I believe that children our our future.
Most people think Whitney Houston penned the lyrics to the timeless hit “The Greatest Love of All,” or that Randy Watson was the genius behind the words when he led the wildly-famous soul band “Sexual Chocolate.” Actually, the song was originally recorded by George Benson in 1977 for the Muhammed Ali film, The Greatest.

Well, as I watched Sexual Chocolate perform their classic gig the other day, and listened to the simple-yet-oh-so-powerful opening line to that song, I was reminded of a video that I had seen a few months ago. The video: a 12 year-old girl chastising a group of United Nations delegates and government representatives from around the world. She took the time to remind them in a very definitive tone why they were there and what their responsibilities were.

Sometimes, young people say or think things that we adults only WISH we had the wisdom to have thought, and this was one of those moments.

Listen to the speech of young Severn Suzuki at the United Nations Earth Summit in 1992.

ALL of her words still ring true today.

Schools of robotic fish could be sent into the Thames to produce a 3D pollution map of the river.

from Daily Mail UK

Researchers at the University of Essex in Colchester are working on the robofish as part of a £2.5million EU-funded project to find new ways of monitoring water waste.

Each fish will be about 50cm long, 15cm high and 12cm wide. They will be packed with pollution sensors that can electronically ’sniff’ harmful chemicals in the water.

Scroll down for a video of how the robofish swims…

Robofish

Green robofish: The pollutant-seeking robots will be based on this model at the London Aquarium, with sensors to detect contaminants and GPS navigation

Scientists have developed ’swarm intelligence techniques’ which allow the fish to work as a team without humans, according to London’s Evening Standard.

The robots will communicate with each other using wi-fi as they seek out areas of pollution. They work out where they are with inbuilt GPS systems - in effect, mini satnavs - and artificial intelligence software will enable them to move without the need for a human operator: they will only alert staff if pollutants are found.

A fish that finds contamination sends GPS coordinates of the location to others.

‘Each school will contain five fish, and they will constantly monitor for pollutants,’ said Dr Dongbing Gu, who is leading the research.

‘When they find something, they will send a message to the rest of the school, who will then converge on the area to take readings.’

The fish move by undulating their bodies - propelled by motors - and use fins and a tail to change direction. It is hoped they will travel at speeds of up to half a metre per second.

Working prototypes could be available within 18 months. Different sensors will be fitted to hunt for different pollutants. The data could be used to build a ‘real time’ 3D map of pollutants in the water, allowing operators to determine the best way to clean up the area.

The fish will initially be used in ports to monitor emissions and leaks from large ships, but Dr Gu said the same system could be used in the Thames. Researchers hope the robots will be able to spend up to 24 hours in the water before needing to be recharged.

They will be based on a design for robot fish that appeared as visitor attractions at the London Aquarium, swimming alongside living creatures.

Rory Doyle, from engineering firm BMT Group, which is overseeing the project, said: ‘This might look like something straight out of science fiction [but] there are very practical reasons for choosing this form.

‘In using robotic fish we are building on a design created by hundreds of millions of years’ worth of evolution which is incredibly energy efficient.’

* The Thames Whale was effectively ‘killed’ by rescuers as they lifted it out of the water and onto a barge, it emerged today.

Rescuers have admitted that the move caused serious internal injuries, and the animal should have been put to sleep far sooner.

Rules from today mean whales will be killed with a lethal injection as soon as they enter shallow water and beach themselves.

‘Saving whales such as the one that swam up the Thames is not viable,’ said Paul Jepson of the Institute of Zoology, who carried out the post-mortem on the whale and was on the boat when it died.

Tests revealed that the strandings had already caused terminal injuries to the whale.

See how an early model of the robofish swims…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wymrQ966pXo

Q&A with Van Jones Obama’s former ‘Green Jobs Czar’ on gray capitalism and why we’re a long way from a green bubble. —By Jesse Finfrock

