Collective Psychosis Cure

"The problem has certainly been growing since the '70s in Ontario. I know from my own research that in the northern parts of Ontario both suicide attempts and deaths saw a tenfold increase in about 1985."
Gerald McKinley, aboriginal health expert, Western University, London, Ontario

"[Young people] want programs and services and better schools, things that we often take for granted. [Youth in Attawapiskat want basic things] YWCA, swimming pool, hockey rink, new school, more teachers, no alcohol on reserve, parenting classes. They want supports and they want healthy things to do."
"We don't even have a word of suicide in our languages. Do you know what that tells me? It tells me that it did not exist in our communities before contact."
Carrie Bourrassa, indigenous health studies professor, First Nations University of Canada, Regina

"[Anthropological research shows] within traditional societies, although infrequent, people did take their own lives."
"Nonetheless, [suicide] seems to have been regarded as aberrant behaviour, as the fact that no indigenous word has been identified that could be translated with the term."
Academic paper, Canadian Journal of Native Studies, 1991

Children from Neskantaga First Nation greet Carolyn Bennett, minister of indigenous affairs, at the airport in the northern Ontario community on Friday. (Jody Porter/CBC)

The rash of suicides within aboriginal communities that far outstrip similar attempts by young people to take their own lives in the general Canadian population, appear to have begun in an episode when a 17-year-old boy on a remote First Nation reserve shot himself to death, distraught that his parents were separating. Since that time in 1974, the idea of suicide has transmitted itself to greater and greater numbers of young aboriginals to become what is now referred to as an "epidemic".

Last year an article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal noted 468 First Nations youth and adults had killed themselves in Ontario between 1991 and 2013. About half of those suicides were committed by people 25 years of age and under. While not all First Nations reserves are plagued with suicides, some clearly are, where clusters of young people claim to feel unbearable pain and seek to end their lives.

The causes are many, from family dysfunction, a change in familial structure, substance abuse, inter-generational trauma, violence, low employment opportunities, and financial insecurity. Obviously for some young people for whom not merely one but many of those soul-destroying traumas occur, they become more vulnerable and susceptible to the allure of a personal final solution to their insecurities and fears.

While Ms. Bourrassa enumerates the social needs of isolated teens, those needs in a sense reflect those of any community's young people; boredom is a trigger for self-destructive and societally destructive behaviours. But for all Ms. Bourrassa's clinical and academic and personal attributes as a social scientist she still falls into the self-recusing trap of blaming outside influences for the fallout of communities incapable of managing their fairly basic social needs.

Authors of a 1991 paper published in the Canadian Journal of Native Studies noted that suicides in the Cree and Ojibway communities in northwest Ontario were happening with "frightening regularity". The Sioux Lookout Zone Hospital reported in 1990 that 143 attempts were made at suicide of which ten succeeded. "These individuals are basically lonely, isolated youth who have never developed a sufficient repertoire of interpersonal skills or of constructive modes of coping with life's frustrations" noted another article published in the Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal in 1977.

Researchers pinpointed the obvious: an observable and growing disconnect with their own aboriginal culture, and at the same time experiencing difficulties in successful adjustment to the greater Canadian culture they had become part of, even at a remove. A McGill University psychiatry professor, Laurence Kirmayer, observed in a 1994 article that suicide clusters posed a "special problem for native communities in which many individuals are closely related and share the same predicaments so that the impact of one suicide is deeply felt within the whole community".

So is the answer a generalized and pointed psychiatric effort to turn the situation around, to help First Nations people find value in their hybrid existence between the abandoned cultural heritage of yore, and the newer realities of being a part of a larger culture of modern technology and values geared to self-sufficiency while still being reliant on state social programs? The paternalistic and longstanding method of providing funding for communal reserves where ownership of homes and self-reliance through employment are denied haven't worked.

Not, it seems, as long as First Nations insist that they must live on isolated reserves representing their historical roots, where employment opportunities are absent, and given how remotely located they are, social remedies such as advanced education, medical facilities, recreational opportunities cannot be matched with those available in large urban centres, or even smaller towns where travel is eased by geographical convenience.

Yet First Nations crying out for help from governments, beseeching the wider community of the country to stand alongside them in their ever greater demands from government and tax coffers in their support in their search for satisfaction and security in their hybrid lifestyle, bristle with indignation when it is suggested that they leave their ancestral lands which no longer offer them life support, and seek their fortunes where other Canadians do, where employment, along with social welfare institutes are available.

Sweet Oblivion, Stark Disillusion

"I am shocked at the extent of the problem they found in India."
"This is incredibly bad, and there is a complete lack of awareness about it both amongst policymakers and the common man."
Dr. Sundeep Salvi, director, Chest Research Foundation, Pune, India

Vendors selling drinks stand beside vehicles near the India Gate war memorial on a smoggy day in New Delhi February 1, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Adnan Abidi/Files

"Our levels are comparable with those of other cities."
"Delhi's air quality is better than Beijing's in summer and much better in monsoon season."
Gufran Beig, chief scientist, Indian state-operated air quality weather forecasting and research

In 2012, air pollution, according to the World Health Organization, killed seven million people worldwide. In other words, air pollution represents the globe's largest environmental health risk. Roughly 80% of the deaths resulted from heart attacks and strokes impacted by environmentally degraded atmospheres. Air pollution is known as well to increase lung cancer mortality.

What is absolutely astonishing is that Indians appear to be nonplussed about the new status given their environment. Despite the level of particulate matter circulating in the air about them, they seem to be completely unaware. Unlike Beijing citizens, few people in India have taken to wearing filter masks. Wealthy Indians haven't bothered to install the kind of air purifiers widely used in East Asia; they seem unconcerned and unaware.

Pedestrians gathered as smog enveloped the Red Fort in New Delhi in 2009. Credit Raveendran/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Yet the air in New Delhi has been scientifically proven to be more polluted than that in Beijing. Cities ranking on the newly-released World Health Organization research on pollution levels internationally, are demonstrably second through fourth in India, within the central Hindi belt. India has missed out only on first-place standing; that record falls to Peshawar, Pakistan. The rivalry between Pakistan and India is fearsomely virulent in political and religious terms.

It will bring little comfort to Pakistan to be hailed as having the distinction of representing the world's top talent in environmental degradation. In New Delhi on Thursday, air pollution monitors quantified levels of the small particles considered the most dangerous for lung health (PM 2.5) at over 350 micrograms per cubic metre of air; twice as  high as Beijing's morning peak.

PM 2.5 speaks of particulate matter less than 2.5 micrometres in diameter, believed to pose the greatest risk to human health, penetrating deeply into lungs. A pollution level high as Delhi's in Beijing would be the cause of huge concern. No one in Delhi, however, appears to notice it as anything extraordinary.

