Wednesday, September 30, 2009
North Korea could opt for devastating land assault
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WASHINGTON - North Korea's nuclear threats are grabbing the world's attention. But if the North were to strike South Korea today, it would probably first try to savage Seoul with the men and missiles of its huge conventional army.
The attack might well begin with artillery and missiles capable of hitting South Korea's capital with little or no warning. North Korea's vast cadre of commandos could try to infiltrate and cause chaos while the South tried to respond.
The hair-trigger nature of the danger is reflected in the pledge of preparedness that American ground forces stationed just below the North-South divide have lived by for decades: "Fight tonight."
If it came to war, destruction - civilian and military - would be heavy, even if the North held back whatever nuclear weapons it may have. The consensus American view, generally shared by allies, is that the South would prevail but at enormous human cost, including a refugee crisis on the Korean peninsula.
Fears of military conflict have increased this week, particularly regarding disputed waters off the western coast, after North Korea conducted an apparent nuclear test on Monday and then renounced the armistice that has kept relative peace between the Koreas. It has held since the two sides fought to a standstill - with the U.S. and the U.N. backing the South and China and Russia supporting the North - in the 1950-53 Korean War.
The North is threatening to respond in "self defense" if the U.N. Security Council imposes more sanctions as punishment for the nuclear test, which Washington and others say violated previous U.N. resolutions.
At the outset of the Korean War, which began 59 years ago next month, North Korean armor rolled across the border, catching the South by surprise. An emergency U.S. defense effort initially crumbled, and the North's forces almost succeeded in pushing the Americans off the tip of the peninsula.
U.S. and South Korean forces have had nearly six decades to anticipate how a renewed attack might unfold and how they would respond. The expectation is that the North would slip commandos, commonly called special operating forces, across the Demilitarized Zone that divides the North and South or into southern waters aboard small submarines to carry out sabotage and assassination.
In congressional testimony in March, the commander of U.S. forces in Korea, Gen. Walter L. Sharp, estimated that the North has more than 80,000 such commandos. He said it is the largest special operating force in the world, with "tough, well-trained and profoundly loyal troops" who are capable of clandestine missions such as sabotaging critical civilian infrastructure as well as attacking military targets.
The South has had glimpses of the commando capabilities. Until recent years the North would routinely infiltrate agents across the DMZ. One of its submarines ran aground in South Korea during a failed spying mission in 1996.
Sharp said North Korea's army is the world's fourth largest with 1.2 million troops on active duty, backed by as many as 7 million reserves, with an estimated 1,700 military aircraft, 800 naval vessels and more than 13,000 artillery pieces. The numbers do not tell the entire story, though. Much of the North's equipment is old and decrepit, and it lacks the high-tech reconnaissance capabilities of the South.
Sharp did not mention chemical weapons, but it is widely believed the North has a chemical capability that it could unleash in the early stages of a land war to demoralize defending forces and deny the use of mobilization centers, storage areas and military bases.
Complicating the defensive calculations of the South and its American allies is the immutable fact that Seoul, with a population of about 10 million, lies about 35 miles south of the DMZ - within easy range of much of the North's artillery.
"It's a very, very direct route. That's always been the problem, right from the early days," said Kerry Brown, an Asia analyst at London's Chatham House think tank. "It's very vulnerable to a sudden, savage all-out military attack."
Robert W. RisCassi, a retired four-star Army general who commanded U.S. forces in Korea from 1990-93, said in a telephone interview Friday that the North's navy is no match for the South's and its air forces are weak and overmatched. Resources, including fuel, are a major limitation for the North.
"They don't fly enough hours to be really proficient," RisCassi said of the North Korean air force.
North Korea can be reached by U.S. Air Force F-16 jets from bases in northern Japan in about 30 minutes, and a squadron of new-generation F-22 fighters should deploy to the southern Japan island of Okinawa on Saturday. North Korea has been shrilly critical of the F-22 deployment, announced well before this week's nuclear test, because the fighters - which are difficult to detect on radar and capable of cruising at supersonic speed - are seen by the North as a threat to its air defenses.
The U.S. Navy's 7th Fleet, based just south of Tokyo, has two destroyers focused on North Korea at all times, meaning they are either in the Sea of Japan or can get there on short notice.
RisCassi said Kim Jong Il, the reclusive leader of North Korea, lost any "bolt-out-of-the-blue" invasion option he may have enjoyed when U.S. and South Korean forces were placed on heightened alert earlier this week.
"Whether he wants to play that card, no one knows, but I think he knows that if he plays it, he's going to lose and he's going to lose North Korea," RisCassi said.
Although the U.S. has a relatively small ground force of about 28,500 troops in South Korea, the key to American support in the event of a sudden invasion would air and naval power. The U.S. has fighters, bombers and an array of other Air Force and Navy warplanes not only stationed in South Korea but also at bases in Japan, Guam and elsewhere in the Pacific.
By ROBERT BURNS, AP National Security Writer
Labels: Korean War, North Korea, trends newsletter
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Monday, September 28, 2009
Opium takes over entire Afghan families, villages
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SARAB, Afghanistan - Open the door to Islam Beg's house and the thick opium smoke rushes out into the cold mountain air, like steam from a bathhouse. It's just past 8 a.m. and the family of six - including a 1-year-old baby boy - is already curled up at the lip of the opium pipe.
Beg, 65, breathes in and exhales a cloud of smoke. He passes the pipe to his wife. She passes it to their daughter. The daughter blows the opium smoke into the baby's tiny mouth. The baby's eyes roll back into his head.
Their faces are gaunt. Their hair is matted. They smell.
In dozens of mountain hamlets in this remote corner of Afghanistan, opium addiction has become so entrenched that whole families - from toddlers to old men - are addicts. The addiction moves from house to house, infecting entire communities cut off from the rest of the world by glacial streams. From just one family years ago, at least half the people of Sarab, population 1,850, are now addicts.
Afghanistan supplies nearly all the world's opium, the raw ingredient used to make heroin, and while most of the deadly crop is exported, enough is left behind to create a vicious cycle of addiction. There are at least 200,000 opium and heroin addicts in Afghanistan - 50,000 more than in the much bigger, wealthier U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and a 2005 survey by the U.N. A new survey is expected to show even higher rates of addiction, a window into the human toll of Afghanistan's back-to-back wars and desperate poverty.
Unlike in the West, the close-knit nature of communities here makes addiction a family affair. Instead of passing from one rebellious teenager to another, the habit passes from mother to daughter, father to son. It's turning villages like this one into a landscape of human depredation.
Except for a few soiled mats, Beg's house is bare. He has pawned all his family's belongings to pay for drugs.
"I am ashamed of what I have become," says Beg, an unwashed turban curled on his head. "I've lost my self-respect. I've lost my values. I take the food from this child to pay for my opium," he says, pointing to his 5-year-old grandson, Mamadin. "He just stays hungry."
Beg's forefathers owned much of the land in the village, located beside a gushing stream at the end of a canyon of craggy mountains in Badakshan province, hundreds of miles (kilometers) northeast of Kabul, Afghanistan's capital.
He once had 1,200 sheep. He sold them off one by one to pay for drugs.
The land followed. He's turned his spacious home, once lined with ornamental carpets, into a mud shell. He grows potatoes in rows in the last of his fields and each time he harvests the crop, he has to make a choice - feed his grandchildren, or buy opium. He usually chooses drugs.
Basic necessities like soap long ago fell by the wayside.
"If we have 50 cents, we buy opium and we smoke it. We don't use the 50 cents to buy soap to clean our clothes," explains Raihan, Beg's daughter and the mother of the 1-year-old. The toddler wears a filthy shirt and no underwear. "I can be out of food, but not out of opium."
The country's few drug treatment centers are in cities far from villages like this one. And even those able to get themselves to the cities are often unable to get help. The drug clinic in Takhar province, the nearest to Sarab, has a waiting list of 2,000 people and only 30 beds.
So the villagers are drowning in opium. They begin taking it when they are sick, relying on its anesthetic properties - opium is also used to make morphine. Sarab, a village located at 8,000 feet (2,438 meters) and snowed in for up to three months a year, is a day's walk over mountain paths to the nearest hospital. The few shops in town do not even sell aspirin.