Mother Jones: Can you briefly explain what “environmental justice” means to you? Van Jones: Environmental justice is the movement to ensure that no community suffers disproportionate environmental burdens or goes without enjoying fair environmental benefits. MJ: What’s the relationship between environmental justice and sustainability? VJ: Well, the only reason that we have the unsustainable accounting that we have right now is because incinerators, dumping grounds, and sacrifice zones were put where poor people live. It would never have been allowed if you had to put all the incinerators and nasty stuff in rich people’s neighborhoods; we’d have had a sustainable economy a long time ago. We’d have had a clean and green economy a long time ago. It’s the environmental racism that allowed the powerful people in society to turn a blind eye for decades to the downsides of the industrial system that got us to this point. So there’s a direct relationship between environmental racism and the lack of sustainability of society as a whole. We were the canaries in the coal mines, crying for relief. Now finally the consequences are affecting everyone, with global warming and everything else. The other thing is that the environmental justice agenda is also changing. Before, it was much stronger on demanding equal protection from environmental bad. Now we are also demanding equal opportunity and equal access to environmental good. We don’t want to be first and worst with all the toxins and all the negative effects of global warming, and then benefit last and least from all the breakthroughs in solar, wind energy, organic food, all the positives. We want an equal share, an equitable share, of the work wealth and the benefits of the transition to a green economy. MJ: How do green-jobs initiatives fit into this picture? VJ: Senators don’t install solar panels. You have to have the right policies, but it’s also a lot of just physical labor to retrofit a whole country. There’s going to be a lot of jobs weatherizing buildings, putting up solar panels, manufacturing parts for wind turbines and wind towers. All that’s work, and we want to make sure that the green economy is an equal-opportunity, diverse economy that can lift millions of people out of poverty. We don’t want it to be an ecoapartheid economy where the vast majority of the owners and workers and consumers and beneficiaries of the green economy are all one race. MJ: There’s been some criticism that the green-jobs movement is overhyped. VJ: It’s easy for people to say that, but it’s a movement that’s two years old. There are movements for education reform that are 30 years old and don’t have a single victory. I guess they’re probably overhyped too. On the one hand, the green-jobs movement has been overhyped if people think that we’re somehow going to have a green utopia, and everybody in America’s going to have a job putting up a solar panel everyday, and that day will be a week from next Thursday. I mean, that’s overhyped. But the reality is that there are either going to be a whole lot more green jobs or we’re going to have a dead planet. It’s become kind of fashionable to pooh-pooh it. I’ve never seen a movement two years old expected to have already changed the country. The civil rights movement took several decades. The women’s rights movement took several decades. Other environmental movements are taking several decades. We need to give the green-jobs movement at least a chance to turn green before we declare it dead. MJ: Some environmentalists argue that the transition to green jobs is not happening fast enough. Does the movement need more energy behind it? VJ: Let’s just quit. I think we should just quit. It’s too late. We should give up. [Laughs.] Look, nothing’s happening fast enough. You may have noticed there’s this jackass in the White House that’s not letting anything happen, whether you’re talking about health care or getting out of the war or fixing the energy crisis or solving global warming or getting the economy to work. So right now nothing’s happening. It’s a tragedy. This is a very new movement. There’s a consciousness changing moment that’s happening right now where people are starting to realize that we’ve got to put these two things together: fixing the economy and fixing the environment. It’s probably been in your mind for a while, but we didn’t even have the language for it ’til three years ago. So, yeah, we need to step on the gas here, or step on the pedal, or whatever you step on in the green economy. MJ: Who in politics understands the green economy, and who is writing some good legislation and moving in the right direction on the green-jobs issue? VJ: Massachusetts just passed something yesterday where they’re moving millions of dollars into green-jobs programs and making sure low-income people and people of color have a real shot. Just to make this perfectly clear, the holdup for green jobs is the holdup for the green economy as a whole, and the holdup for the green economy as a whole isn’t about consumer demand, isn’t about the lack of technology, or anything like that—it’s a political logjam. The rules have to be changed to punish the polluters and reward the problem solvers. It’s still free to dump carbon by the ton even though it’s going to cost us the whole planet. It’s still free to you, it’s still free to ExxonMobil, and it’s still free to the coal plants. As long as that’s true, as long as the rules favor the problem makers, the problem solvers are going to be struggling to break out of very narrow, niche markets. When you’re dealing with the problem solvers in the solar industry, wind industry, organic food industry, still trapped inside of little niche markets. The minute the rules change so that we punish the polluters, so the polluters have to pay, and the people who are doing things in a clean and green way are benefited, which can happen within the year, then you’re going to see a massive transfer of both public and private capital into the clean and green sector. You’re going to see a huge uptick in jobs. Now, the real question is who’s going to get those jobs. Everybody thinks the people who do venture capital are geniuses because they’re making economic bets on the future. Well, the green-jobs movement is doing “venture policy,” “venture politics.” We’re making a political bet on the future. We’re making a political bet that this country is smart enough to change the rules in a sane direction. When the government moves, then capital will move, and when capital moves, then jobs will be created. We want to say very early and very loud, not after we see the big green economic boom, the real boom that’s coming, but before, that the jobs question is critical, justice is critical, equal opportunity is critical, and pathways out of poverty are critical. We raised it early, deliberately, and on purpose. Now people are saying, “Okay, well, you raised it; where are the jobs?” The whole point is that we’re raising it before it’s over, before it’s too late. Why are we so clear about this? We’re so clear about this because with the Silicon Valley tech boom, communities of color, poor people got nothing out of it. By the time we got into the argument, to talk about “Let’s close the digital divide,” the only thing Silicon Valley could think of to do is to give us recycled computers. Wealthy elites and also just good hardworking college kids went on to making billions of dollars, and we got recycled computers. We don’t want, having already fought the digital divide in the ’90s, to now have to deal with an eco divide. MJ: How do we get to the tipping point where the rules change. Does it have to come from the very highest levels? VJ: The change has got to be top down, bottom up, and inside out. The federal government has to get off the bench. Or frankly the federal government has to put down its pompoms for the polluters and put on the cleats and get on the side of our team trying to solve this problem. That’s critical. Otherwise, we’re going to have patchwork solutions, every state, every city going its own way. We’re not going to win with that. We also have to have bottom-up solutions in terms of communities, cities, mayors, community colleges, local labor unions, local business councils, all in their own ways beginning to move to a cleaner, greener, more sustainable economy. But probably the biggest change is what I call the inside-out change. Each individual has got to have a big change of heart here in terms of not only respecting the earth more, but also respecting each other more, and insisting that this green economy not have any throwaway resources, or throwaway species, but also that it doesn’t have any throwaway people or children or neighborhoods. MJ: What are some of the policies that you’re envisioning would create this more level green-jobs market? VJ: It’s a two-part answer. First you’ve got to have a green economy. Then you’ve got to make it just and inclusive. You’ve got to put a price on carbon; that’s got to be a top priority for the new administration. MJ: Do you favor a carbon tax or a carbon trade? VJ: I don’t care. I just say cap, collect, and invest. Cap carbon. We want a radical reduction in carbon. We support Al Gore’s call for 100 percent renewable in 10 years. We think it’s the only call that makes any sense given the science. We want a really aggressive cap. We want to make the polluters pay. We don’t care if they pay by buying permits or paying taxes. It really doesn’t, at the end of the day, matter a whole lot as long as the price is right and there aren’t a whole lot of giveaways. We say take the money from the carbon proceeds, whether it’s carbon taxes or a sale at auction, and a cap-and-trade system and invest that money in jobs, transportation, and new technology via weatherization crash programs, the weatherization and solarization of the country. So people get in a big fistfight about taxes versus cap and trade. We don’t care how the money comes in. We just want to make sure the money comes in and is invested in people and not just handed right back to the polluters. MJ: What’s your take on whether or not buying and producing new things is inherently unsustainable? VJ: It probably is. We are going to have steps and stages here. The first step is going from just grey, dirty, suicidal capitalism that doesn’t even try to take account of any sustainability at all to a form of capitalism that does. But then you’ve still got to have probably growth featured—that’s more quantitative than qualitative and therefore still not sustainable. We’ll have to keep moving from there. MJ: If the green movement gets overhyped, do you think people might lose interest, get sort of burned out? VJ: That’s a valid fear. But it’s mainly a valid fear among people who are into political fads. It’s not a valid fear among people who don’t have a job. It’s not a valid fear among people who would love to have their homes weatherized and solarized and use government programs, or at least a functioning solar company with actually green-collar workers. It’s not a fad or a point of burden for people who need healthy food in their communities. There’s the political class, the political elite, and what they jump up and down about, and then there’s reality. And in reality, if we’re going to get through this ecological and social crisis, there’s a lot of work that has to be done. That’s going to be called “green-collar work” or “green work”—we’re going to fight over the definition. It’s not all going to happen overnight. It’s not going to be distributed fairly. There’s going to be fights over wages, and working conditions, and that kind of stuff. But these issues are not going to go away just because we get bored by talking about them. MJ: With all of the excitement about the green economy, is there a danger we’re creating a green bubble? VJ: The question of the green bubble is objectively overstated right now. There will be a green bubble, in that there will be way too many good dollars chasing green projects and green technologies than there are good projects and good technologies out there. That will happen. That’s a natural part of any of these transitions. You’ll have too much skepticism at first. You’ll have “irrational exuberance,” as Alan Greenspan said, and then you’ll have some kind of correction. But we are far from that. I mean, the entire venture capital outlay last year for all clean tech was about $5 billion. That’s nothing. At the top of the tech bubble you had $100-plus billion a year, every year. So we’re a long way from a green bubble on the tech side. I think that will happen. Hey, everyone wants to fix these problems with the market, and that’s a part of what you buy with that. Otherwise you’ve got the government doing it directly and you’ve got a different set of problems. If you use markets, you’re going to risk bubbles.

