NewsHour with Jim Lehrer transcript
Others standing still(10/14/2002)
JIM LEHRER: Now, a growing media story, about one segment in the United States that is expanding while others are standing still. Media correspondent Terence Smith has our report.
Ethnic media sector is growing
TERENCE SMITH: These are the faces of a changing California, the so-called new California, where minorities are now the majority. In the last census, 53 percent of Californians identified themselves as non-white. That's some 18 million people, 40 percent of whom speak a language other than English at home.
MAN: So help me God.
GROUP: So help me God.
MAN: Congratulations, and welcome as American citizens.
TERENCE SMITH: And what is happening in California is happening elsewhere around the nation, which is in the midst of the greatest wave of immigration in nearly a century.
TERENCE SMITH: Not surprisingly, these are boom times as well for ethnic and foreign language media. In an era when many mainstream English-language news organizations are actually losing readers and viewers, the ethnic sector is growing rapidly.
And it has impact. A recent survey found that ethnic media reach 84 percent of the three largest minority groups in California. In fact, the Spanish language Univision Station in Los Angeles has a larger audience than any of the English-speaking stations.
KSCI-Television is another thriving ethnic station. From studios in Los Angeles, it broadcasts in 14 different languages during the course of a typical day. Its audience has quadrupled in the last five years.
SPOKESMAN: It's primarily Chinese, Korean, Tagalog for the Filipino community, Vietnamese, and Japanese.
TERENCE SMITH: Jon Yasuda, a third- generation Japanese American, runs the 25-year-old KSCI. He says up to 1.5 million people may be watching at any given time.
JON YASUDA, President & CEO, KSCI-TV: What we try to provide is a mixture of local news and news from their home country. So it gives them a feel for what's happening here in the Los Angeles and southern California area, but also gives them a feel for what's happening back home.
Importance in the community
TERENCE SMITH: On a recent day, KSCI highlighted a story important to its viewers: The first Taiwanese baseball player to make the major leagues was called up by the Los Angeles Dodgers.
JON YASUDA: That's big news within the Chinese community, so we gave it a little more coverage than what you would see on general markets.
TERENCE SMITH: Indeed they did. KSCI blanketed the story, while the local network-owned stations ignored it, offering instead the usual highlights from the Dodgers' game.
KSCI also covers general news in the studio and on the streets. KSCI reporter Harry Chang says the station provides a bridge between the old world and the new. In San Gabriel, east of Los Angeles, he samples opinion on the story of the day, Iraq. KSCI emphasizes success stories within the community, but tries to avoid boosterism and outright advocacy.
JON YASUDA: We see ourselves more as serving the community and providing them with information and news in assisting them in the assimilation and acculturation process, as opposed to advocating on behalf of them here in this region.
TERENCE SMITH: Assisting and assimilation is an important role for ethnic media, in the view of Sandra Ball-Rokeach, who heads an ethnic media program at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.
SANDRA BALL-ROKEACH, University of Southern California: It's something we have been talking about for four years now, trying to get people to recognize the importance of these media in the daily lives of large, large populations. Not only for understanding their home country, but also leading their everyday lives, like where to go to purchase goods, where to go to have recreation. Where is it safe? What's going on in the community that you should know about?
TERENCE SMITH: Representatives of some 400 ethnic media organizations came to this Los Angeles hotel for an award ceremony that is known as the "Ethnic Pulitzers."
The awards recognized outstanding work by journalists who write and broadcast in 21 languages serving a vast and diverse community that politicians, advertisers, and mainstream media largely ignore.
SPOKESPERSON: Congratulations.
TERENCE SMITH: Phil Bronstein, executive editor of The San Francisco Chronicle, was honored for his paper's coverage of immigrant communities. He says the mainstream media have a lot to learn from their mostly smaller ethnic counterparts.
PHIL BRONSTEIN, San Francisco Chronicle: The mainstream media ignores the communities, and then, of course, by extension ignores the ethnic press. In San Francisco, to me that would be suicide, because the ethnic communities are not only such a large part of the community, but such a big and significant cultural part. So for us it's a no-brainer.
TERENCE SMITH: Bronstein credits Sandy Close, the founder of New California Media, a consortium of ethnic news organizations, with raising the visibility of ethnic media. The Chronicle runs a series of news briefs from ethnic outlets each week, and has joined with some ethnic organizations to report sensitive stories that can be hard for an Anglo reporter to cover.