The WHO report examined pollution levels in almost 1,600 cities throughout 91 countries between the years 2008 - 20013. It discovered the annual mean for PM 2.5 concentrations in Delhi came to 153 micrograms per cubic metre. After Delhi the Indian cities of Patna, Gwalior and Raipur followed for dismally awful air pollution readings. Beijing's annual mean in the report by contrast, came to 59.

India's chief scientist at its state-operated system of air quality forecasting and research contends that the annual mean provided for Deli in the report could not possibly be correct.

Blind to Reality

"Severe vitamin A deficiency results in blindness, and half of the roughly half-million children who are blinded by it die within a year. Vitamin A deficiency also compromises immune system function, exacerbating many kinds of illnesses. It is a disease of poverty and poor diet, responsible for 1.9 to 2.8 million preventable deaths annually mostly of children under 5 years old and women..."
"The rice has been ready for farmers to use since the turn of the 21st Century, yet it is still not available to them. Escalating requirements for testing have stalled its release for more than a decade..."
"New technologies often evoke rumours of hazard. These generally fade with time when, as in this case, no real hazards emerge. But the anti-GMO fever still burns brightly, fanned by electronic gossip and well-organized fearmongering that profits some individuals and organizations.
"We, and the thousands of other scientists who have signed the statement of protest, stand together in staunch opposition to the violent destruction of required tests on valuable advances such as Golden Rice that have the potential to save millions of impoverished fellow humans from needless suffering and death."
Journal Science editorial

Jes Aznar for The New York Times

Genetically engineered Golden Rice grown in a facility in Los Baños, Laguna Province, in the Philippines.

The journal Science is considered to be the foremost scientific journal in the developed world. Those scientific minds behind the publication are so alarmed at the gross ignorance that is characterizing the rejection of genetically modified foods that they have decided the issue must be met head on, to counteract the harmful effects of a public believing the scare stories of "frankenfood" that have been circulating on the Internet by unscrupulous NGOs portraying themselves as science food experts.

Eleven eminent scientists put together the recently published editorial in Science. They include the current and past presidents of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's most influential science society; two past editors-in-chief of Science; Martin Rees of Britain's Royal Society; two Nobel Prize winners, along with a number of others high on the professional expertise scale of scientific research and knowledge.

Protesters destroy GM crops. Photograph: David Hoffman Photo Library / Al/Alamy

Their alarm has been raised over the refusal of farmers to have any truck with genetically modified grains. Despite the proliferation of evidence that those grains are not harmful to human health, but rather on the contrary are hugely beneficial to human health. And that activists whose 'public conscience' has been raised to shrieking level have undertaken to destroy Golden Rice, engineered to include beta-carotene, converted to vitamin A by the human body, and whose use in poverty-stricken areas of the world would combat dangerous deficiencies in vulnerable children.

A crowd breaking through a fence to destroy an experimental field of genetically modified golden rice in the Philippines, Aug. 8.   Photo courtesy Philippine Department of Agriculture Regional Field Unit 5


Research on the safety and effectiveness of GM foods has been carried out by universities or groups such as the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Others from sources like Ghent University in Belgium, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which publishes only studies that have been checked by independent outside experts to ensure scientific trustworthiness.

Summaries and abstracts of over 600 studies are freely obtainable at GENERA, an online database of studies in genetic research at Washington D.C.'s George Mason University. No industry funding is accepted to further research capabilities. Whereas research purporting to dispute the legitimacy of such findings is nowhere to be found. There is no reliable research that concludes the use of GMO foods is harmful to human health. There are shrill claims aplenty, though.

The threat of crop failures due to environmental conditions, leading to mass hunger, starvation in many under-developed countries of the world all can be met with the judicious use of many types of GMO grains. Quite aside from the issue of mendacious marketing programs led by producers like Monsanto whose ferocious greed and manipulation of the market give a black name to any types of GMO products, all the more so when seeds will respond only to the herbicides and pesticides that they alone produce.

And their practise of strictly disallowing through a signed contract with seed purchasers, the extraction of seeds from the food product for next year's sowing represents a travesty of crude capitalist criminality.

Meticulously Cleaning House

Of the third Pope back it was claimed, bucolic as he was typecast, that he was also a scholar and a gentleman. His successor was the scholar. Now the first Jesuit pope, learned as he would be through his Jesuitical tutelage, appears the ultimate gentleman. A modest man by all accounts, and truly given as none before him appeared to have been, to quietly assuming his duties with a spare elegance of show, shunning the elaborate trappings of tradition and ornamental elaboration in the simplicity of his urge to serve.


As Pope, he is held to sit in an elevated position above mere kings and queens, yet without a hint of artifice he exhibited the courtly gentleness of a bow to a queen of Jordan. Not even of his faith, allowing him the opportunity to display respect of all religions. Certain enough in his faith and its strength that gives him his purpose in life to render civil respect where in his opinion he feels it is warranted.

Pope Francis welcomes King of Jordan Abdullah II Ibn Hussein’s wife Rania at the Vatican. Photo: MAURIZIO BRAMBATTI /AFP

He has parted with tradition at every opportunity, eschewing the rich robes of his office, and assuming instead simple white garments he feels more suitable to a servant of god. Setting an example for others that surround him. And while he may fail in persuading them to follow his lead, and his lead may have the effect of discomfiting those who serve his office, he surely has impressed the laity.

He has pledged himself to the arduous and yet delicate task of bringing order and openness, kindly regard and clarity of purpose to the Vatican. And because of the corruption that has rotted its understory and because of the conflict in personalities and priorities that have riven its members, he is taking careful steps to restore to the precincts of the sacred city a propriety and dignity of depth, not facade.

The discovery of his predecessor Pope Benedict's trusted butler purloining papers meant only for the eyes of the pope and which revealed matters not open to other eyes appears to have brought about the resignation of the pope, an event that astonished the world. The long-term friendship of Pope Benedict with the man he elevated in 2006 to secretary of state alongside his own ascension to the post of Vicar of Christ protected Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.

The Cardinal was rumoured to have been involved in corrupt Vatican affairs, and there were trusted advisers who urged Pope Benedict XVI to discharge him from his duties as a way to restore trustworthiness to the affairs of the Vatican. Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Cologne revealed months ago that he had pleaded for the replacement of Cardinal Bertone, but was soundly and roundly refused. His contention, speaking on behalf of a group of Cardinals, that Cardinal Bertone was incapable of adequately discharging his duties was rebuffed.

"During the Williamson affair, I even once, on behalf of a number of cardinals, went to the Pope and said: "Holy Father, you have to dismiss Cardinal Bertone! He's in charge -- as would be the responsible minister in a secular government." He looked at me and said, 'Listen to me carefully! Bertone remains! Basta! Basta! Basta! (stop it!)" After that I never brought up the subject again."

So it is entirely conceivable that Cardinal Bertone was referring to Cardinal Meisner when he was dismissed from his position on Saturday by Pope Francis, when he mourned that he was surrounded by "crows and vipers" who had set out to maliciously undermine his authority. And who appeared to have done so quite successfully. Vatican observers now believe this to represent part of the effort to reform the Vatican Bank.