Outkast To Deliver Two Solo Albums And Another Group Effort in 2009. ‘Y’all gonna get three records from the ‘Kast next year,’ Big Boi says.

By Shaheem Reid

ATLANTA — Big Boi is getting his second solo album, Sir Lucious Leftfoot: The Son of Chico Dusty, back on the good foot. The street-embedded member of Outkast says that despite a delay, his record is still coming.

“The South got something to say, and we gonna keep on talking,” he told us recently in Atlanta. The roll-out plan for his LP seems to coincide once again with that of his partner, Andre 3000, and the ‘Kast have been putting their heads together in preparations.

“Me and ‘Dre were on the conference call [recently],” Big explained. “He’s working on his album; my album is done. We’re gonna wait until the top of the year — January or February — to put it out. Then ‘Dre is gonna come hit y’all, and [then] we’re gonna do the Outkast album. So y’all gonna get three records from the ‘Kast next year.”

Besides being holed up in the studio working on these records, Daddy Fat Sacks has also been spending time on the set — he’s due to appear on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” next Tuesday, November 25. He plays a rapper — Gots Money — who gets greedy. Instead of just relying on the loot he gets as an artist, he decides to get involved with an animal-smuggling ring — when the cops catch him, he turns sides and works undercover for the authorities.

Now, we have heard about the ‘Kast pulling a trifecta of albums before, and it hasn’t materialized — but it might actually happen this time. Andre 3000 told MTV News’ Mixtape Monday in September he had finally started work on his album.

“To be honest, I work best when people doubt me,” ‘Dre explained. “Our whole Outkast career has been built on people doubting us. [Hip-hop fans] up North hated on us from the get-go. We wouldn’t be Outkast if people didn’t understand what people would call weird. You know, none of that would’ve happened. Actually, if you see me, tell me I’m wack. That’s the best thing you can do for me. You know, if you want a greater album, say that. Say that!”

Straight Outta Mogadishu

Somali-born rapper K’naan on African pirates and the world’s hardest ghetto.
—By Eamon Kircher-Allen for Mother Jones

K’naan’s music sounds a little like Eminem’s, if Slim Shady had spent his childhood dodging bullets in Somalia’s civil war. The 30-year-old hip-hop artist (born Kaynaan Warsame) grew up on the mean streets of Mogadishu and escaped in 1991 on one of the last commercial flights out of the country. Now living in Toronto, he’s just released his second studio album, Troubadour, an addictive blend of African-jazz-infused ballads and rhymes about everything from Somali pirates and the immigrant experience to Iraq. Having survived “the most dangerous city in this universe,” K’naan says he can’t separate his music from his past. “I don’t have the luxury of ignoring myself,” he says. His honesty has resonated with other musicians; he’s collaborated with Damian Marley and Maroon 5’s Adam Levine, and Mos Def has joined him onstage. K’naan talked to Mother Jones while sitting on a bus on his way to a show.

Mother Jones: You said goodbye to Somalia when you were 13 years old. How does your childhood relate to your music?

K’naan: It’s kind of the primary influence. The only way I see the world now is through coming out of and growing up and living in Somalia. In the time of war, everyone was basically trying to live and manage the best they could. But you also had another period which was not a hard time at all—it was just a beautiful time. I lived in both eras. I got to fully experience and appreciate both the tragedy of Somalia and the beauty of it.

MJ: In your music, you talk a lot about being a kid in a war zone. In “People Like Me,” you say you “partook in the gun crimes” and mention a “close call with a grenade.” Did you fight in the war?

K: The idea of child soldiers is different in Somalia. There is no real military to join, nor are there any consistent rebel groups. There is just war. And it’s everywhere; in the hands of adults and in the little hands of children. It is the very survival of the streets that makes children pick up guns in Somalia, not some older, wide-eyed rebel leader. My intimate experiences during these years are something which I have shared with people through my music but am very careful about how they are addressed. I learned to fire guns at the age of nine or so, but luckily was not out killing people. We zigzagged the streets to escape those trying to kill us. I guess it would have been a matter of time till I turned around with a gun myself, to go after those coming for us. But I was fortunate. The grenade incident was about an explosion which destroyed a section of my school, from a grenade that me and my cousin detonated by accident. We both lived to tell about it.

MJ: When you were growing up, were you aware of American hip-hop?