"Opium is our doctor," says Beg. "When your stomach hurts, you take a smoke. Then you take a little more. And a little more. And then, you're addicted. Once you're hooked, it's over. You're finished."
When his grandson Shamsuddin, 1, cut his finger in the door jamb, Beg blew opium smoke into the child's mouth, a common practice in this part of the world which is now resulting in rampant child addiction. He doesn't want his grandchild to become an addict, but he says he has no choice. "If there is no medicine here, what should we do? The only way to make him feel better is to give him opium."
From a single smoke, they progress to a three-times-a-day habit that spreads. When Beg began using opium, it wasn't just his wife and daughter who followed suit. It was his brother. Then his brother's wife. Like an epidemic, it makes its way across the village.
Health workers say that to treat the addiction, they need to treat the entire community. Last year, the Ministry of Health took 120 addicts from Sarab to a facility in a town one day's drive away to be treated. Three months later, they found that 115 of the 120 had relapsed.
"First my neighbor started doing opium again," explains Noor, one of the women treated, whose eyes are dark caves. "Then my cousin. Then my husband. And then after a while, I also started."
Most of the addicts spend $3 to $4 a day on opium in a part of the world where people earn on average $2. They sell their land and go deeply into debt to maintain their habit.
"I used to be a rich man," says Dadar, a man who looks to be in his 70s and whose family of seven is addicted. "I had cattle. I had land. And then I started smoking. I sold the cattle. I sold my land. Now I have nothing."
He wears an old windbreaker encrusted with dirt. His wife pulls back her lips to show a mouth full of diseased teeth. Their grandchildren have knotted hair and ripped clothes stained with muck.
Because they've sold their cattle, they no longer eat meat. When they sold the last of their land, they also lost their wheat, potatoes and greens. Their diet now consists of tea and the occasional piece of bread given by a neighbor.
Village chief Sahib Dad says even those who are not addicted are forced to pay a price.
"When a person gets addicted, he has nothing to eat," says Dad. "That affects his neighbor because the neighbor is forced to give over a part of his food. For this reason, all of us are poorer."
After selling their land, some families resort to even more desperate measures. They take loans from the shopkeepers who sell them drugs. Then they sell their daughters, known as 'opium brides,' to settle the debt. They lease their sons.
"I know he is angry with me. But what can I do? I have nothing left to sell," says Jan Begum, who has sent her 14-year-old to do construction work for the drug dealers. "I tried to stop, but I can't. Whenever I do, the pain becomes unbearable."
The problem is compounded by Afghanistan's neighbors. Iran immediately to the west has the world's highest per capita heroin use. The heroin labs there, as well as in Pakistan to the east, use opium imported from Afghanistan. These countries are now exporting heroin addiction back to Afghanistan in the form of returning refugees.
Like opium, heroin in Afghanistan is biting off whole families. Gul Pari, 13, watched her mother get high on heroin when she and her brother were in elementary school. Now she lies in a bed in a drug treatment center for women in Kabul. Her 15-year-old brother Zaihar is across town in a rehab facility for men.
Their bodies are like brittle sticks. The 13-year-old tries to push herself up on one elbow, but her thin arm cannot hold her up, so she falls back onto the pillow. Her emaciated brother leans against a wall to steady himself.
What will happen when they go home is unknown. They live with their mother - a recovering heroin addict - under a tarp in the yard of an abandoned house.
Mohammad Asef, a health worker at the clinic taking care of Zaihar Pari, says he is worried about the boy's chances of recovering. "In America people go and get high in the park. In Afghanistan, they do it in the home," says Asef. "They bring it inside. They burn it on the family stove. Everyone sees. So everyone is affected."
In Sarab, villagers who are not addicted keep their distance from those who are. They don't invite them into their homes. They discourage them from coming to village meetings. It's as if they are trying to quarantine themselves.
Beg says that for him all hope is lost. Even after he is buried, it'll take 70 years for the opium to ooze out of his bones. His hope, he says, are his grandkids - the only people in the family who are not yet addicts.
As Beg is getting high on a recent morning, the 1-year-old crawls over and starts playing with the opium pipe. He picks it up and shakes it, as if it were a rattle. Then, imitating his grandfather, he raises the pipe to his mouth.
By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI, Associated Press Writer
Labels: drugs, opium, trends newsletter
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Friday, September 25, 2009
Powerful Ideas: Military Develops 'Cybug' Spies
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Miniature robots could be good spies, but researchers now are experimenting with insect cyborgs or "cybugs" that could work even better.
Scientists can already control the flight of real moths using implanted devices.
The military and spy world no doubt would love tiny, live camera-wielding versions of Predator drones that could fly undetected into places where no human could ever go to snoop on the enemy. Developing such robots has proven a challenge so far, with one major hurdle being inventing an energy source for the droids that is both low weight and high power. Still, evidence that such machines are possible is ample in nature in the form of insects, which convert biological energy into flight.
It makes sense to pattern robots after insects - after all, they must be doing something right, seeing as they are the most successful animals on the planet, comprising roughly 75 percent of all animal species known to humanity. Indeed, scientists have patterned robots after insects and other animals for decades - to mimic cockroach wall-crawling, for instance, or the grasshopper's leap.
Mechanical metamorphosis
Instead of attempting to create sophisticated robots that imitate the complexity in the insect form that required millions of years of evolution to achieve, scientists now essentially want to hijack bugs for use as robots.
Originally researchers sought to control insects by gluing machinery onto their backs, but such links were not always reliable. To overcome this hurdle, the Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (HI-MEMS) program is sponsoring research into surgically implanting microchips straight into insects as they grow, intertwining their nerves and muscles with circuitry that can then steer the critters. As expensive as these devices might be to manufacture and embed in the bugs, they could still prove cheaper than building miniature robots from scratch.
As these cyborgs heal from their surgery while they naturally metamorphose from one developmental stage to the next - for instance, from caterpillar to butterfly - the result would yield a more reliable connection between the devices and the insects, the thinking goes. The fact that insects are immobile during some of these stages - for instance, when they are metamorphosing in cocoons - means they can be manipulated far more easily than if they were actively wriggling, meaning that devices could be implanted with assembly-line routine, significantly lowering costs.
The HI-MEMS program at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has to date invested $12 million into research since it began in 2006. It currently supports these cybug projects:
* Roaches at Texas A&M.
* Horned beetles at University of Michigan and the University of California at Berkeley.
* Moths at an MIT-led team, and another moth project at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research.
Success with moths
So far researchers have successfully embedded MEMS into developing insects, and living adult insects have emerged with the embedded systems intact, a DARPA spokesperson told LiveScience. Researchers have also demonstrated that such devices can indeed control the flight of moths, albeit when they are tethered.
To power the devices, instead of relying on batteries, the hope is to convert the heat and mechanical energy the insect generates as it moves into electricity. The insects themselves could be optimized to generate electricity.
When the researchers can properly control the insects using the embedded devices, the cybugs might then enter the field, equipped with cameras, microphones and other sensors to help them spy on targets or sniff out explosives. Although insects do not always live very long in the wild, the cyborgs' lives could be prolonged by attaching devices that feed them.
The scientists are now working toward controlled, untethered flight, with the final goal being delivering the insect within 15 feet (5 m) of a specific target located 300 feet (100 meters) away, using electronic remote control by radio or GPS or both, standing still on arrival.
Although flying insects such as moths and dragonflies are of great interest, hopping and swimming insects could also be useful, too, DARPA noted. It's conceivable that eventually a swarm of cybugs could converge on targets by land, sea and air.
Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience
Labels: cyborgs, cybugs, Miniature robots, trends newsletter
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Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Scientists Claim New State of Matter Created
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Scientists claim to have created a form of aluminum that's nearly transparent to extreme ultraviolet radiation and which is a new state of matter.
It's an idea straight out of science fiction, featured in the movie "Star Trek IV." The work is detailed in the journal Nature Physics.
The normal states of matter are solid, liquid and gas, and a fourth state, called plasma, is a superheated gas considered more exotic. Other experiments have created strange states of matter for brief periods. This one, too, existed only briefly.
To create the new, even more exotic stuff, a short pulse from a laser "knocked out" a core electron from every aluminum atom in a sample without disrupting the metal's crystalline structure, the researchers explain.