 

And so the Pope has introduced another saintly individual to the position now vacated however reluctantly and with very bad humour by Cardinal Bertone. The position going to Archbishop Pietro Parolin, currently Vatican nuncio in Venezuela. Who will doubtless refrain from comporting himself in a manner so as to reflect badly on the office he will serve. And unlike Cardinal Bertone it is doubtful that Archbishop Parolin will, under duress, suggest blame for misplaced judgement on his part be shared by the Pope.

Fukushima leaks: Japan pledges $470m for 'ice wall'

BBC News online -- 3 September 2013

Joanna Gosling explains where the leaks are coming from

Japan is to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into building a frozen wall around the Fukushima nuclear plant to stop leaks of radioactive water.

Government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said an estimated 47bn yen ($473m, £304m) would be allocated.

The leaks were getting worse and the government "felt it was essential to become involved to the greatest extent possible", Mr Suga said.
The plant was crippled by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

The disaster knocked out cooling systems to the reactors, three of which melted down.
Water is now being pumped in to cool the reactors, but storing the resultant large quantities of radioactive water has proved a challenge for plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco).

Under the government plan, a wall of frozen earth will be created around the reactors using pipes filled with coolant to prevent groundwater coming into contact with contaminated water being used to cool fuel rods.

Water treatment systems will also be upgraded to tackle the build-up of contaminated water, officials said.

Dr Tatsujiro Suzuki, vice chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, told the BBC that the situation at the nuclear power plant was an "unprecedented crisis" and that it was "getting worse".
He said the plan to freeze the ground around the site was "challenging", and a permanent solution was needed.

The technique has only been used on a small scale to control pollution before but not with radioactive contamination, he added.

The damage to the plant has necessitated the constant pumping of water to cool the reactors - a process which creates an extra 400 tonnes of contaminated water every day.

That water is being stored in temporary tanks at the site. Last month Tepco said that 300 tonnes of highly radioactive water had leaked from one of the tanks, in the most serious incident to date.

Satellite images show how the number of water storage tanks has increased in the past two years. The tanks store contaminated water that has been used to cool the reactors.

 

But in recent months there have also been leaks from pipes and there are concerns that water is seeping from damaged reactor buildings into the ground.

Last month, Japan's nuclear regulator classified the severity level of radioactive water leak issues at Fukushima as a three on the seven-point International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (Ines).
The triple meltdown at Fukushima two years ago was classed as a level seven incident, one of only two nuclear events ever rated that highly - along with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the former Soviet Union.

"The world is closely watching whether we can dismantle the (Fukushima) plant, including the issue of contaminated water," said Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
"The government is determined to work hard to resolve the issue."

The funding pledge comes days before a decision is due on the host nation for the 2020 summer Olympic Games, for which Tokyo is a candidate.

Meanwhile, one of Japan's only two nuclear reactors still online was shut down on Tuesday for mandatory inspections.

The shutdown of Kansai Electric's Oi Unit 3 reactor will leave the plant's Unit 4 reactor the only one still functioning in Japan. Unit 4 must also be taken offline later this month for routine assessment.
Restarting Japan's other nuclear reactors remains a highly controversial issue, but the government is working to get this done to fill an energy gap.

Water from the storage tanks has seeped into the groundwater and then into the sea. Efforts to use a chemical barrier to prevent sea contamination have not worked.

The Dream Realized

"To dismiss the magnitude of this progress, to suggest as some sometimes do that little has changed, that dishonours the courage and the sacrifice of those who paid the price to march in those years. But we would dishonour those heroes as well to suggest that the work of this nation is somehow complete.
"The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice but it doesn't bend on its own. To secure the gains this country has made requires constant vigilance, not complacency.
"Because they kept marching, America changed. Because they marched, the civil rights law was passed. Because they marched, the voting rights law was signed. Because they marched, doors of opportunity and education swung open so their daughters and sons could finally imagine a life for themselves beyond washing somebody else's laundry or shining somebody else's shoes."
U.S. President Barack Obama

Ceremony: Obama watches on as members of Martin Luther King Jr's family ring a bell beneath the Lincoln Memorial during the ceremony

Standing at the Lincoln Memorial, before the image of the very man whose vision of an end to slavery in America created a national upheaval in a bloody, fierce civil war, the black man who is the inheritor of Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream spoke movingly of what he knows very well. With him, the King family, and with them former presidents of the United States.

In a strangely partisan show of unity. But one has to ask what kind of unity is it when American blacks celebrate their equality and the two major political parties of the country mutually exclude one another? Where were the Republican presidents to join with the Democratic presidents? It was not solely Democrats who supported Martin Luther King's vision in the final analysis, but Republican ones as well.

President Obama's immediate predecessor was responsible for elevating blacks to positions of elite political administrative authority during his lengthy presidency; Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, for example. The sad and sorry spectacle of the memorial presenting as a unitary political event speaks ill of the organizers, the current administration and the party he represents.

President Obama himself spoke disparagingly of his political opponents at a time when there should have been a memorial session of a great American historical event to bring them together in unity of purpose. Speaking of them as those who "practise the old politics of division". In fact, there is division aplenty within the black community itself. The division of the social elite, the black aristocracy and achievers, and the greater unwashed community of the rudely ungroomed, social failures.

And the culture that unites them, black celebrity figures in entertainment, politics, sports and society and rap with its sexist, racist, criminal clever asides. Black America has its black comics, actors, singers, television personalities and intellectuals of note. And it has its shadowy, sorry criminal class of dope dealers and gangs, preying on one another and causing social unrest and misery among their own. A culture of single mothers, absent fathers, poverty and children abandoned to fate.

A one-time community organizer and briefly state senator is now the towering figure of president of the United States of America. There is pride in the black community; the ultimate has been achieved. But has it? The figure of commanding authority is there, but has that made any difference whatever to the status of black youth intent on gangs, drugs, guns and criminal activities? A crime rate that continues and continues to prey on its own?

An event that overtook history and made America giddy with the prospects of its own racial freedom, salvation from the history that so shamed them. And so impressing the international community that nothing seemed impossible And because nothing seemed impossible the Nobel Peace prize was awarded rather precipitously to someone who had distinguished himself by nothing more than high-flown rhetoric, promising that element that resides deep in the emotional hearts of all of humankind; 'hope'.

Crowds: Tens of thousands of spectators watch President Obama speak at the service marking 50 years since the iconic address

The audacity of his vision so enthralled his people, the electorate, the nation and the global community that he towered well above the office he held. He has since floated back to ground, his once-ebony hair grey, the global problems laid at his office door too numerous to count, his decisions uncertain, their outcomes problematical.

And the world continues to spin on its axis.