K: Very limited stuff—this one album by Eric B. & Rakim called Paid in Full. That was my first and last interaction with hip-hop until I got to North America.

MJ: Is there Somali hip-hop?

K: No. Somalis really are very musically sophisticated, and they’re about their own thing. They’re not very quick to import.

MJ: What do you think about the situation in Somalia right now?

K: It’s horrific. The UN recently said that it’s the worst humanitarian disaster in the world, more so than Darfur. What can I say, man—it’s a sad situation. It was great to have the fortune to escape what was happening in the country. Of course, the flip side of that is that you’re leaving everyone you love, and you’re leaving the place you love and the things you know.

MJ: How do you feel when people turn Somali pirates into a joke?

K: Well, the pirates are serving a purpose right now. They come from regions which have been completely ignored, and Westerners have tried to destroy these regions by their constant plundering of resources and by the illegal dumping of nuclear waste. The pirates really began in order to discourage these actions—initially. And then the business became lucrative. So I don’t know what to tell these people who want Somalis to condemn them. One man’s pirate is another man’s coast guard.

MJ: You make fun of rappers who have a thug posture. Don’t you think that what people are going through in Oakland and New Orleans and Queens is hardcore enough?

K: I guess it’s hardcore enough—for them. The truth is that everyone’s struggle is legitimate. I understand those ghettos; I’ve lived in them. But there are, in fact, more severe struggles.

MJ: Have you gotten any flak from other rappers about that stance?

K: Actually, rappers understand that more than a lot of people. The same rappers who are the glorifiers of it all, when faced with reality, are like, “Yo, man, you’re right. It’s the truth.”

MJ: So why this obsession with glorifying violence in hip-hop?

K: I think a lot of it has to do with marketing groups, statistics—what works and what doesn’t. If peace began to sell, that would be the norm. But right now the consumer is getting really smart. Extreme exposure no longer equals selling records, which I think is a very good scenario for music. Not so much for record labels.

MJ: In “15 Minutes Away,” about making a money transfer back home, you say, “Generosity is the key.” Are you taking a stance against rappers like Kanye West and Cash Money Millionaires, who brag about how much their jewelry costs?

K: It’s just how I feel. These guys are very hungry for opportunity, and they really try to expose themselves. But I just think that sometimes that might not be the most important thing in the world. I’m not about trying to get and get and get. I feel good when I get, but I kind of feel better when I give.
5 K’Naan Songs You Don’t Want to Miss

1) Wash It Down

2) What’s Hardcore?

3) I Was Stabbed By Satan

4) If Rap Gets Jealous

5) Going Away

K’Naan’s new album, Troubador, is out February 24.

from Mother Jones

She’s Pumped. Your Turn.

By LIZ ROBBINS

THE arms have taken on a life of their own. They have provoked controversy, envy, a bit of backlash, even bad puns about the right to bare them. But enough debate and deconstruction. Now women are talking about construction.

“I want Michelle Obama arms,” Julie Eich told her trainer on the Upper East Side of Manhattan two weeks ago, uttering a request echoing off many gym mirrors these days.

In recent months, the first lady has bared her toned biceps, triceps and shoulders at the Inaugural Ball, on the covers of Vogue and People, at her husband’s first televised address to Congress and in her official White House photograph. She does not have Madonna’s sinewy muscles popping out of paper-thin skin. Nor, with her solid 5-foot-11 frame, does Mrs. Obama, who is 45, have a typical runway model body. That makes her image even more admirable to many women, and perhaps even attainable.

“It’s great to see a first lady that looks good, wears great clothes and takes care of herself,” said Guthrie Schweitzer, 34, who has two daughters.

While watching the election campaign — most often, from a treadmill — she could not help mentioning Mrs. Obama’s physique to the director of personal training at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, Keith Gittens, who helped her lose 35 pounds.

“I don’t know anyone who sees her and doesn’t think, ‘That’s the type of woman I want to be,’ ” she said.

It is one thing, however, to emulate Michelle Obama by buying from J. Crew or one of the designers she favors. It is another thing to do some biceps curls and achieve instant results.

“You work hard to look like that,” Simone Scott, 47, said, before adding with a sigh: “I had those arms once upon a time. And then, I fell off the wagon.”

So Ms. Scott called her trainer, Brad Schoenfeld, after a 10-year hiatus, which included the birth of her twins, now 4 years old. A visiting nurse in the Bronx, Ms. Scott has returned to twice-weekly sessions with Mr. Schoenfeld in Scarsdale, N.Y. He is the owner of the Personal Training Center for Women and the author of several fitness books, including “Sculpting Her Body Perfect.”

There is no single, easy route to arms like Mrs. Obama’s (dubbed “Thunder” and “Lightning” by David Brooks, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times). Instead, the trainers recommend an integrated workout that combines weight lifting — working the opposing muscles in the biceps, triceps and shoulders in one session — along with cardio activities, core strength development and, equally important, diet.

“You can have the best muscle definition, but if you have that layer of fat over it, you’ll never see the tone underneath,” Mr. Schoenfeld said.

Mrs. Obama has not revealed details of her workouts, although she has said that she trains in the morning several times a week (before her daughters wake up), lifting weights and doing cardio, and working with a personal trainer who has also guided her husband.

Trainers are careful, though, to warn their clients who choose to emulate a celebrity role model. “You have to have their genetics,” said Mr. Schoenfeld, who added, “That covers about 50 percent, but if you train, everyone has the ability to look terrific within their own genetic framework.”

Putting heredity aside, to build the better arm in the mold of Mrs. Obama, trainers suggest developing one specific shoulder muscle: the medial deltoid.

“The shoulders are important because they create the whole illusion of the upper body and mask flaws below,” Mr. Schoenfeld said. “The side part of the deltoid muscle is what gives you a shapely look.”

Trainers suggest one specific exercise for that: lateral raises. The client, holding dumbbells, raises her arms out to her side, repeating the motion 10 to 12 times, for three sets. For people who want a leaner look, trainers suggest using a lower weight with more repetitions (15 to 20).