''What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before," said professor Justin Wark of Oxford University's Department of Physics.
"Transparent aluminum is just the start," Wark said. "The physical properties of the matter we are creating are relevant to the conditions inside large planets, and we also hope that by studying it we can gain a greater understanding of what is going on during the creation of 'miniature stars' created by high-power laser implosions, which may one day allow the power of nuclear fusion to be harnessed here on Earth."
Fusion is a dream of scientists who would create cheap and plentiful power by fusing atoms together, as opposed to nuclear fission that generates electricity today.
The discovery was made possible with a high-powered synchrotron radiation generator called the FLASH laser, based in Hamburg, Germany. It produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the output of a power plant that provides electricity to a whole city.
The Oxford team, along with their international colleagues, focused all this power down into a spot with a diameter less than a twentieth of the width of a human hair. At such high intensities the aluminum turned transparent.
While the invisible effect lasted for only an extremely brief period - an estimated 40 femtoseconds - it demonstrates that such an exotic state of matter can be created using very high power X-ray sources.
"What is particularly remarkable about our experiment is that we have turned ordinary aluminum into this exotic new material in a single step by using this very powerful laser," Wark said. "For a brief period the sample looks and behaves in every way like a new form of matter. In certain respects, the way it reacts is as though we had changed every aluminum atom into silicon: it's almost as surprising as finding that you can turn lead into gold with light."
Livescience Staff
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Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Kasparov, Karpov re-match seeks to put chess back in spotlight
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VALENCIA, Spain (AFP) - Chess legends Garry Kasparov and Anatoli Karpov said Monday they hope the re-match of their epic 1984 world championship this week in Spain will renew interest in the game.
"We are here to recover, if not a golden age at least a silver age, for chess," Karpov, 58, told a joint news conference with his old foe Kasparov in Valencia in eastern Spain on the eve of the start of their clash.
Kasparov, 46, who has been active in the political opposition to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin since withdrawing from competitive chess in 2005 and setting up his own political party, said the World Chess Federation "had let the game die".
"The chess that is played today is more technical, more aggressive, with younger players, but it has lost its glamour," he added.
"The duel will put chess in the spotlight once again, as it did 25 years ago," he said in an interview published in Spanish daily El Pais on Monday.
That epic encounter in Moscow lasted five months before the World Chess Federation, in a controversial move, stopped the duel without a clear winner on alleged health grounds though both players said they wanted to continue.
Karpov, who was 33 at the time, had won five of the matches, Kasparov, who was only 21, won three and 40 more were draws.
In their 1985 rematch, Kasparov beat Karpov narrowly, becoming the youngest world champion, and defended his title the following year.
The last time he played Karpov was in 1990 when he narrowly won.
Their new duel will have only 12 games -- four semi-rapid and eight rapid -- with the two men facing off under the watch of Dutch chess arbiter Geurt Gijssen in Valencia, known as the birthplace of modern chess.
The tournament officially gets under way Monday with both players facing local personalities, but the real action begins Tuesday when Kasparov and Karpov play their first match of the series. It ends on Friday.
Kasparov acknowledged that the match will not carry the same suspense as the 1984 Moscow showdown, when he was challenging then world champion Karpov.
"Don't expect a match with the same quality as 25 years ago," he said.
Kasparov, who earlier said it would be more a "ceremonial tournament", has been training in the Norwegian capital Oslo with the 18-year-old chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen.
Karpov, the undisputed world chess champion from 1975 to 1985 and FIDE world chess champion from 1993 to 1999, has been sparring with a computer and a group of grandmasters, including Moldavia's Viktor Bologan, from a base on the Spanish coast.
Both men are considered among the greatest chess players ever.
The matches will be broadcast live on the Valencia regional government website (www.gva.es). Organisers said they expect some 10 million web users to follow the event.
Kasparov also called for the promotion of chess saying the game could have an "outstanding" social role "in schools, as a prevention for Alzheimer's."
"But good ideas aren't enough, they have to be financed, organised, and promoted," Kasparov urged.
Karpov echoed this view, telling El Pais: "I am convinced that chess is going to have growing importance as a social tool."
"We are here to recover, if not a golden age at least a silver age, for chess," Karpov, 58, told a joint news conference with his old foe Kasparov in Valencia in eastern Spain on the eve of the start of their clash.
Kasparov, 46, who has been active in the political opposition to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin since withdrawing from competitive chess in 2005 and setting up his own political party, said the World Chess Federation "had let the game die".
"The chess that is played today is more technical, more aggressive, with younger players, but it has lost its glamour," he added.
"The duel will put chess in the spotlight once again, as it did 25 years ago," he said in an interview published in Spanish daily El Pais on Monday.
That epic encounter in Moscow lasted five months before the World Chess Federation, in a controversial move, stopped the duel without a clear winner on alleged health grounds though both players said they wanted to continue.
Karpov, who was 33 at the time, had won five of the matches, Kasparov, who was only 21, won three and 40 more were draws.
In their 1985 rematch, Kasparov beat Karpov narrowly, becoming the youngest world champion, and defended his title the following year.
The last time he played Karpov was in 1990 when he narrowly won.
Their new duel will have only 12 games -- four semi-rapid and eight rapid -- with the two men facing off under the watch of Dutch chess arbiter Geurt Gijssen in Valencia, known as the birthplace of modern chess.
The tournament officially gets under way Monday with both players facing local personalities, but the real action begins Tuesday when Kasparov and Karpov play their first match of the series. It ends on Friday.
Kasparov acknowledged that the match will not carry the same suspense as the 1984 Moscow showdown, when he was challenging then world champion Karpov.
"Don't expect a match with the same quality as 25 years ago," he said.
Kasparov, who earlier said it would be more a "ceremonial tournament", has been training in the Norwegian capital Oslo with the 18-year-old chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen.
Karpov, the undisputed world chess champion from 1975 to 1985 and FIDE world chess champion from 1993 to 1999, has been sparring with a computer and a group of grandmasters, including Moldavia's Viktor Bologan, from a base on the Spanish coast.
Both men are considered among the greatest chess players ever.
The matches will be broadcast live on the Valencia regional government website (www.gva.es). Organisers said they expect some 10 million web users to follow the event.
Kasparov also called for the promotion of chess saying the game could have an "outstanding" social role "in schools, as a prevention for Alzheimer's."
"But good ideas aren't enough, they have to be financed, organised, and promoted," Kasparov urged.
Karpov echoed this view, telling El Pais: "I am convinced that chess is going to have growing importance as a social tool."
Labels: Karpov, Kasparov, trends newsletter
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Monday, September 21, 2009
Scientists find HIV's 'missing link' in ill chimps
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WASHINGTON – Scientists believe they have found a "missing link" in the evolution of the virus that causes AIDS. It bridges the gap between the infection that does no harm to most monkeys and the one that kills millions of people. That link is a virus that is killing chimpanzees in the wild at a disturbingly high rate, according to a study in Thursday's journal Nature.
Chimpanzees are the first primate besides man shown to get sick in the wild in significant numbers from a virus related to HIV. Chimps are also man's closest relative among primates.
And chimps are already endangered.
But the discovery of the disease killing chimps may help doctors come up with better treatments or a workable vaccine for humans, experts said.
The monkey version of the virus that causes AIDS is called simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), but most apes and monkeys that have it show no symptoms or illness. So "if we could figure out why the monkeys don't get sick, perhaps we could apply that to people," said study lead author Beatrice Hahn, a professor of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
The nine-year study of chimps in their natural wild habitat at Gombe National Park in Tanzania found chimps infected with SIV had a death rate 10 to 16 times higher than uninfected chimps. And necropsies of dead infected chimps showed unusually low counts of T-cell white blood proteins that are just like the levels found in humans with AIDS, Hahn said in a phone interview.
And when scientists looked at the particular strain, they found that it was the closest relative possible to the virus that first infected humans.
"From an evolutionary and epidemiological point of view, these data can be regarded as a 'missing link' in the history of the HIV pandemic," AIDS researcher Dr. Daniel Douek of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases wrote in an e-mail. Douek was not involved in the Nature study.