Failing Aboriginal Children

"It's an interesting process with respect to First Nations. We [the provincial government] are accountable, essentially, for children in protection and that gets delegated to First Nations authority. But the funding is from the federal side, so the accountability is to us, but the funding is from the federal government.
"We have a number of people working with them directly as role models and mentors. We've been working with those boards and we have a very good relationship and we're doing a lot of work with them on processes and procedures."
Dave Hancock, Alberta Minister of Human Services

First Nations children are over-represented in their high numbers in the province's child welfare system. Of all children in the care of the province, fully 68% are First Nations children. First Nations are jealous and protective of their sovereignty. For they are, after all, nations, and they consider themselves to be fully capable of administering all of their own services. Funded, of course, by the province and by the federal government.

Which is to say funded by the tax-paying component of the Province of Alberta and all Canadian taxpayers in general. With the exclusion of aboriginals living in tribal First Nations reserves. Native Canadians living on reserves do not pay taxes; they are excused from this onerous civic obligation because they are First Nations; the first nations to live on the land we now call Canada. They were first, all others mere late-comers and as such colonialists.

Aboriginals living on reserves need not pay taxes, in fact general tax revenues are the means by which the federal government is able to pay huge sums of money to all First Nations reserves. Where housing, schools, medical services and all other civil infrastructures are paid for by the universal collection of taxes and reserve-transferable funding. One might think that people who have lived forever on the land know how to raise their children and how to employ themselves gainfully, living off the land.

The traditional way of living is always extolled as hugely desirable for any number of reasons; not the least is that it represents a noble way of life and a way in which ancestors can be honoured. The mystery here is why people who declare themselves to be sovereign, capable and spiritedly proud of their heritage are so fiscally dependent, and so sadly incapable of looking to their own devices. The worst thing is the common failures in raising children in secure and loving homes.

Perhaps it is a matter of transitional values being so utterly confusing. Too many families raise too many children on reserves with no regard to those children's welfare; they are not adequately cared for, fed, valued, educated. Their exposure all too often is to alcohol and drug addiction, sexual abuse and a nasty lifestyle of semi-abandonment. Which accounts for the numbers of aboriginal children in care.

Ian Jackson / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILE PHOTO   The home of Ethan Yellowbird is pictured after his fatal shooting July 11, 2011 at the Samson Cree reserve. 

Just as First Nations strenously object to their children being adopted outside their First Nations communities, they also insist on administering themselves the many types of civil programs that exist within their communities to provide social welfare, as is done elsewhere, in all other communities. The trouble appears to be the lack of accountability, of professional behaviour, of commitment to the welfare of the children they are tasked to support.

A recently-released report on the activities of the Kasohkowew Child Wellness Society which manages child welfare in the Samson Cree First Nation is a case in point. A 13-month-old girl in their care died as a result of gross incompetence in best practises relating to child welfare. "An ordinary reasonable caregiver with average education would have sought medical intervention for a child with symptoms of pneumonia serious enough to have caused her death", wrote Judge Bart Rosborough.

He made a number of recommendations in the interests of providing better health-care training for foster parents, for the child died in the custody of a foster parent. A foster mother who, in fact, worked as a caseworker at the same child welfare agency that managed the child's file. The little girtl had been in and out of hospital ten times prior to death for respiratory problems, including pneumonia and a bout of meningitis being suspected as well.

The judge pointed out inequities in financing care for aboriginal and non-aboriginal children. At the time of the enquiry he sat on, the Samson Cree Nation had two thousand children, and 322 of them were under permanent guardianship orders. The disparity in funding is a grave problem. On the other hand, he saw misuse of funds at the time of the baby's death, with staff members sent on expensive out-of-country 'educational' seminars.

Funds being diverted to activities described as "cultural activities", were also mentioned. Where choices were made to fund these types of events even in the face of case workers being fired because of tight budgets. Another issue was impossibly sloppy filing where one client's files could be scattered over a number of different places, difficult to pull together for a well-rounded picture of the client's history and needs.

All of the recommendations issued by Judge Rosborough had been accepted, said one of the women who sits on the board of directors at the Kasohkowew Child Wellness Society.

"It's Crucial"

The disaster of Lac-Megantic, Quebec is raw. Only yesterday for the first time did police permit reporters to enter the area of impact, in a guided tour which warned beforehand that what they were about to see would be hard to take. Roughly 60% of the area has been sifted through, and 38 bodies found; another dozen to go, but it is difficult and dangerous to remain for too long in the deadly fumes and overwhelming heat of the area.

The town saw a large number of curiosity-seekers on the week-end, people compelled by their fascination of disasters to see with their very own eyes what news media may have failed to convey.

Work continues at the crash site of the train derailment and fire Tuesday, July 16, 2013 in Lac-Mégantic, Que.
(Ryan Remiorz/THE CANADIAN PRESS)

In fact, some of the media personnel who have direct ties with the town because they live and work locally, say that despite their pain in touring the area, they would never have been able to imagine the affecting depth of the calamity without being witness to its after-effects. They slowly looked about them, conscious all the while that there were still the dead whose remains were waiting to be discovered by those working on their hands and knees for that very distinct purpose.

Transportation Board Chairman Wendy Tadros has advised that safety records of individual train companies are to be published. Those train companies feel concerned with the possibility that the federal government may over-react, calling for additional regulations for their industry to observe. She added, speaking with reporters, that it has been her experience that the investigation of crashes conclude with the understanding that they are never determined to be the fault of a single person. The cause/s are cumulative in nature, and not confined to a narrow spectrum.

Canadian short line rails are subject to the very same regulations that larger, Class I railroads must observe. Some enjoy a better safety record than others. But on the whole, rail transportation has significantly improved its safety record over the past decade. "I would put my safety record beside any other Class I railroad's safety record", said Mario Brault, president of Genesee & Wyoming Canada Inc whose railways move over 150,000 carloads of steel, lumber and additional commodities across Canada on 2,100 or so of track.

Canadian short-line rail companies, he claims, are safer than the larger railroads. He cites more face-time with employees, trains that move at a slower pace resulting in less likelihood of a major line derailment. "Smaller sometimes is better. I wouldn't be shy at all to make comparisons", he said. And he hopes that federal regulators would consider the tragic accident last week-end in Quebec a truly isolated one -- and, representing the single most catastrophic rail accident in Canadian history, it must qualify -- and not result in unnecessary regulations whose effect would impede commerce.

Railroads have historically linked the country from sea to sea to sea. They were vital to local economies. But original cargoes like wood and coal and potatoes have been replaced by industrial commodities and dangerous goods. The towns that were once built around railways no longer have much connection to them other than general revenues that accrue to whichever province they are located within and enrich. The short-run trains just follow the tracks running through town, more frequently, with greater urgency, and carrying more potentially dangerous loads.

"As a community we used to have a direct economic interest from the railway. No more. Now there is much more inconvenience and risk than advantages. There are no advantages", said Michel Gilbert, Mayor of Mont Saint-Hilaire on Montreal's south shore. "It's a fair perspective that if there's no business for the train to conduct in your town, there is a diminished benefit. The concern here is if you said 'Not in my backyard' and if everyone said 'Not in my town' then you'd never be able to get anything moved'", commented Brigham McDown, a federal transportation and energy policy expert at Southlake, Texas consultancy United Transportation Advisers.