To work the biceps, there is the standing biceps curl, flexing at the elbow. That should be paired with triceps kickbacks, either standing or leaning on a bench, extending the arm backward. Triceps can also be developed with a variety of bench presses, or dips using a chair or bench.

The goal? “You don’t want the triceps to wiggle,” Mr. Gittens said.

Traditional pushups, as well as pushups on a stability ball, also engage the triceps and biceps. In fact, for a more comprehensive workout, trainers suggest doing several exercises on the stability ball to develop core strength.

Brad Guzman, the program director of personal training for Method Fitness in Manhattan, is pleased that the first lady has inspired women to take care of their bodies. “From the perspective of sound fitness, though, I’m not going to change my program just to focus on arms,” Mr. Guzman said. “You want to train the body from the inside out, as opposed to doing isolated muscle movements like biceps curls. Now the general movement in fitness tends to be full body and core conditioning.”

Ms. Eich, 28, had some full-body goals, she told her new trainer at Equinox. “I wanted more energy, more endurance for running and most definitely those arms,” she said.

At 5-foot-5 and 125 pounds, Ms. Eich knows she has a different body type than Mrs. Obama, but she wants to achieve the same overall image. “She’s a buff mom,” said Ms. Eich, herself a mother of a 14-month-old son.

Some women fear that lifting weights will lead to bulking, not buffing, but trainers and researchers say many women don’t push themselves hard enough. “You need to challenge the muscles,” Mr. Schoenfeld said. “It should be a struggle on the last few reps.”

Miriam Nelson, the director of the John Hancock Center for Physical Activity and Nutrition at Tufts University, has studied the effects of strength training for women, publishing several books. She has worked specifically with women 40 and older. “In 12 weeks, you see significant gains in muscle strength, and reductions in body fat,” she said.

She was the vice chairwoman for the country’s new physical activity guidelines, written by the United States Department of Health and Human Services this fall, and has been thrilled to have Mrs. Obama and President Barack Obama as fitness role models.

Ms. Nelson said she and her colleagues celebrated Mrs. Obama’s official White House portrait, identifying the sleeveless look as a fitness trend that surpasses fashion.

“I can tell you, over and over again, whether it’s women 45, 65, or 85, when they do strength training and see the results, one of the first things they like to do is wear sleeveless shirts,” Dr. Nelson said. “They are proud of their body.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/fashion/19fitness.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&ref=fashion&adxnnlx=1237464264-mQuu/70kwRzk0rqSv3U2ww

Why Biofuels Are the Rainforest’s Worst Enemy.
By Heather Rogers

Nestled deep in the tropical rainforest on the island of Borneo, Pareh is a collection of about 60 weathered wooden houses perched on stilts and enfolded by coconut palms, banana trees, and the dappled green overhang of the towering forest. Pareh’s inhabitants belong to the indigenous tribes of Borneo collectively identified as the Dayak. They have lived here for centuries, raising rubber trees, pumpkin, cassava, and rice, and harvesting wood for fuel and lumber.

In 2005, a group of village men went hunting in the forest several hours from Pareh and stumbled on a clearing in which the trees had recently been felled. That was how they discovered that Perseroan Terbatas Ledo Lestari, or ptll, a subsidiary of an Indonesian company named Duta Palma Nusantara, was seizing their ancestral land to establish a massive plantation of oil palms, a tree whose oil is rendered and refined into biodiesel. (One of Duta Palma’s major customers is Wilmar International Ltd, a Singapore-based firm in which US agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland holds a 16 percent stake.)

Over the next two years ptll destroyed 15,000 acres, which the Dayak say amounts to three-quarters of their “customary forest”—land that’s vital for their survival and to which they have certain rights under Indonesian law. The plantation also uprooted monkeys and wild boar, which began raiding the community’s food supply. Because ptll replaced diverse forest with a monocrop, pests invaded Pareh’s subsistence gardens. Rice crops failed. The Dayak filed complaints with regional and national officials; at one point they commandeered one of ptll’s bulldozers (an offense for which Momonus, the village head, and Jamaluddin, an elder, served jail time—.pdf). The clearing went on.

Increasingly desperate, in 2007 the people of Pareh offered ptll a drastic compromise. The villagers would surrender every acre the plantation had illegally seized if the company agreed to take no more land. There was no response. Soon after, a villager obtained a ptll map showing the company’s long-term plan: It aimed to clearcut 50,000 acres, more than three times as much land as it had already taken. On the map, both Pareh and its sister village, Semunying, were gone.

Later that fall, a hunting party was searching for wild boar when the men heard the unmistakable whine of chain saws. This time, they didn’t write up a complaint—they assembled a posse. More than 60 people from Pareh and Semunying descended on the site. They found a clearcutting crew in action, protected by Indonesian army troops; by way of protest, they seized 11 chain saws. “If we didn’t do anything, our land would be gone,” a defiant Jamaluddin told me.

with governments and consumers scrambling for alternatives to fossil fuel, worldwide demand for biofuels has gone through the roof; in Europe, where more than half of all automobiles run on diesel, consumption of biodiesel is set to triple by 2010. US subsidies for biofuels, mostly ethanol, will add up to $92 billion between 2006 and 2012, and producers in developing countries like Indonesia are often eligible for millions of dollars in development money from the World Bank.

But amid the hype, problems have emerged. Biodiesel emits less than one-quarter the carbon of regular diesel once it’s burned. But when production—and the destruction of ecosystems in the developing countries where most biofuel crops are grown—is factored in, many biofuels may actually emit more carbon than does petroleum, the journal Science reported last year. Because oil palms don’t absorb as much CO2 as the rainforest or peatlands they replace, palm oil can generate as much as 10 times more carbon than petroleum, according to the advocacy group Food First. Thanks in large part to oil palm plantations, Indonesia is now the world’s third-largest emitter of CO2, trailing only the US and China.