Monkeys and apes - except for chimps - seem to survive the virus because of some kind of evolutionary adaptation, probably on the cell receptors, Douek wrote. The infection of chimps is more recent so they haven't adapted, he wrote.
Hahn said chimps and people probably caught the virus the same way, by eating infected monkeys. And they both spread it the same way, through sexual activity.
Many factors are causing Africa's chimp population to dwindle, said study co-author Michael Wilson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota and former director of field research at the Jane Goodall Institute in Tanzania. Hunting, loss of habitat and disease are decreasing chimp numbers and it's hard to figure out how much of a factor SIV is, he said.
"It is a concern," Wilson said. "The last thing these chimps need is another source of mortality."
Wilson, who spent years observing chimps in Tanzania as part of the study, said that when researchers realized the virus was fatal and they knew which chimps were infected, it became hard to watch some of their activities in the wild.
He recalled wanting to warn one female chimp, "Don't mate with those guys." Wilson said. "But of course I can't do that."
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer
Labels: aids, simian immunodeficiency virus, trends newsletter
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Friday, September 18, 2009
US ranks 28th in Internet connection speed: report
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WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States ranks 28th in the world in average Internet connection speed and is not making significant progress in building a faster network, according to a report released on Tuesday.
The report by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) said the average download speed in South Korea is 20.4 megabits per second (mbps) -- four times faster than the US average of 5.1 mbps.
Japan trails South Korea with an average of 15.8 mbps followed by Sweden at 12.8 mbps and the Netherlands at 11.0 mbps, the report said.
It said tests conducted by speedmatters.org found the average US download speed had improved by only nine-tenths of a megabit per second between 2008 and 2009 -- from 4.2 mbps to 5.1 mbps.
"The US has not made significant improvement in the speeds at which residents connect to the Internet," the report said. "Our nation continues to fall far behind other countries."
"People in Japan can upload a high-definition video in 12 minutes, compared to a grueling 2.5 hours at the US average upload speed," the report said.
It said 18 percent of those who took a US speed test recorded download speeds that were slower than 768 kilobits per second, which does not even qualify as basic broadband, according to the Federal Communications Commission.
Sixty-four percent connected at up to 10 mbps, 19 percent connected at speeds greater than 10 mbps and two percent exceeded 25 mbps.
The United States was ranked 20th in broadband penetration in a survey of 58 countries released earlier this year by Boston-based Strategy Analytics.
South Korea, Singapore, the Netherlands, Denmark and Taiwan were the top five countries listed in terms of access to high-speed Internet.
US President Barack Obama has pledged to put broadband in every home and the FCC has embarked on an ambitious project to bring high-speed Internet access to every corner of the United States.
According to the CWA report, the fastest download speeds in the United States are in the northeastern parts of the country while the slowest are in states such as Alaska, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.
Labels: Communications Workers of America, Internet connection speed, trends newsletter
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Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Web-savvy & cynical: China's youth since Tiananmen
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KAIFENG, China - Twenty years ago, on the night of June 3, rumors were flying about an impending military crackdown against demonstrators in Beijing. That's when Feng Shijie's wife went into labor in his hometown, Kaifeng.
The baby born the next morning, June 4, is now an undergraduate at Kaifeng University. After class, he plays games online or shoot hoops at a campus basketball court. He can list the latest Hollywood releases and NBA stats. But he knows next to nothing about the pro-democracy movement that ended in a bloody crackdown the day he was born.
"My parents told me some incident happened on Tiananmen Square on my birthday but I don't know the details," says Feng Xiaoguang, an upbeat graphic design student in faux Nike shoes and an imitation Prada shirt.
Xiaoguang is one of China's 200 million so-called 'post-1980' kids - a generation of mostly single children, thanks to the one-child policy, born on the cusp of an unparalleled economic boom. Aged between 20 and 30, they are Web-savvy, worldly, fashion-conscious — and largely apolitical.
Asked what kind of reform the Tiananmen students were after, Xiaoguang says he doesn't know.
"Did it have something to do with the conflicts between capitalism and socialism?" he asks.
It would be hard for him to know more. The subject is taboo. The demonstrations are classified as a counter-revolutionary riot and rarely mentioned in public. Textbooks touch on them fleetingly, if at all.
Few young people are aware that millions of students, workers and average people gathered peacefully in Beijing and other cities over seven weeks in early 1989 to demand democratic reform and an end to corruption. They are not told how communist authorities finally silenced the dissent with deadly force, killing hundreds.
Chinese leaders today argue that juggernaut growth and stability since the early 1990's prove that quelling the uprising was the right choice. Indeed, young Chinese people are materially better off now than they have perhaps ever been, with annual income per capital soaring to about 19,000 yuan ($2,760) in 2007, up from just 380 yuan ($55) in 1978.
But the tradeoff has been that young Chinese have no real role in shaping their country's future - and may not be very interested in having one.
An official survey released this month found 75 percent of college students hoped to join the Communist Party, but 56 percent of those said they would do so to "boost their chances of finding a good job." The rest wanted to join for personal honor - 29 percent - while 15 percent were motivated by faith in communism, said the Internet survey of 12,018 students by the People's Tribune.
An accompanying commentary said students today are clearly "cold" about politics and cited concern from education experts about "extreme egotism" among the youth.
At Peking University, a hub for the 1989 protests, only one political group cracked the top 15 extracurricular clubs - the elite Marxism Youth Study Group, reputed to be good for career networking.
The generation that demonstrated on Tiananmen Square grew up surrounded by political discussion, scripted as it often was, and lived through mass movements that demanded full public participation, notably the tumultuous Cultural Revolution that ended in 1976.
But the 1989 crackdown put an end to most public debate on the topic of whither China. Few now risk serious political discussion even behind closed doors, with good reason.
Consider The New Youth Study Group, a short-lived club of young Beijing professionals that met privately to talk about political reform and posted essays online, including one titled "China's democracy is fake." Four of the members were convicted of subversion and intent to overthrow the Communist Party in May 2003 and sentenced to between 8 and 10 years in prison.
With this fear of political dissent, it's hard to tell whether young people like underground musician Li Yan are being shallow or shrewd when they shrug off Tiananmen. Li Yan, also known as Lucifer, was born in May 1989 and is a performing arts student in Beijing with a cultivated rebel image.
"Young kids like us are maybe just more into popular entertainment like Korean soap operas. ... Very few people really care about that other stuff," says Lucifer, before mounting the stage at a Beijing club to belt out "Rock 'N Roll for Money and Sex."
Tiananmen veterans read the reaction as apathy and lament it.
"All those magnificent ideals have been replaced by the practical pursuit of self-centered comforts," says Bao Tong, former secretary to Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party leader deposed for sympathizing with the 1989 protesters. "The leaders today don't want young people to think."
According to Bao, 76, China's youth are in the arms of the government being fed candy. They could continue this way if the economy remains strong and the government distributes wealth more equitably, he says, but he doesn't think either is likely.
Others say the reckless optimism of the Tiananmen era is the reason young people today lack ideals. The fearless naivete of 1989 serves as a cautionary tale, not inspiration.
Sun Yi's father was a Tiananmen-era dissident. In a self-published magazine in 1990, he openly criticized the crackdown and was soon imprisoned for speaking out. She admires her father but wonders if his sacrifices, a broken marriage and seven years in jail, were worth it.
"It was a really heroic undertaking, but still I feel he gave up so much, too much," says Sun, a 22-year-old engineering student in Sydney, Australia. "His voice was heard by some of the people but not many, not many compared to the population in China. Is that worth it?"
Wu Xu, 39, was a Tiananmen participant. His generation was plagued by insecurity, he says, and hoped that China could "catch up" to the West politically and economically.
"This generation is totally different," says Wu, author of a recent book about Chinese cybernationalism. "There is no kind of feeling of inferiority. ... They have had the advantage of the last thirty years of China's economic performance."
Wu contends that China's youth know more than they let on, and while they tend to be fiercely proud of their country they are also highly critical of their government. He calls them "a double-edged sword with no handle," because their opinions cut in many directions and are not guided by any single ideology or organization.
Xiaoguang, the boy born that June 4, bears out the theory. He criticizes the United States for the "inadequate apology" it made after a mid-air collision between an American spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet in 2001. He is angry at CNN for allegedly exaggerating Chinese military brutality against Tibetan rioters last year. Both views parrot the government. Later though, he scoffs at classmates keen to join the Communist Party and grouses about corruption.