In Farnham, Quebec, where the engineer Tom Harding who drove the train at the centre of the Lac-Megantic disaster lives, the municipal council ironically passed a decree halting all transport by train through its territory until such time as federal regulators can prove safety. Three quarters of the 9,000 residents of Farnham live within 500 metres of the main rail line. "We're not in a position to reassure our citizens because we have the same information they do about what's coming through here -- nothing", said town manager Francois Glasson.

Reporters who walked along the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic's main line last week discovered loose spikes on the line, along with decayed rails. They aren't technical experts, however. And it's highly unlikely that just because a small town, concerned about the welfare of its citizens, declares its intent, that it can unilaterally declare the rail tracks running through its interior to be off limits to the rail company that owns them. Railways that cross provincial boundaries fall under federal regulation.

It is the railways themselves that exert controls over train operations. Towns are now demanding, and have been for some time, that they be given some say in the transportation process. "A lot of us would wish that rail lines would be outside our town borders. But we know that communities have been built around rail stations so that's difficult to address. In the short term, people simply want to know if our infrastructure is able to handle these volumes safely. It's crucial", said Eric Forest, president of the Quebec Union of Municipalities.

• 
• Malala and fellow teenage girls struggle not to stall out in school

Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who survived a Taliban assassination attempt, has become a leading voice for girls' education and spoke at the UN today.

By Ryan Lenora Brown, Correspondent / July 12, 2013

• 

Malala Yousafzai signs United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's guest books as Ban Ki-moon (c.) and youth delegates look on, Friday, July 12, at United Nations headquarters. Malala, the Pakistani teenager shot by the Taliban for promoting education for girls, will celebrated her 16th birthday on Friday addressing the United Nations.   Mary Altaffer/AP

The hooded Taliban gunman stepped onto the bus full of schoolgirls in northwest Pakistan and barked a single question.
“Which one of you is Malala?” he demanded, referring to Malala Yousafzai, a 15-year-old education activist. “Speak up, otherwise I will shoot you all.”

Before anyone could answer, he saw her, raised his gun, and fired. Then he ran, leaving the girl and two of her friends for dead on the crowded bus.

But she was not dead. Today, almost nine months to the day later – on her 16th birthday – Malala stood before the United Nations Youth Assembly in New York to deliver her first public speech since the assassination attempt, calling on the global community to rally behind the cause of universal educational access.

“They thought that the bullet would silence us, but they failed – and out of that silence came thousands of voices,” she said. “The terrorists thought that they would change my aim and stop my ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: Weakness, fear, and hopeless died. Strength, courage, and fervor were born.”

But the confidence radiating from the young activist, who wore a vivid pink shawl once owned by assassinated Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, belies the staggering challenges that still face education activists around the world.

Some 57 million primary school-aged children worldwide were out of school in 2011, according to a study released yesterday by the international NGO Save the Children, half of them in countries embroiled in violent conflict.

Meanwhile, between 2009 and 2012, the percentage of international humanitarian aid devoted to education dipped from 2.2 percent to 1.4 percent.

And most prescient to the teenage activist making her case at the UN today, there are also 69 million adolescents not enrolled in secondary school. This cohort's educational crisis has often lingered just beyond the reach of international campaigns and funding.

“Secondary education is a particularly difficult issue because you’re dealing with infrastructural issues, but you’re also dealing with great social malaise in many cases,” says Orla Kelly, an expert on gender and education in South Asia at Harvard's François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights. “There’s a great consensus in much of the world that children should go to school, but there’s a lot less agreement about if they should continue during those later years, especially if they are girls.”

It’s no coincidence, she says, that the Taliban targeted a 15-year-old well on her way to her ambition of becoming a doctor. That, after all, is the moment when education – particularly the education of girls – threatens to tip the balance of a conservative social order.

The Taliban “are afraid of women,” Malala said. “They were and are afraid of change and the equality we will bring into our society. They think God is a tiny conservative being.”

Malala first rose to international attention in 2009, when the 12-year-old authored an anonymous blog for the BBC on her experiences growing up in Pakistan’s troubled tribal belt, where the Taliban has attacked more than 800 schools in the past four years.

“I had a terrible dream yesterday with military helicopters and the Taleban,” she wrote in one entry. “I have had such dreams since the launch of the military operation…. My mother made me breakfast and I went off to school. I was afraid going to school because the Taleban had issued an edict banning all girls from attending schools.”

But it was the news of the fearsome attempt on her life, and her unexpected recovery in a London hospital late last year, that elevated the activist and her cause to international célèbre. The UN declared Friday, Malala’s birthday, “Malala Day.”

But history rarely pivots on a single newsworthy event, Ms. Kelly notes.
“When the cameras go away, the problems are still there,” she says. “There has to be grassroots organizing on the ground to make change.”

In places like Pakistan’s tribal belt, she says, many want that change. But many rightly see the prospect of defying Taliban edicts against girls’ education as literally a matter of life and death. After all, they say, look what happened to Malala.

For her part, the 16-year-old now attends school in Birmingham, England. The school she attended in Pakistan, which was started by her father, is still open, despite threats of violence. And she says the Taliban’s retaliation has only strengthened the resolve of young people there to get an education.

“We realize the importance of light when we see darkness. We realize the importance of our voice when we are silenced,” Malala said. “In the same way [in Pakistan] we realized the importance of pens and books when we saw the gun.”

Related stories

• How much do you know about Pakistan? Take this quiz.
• The Malala moment: 6 Pakistani views on the girl shot by the Taliban
• Malala Yousafzai airlifted to Britain for treatment (+video)

Memoriam

"Good night mum, I hope you had a fantastic day today because you are the most fantastic and one in a million mum that anyone could ever wish for. Thank you for supporting me all these years, you're not just my mum, you're my best friend. So good night, love you loads."
Ian Rigby, London, England

Isn't that just the most inspired message of love and appreciation a mother could receive from a grown son? Well, the memory of how her son felt about her, and his appreciation of her as his mother may help Ian Rigby's mother in the long run to adjust to the fact that her son died a truly atrocious death right after sending her that message.

Whatever might have inspired that message at that very time, shortly before the end of his life? At the present time, raw with the pain of having lost him at 25 years of age, despite his daunting experience as a British soldier who had seen more than his share of conflict, it will without doubt be of little help.

Ian Rigby's family is in deep shock, despair and mourning. How might it be possible that their son, a soldier of the 2nd Battalion the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers won't be coming back to them, to share all the joys of having a loving family, to help raise his  two-year-old son, to grow old with his wife, as a normal person would?

He fought in Afghanistan and survived that mission in a foreign land rife with attacks against both civilians and foreign troops.