Yet Indonesia aims to expand these plantations from 16 million acres currently to almost 26 million by 2015. If deforestation, which is due largely to oil palm, continues at the present rate, 98 percent of the country’s forest—one of only a handful of large rainforests remaining in the world—will be degraded or gone by 2022. And although Indonesia has strict environmental regulations and formally recognizes customary land rights, those laws are only as effective as the local bureaucrats enforcing them. “For the permit certification, a guy just comes to your office and you just pay him off,” explains Ong Kee Chau, a former Wilmar executive who was responsible for most of the company’s operations on Borneo. “This is how it works.” For everyone from national politicians to struggling villagers, biofuel represents opportunity. “Oil palm is one of our areas of competitiveness,” explains Herry Purnomo, an Indonesia-based forestry researcher. “We can’t compete with information technologies or in auto manufacturing, but we have plantations.”

the only way to get to Pareh is to travel up the Kumba River, typically in a traditional wooden boat fitted with an outboard motor. When I make the trip with a researcher from Friends of the Earth-Indonesia, we arrive about two hours after sundown. Momonus and his wife, Margareta, receive us in their home. (The people I meet in Pareh all go by single names.) There is no furniture; we sit in flickering candlelight around plastic tablecloths spread on the floor. Pages of newspaper have been pasted over gaps in the walls, and in one room I read a story about girls being kidnapped and used as sex slaves by plantation workers.

After a meal of fiddlehead ferns and banana flowers, the front room begins to fill with village men who spill out onto the porch and linger in the doorway. All wear freshly washed T-shirts and jeans or khakis, and all of them smoke except Momonus, a 38-year-old with a low, solid build, dark hair, and a thin mustache. The men tell me that if the government and Duta Palma continue to rebuff them, they will resort to their machetes. (The Dayak have a history of head-hunting, although nowadays they mostly use that reputation to inspire fear.) As the meeting winds down, Julian, a young father of two, asks if anyone has been to the boundary between the forest and the plantation. Another young man speaks up. Yes, he was recently there, and didn’t see any logging.

The next day, I go with Momonus, Julian, and two other villagers to see for ourselves. On motorbikes, we navigate the ribbon of slick mud that passes for a road. After two perilous hours, we reach the land Duta Palma has seized.

The contrast between past and future is extreme. The ancestral forest is carpeted with ferns and flowers; monkeys swing from branches of wild mango, teak, and ironwood trees, and soaring above it all is a majestic canopy of dipterocarps. One of the rainforest’s iconic treasures, dipterocarps bloom just once every four years but do so in unison, their vivid red flowers erupting over millions of acres.

Across the road is a moonscape. Charred trunks lie prone as far as the eye can see. On the horizon we can make out a thin emerald seam—the encroaching column of palms. Duta Palma has also planted seedlings in a narrow band along the border of the community’s land, like a message written in green: The forest belongs to the palm.

We pass the area denuded last fall, and the empty military guard post set up to protect the loggers. Farther along we find a camp. A blue tarp is pitched over a platform covered with bedding and folded clothes. Momonus lifts the lid on a pot of rice; it’s still warm. He takes a stub of wood from the cooking fire and writes on the platform in thick black letters: Stop destroying the ancestral forest!!!

We hit the road again. After a few miles, we come to an abrupt halt—several recently downed trees are blocking the way. As the drone of chain saws reverberates, a few workers emerge from the trees. Unlike the people of Pareh, they have tattered clothes and black teeth. Momonus calmly exchanges words with one of them and heads into the forest to see what’s going on. When he returns 10 minutes later, his eyes shine with rage. Then another man, better dressed than the laborers, comes barreling toward us on a white motorcycle. He, too, looks furious. Momonus orders us on the bikes, and we speed away. When we finally stop, Momonus reminds me where I’ve seen the man before. He was the villager at the meeting last night who said the clearing had stopped. He is Momonus’ brother-in-law.

I have just witnessed the palm companies’ modus operandi in miniature. Operatives will proposition community members to assemble a logging crew in return for a sum that is insignificant to the company and a fortune to a villager. Some people will say no—Julian refused $6,000. But the company will keep trying until someone says yes, and someone almost always does. This helps the plantations expand into the forests, but, even more important, it sows betrayal and division that undermine the opposition.

A few days later, I get a text message from Momonus saying that the community went back to the clearing and confiscated 20 chain saws.

is there any hope for Indonesia’s rainforests—and the people who depend on them? To answer that question, I visit an older oil palm plantation, Perseroan Terbatas Bumi Pratama Khatulistiwa. It’s owned by Wilmar and located in the coastal district of Pontianak, near the village of Mega Timur. This terrain used to be tropical peatland forest, but in 1996, Wilmar began razing the groves and digging deep canals to drain the soil. Now the land is a uniform grid of oil palms. According to Greenpeace (.pdf), the destruction and degradation of Indonesian peatlands releases 4 percent of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

Unlike the Dayak of Pareh, the peasants of Mega Timur welcomed the plantation, seeing it as their ticket to a better life. Many families agreed to surrender their land to Wilmar; each received in exchange a smaller plot sown with palm, with the cost of the planting passed on to the family in the form of a loan. This is a common arrangement that somewhat resembles sharecropping: The peasants are obliged to sell their harvest to the company at a set price, regardless of the market rate. The Wilmar plantation siphons off half the money as payments on the planting loans; it also deducts fees for roads and drainage systems, fertilizer and pesticides, harvest collection, security and administrative charges, and a deposit into a mandatory savings account. After almost a decade of working with the company, none of the smallholders I talk to know how much they’ve earned, how much they’ve saved, or what portion of their loans they’ve paid. They do know, however, that floods are common now that the wetlands are gone. Several times a year their fields are submerged, sometimes for weeks on end.

Wilmar is currently under scrutiny for illegalities at three other plantations, including logging protected areas, using fire to clear trees, forcibly removing peasants and indigenous people, and operating without proper permits. These activities violate Wilmar’s own social responsibility policies, as well as the standards of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, an industry-led oversight group the company belongs to, and the International Finance Corporation, a World Bank agency that has provided Wilmar tens of millions of dollars. After considerable pressure from Indonesian activists, both agencies have launched investigations. The industry group’s probe ended last year after Wilmar promised to make improvements.