His convictions are worn loosely, like a fashion, and have not translated into action. Like many Chinese people today, he appears satisfied with his hobbies, pop culture and other distractions.
He lives with his parents down a dusty dirt road in a simple concrete home. A grapevine snakes up a trellis in the courtyard. The family is supported his mother's monthly 800 yuan ($117) retirement pension and his weekend odd jobs.
In his bedroom, he can watch downloaded pirate copies of Hollywood films like "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" with slapdash Chinese subtitles. At the same time, he texts friends on his Nokia phone and sends instant messages online.
His parents have scrimped and borrowed to provide their only child with these luxuries — 2,800 yuan ($410) for the computer and 500 yuan ($73) a year for the Internet connection - because he says he needs them for school.
An anxious scowl steals across Xiaoguang's usually cheery face as his father recounts the night he was born.
A debilitating stroke ten years ago has made speaking difficult. But, with help from his wife, Feng told how he dropped his wife at the hospital on the evening of June 3, 1989, then dashed to Kaifeng's Drum Tower where a crowd had gathered in solidarity with protesters in Beijing.
He spent an hour there and the experience inspired his son's name, which means light of dawn.
"His name has great significance. I had just seen China's dawning promise and possibility."
By ALEXA OLESEN, Associated Press Writer
Labels: china, post-1980 kids, trends newsletter
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Monday, September 14, 2009
Taylor Swift's Video
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Taylor Swift
Labels: Taylor Swift, trends newsletter
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Lehman's collapse -- an insider's view
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WASHINGTON (AFP) – A chill runs down the spine of Lawrence McDonald every time he drives past the Wall Street building of collapsed investment bank Lehman Brothers, where he was one of the most profitable bond traders.
"The big takeaway is that the fate of 20,000 souls was determined in that building, especially on the 31st floor," McDonald, 43, told AFP in an interview ahead of the first anniversary Tuesday of Lehman's collapse.
The 158-year-old Lehman filed for bankruptcy protection on September 15, 2008, in the largest US bankruptcy filing in history, leaving the future of 25,000 staff in jeopardy and sending a financial tsunami across the globe that continues to reverberate today.
But McDonald thinks Lehman, which collapsed under the weight of hundreds of billions of dollars in risky mortgage-backed securities, could have been saved if the bosses would have heeded a number of clear early warnings.
The top Lehman leadership, housed on the bank building's 31st floor, "drove us at 162 miles (261 kilometers) an hour... right into the biggest sub-prime iceberg ever seen."
Bank chief executive Richard Fuld and president Joe Gregory heard warnings beginning in 2005 that the property market, on which they were "betting the ranch," was on the verge of collapse but turned their backs each time, McDonald charged.
"It was 24,992 people making money and eight guys losing it," said the man who rose from a humble pork chop salesman to top-notch Wall Street trader -- once his team made 250 million dollars in a single day.
Lehman was heavily over-leveraged at the top of the market in 2007 -- its net tangible equity was 17 billion dollars but its total investment was 750 billion dollars -- a good chunk of it in mortgage-backed securities that turned "toxic."
"Inside Lehman, some really weird things were going on... the 31st floor was one of those mysterious places on Wall Street because we had incredibly talented risk takers that were politically outmaneuvered and squashed like grapes," said a fuming McDonald.
"They didn't just rule with an iron first, they wore brass knuckles."
Asked if he had personally raised the issue with the top brass, McDonald said he had no access to them, but his immediate bosses had raised the alarm. "It would be complete suicide if I were to go to" the top management, he said.
McDonald is now managing director of Pangea Capital Management and has co-authored a top-selling book, "A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Incredible Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers."
The book, published in July, squarely points the finger of blame at Fuld and his board, accusing them of taking dangerous risks in pursuit of short-term profits.
"I spoke to 150 people, 45 managing directors, members of the risk committee who were my best friends, and members of the executive committee. This is incredible access," he said.
Fuld was so perturbed about McDonald's book that he angrily phoned a pair of former Lehman traders he believed secretly had helped to contribute to the account of the bank's stunning collapse, the New York Post reported last week.
The former chief executive said he felt "horrible" over the bank's demise when he testified to the US Congress in October 2008, one month after the bank's collapse, to explain the events leading to the disaster.
"What has happened is an absolute tragedy," Fuld said. "I take full responsibility for the decisions I made and for the actions I took."
Fuld also told lawmakers that if he could turn back the clock, he would do many things differently but lawmakers took turns to castigate him.
One of them held up a chart suggesting that Fuld's personal remuneration totaled 480 million dollars over eight years but Fuld said the figure was exaggerated and that the majority of the compensation came in stock, most of which had not been paid to him at the point of Lehman's bankruptcy.
McDonald said the lessons from Lehman's collapse were important -- "not just to warn of such disasters in the future but ultimately to provide a beacon to help us serve Main Street better."
by P. Parameswaran
Labels: Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld, trends newsletter
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Work begins on world's deepest underground lab
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SIOUX FALLS, S.D. - Far below the Black Hills of South Dakota, crews are building the world's deepest underground science lab at a depth equivalent to more than six Empire State buildings - a place uniquely suited to scientists' quest for mysterious particles known as dark matter.
Scientists, politicians and other officials gathered Monday for a groundbreaking of sorts at a lab 4,850 foot below the surface of an old gold mine that was once the site of Nobel Prize-winning physics research.
The site is ideal for experiments because its location is largely shielded from cosmic rays that could interfere with efforts to prove the existence of dark matter, which is thought to make up nearly a quarter of the mass of the universe.
The deepest reaches of the mine plunge to 8,000 feet below the surface. Some early geology and hydrology experiments are already under way at 4,850 feet. Researchers also hope to build two deeper labs that are still awaiting funding from Congress.
"The fact that we're going to be in the Davis Cavern just tickles us pink," said Tom Shutt of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, referring to a portion of the mine named after scientist Ray Davis Jr., who used it in the 1960s to demonstrate the existence of particles called solar neutrinos.
Davis and a colleague named John Bahcall won a share of the 2002 Nobel Prize for physics for their work.
The old Homestake Gold Mine in a community called Lead (pronounced LEED) was shut down in 2001 after 125 years. Pumps that kept the mine dry were turned off years ago, so workers have been drying it out to prepare for the new research.
Before the labs are built, crews must also stabilize the tunnels and install new infrastructure. The lab at 4,850 feet is not much to look at yet. A rusty orange film covers the walls, floors, ceilings and debris left behind by miners.
The first dark matter experiment will be the Large Underground Xenon detector experiment — or LUX - a project to detect weakly interacting particles that could give scientists greater insight into the Big Bang explosion believed to have formed the universe.
Shutt, along with Brown University's Rick Gaitskell and nearly a dozen collaborators will work at the site to search for dark matter, which does not emit detectable light or radiation. But scientists say its presence can be inferred from gravitational effects on visible matter.
Scientists believe most of the dark matter in the universe contains no atoms and does not interact with ordinary matter through electromagnetic forces. They are trying to discover exactly what it is, how much exists and what effect it may have on the future of the universe.
Physicists have said that without dark matter, galaxies might never have formed. By learning more about dark matter, they hope to understand better whether the universe is expanding or contracting.
The research team will try to catch the ghostly particles in a 300-kilogram tank of liquid xenon, a cold substance that is three times heavier than water. If they tried to detect dark matter above ground, the highly sensitive detector would be bombarded by cosmic radiation.
Scientists hope to start construction on the two deepest labs by 2012 and open them by 2016. The projects are expected to cost $550 million.
By DIRK LAMMERS, Associated Press Writer
Labels: dark matter, Davis Cavern, trends newsletter
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Friday, September 11, 2009
Family time eroding as Internet use soars
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NEW YORK - Whether it's around the dinner table or just in front of the TV, U.S. families say they are spending less time together.
The decline in family time coincides with a rise in Internet use and the popularity of social networks, though a new study stopped just short of assigning blame.
The Annenberg Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California is reporting this week that 28 percent of Americans it interviewed last year said they have been spending less time with members of their households. That's nearly triple the 11 percent who said that in 2006.