It was in his home country that he was sacrificed to a pathology of hatred and revenge. The very people whom his country sent him abroad to help protect from a savage insurgency that used murder of civilians as a way of reasserting its authority viewed him back home in Britain, as an interloper whose activities were inimical to the welfare of Afghan Muslims.

Two London fanatics had conspired to slaughter Drummer Lee Rigby, and they succeeded.

One of his assailants shouted "Allahu akbar", meat cleaver in hand, as the two attempted to decapitate their victim after having run him over with a car. And then they busied themselves hacking his body, and inviting horrified onlookers to take pictures. Until one middle-aged woman, a mother and a teacher, attempted to resuscitate an already-dead Lee Rigby, confronting the two lunatics with her common-sense practicality.

Informing them, before the arrival of police with arms, that their mission would not succeed; the larger mission, that is, of destroying faith in a democratic country, replacing it with a Sharia-led Islamic tyranny.

These transplants from another continent, worshipping a religion its faithful claim to be one of peace, even while it is a religion whose call to jihad has been claimed by those like Lee Rigby's killers, have succeeded in one signal manner: inspiring in others abhorrence, dread, rage.

Wildly Inaccurate Allegations....

What is there about staid old Toronto that attracts highly unusual individual extrovert-introverts to the mayoralty? The city striving to shed its reputation as Toronto the Good?

That someone of the batty ilk of Mel Lastman, a raucous entrepreneur with a string of Bad Boy appliance stores selling cheap, sub-grade home appliances, a man with a penchant for self-promotion and a sense of inappropriately outrageous attention-getting hijinks would be followed soon afterward by a jolly, rolly-polly champion of fiscal conservatism backed by socially polarizing charitable work balanced against creepy malfunction speaks volumes of something.

We just can't figure out what it might be.

The bad-publicity-averse, but invariably-attracting mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, hit the big time on his carousel-rounds. Even Slate writers are musing about what makes the man tick and then tock and then clock into a heap of problems that any self-respecting mayor of any self-respecting town would prefer to avoid. This time around the cow-pie-prone mayor hit the jackpot.

And there's little doubt his loyal supporters are groaning in frustrated vexation over the man who keeps putting his foot into those cow-pies. Another term in office, Mayor Ford? Doubt it. Consorting with street-crime-level drug dealers is not the kind of activity one usually connects with big-town mayors.

And Toronto is striving to offer that status for itself, a big-time player among the heavies on the international scene. There's New York, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris, London, Beijing, Moscow - and hello there, Toronto! Toronto the Good suddenly transformed into Toronto the Bad, with its mayor studying the history of Marion Berry who got re-elected despite his penchant for crack cocaine.

And that was in the capital of the most powerful country on Earth.

Take that and smoke it in your glass pipe.

At least Mayor Ford proved that he's no racist, even if it has been bruited about that he's a tad homophobic. The tawdry, sex-obsessed spectacles on show at Gay Pride parades aren't his cup of tea, but the underworld of shady drug paraphernalia and drug-gang enterprise with Somali dealers is kind of intriguing, obviously. All in the name of serving all the people all the time, some better than others, but getting to know them all.

Fooling around with marijuana is one thing, cocaine use ticks it up a notch.

Mayor Ford admires enterprise, and it was an enterprising move on the part of a dealer to surreptitiously video the mayor smoking up in good and trusted company on the theory that honour exists among blackguards, that has landed him in this dungheap of controversy. So, really, what you see is what you get, with Mayor Ford. Blond and buxom, eyebrow-battingraising and sexily controversial. Smiling, happy, glad to be with friends.

One of whom was anxious to make big bucks out of that video, but ended up feeding a frenzy of gawkers eager to see the snippets that easily identified the man who vowed to do things differently, his way, just like Frank Sinatra who did things his way, snorting cocaine, ravishing women with his voice, and running with the mobsters. Oh, gee, Rob Ford is a fambly man, and some of those little enticements wouldn't go well with his familial obligations.



So he's settled for what he could manage, only it seems he managed these affairs oblivious to the complicating consequences. He's just a spectacularly nice guy with a mission left unaccomplished when life got excitingly ahead of him.

Dhaka building collapse: Woman pulled alive from rubble

BBC News online - 10 May 2013

The BBC's Akbar Hossain: "People here are extremely surprised." Photo courtesy Shariful Islam

A woman has been pulled alive from the ruins of an eight-storey building that collapsed in a suburb of Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka, 17 days ago. 

Rescuers said the woman, named Reshma, was found in the remains of the second floor of the Rana Plaza after they heard her crying: "Please save me."

She has been taken to hospital, but is not thought to have serious injuries.
More than 1,000 are now confirmed to have died, most of them women working in clothes factories.
The authorities said 2,437 people had been rescued, of whom about 1,000 had suffered serious injuries.

Reshma: "I kept banging whatever I could with my legs but no-one could hear me"

Dozens lost limbs as they were cut free from the wreckage.

The accident is one of the deadliest industrial disasters in history.
Crews using heavy machinery have begun removing rubble from the worst-damaged areas, and are expecting to find more bodies.

Brig-Gen Siddiqul Alam said rescuers had found a huge number of bodies under staircases.
"When the building started to collapse, workers thought they would be safe under the staircases. Each time we moved a slab of concrete, we found a stack of bodies," he said.

Soldiers were reported to have been preparing to break through a large concrete slab at about 15:15 local time (10:15 GMT) on Friday when the woman was discovered.

The worker who first discovered her told the BBC Bengali service: "I was cutting iron rods when I suddenly found a silvery stick just moving from a hole.

"I looked closer and heard someone calling 'Please save me'. I immediately called over soldiers and firefighters."

Officers ordered workers operating heavy machinery to stop, and rescuers used video and audio detection equipment to locate her exact position.

Crews saw a woman waving her hand, and she shouted "I'm still here" and told rescuers her name was Reshma.

Within minutes, hundreds of soldiers and firefighters rushed to the scene to help clear the rubble, says the BBC's Akbar Hossain in Dhaka.

The woman said that she was not badly hurt, and she was given water and biscuits while handsaws and drilling equipment were brought in to cut through iron rods and debris.

Rubble survivor records

• Naqsha Bibi - buried for 63 days in what had been her kitchen after 2005 Pakistan quake; survived on rotten food and water
• Evans Monsignac - trapped for 27 days in the rubble after 2010 Haiti tremor; stayed alive by drinking sewage water
• Park Seung Hyun - pulled from the wreckage of a supermarket in South Korea in 1995, 16 days after it collapsed; drank rainwater
• Pedrito Dy - spent 14 days in the ruins of a hotel after the 1990 Philippines tremor; drank water and urine

Rescuers worked for 40 minutes before finally pulling her from the rubble, amid cheers from the crowd.

She was taken to an ambulance and then rushed to the nearby Combined Military Hospital for evaluation and treatment.

She later told local TV from her hospital bed that she never dreamt she would see daylight again.
"I heard voices of the rescue workers for several days. I kept hitting the wreckage with sticks and rods to attract their attention. No-one heard me," she said.