My last stop in Indonesia is the Center for International Forestry Research, a serene, wooded compound where more than 100 top scientists are working out ways to protect the world’s forests and their peoples. Researcher Herry Purnomo is part of an international team that has devised a plan to pay developing countries to leave the trees standing. Known as the Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Degradation initiative, the program is projected to cost a mere $12 billion annually worldwide—not bad considering that the US government has spent $126 billion on post-Katrina reconstruction. But international agencies and Western governments have promised only $1 billion so far—”nowhere near what there needs to be,” Purnomo says with frustration.

While I was in Pareh, some village men asked if I wanted to see the 11 chain saws they’d seized the previous fall. They led me to a hiding place and took out the orange-handled saws one by one, carefully placing them in a straight line on the ground. A few minutes later they meticulously arranged them in a circle. I could tell how proud they were: The chain saws were trophies of their bravery. I also realized that despite all they’d been through, the villagers continued to see the saws as bargaining chips, a monumental misperception of the size and scope of their opponent.

Study: Lots Of Red Meat Increases Mortality Risk

CHICAGO — The largest study of its kind finds that older Americans who eat large amounts of red meat and processed meats face a greater risk of death from heart disease and cancer. The federal study of more than half a million men and women bolsters prior evidence of the health risks of diets laden with red meat like hamburger and processed meats like hot dogs, bacon and cold cuts.

Calling the increased risk modest, lead author Rashmi Sinha of the National Cancer Institute said the findings support the advice of several health groups to limit red and processed meat intake to decrease cancer risk.

The findings appear in Monday’s Archives of Internal Medicine.

Over 10 years, eating the equivalent of a quarter-pound hamburger daily gave men in the study a 22 percent higher risk of dying of cancer and a 27 percent higher risk of dying of heart disease. That’s compared to those who ate the least red meat, just 5 ounces per week.

Women who ate large amounts of red meat had a 20 percent higher risk of dying of cancer and a 50 percent higher risk of dying of heart disease than women who ate less.

For processed meats, the increased risks for large quantities were slightly lower overall than for red meat. The researchers compared deaths in the people with the highest intakes to deaths in people with the lowest to calculate the increased risk.

People whose diets contained more white meat like chicken and fish had lower risks of death.

The researchers surveyed more than 545,000 people, ages 50 to 71 years old, on their eating habits, then followed them for 10 years. There were more than 70,000 deaths during that time.
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Study subjects were recruited from AARP members, a group that’s healthier than other similarly aged Americans. That means the findings may not apply to all groups, Sinha said. The study relied on people’s memory of what they ate, which can be faulty.

In the analysis, the researchers took into account other risk factors such as smoking, family history of cancer and high body mass index.

In an accompanying editorial, Barry Popkin, director of the Interdisciplinary Obesity Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wrote that reducing meat intake would have benefits beyond improved health.

Livestock increase greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to global warming, he wrote, and nations should reevaluate farm subsidies that distort prices and encourage meat-based diets.

“We’ve promoted a diet that has added excessively to global warming,” Popkin said in an interview.

Successfully shifting away from red meat can be as easy as increasing fruits and vegetables in the diet, said Elisabetta Politi of the Duke Diet and Fitness Center in Durham, N.C.

“I’m not saying everybody should turn into vegetarians,” Politi said. “Meat should be a supporting actor on the plate, not the main character.”

The National Pork Board and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association questioned the findings.

Dietitian Ceci Snyder said in a statement for the pork board that the study “attempts to indict all red meat consumption by looking at extremes in meat consumption, as opposed to what most Americans eat.”

Lean meat as part of a balanced diet can prevent chronic disease, along with exercise and avoiding smoking, said Shalene McNeill, dietitian for the beef group.

By CARLA K. JOHNSON | March 23, 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/23/study-lots-of-red-meat-in_n_178169.html

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Can “megawatersheds” save Africa from drought? Or is explorer Robert Bisson all wet?

By Bruce Falconer

Spend any time with Robert Bisson, and conversation will eventually turn to the tiny island of Tobago. Bisson loves the place, and with the enthusiasm of a travel agent raves of its friendly people, its pristine beaches, and its lush tropical rain forest. But the real source of his boosterism runs deeper, down to the bedrock that underlies the tourist haven. There, a few years ago, Bisson demonstrated a discovery that he claims has the potential to solve the looming global water crisis—which according to the UN could leave 2.7 billion people facing severe shortages by 2025—by bringing forth a steady flow of untapped freshwater from the geologic depths.

Not everyone agrees with his grandiose claims. Bisson is a controversial figure who has transferred his experience scouring the earth for oil and minerals to the field of hydrology. His unorthodox theories on the volume and dynamics of the world’s freshwater supply go against the scientific current. Even so, Bisson has confounded his critics, who can’t deny that he has an unnatural knack for finding water—hundreds of millions of gallons of it—in places where none was thought to exist.

Such was the case with Tobago, a 120-square-mile sliver of land in the southern Caribbean. By the summer of 1999, a historic drought had nearly exhausted the island’s supply of freshwater. Hotels ran dry, turning on their pipes only a few hours a day. A new, $100 million Hilton resort sat empty for about six months as its owners debated whether to install a desalination plant. That June, a European firm, commissioned by the island’s government to survey groundwater reserves, reported that no significant sources existed. Instead, it recommended damming a local river to create a reservoir—a major infrastructure project that would have cost an estimated $60 million and taken up to eight years to complete. In desperation, the government turned to Bisson, whose Virginia-based EarthWater Technology International (now called EarthWater Global) drilled a series of wells deep into the underlying bedrock. Within a year, at a cost of less than $20 million, the wells were drawing 5 million gallons a day of previously undiscovered groundwater, with the possibility of upping the sustainable yield to a daily 50 million gallons—10 times what the dam had been expected to produce. Eight years on, the wells are still flowing at capacity.