PHIL BRONSTEIN: We've had any number of stories like that, where our understanding and appreciation for that community or for any community really was helped, if not initiated by Sandy and New California Media, helped by them significantly.
TERENCE SMITH: Sandy Close
SANDY CLOSE, Executive Director, New California Media: Ethnic media themselves are coming together. They recognize that if you really want to knit together the horizontal city, it isn't just about the Chinese media getting visibility for itself, or the Spanish media, or the black media. It's about each of these media come together to make a big bang, to showcase all of this segment that for so long has been in the shadows, so long been treated as kind of an afterthought or footnote of American journalism.
TERENCE SMITH: La Opinion, the largest and most established Spanish-language newspaper in the country, is anything but a footnote. 130,000 people buy the paper each day. But industry studies show that between 500,000 and 700,000 actually read it, according to editor Gerardo Lopez.
GERARDO LOPEZ, Editor, La Opinion: When people call us ethnic media, they usually have a connotation that we are a second-class journalism publication, or that we are somehow biased, or that we have to package our newspaper just so we can advocate for something. We are a mainstream newspaper in this country.
TERENCE SMITH: But you happen to publish in another language.
GERARDO LOPEZ: We happen... yeah.
TERENCE SMITH: The paper is owned by the Lozano Family and the Tribune Company, which also publishes The Los Angeles Times.
GERARDO LOPEZ: Our journalism is, on one end, the traditional type. We send the news like everybody else, just the way it is. We also do a great deal of public service journalism because of the fact that we... our readers need some explanations of certain things.
TERENCE SMITH: Reporter Maria Luisa Arredondo has been tracking a story about proposed cutbacks at Los Angeles county hospitals, which would disproportionately hurt the poor.
She interviews in English and Spanish, as all La Opinion reporters do. Her story, which made page one, was not covered that day by The Los Angeles Times or the local network affiliates. Attorney Sylvia Argueta of the Legal Aid Foundation says La Opinon plays a critical role in the community she serves.
SYLVIA ARGUETA: We work with low-income people in East Los Angeles, and it's amazing how many of them walk in with the newspaper in their hand. That's where they get their information. No matter how low-income they are-- and the people we see are very low-income -- they always have enough to buy the paper, make an effort to at least share it with people and really keep themselves informed.
TERENCE SMITH: La Opinion's readers have responded. The paper's circulation has grown nearly 30 percent in the last three years. The paper also focuses on news beyond the border, much of it lately in Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Venezuela.
GERARDO LOPEZ: We define international news as anything that happens outside this country. The rest of the editors, or most of the editors in this country, would define international news as anything outside the United States. Not us.
Impact on advertisement
TERENCE SMITH: La Opinion and KSCI-TV have succeeded where many other ethnic media have failed, by attracting national advertisers.
SPOKESMAN: Among her clients are Northwest Airlines, J.C. Penney...
TERENCE SMITH: How to attract those advertisers, the lifeblood of most media outlets, was among the topics discussed at this convention in Los Angeles, where hundreds of ethnic news organizations and advertisers came together to network and collaborate. Heide Gardner of the American Advertising Federation:
HEIDE GARDNER, American Advertising Federation: There is a gap. There is an information gap. Many national advertisers are still not aware of the opportunities they have by targeting multicultural consumers. Growth is flat in the general market in many product categories, and so there is tremendous opportunity by targeting multicultural consumers.
TERENCE SMITH: Calculating the size of that multicultural audience has been difficult as ethnic media try to sell themselves to advertisers. Nonetheless, says Sandra Ball-Rokeach:
SANDRA BALL-ROKEACH: If I were an advertiser of whatever consumer product, I would want to put ads in these media. Those are the media that these people go to in large, large numbers to make decisions about where to go and what to buy.
TERENCE SMITH: And what of the future?
SANDRA BALL-ROKEACH: The question I have is, will the thing that used to happen with immigrant media happen again, or will something new happen? In the past, immigrant media survived only through about the third generation, and then they tended to die off. So the question for me now is, will they stay around?
TERENCE SMITH: For now, the answer is yes.
See also the original transcript page with audio and video where you can also--or instead--listen to this story or watch it.