These people did not report spending less time with their friends, however.
Michael Gilbert, a senior fellow at the center, said people report spending less time with family members just as social networks like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are booming, along with the importance people place on them.
Five-year-old Facebook's active user base, for example, has surged to more than 200 million active users, up from 100 million last August.
Meanwhile, more people say they are worried about how much time kids and teenagers spend online. In 2000, when the center began its annual surveys on Americans and the Internet, only 11 percent of respondents said that family members under 18 were spending too much time online. By 2008, that grew to 28 percent.
"Most people think of the Internet and (our) digital future as boundless, and I do too," Gilbert said.
But, he added, "it can't be a good thing that families are spending less face-to-face time together. Ultimately it leads to less cohesive and less communicative families."
In the first half of the decade, people reported spending an average of 26 hours per month with their families. By 2008, however, that shared time had dropped by more than 30 percent, to about 18 hours.
The advent of new technologies has, in some ways, always changed the way family members interact.
Cell phones make it easier for parents to keep track of where their children are, while giving kids the kind of privacy they wouldn't have had in the days of landlines.
Television has cut into dinner time, and as TV sets became cheaper, they also multiplied, so that kids and parents no longer have to congregate in the living room to watch it.
But Gilbert said the Internet is so engrossing, and demands so much more attention than other technologies, that it can disrupt personal boundaries in ways other technologies wouldn't have.
"It's not like television, where you can sit around with your family and watch," he said. The Internet, he noted, is mostly one-on-one.
Likely because they can afford more Web-connected gadgets, higher-income families reported greater loss of family time than those who make less money. And more women than men said they felt ignored by a family member using the Internet.
The center's latest survey was a random poll of 2,030 people ages 12 and up was conducted April 9 to June 30, 2008, and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
By BARBARA ORTUTAY, AP Technology Writer
Labels: family time, hot trends, internet use, trends newsletter
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Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Crisis spurs spike in 'suburban survivalists'
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SAN DIEGO - Six months ago, Jim Wiseman didn't even have a spare nutrition bar in his kitchen cabinet.
Now, the 54-year-old businessman and father of five has a backup generator, a water filter, a grain mill and a 4-foot-tall pile of emergency food tucked in his home in the expensive San Diego suburb of La Jolla.
Wiseman isn't alone. Emergency supply retailers and military surplus stores nationwide have seen business boom in the past few months as an increasing number of Americans spooked by the economy rush to stock up on gear that was once the domain of hardcore survivalists.
These people snapping up everything from water purification tablets to thermal blankets shatter the survivalist stereotype: they are mostly urban professionals with mortgages, SUVs, solid jobs and a twinge of embarrassment about their newfound hobby.
From teachers to real estate agents, these budding emergency gurus say the dismal economy has made them prepare for financial collapse as if it were an oncoming Category 5 hurricane. They worry about rampant inflation, runs on banks, bare grocery shelves and widespread power failures that could make taps run dry.
For Wiseman, a fire protection contractor, that's meant spending roughly $20,000 since September on survival gear - and trying to persuade others to do the same.
"The UPS guy drops things off and he sees my 4-by-8-by-6-foot pile of food and I say 'What are you doing to prepare, buddy?'" he said. "Because there won't be a thing left on any shelf of any supermarket in the country if people's confidence wavers."
The surge in interest in emergency stockpiling has been a bonanza for camping supply companies and military surplus vendors, some of whom report sales spikes of up to 50 percent.
These companies usually cater to people preparing for earthquakes or hurricanes, but informal customer surveys now indicate the bump is from first-time shoppers who cite financial, not natural, disaster as their primary concern, they say.
Top sellers include 55-gallon water jugs, waterproof containers, freeze-dried foods, water filters, water purification tablets, glow sticks, lamp oil, thermal blankets, dust masks, first-aid kits and inexpensive tents.
Joe Branin, owner of the online emergency supply store Living Fresh, said he's seen a 700 percent increase in orders for water purification tablets in the past month and a similar increase in orders for sterile water pouches.
He is shipping meals ready to eat and food bars by the case to residential addresses nationwide.
"You're hearing from the people you will always hear from, who will build their own bunkers and stuff," he said. "But then you're hearing from people who usually wouldn't think about this, but now it's in their heads: 'What if something comes to the worst?'"
Online interest in survivalism has increased too. The niche Web site SurvivalBlog.com has seen its page views triple in the past 14 months to nearly 137,000 unique visitors a week. Jim Rawles, a self-described survivalist who runs the site, calls the newcomers "11th hour believers." He charges $100 an hour for phone consulting on emergency preparedness and says that business also has tripled.
"There's so many people who are concerned about the economy that there's a huge interest in preparedness, and it pretty much crosses all lines, social, economic, political and religious," he said. "There's a steep learning curve going on right now."
Art Markman, a cognitive psychologist, said he's not surprised by the reaction to the nation's financial woes - even though it may seem irrational. In an increasingly global and automated society, most people are dependent on strangers and systems they don't understand - and the human brain isn't programmed to work that way.
"We have no real causal understanding of the way our world works at all," said Markman, a professor at the University of Texas, Austin. "When times are good, you trust that things are working, but when times are bad you realize you don't have a clue what you would do if the supermarket didn't have goods on the shelves and that if the banks disappear, you have no idea where your money is."
Those preparing for the worst echo those thoughts and say learning to be self sufficient makes them feel more in control amid mounting uncertainty - even if it seems crazy to their friends and families.
Chris Macera, a 29-year-old IT systems administrator, said he started buying extra food to take advantage of sales after he lost his job and he was rehired elsewhere for $30,000 less.
But Macera, who works in suburban Orange County, said that over several months his mentality began to shift from saving money to preparing for possible financial mayhem. He is motivated, too, by memories of the government paralysis that followed Hurricane Katrina.
He now buys 15 pounds of meat at a time and freezes it, and buys wheat in 50-pound bags, mills it into flour and uses it to bake bread. He checks survivalist Web sites for advice at least once a day and listens to survival podcasts.
"You kind of have to sift through the people with their hats on a little bit too tight," said Macera, who said his colleagues tease him about the grain mill. "But I see a lot of things (on the Web) and they're real common sense-type things."
"I don't want to be a slave to anybody," he said. "The more systems you're dependent on, the more likely things are going to go bad for you."
That's a philosophy shared by Vincent Springer, a newcomer to emergency preparedness from the Chicago area.
Springer, a high school social studies teacher, says he's most worried about energy shortages and an economic breakdown that could paralyze the just-in-time supply chain that grocery stores rely on.
In the past few months, Springer has stockpiled enough freeze-dried food for three months and bought 72-hour emergency supply kits for himself, his wife and two young children. The 39-year-old is also teaching himself to can food.
"I'm not looking for a retreat in northern Idaho or any of that stuff, but I think there's more people like me out there and I think those numbers are growing," he said.
By GILLIAN FLACCUS, Associated Press Writer
Labels: hot trends, suburban survivalists, trends newsletter
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Monday, September 7, 2009
Cinema comes to Riyadh for first time in decades
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RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - For the first time in three decades, Saudis in the nation's capital did something that most Westerners take for granted - they went to the movies. But it wasn't exactly date night. No women were allowed.
Saturday's screening of the Saudi film, "Menahi," brought a taste of the moviegoing experience to Riyadh more than 30 years after the government began shutting down theaters - a move driven by religious conservatives who view cultural activities such as movie screenings and concerts with concern because they could lead to mixing of the sexes and violate Islamic values.
Men and children, including girls up to 10, were allowed to attend Saturday's show at a government-run cultural center. Young male organizers of the event manned a checkpoint on the road leading to the gated center so no women could reach the theater.
And in a sign of the challenges that face every small step toward reform, a group of conservative men gathered outside the entrance to the center to try to discourage the moviegoers from going in. People largely ignored them, savoring the chance to munch popcorn and enjoy the cinema.
"It was just beautiful to see people look so animated and happy," said Misfir al-Sibai, a 21-year-old Saudi businessman who attended the screening. "That was the best part of the evening."
Despite the exclusion of half of Riyadh's population, the decision to show the film, produced by a company owned by royal tycoon Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, was a daring step. It followed a trend in opening up the kingdom, culturally and in other ways, that began when King Abdullah came to power in 2005.