"I ate dried food for 15 days. The last two days I had nothing but water."

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, whose government has been criticised for lax oversight of the clothing industry, spoke to the woman on the telephone.

Ms Hasina was reportedly flying to the hospital by helicopter to meet her.

Rana Plaza had housed several factories that made clothes for companies including Western retailers.
A preliminary government report suggested the collapse was been triggered when electricity generators switched on during a blackout.

At least nine people have been arrested over the accident, including the owner of the building and several factory bosses.

Singing To The Converted

"Frightened citizens sheltered with no means to defend themselves. How many Bostonians wish they had a gun two weeks ago? How many other Americans now ponder that life or death question?
"Lying in wait right now is a terrorist, a deranged school shooter, a kidnapper, a rapist, a murderer waiting and planning and plotting in every community across our country, lying in wait right now"
Wayne LaPierre, executive vice-president, National Rifle Association, U.S.

Of the 340-million people in the United States, it is highly likely that almost three-hundred-million would eschew the right to bear arms for the purpose of personally tracking down supposed killers in their midst. The United States is a civilized country, due process of law is vital to its honour and its reputation, its respect for justice and its commitment to law and order. Wayne LaPierre boasts that the lobby group he represents will soon have ten million members.

The 'bad' people who illegally have possession of firearms and spend all their time plotting attacks on the 'good' people who legally own firearms, must be confronted before they are able to commit their atrocities on the innocent. How does one confront someone you don't even know exists, much less is busy plotting crimes of mass murder? Presumably, you take great care to take along with you wherever you venture, an reliable arsenal of weapons which will enable you to respond swiftly to any threatening situations.

Perhaps discovering, when a threat has been perceived and responded to, that no threat existed at all, and innocent people, who were assumed to be 'bad' have been looked after by armed thugs who have been dispatched through vigilante action to protect the community. Trayvon Martin, a young black man in Florida was shot to death by community volunteer George Zimmerman, who took him for a thug. Such suppositions are fallacious and their fallout fatally irreversible.

The National Rifle Association, regardless, is eager to cite instances where armed homeowners have acted in self-defence against the incursions of home invaders, righteously proving without a scintilla of doubt that one must be prepared to react against all instances of supposed and actual invasions of personal space and with armed resolve, when encountering potential threats to body and soul.

"The freedom of all mankind is at stake", right-wing television/radio host Glenn Beck told NRA members at their "Stand and Fight Rally". "They feel they must regulate us until we comply, but I will not comply. Weapons will always find their way into the hands of bad people, always. But we must declare this, that guns must remain in the hands of good people." Obviously, members of the National Rifle Association are the good people.

Those who oppose their standards of social responsibility and reasonableness are most obviously the bad people, though they are the greater majority.

Global Responsibilities

We're still agonizing. Not that it's wrong that we do this, we should. That well over 400 people, impoverished garment workers in Bangladesh have lost their lives as a result of miserable cupidity and an absolute lack of interest in the welfare of others' well-being deserves an agony of sadness. Introspection of a very personal kind also followed, and while that's not entirely misplaced, it's not all that useful, either.

Except, in a very real sense, to draw sharp comparisons between rules and regulations, justice and security obtainable and reliable in socially, culturally, technologically advantaged and economically advanced countries of the world for whom an obligation to their citizenry is close to absolute, should governing bodies anticipate the goal of re-election in their democracies.

So, what motivates the garment industry to look outside its own countries for the inexpensive production of goods for sale at the lowest possible price while still guaranteeing profit? A single word will suffice: profit. But there are those in the industry, particularly those in Canada who articulate a second motivation, one of moral responsibility, to advance the prospects of those living in third-world countries.

A contention that cannot be entirely dismissed out of hand. North American garment manufactories were once very similar to their Asian counterparts; goods were produced cheaply because wages were kept low, and people worked in Canada and the United States in sometimes dangerous conditions, and they had no rights under inadequate and sometimes absent laws that then prevailed with respect to decent working conditions.

There are still manufacturers of wearing apparel in North America; they pay their workers fair wages and safe and decent working conditions are mandated by law. Needless to say, what they produce is more costly both to produce and to purchase by the consumer. But not always, since there is a considerable mark-up in goods produced in Asia when their labels happen to be elite brand-names.

That said, it isn't entirely correct to believe that companies that contract-out to Asian manufacturers are complicit with the corrupt practises of low-wage, high-incident of human rights abuses that are all too common in third-world countries where the employed have little recourse to the adjudication of fairness and justice in working conditions.

First-world buyers of third-world products, fully aware of scandals that can erupt from time to time, have an eye to foisting their own standards on those who would do business with them, and they do make demands that workers be treated fairly, in relation to standards prevalent in the country in which they toil. Which is why, we are informed, garment-factory work is considered preferable than other work available in those countries.

Where work is often scarce, and wages are rock-bottom, enabling workers to just get by, with little to no fall-back on slim social welfare available through government auspices, because there is none. The presence of foreign companies with their industrial consciences, also empowers poor workers. And, apart from refusing to do business altogether with manufacturers in third-world countries like Bangladesh, there is often little that can be done about the prevalence of corruption.

Where government bodies tasked to ensure that minimum standards in workplace conditions, let alone engineering, architecture and building materials meet other, necessary standards to ensure maximum reliability and minimum episodes of catastrophic collapse, fail. Because government oversight bodies and their bureaucracies fail to exercise due diligence when bribes are expected and are given.

Doing business in far-off countries whose standards do not meet the more stringent ones of well-managed economies is an option that has its advantages, clearly. And while there are companies that don't really care about outcomes and conscientious standards, because their bottom line is the end of the line as far as they're concerned, there are also counterparts for whom this is not true, who insist on operating to a standard of honourable decency.

Operation of manufacturing facilities, inclusive of wages is significantly less than elsewhere, because these are poverty-stricken countries, whose population just manage to keep their heads above water. There is a stark divide in privilege, with those in power and the cultural elite can amass wealth, while the great majority flounder in a never-ending cycle of endurance.

But those same people who work for what seems to western sensibilities a pittance, have few other alternatives other than to work at anything they can find which will offer a remuneration even more slight than at garment factories. Boycotting the wares produced do no one any good, factories will close and people will be without the opportunity to manage altogether, to feed themselves and their families.

But the constant pressure that is exerted by the outside, more privileged world, on country elites eager to see their export opportunities grow, enabling them to become wealthy, has its effect on the disentitled as well. At one time China was in that unfavoured position; it has since become a powerful producer of all manner of goods, exporting their products world-wide, and as a result a large middle-class has emerged.