FISH CATCH LEVELING OFF
By Janet Larsen, Earth Policy Institute
Some scientists say world catch since 1988 has been declining(2002)--The world fish catch in 2000, the last year for which global data are available, was reported at 94.8 million tons. After decades of steady growth, the oceanic fish catch has plateaued and since the late 1980s has fluctuated between 85 million and 95 million tons. Some three fourths of oceanic fisheries are fished at or beyond their sustainable yields. In one third of these, stocks are declining.
Some scientists, when correcting for suspected overreporting by China, the world's leading fishing nation, believe that global catch has actually declined by 360,000 tons each year since 1988. When catch of the highly variable stocks of Peruvian anchovetas, a species substantially affected by El Niņo/Southern Oscillation events, is excluded, the world fish catch appears to have declined by 660,000 tons a year during that time.
Recent evidence points to a rapid decline in production of the North Atlantic Ocean, where catches of many popular fish species, including cod, tuna, haddock, flounder, and hake, have dropped by half within the past 50 years, even though fishing efforts tripled. Previous infamous collapses, like that of the Newfoundland cod fishery, were local in scale, but this decline is ocean-wide.
At least $2.5 billion of government money goes to subsidize fishing in the North Atlantic each year, supporting incomes and paying portions of boat fuel and equipment bills. Worldwide, fishing subsidies total at least $15 billion, but may be substantially higher. In 1993, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reported that the operating costs of fisheries around the world exceeded commercial revenues by over $50 billion each year. Without subsidies, the world's fishing industry would be bankrupt.
About 950 million people worldwide rely on fish as their primary source of protein. In addition, ocean fisheries and fish-related industries sustain the livelihoods of some 200 million people. These are high numbers to sustain on a bankrupt industry.
Subsidies hide the fact that current fishing practices are unsustainable, both economically and ecologically. Subsidy money has helped to build a technologically advanced global fishing fleet of over 23,000 ships weighing more than 100 tons each. Massive ships, such as trawlers, drag big nets--quickly catching large quantities of fish and bycatch. Some vessels have onboard processing facilities. Large ships consume a great deal of energy: it takes twice as much fuel to capture a ton of fish today as it did 20 years ago. Overall, the world's fishing fleet has the capacity to catch fish at more than twice the fisheries' sustainable yields.
As fish harvests from the ocean are steady or declining, production of fish from farms (aquaculture) is booming. Since 1990, aquaculture production has grown by almost 10 percent each year, more than twice the rate for poultry, the second fastest-growing sector of the animal protein economy. Total fish-farm production in 2000 was almost 36 million tons. In 1950, aquaculture provided less than 1 percent of the fish supply; now it accounts for a full 27 percent of the world fish market.
Growing fish in pens and ponds could reduce pressure on oceanic fisheries, but only if it is done wisely. A number of popular farmed fish, like salmon and shrimp, are carnivorous, requiring fish from the oceans to be harvested to provide fish meal and fish oil for their food. Some species require up to 5 kilograms of wild fish for each kilogram of fish produced. Harvesting fish for feed can empty oceans of smaller fish, depriving larger wild fish of their food supply.
China, which provides 23 million tons of the world aquaculture output, has farmed fish for thousands of years. It now devotes some 5 million hectares of land to farming primarily herbivorous fish. An additional 1.7 million hectares of rice paddies double as fish ponds. China has developed an innovative carp polyculture, in which several carp species with complementary feeding habits are grown together as they would in natural ecosystems.
China's onshore, integrated aquaculture and agriculture production system can serve as a model for aquaculturalists. Onshore production can minimize problems that plague marine aquaculture operations, such as coastal habitat destruction and excessive nutrient pollution, which can cause algal blooms. It also reduces the risk of introducing nonnative species through escapes and spreading diseases that fish in high-density confinement are prone to.
For a number of oceanic fisheries, a deliberate reduction of fishing, along with the development of "no-take" protected areas, is the only way for stocks to rebuild. Marine reserves have been shown to increase fish populations and diversity and to produce larger fish both within their boundaries as well as in commercially accessible waters. In a matter of a few years, a nearby off-limits area can revive a foundering fishery.
To protect wild stocks, consumers can reduce their overall fish consumption, or at least purchase responsibly produced herbivorous fish or those caught from well-managed fisheries. The Marine Stewardship Council, an independently operated international accreditation organization, has certified six fisheries as sustainable. Careful management of fisheries can be likened to prudent use of an endowment: if the principal, or the stock, is conserved, people can live off the interest indefinitely.
See also the original article with data and graphs at the Earth Policy Institute.
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