That has angered conservatives, who have issued edicts against such cultural events. One of them, Youssef al-Ahmed, has even accused Alwaleed and another Saudi businessman of being as dangerous as drug dealers because the TV channels they own broadcast movies.
Inside the center on Saturday, the atmosphere was lively as the moviegoers bought popcorn and posed for pictures with the film's cast.
Two Saudi men tried - but failed - to disrupt the evening. One of them stood up after evening prayers at the mosque attached to the cultural center and urged worshippers not to take the few steps to the theater, said al-Sibai.
Shortly after the film began, the viewers could hear another man shout that they should refrain from spending their money on such decadent pursuits, said al-Sibai. He was led away by security.
Al-Sibai said the disturbances didn't dampen people's mood, and the film - a comedy about a Bedouin who has a difficult time adapting to life in Dubai - was shown in its entirety to an almost full house.
Saudi movie directors and aficionados have tried to revive cinema in Saudi Arabia in the past few years, encouraged by the more open environment in the kingdom.
There has been an upsurge in Saudi-produced movies, some of which have taken part in international film festivals. The kingdom held its first Saudi film festival last year in the city of Dammam. The event was attended by the information minister in a clear sign of official approval.
Alwaleed, a nephew of King Abdullah and the world's 13th-richest person as ranked by Forbes magazine, has been outspoken about the need for movie theaters, saying in February he is certain that one day there will be cinemas in Saudi Arabia.
Although there are no theaters in the country, Saudis can watch movies at home on television. Some hold informal screenings in their living rooms or travel to nearby Bahrain to catch the latest releases. There are also numerous video stores that stock the latest films after kisses and other such scenes have been cut. Several Saudi newspapers even have a weekly movie page.
"Menahi" was shown to a mixed audience in the more open western seaport city of Jiddah and the resort of Taif a few months ago. According to a statement by Rotana, which produced "Menahi," 25,000 viewers watched the movie, including 9,000 women.
Ibrahim Badi, Rotana spokesman, said the company could not get permission from authorities for women to attend in more conservative Riyadh.
Publicity for the film in Riyadh was discreet, apparently out of fear opponents would gather en masse to stop the screening. A couple of newspapers reported the coming event Saturday and listed the few places where tickets could be bought. Three more shows are expected in the coming days.
Talal Saleh, a 25-year-old who attended the screening, said it's better to keep women away at the beginning.
"This is a conservative society that's not used to mixing," said Saleh. "Change should happen gradually."
By DONNA ABU-NASR, Associated Press Writer
Labels: Alwaleed, cinema, hot trends, Menahi, riyadh, saudi arabia, trends newsletter
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Friday, September 4, 2009
Americans spend $34B for alternative medicine
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ATLANTA - Americans spend more than a 10th of their out-of-pocket health care dollars on alternative medicine, according to the first national estimate of such spending in more than a decade.
Chiropractors, massage therapists, acupuncturists and herbal remedies are commanding significant consumer dollars as people seek high-touch care in a high-tech society, the report released Thursday by the government shows.
Altogether, consumers spent an estimated $34 billion on those and other alternative remedies in 2007, the report found.
"We are talking about a very wide range of health practices that range from promising and sensible to potentially harmful," said Dr. Josephine Briggs, director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, the federal agency that leads research in this field.
More research into which therapies work is critically needed, because the spending on them is "substantial," she said.
The data, gathered in 2007 mostly before the recession was evident, don't clearly reflect whether the economy played a role in spending on these therapies. But Briggs noted there has been "speculation that as the number of uninsured grows, there may be increased utilization of some of these approaches, which tend to be relatively inexpensive."
Nearly half of those who use alternative medicine say they cannot afford conventional care, according to government data published in a separate report.
Some consumer advocates say people are wasting money on some products that rigorous studies have shown don't work. Dr. Sidney Wolfe, who leads Public Citizen's health research, has long criticized the government for what he considers lax regulation of prescription drugs and mainstream medicine. Yet, he also sees problems with the widespread use of dietary supplements.
"People think they are cleared" by the Food and Drug Administration, he said, when in fact they do not need proof of safety or effectiveness to go on the market.
"Mainly, they're ineffective," he said.
The report is based on a 2007 survey by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of more than 23,000 adults nationwide. An earlier report from this survey, released in December, found that more than one-third of adults use alternative medicine.
That includes a wide range of services from meditation and yoga to herbal supplements, such as echinacea and ginseng. Vitamins and minerals are not included in this report but will be addressed in a future one.
Pain was the main reason people tried massage, chiropractic care and other alternative therapies. Among supplement users, most popular were glucosamine for joint pain and fish oil to cut the risk of heart disease.
The new survey results focus on how often Americans use these things, and how much they pay for them. The numbers show that alternative medicine accounts for more than 11 percent of out-of-pocket spending on health care in the United States.
The study found that about 44 cents out of every dollar spent on alternative medicine was for products like fish oil, glucosamine and echinacea. Spending on these products was nearly $15 billion, or about a third of what Americans spend out-of-pocket for prescription drugs.
"I personally am pretty conservative about supplement use," Briggs said. She believes that research her center has sponsored has affected consumer use. After widely publicized studies showed the ineffectiveness of echinacea for colds and St. John's wort for major depression, their use fell; fish oil use has risen following some research suggesting it might help lower risk of heart problems.
The survey shows about 35 cents of each alternative therapy dollar was for visits to acupuncturists, chiropractors, massage therapists and other practitioners. That totals nearly $12 billion, or about one-quarter of what Americans spend on visits to mainstream physicians.
"Some of the useful things chiropractors are doing amounts to physical therapy," Wolfe said. "Medicine is beginning to realize how important physical therapy is."
The last government estimate for out-of-pocket spending on alternative medicine came from a 1997 survey. That research suggested $27 billion was being spent.
The new report concludes that 38 million adults visited alternative medicine practitioners in 2007. They paid less than $50 per visit on average, but many paid $75 or more for services such as acupuncture, homeopathy and hypnosis therapy.
The average annual spending per person to see practitioners was about $122, and the average spending on products was $177.
A whopping $3 billion was spent on homeopathy, a form of treatment that uses highly diluted drugs made from natural ingredients and based on a theory unverified by mainstream science.
Private insurance paid for about 43 percent of all alternative medicine in 2007, public insurance paid for 31 percent and patients paid for the rest, according to a separate government report.
Dianne Shaw, a media relations worker at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sees value in at least one form of alternative medicine - acupuncture. She says acupuncture helped her recover from a stroke-like facial nerve paralysis that standard drugs didn't remedy. During an exam, one of her doctors commented on her progress, and she revealed that she was getting acupuncture.
"They said, 'Well I'm glad it worked,'" Shaw said.
By MARILYNN MARCHIONE and MIKE STOBBE, AP Medical Writers
Labels: alternative medicine, hot trends, trends newsletter
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Wednesday, September 2, 2009
al-Qaida Is Morphing
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DRAA BEN KHEDDA, Algeria - Deep in the Sahara Desert, along the remote southern borders of Algeria, lies an immense no man's land where militants roam.
It is here that terrorists linked with al-Qaida traffic everything from weapons and drugs to illegal migrants. They have planted at least a half-dozen cells in Europe, according to French, Italian and Belgian intelligence. Last week, they announced on the Internet that they had killed a British hostage in Mali, and are still holding a Swiss hostage.
The al-Qaida of the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, is perhaps the best example of how al-Qaida is morphing and broadening its reach through loose relationships with local offshoots. The shadowy network of Algerian cells recruits Islamist radicals throughout northern and western Africa, trains them and sends them to fight in the region or Iraq, according to Western and North African intelligence officials who asked to remain anonymous because of the nature of their jobs. In turn, AQIM gets al-Qaida's brand name and some corporate know-how.
"The relationship with the al-Qaida mother company works like in a multinational," says Jean-Louis Bruguiere, France's former top counterterrorism judge and an expert on North African networks. "There's a strong ideological link, but the local subsidiary operates on its own."
Another Western intelligence official compares AQIM to a local fast food franchise, "only for terrorism."
A picture of AQIM and its ties with al-Qaida emerges from accounts by its victims, interviews with some of the dozens of intelligence officials following its activities and data pieced together by Western diplomats in Algeria.