Child Abduction

"The government is jut not ready to confront the issue of trafficking or missing children. And this gets reflected in the apathy of the police in dealing with cases of missing children."
Bhuwan Ribhu, lawyer, Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save the Children Movement), India

Kunwar Pal still looks for his son Ravi Kumar, 12, when he disappeared three years ago. Kunwar Pal has cycled across New Delhi, desperately searching for his son's whereabouts, for clues to his disappearance, to find reassurance that he is well. He visits police and railway stations, children's homes and hospitals. He hands out posters and photographs. The 45-year-old construction worker hopes his son was taken by a couple without children of their own; it is what he prefers to think.

"If they were to let me know somehow that my son is alive, I would be happy. They can keep him. Just let me see his shadow. Just let me know he's safe. If I were rich, my son would have been found by now. If I had money, the police would have taken the case more seriously", he said, wracked with weeping.

India's National Crime Records Bureau has reported 34,406 missing children that were never found in 2011 alone, an increase from the 2009 figure of 18,166. Those involved in trying to understand, attempting to track the problem feel the children are trafficked, forced to beg on the streets, to work on farms or factories as forced labourors. Even having their internal organs harvested and sold. And as for young girls, entered into the sex trade, or sold for marriage.

There is a shortage of marriagable girls in India, thanks to the culture of feticide that takes place so commonly among families preferring a male child over a female child. India has that in common with China, as a result of its one-child official policy and the cultural preference for male children. In both countries young males discover there is a paucity of women their age. Representing a social anomaly and a personal catastrophe.

Formal police complaints are registered in one-sixth of missing child cases. Police prefer not to register such cases, eager to maintain low crime figures. If bribes could be brought to bear police might react as they should, but most parents of missing and abducted children are too poverty-stricken to raise the funds to bribe officials in an overwhelmingly corrupt society.

The first few hours after an abduction, with the parents anxiously attempting to alert police, are the most critical. "The police can cordon off nearby areas, issue alerts at railway and bus stations, and step up vigilance to catch the kidnappers", explained Mr. Ribhu. Delays allow traffickers to move children far away where police have no jurisdiction. And there is no national database of missing children for reference.

In 2006 the Central Bureau of Investigation advised that there existed 815 criminal gangs whose specialty was kidnapping children to induct them into a begging enterprise, for prostitution purposes, or to claim ransom. "Despite our providing the police with all the details of where a child was picked up from, where he was taken, the police are simply not willing to act", said Mr. Ribhu.

When a five-year-old girl had vanished and her parents went in alarm to police, their pleas for action were ignored. Days later neighbours found the little girl in a locked room, dreadfully injured; she had been repeatedly raped, beaten and left for dead; her anguished cries had alerted neighbours to her presence in the very building in which her parents live.

The parents have said the police offered them $37 to say nothing. "They just wanted us to go away. They didn't want to register a case even after they saw how badly our daughter was injured", the father complained. "There have been shortfalls, so the station house officer and his deputy have been suspended", explained New Delhi's police commissioner.

Brave New Eco-World

New York City is preparing to launch its Taxi of Tomorrow, introducing six fully electric taxis into the vast fleet of the city's famed yellow taxis. There will be time-out in the city's taxi drivers' angst not to miss any potential fares as they line up to plug their vehicles in to electrical outlets to recharge their batteries. But they will be visible, those taxis, and much admired, and the city congratulated on its forward-looking environmental green prospect.

Problems? Perhaps. "It's to figure out how a taxi driver can integrate 60 - 90-minutes of charging into a day. Frankly, just as important, it's to show other taxi drivers that it can be done", explained David Yassky, New York's taxi commissioner. "Looking ahead to the taxi of the day after tomorrow", proudly proclaimed Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The vehicles of choice will be coloured silver and yellow. They will be Nissan Leafs. And the drivers of the pilot project are all volunteers. There will be privileges awarded them; they will have the right to refuse passengers whose destinations do not appeal because of requiring a charge in the middle of a destination. "They're pioneers. We want to give them the leeway", said Mr. Yassky.

Doubts? "You can't go charge in the middle of your shift", observed Fahd Khan. He would agree to driving an electric vehicle, only if the daily rental rate for his taxi is reduced in compensation. To make up for the time spent charging the electric battery. Those charging stations are being installed on the Lower East Side, the Far West Side and close to Union Square.

That's aside from homes with charging stations, so that can be done between shifts. Don't they think of everything! Well, almost everything. Bjorn Lomborg, that environmental skeptic, reminds us that sales of electric cars have tanked. In Germany, for example, where car sales totaled 3.2 million in 2011, a mere 2,154 electric vehicles were sold, in a country whose chancellor boasted it would have a million electric cars on the autobahn by 2020.

The U.S. Department of Energy expects about 250,000 electric cars on the road by 2015, representing about 0.1% of all cars on the country's highways. According to an analysis conducted by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, an electric car's lifetime cost is about $12,000 higher than its gas-powered counterpart. Costs and subsidies apart, electric cars have proven inconvenient.

A BBC reporter drove the 484 miles from London to Edinburgh in an electric Mini, stopping eight times to recharge. Counting in wait times, he spent 80 hours waiting or driving, averaging just about six miles an hour on his otherwise-ordinary trip.

The manufacturing process producing those electric cars, and more so their batteries, is produced with the use of fossil fuels. The Nissan Leaf, Mr. Lomborg points out can go 73 miles on a single charge. Which explains why most people purchase an electric car as a second family vehicle, to be used for short commutes.

An electric car's C02 emissions are 28% less than a gasoline-powered vehicle. During the lifetime of the electric car this will bypass 11 tons of Co2 emissions. Consider China, where most energy is produced by burning coal. An electric car powered with the electricity earned from coal firing will emit 21% more C02 than a gasoline-powered car.

Well, it's early days yet. For the time being, we just cannot win for losing. But human ingenuity and universal environmental need will surely surface some really workable solutions. We hope.

We surely do hope that to be the case.

China pig and dog deaths prompt probe into factories

BBC News online - 18 April 2013

Dead pigs were also found in China's Huangpu river last month

A Chinese village has closed nearby chemical plants after hundreds of pigs and dogs died mysteriously, sparking fears among local residents. 

A total of 410 pigs and 122 dogs were found dead in Dongtun village in Yanshi city, Henan province, officials said.

The deaths were not caused by an epidemic or the new H7N9 bird flu strain, and nearby chemical factories were being investigated, they added.

More than 16,000 dead pigs were pulled from Shanghai's main river last month.

"Dead animals were found in nearly half of the village. The animals just suddenly died without any warning," a local resident, who only identified herself as Ms Kou, told China's Global Times.

Police are investigating the incident, which many local residents blame on fumes from a nearby chemical plant, Chinese media reported.

Local villagers said that there had been an "extremely strong odour" on Monday morning, state-run news agency Xinhua said.

Public health concerns have been high in China in recent months.

Last month, more than 16,000 dead pigs were pulled from Huangpu river, which supplies Shanghai with drinking water, and around 1,000 dead ducks were found in a river in Sichuan.

A new strain of bird flu has also raised concerns. The H7N9 virus has infected a total of 83 people, killing 17, state media said on Thursday.

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