It shows that the battle against radical Islam in Algeria has become crucial — and not only for North Africa. Intelligence officials throughout Europe are convinced that AQIM wants to expand in their region.
A senior counterterrorism official in France, who was not authorized to talk on the record, told The Associated Press that his services work "daily, constantly" with Algerian security to contain this threat. He says at least six AQIM-related cells, dormant or getting ready for action, have been dismantled across Europe in recent years.
Last month, the Spanish judiciary announced it had caught 12 Algerians from a suspected support cell. And last week, Italian authorities issued arrest warrants for two Tunisians, two Moroccans and an Algerian suspected of plotting attacks on a church and a subway line.
"For now, we've been good," the French official says. "But we've basically been lucky."
___
Four years ago, the Algerian terrorists — then known as the Salafist Group for Call and Combat — were running out of steam.
Born in an insurgency in 1992, the group took part in a near-civil war the next decade that killed about 200,000 people. But its fighters had lost popular support after killing Muslim civilians. Many leaders had turned themselves in during government amnesties, and the group was weak from internal feuds.
So its new emir or leader, Abdelmalek Droukdel, reached out to the superstar of international jihad: Al-Qaida.
His emissaries met with Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, or close associates of his in countries like Sudan, Lebanon or Yemen, the Western intelligence officials told the AP.
Al-Qaida said it couldn't give its brand away to an unreliable group: Even by jihad standards, Algerian militants had a reputation for excess violence. But after a year of talks and tests, al-Zawahri issued a statement recognizing the "blessed union" on Sept. 11, 2006.
AQIM tried to focus more on Western targets in Algeria or tourists and Jews in Morocco. It also imported al-Qaida techniques, such as fine-tuned remote-controlled roadside bombs and suicide bombers.
In an apparent reference to al-Qaida's attacks on the U.S. on 9/11, AQIM carried out its first suicide bombings on April 11, 2007. On Dec. 11 that year, it killed 37 people — including 17 United Nations staffers — in an attack that devastated the U.N.'s Algerian headquarters.
The key technology input seems to be public relations. Several times a month, AQIM now uses global jihadist forums on the Internet to issue political statements and videos of bombings or ambushes.
The Algerian group appears to raise its own money rather than get any from al-Qaida, according to Bruguiere and others.
"I don't think there are many ties to headquarters other than ideological," said Bruguiere, the European Union coordinator of the Terrorism Finance Tracking Program run jointly with the U.S. Treasury Department and CIA.
The group pays its dues back to "headquarters" by trying to expand a new front for jihad in North Africa that could also serve as a forward base to hit Europe. Terrorists from Algeria or of Algerian descent have already been implicated in several devastating attacks, including the 2004 Madrid train bombings and a series of blasts in the Paris metro in the 1990s.
The Western and North African intelligence officials said expansion is under way, to a limited extent, in Tunisia and Libya.
And Moroccan security said police dismantle at least a half-dozen suspected terrorist cells on average each year. The Interior Ministry recently ordered 267 local bank branches to close because they were too vulnerable to holdups that could fund militants.
The Pentagon's new Africa Command is also striving to prevent the Algerian group's expansion south into the desert. U.S. troops or Special Forces help the weak military in Saharan states increase patrolling and cross-border cooperation.
The need is pressing. The British and Swiss hostages were among four European tourists and two senior U.N. envoys kidnapped this winter near the Mali and Niger borders. The Swiss hostage is still being held, but the others have since been released. Likely kidnapped by local gunmen, they were transferred to AQIM, which asked for a huge ransom and the release of a radical Islamist preacher held in Britain.
But the bulk of the militants' activities remain in densely populated northern Algeria, where nearly every day they traffic goods, plunder drivers at fake road blocks, kidnap, and extort money from small businessmen in exchange for safety.
"They're not al-Qaida, they're just a mafia," said Majid Benhamiche, who regularly dons his military uniform to join the army in raids against terrorist camps across the Kabylie mountains.
Benhamiche never drives without a Kalashnikov, and carries a pistol at all times. He is part of a village militia armed by the Algerian Defense Ministry. His isolated family house has been turned into a fortress-like compound with high walls and at least three armed family members on guard.
"It's a war out there, and we don't even know who we're fighting," he said. "But we're not frightened. We're well-armed."
In this deeply macho society, Benhamiche has even taught his wife to use a Kalashnikov in case militants mount the raid they have been expecting every night for more than a decade. "She's a pretty good shot," he said.
___
Algerian authorities describe the militants as on the run. In a rare interview with the AP during the presidential election in April, Interior Minister Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni said "the armed elements are currently being cornered."
Authorities have indeed dismantled several large cells this year. Important local "emirs," or militant leaders, have turned themselves in, and several former high-profile leaders — known as "repentants" in Algeria — are calling on militants to stop fighting. Algerian authorities believe there are 500-800 active fighters left, a mere fraction of what there used to be.
These die-hards "are hard to catch because they're taking refuge in remote mountains and forests," Zerhouni told the AP.
Still, violence is persistent. Data obtained by the AP from Western diplomats in Algeria shows 85 significant bombings in 2008. Some 639 people died that year because of terrorism-related violence: 409 suspected militants, 158 security force members and 72 civilians.
This year, there were 64 bombings from January to April alone, with deaths of 19 civilians and 61 security force members. The data also shows 167 suspected militants killed amid police sweeps, army raids and aerial bombardments.
Construction entrepreneur Mohammed remembers his terror in February, when he and his son returned late from a construction site, unarmed. They saw five gunmen blocking the road and waiting for them, said Mohammed, who asked to be identified only by his first name for fear of retaliation.
"They told me, 'You know who we are,'" the businessman recalls, still visibly shaken. "I answered, 'Yes, you are the mujahedeen.'" Mohammed describes the men as young, clean-shaven and wearing nice sport shoes. "They could have been anybody."
The gunmen brought Mohammed and his son to the edge of the forest near their local base. Then they released him so he could collect a ransom for his child.
The kidnapping occurred within 5 kilometers (3 miles) of a police and army barracks. The AQIM fighters told Mohammed not to contact police, but he said he did anyway. They offered no assistance. An emergency law passed in the 1990s forbids discussing security matters, and officials declined to comment on any aspect of this article.
The militants asked Mohammed for euro40 million ($55 million). The father negotiated it down to 2 million dinars, about euro20,000, or $28,000. Though considerable, Mohammed said this is only about half the going rate for ransoms among the 39 people he knows or has heard of as being recently kidnapped in his region.
Mohammed retrieved his son safely and thought the terrorists would kill him after taking the money.
"But they didn't even behead me. What kind of al-Qaida is this?" he asked, speaking with a blank voice and a shadow of fear in his eyes, convinced AQIM will come back to get him sooner or later.
Mohammed said the kidnappers left him with a warning for police: They planned to attack its headquarters in the nearby town of Les Ouacifs. Some 30 militants did indeed attack on March 26, spraying the station with bullets for a half-hour and injuring four officers.
"They're afraid of no one," Mohammed said.
Algeria has ramped up its security. These days, the capital is surrounded by rings of police and army checkpoints. With 100,000 military police, 80,000 government-funded militia members and 150,000 police, the Defense and Interior ministries are by far the biggest employers in this nation of 35 million people — except possibly for the regular army, whose numbers are kept secret.
Together, the two ministries spent 656 billion dinars ($9.1 billion), according to Algeria's 2008 budget. That was more than a quarter of the state's functioning budget, more than the education, justice and industry ministries combined.
For now, Algeria can pay for this vast security apparatus because it is one of the world's largest oil and natural gas exporters. But in the global economic downturn, the burden is getting heavier.
In the meantime, poverty is rampant, unemployment is widespread, development falls far short and 70 percent of the population is under 30. The resulting tinderbox continues to stoke militancy that spreads far beyond Algeria's borders, especially with the help of al-Qaida.
Security is indeed killing or arresting militants in droves, said a Western intelligence official. "But the problem is, the groups can recruit just as fast within the desperate and angry youth."
By ALFRED de MONTESQUIOU, Associated Press Writer
Labels: al-Qaida, AQIM, hot trends, Islamic Maghreb, trends newsletter
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