At the root of Tobago’s success, says Bisson, is the presence of what he calls a “megawatershed.” He coined the term himself, and for the last several decades has been leading a crusade for broader acceptance of his idea, one that he claims could revolutionize how the world thinks about water. According to Bisson, far more precipitation falls at high altitudes than most hydrologists have been able to measure. It then seeps deep into the ground, penetrating the fractured bedrock along fault systems where it streams through fissures in the rock, sometimes for hundreds or even thousands of miles. Contrary to what most scientists believe, Bisson says, many of the most drought-prone places on earth—Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia—actually sit atop a constantly recharging supply of freshwater. All we need to do is drill for it.

On a hot day in July, I met Bisson at his office on a leafy, cobblestoned street in Alexandria. A short man with a gray mustache and the weathered face of an outdoorsman, he sat in a chair of finely carved wood near a fireplace while his dog, a white teacup Maltese named Lexi, sniffed at my leg.

In some ways, Bisson doesn’t seem the type to lead a global water revolution. For one thing, in a field dominated by PhDs, he has only about four years of college, spread across seven universities, and never earned an undergraduate degree. He considers it a badge of honor. Above all, Bisson thinks of himself as an explorer. He’s a fellow at the elite Explorers Club in New York City, and when we met he pointed to the window and said with a smile, “Exploration is out there, not in here.”

Born in 1946 in Laconia, New Hampshire, Bisson took an early interest in underwater exploration. By the mid-1960s he had joined Jacques Cousteau’s crew in the Mediterranean. He later got into the oil, natural gas, and mineral exploration business, founding his own company, bci-Geonetics, in 1972. It was then, while drilling for minerals, that he began to encounter groundwater in fractured bedrock. “Virtually everyone on the planet who’s looking for economic minerals, oil, and gas has found tons of freshwater in places where it shouldn’t be according to what they learned in school,” he explains. Puzzled at the sheer volume of water he was finding, Bisson built some test wells and began pumping them. “It kept on coming. When you stop pumping, the water’s at about the same level,” he says, an indication that new water was flowing in. But from where?

What Bisson believes to be the answer occurred to him in 1987, while he was exploring for groundwater on a usaid contract in Sudan. “The eureka moment was when I realized that the Great Rift systems of East Africa”—a 4,000-mile fault zone spanning from Jordan to Mozambique—”were leading to regional collection and transmission of water, not by a few miles, not just going outside a few local boundaries, but going hundreds or even thousands of miles all over these vast desert terrains of East Africa.” Bisson was unable to continue drilling in Sudan due to the country’s political instability, but since then has conducted groundwater surveys all over the world. In the places his megawatershed wells have gone online—including Seabrook, New Hampshire, Somalia, Tobago, and Trinidad—groundwater has flowed from previously undiscovered sources. More contracts are pending in South America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Bisson now talks of augmenting the world’s freshwater supply 100 times over, effectively ending the global water shortage and, by extension, improving the health, economics, and security of nations around the world. Best of all, he says, drilling for water is cheaper, more sustainable, and more environmentally friendly than alternatives like desalination plants and dams.

There’s one problem, though: As Bisson freely admits, most hydrologists think his megawatershed theory is unproven, if not dead wrong. The debate centers on whether wells drawing groundwater from deep, fractured bedrock are accessing a renewable flow of freshwater, or just stagnant pools that will ultimately run dry for lack of recharge. The latter is known as “fossil water,” and the current scientific consensus is that Bisson’s megawatersheds are brimming with it. “It’s very unlikely that the volumes of water he argues are in these megawatersheds can actually be coming from renewable resources,” says Peter Gleick, a water expert and president of the Pacific Institute, a sustainability think tank. Bill Alley, chief of the US Geological Survey’s Office of Ground Water, labels the term “megawatershed” as “an advertising scheme…There are some very large groundwater resources around the world that are being tapped and used, but a lot of them are in arid or semiarid areas that were recharged during a different climate period. They’re effectively nonrenewable.”

Even Claude Cormier, a groundwater specialist who worked with Bisson briefly on the Tobago project, steers clear of using the term “megawatershed.” But with regard to Bisson’s groundwater wells in Tobago, he says, “I guess the proof is in the pudding there.” Utam Maharaj, the former director of water resources at the Water and Sewerage Company of Trinidad and Tobago, which contracted Bisson’s firm to explore for water, says that the projects “had dramatic impacts on the water needs of both islands,” and characterizes Bisson’s methods as “totally revolutionary.”

Bisson acknowledges that “there are challenges to be met if one is going to be exploring for something that (a) no one believes exists, (b) they believe exists, but only as fossil water, not replenished, and (c) challenges the entrenched interests that make so much money off of capital works.” But as time goes on, he remains convinced that opposition to his idea will fade. “It’s like cold fusion,” he tells me. “If somebody actually does it in the laboratory and it stands up to scrutiny, and if someone is able to do it in another laboratory, then you’ll have General Electric doing it. That’s what I’m hoping for. This is one of those things where you contribute something that starts as a footnote in history and maybe grows into a page, then a chapter.”

Bruce Falconer is a reporter at the Mother Jones Washington, DC, bureau.

Illustration: Peter Hoey

Todd Chretien reports on the outpouring of anger after Oakland police killed an unarmed man on the platform of a transit station.

January 7, 2009

In the Age of Obama, Still Playing the Race Card

By William Jelani Cobb
Sunday, January 11, 2009

Here’s what hasn’t changed in America. In the past week or so, we’ve seen a threatened Senate stand-off, hyperbolic historical references, an alleged case of stonewalling by the Illinois secretary of state, lawsuits and rumors of lawsuits, a wild-card nominee for the Senate first turned away from that body and then perhaps accepted by it, and that same nominee called upon to testify in the impeachment hearings of the man who nominated him — all tied together by the complicating factor of race.

Former Illinois attorney general Roland W. Burris may well be qualified to serve as the junior senator from Illinois, but his path to office demonstrates not only that cynicism is alive and well but that the politics of racial divisiveness remain with us too. With one stroke, public attention shifted away from a corrupt governor’s attempt to auction a public office and onto the reliably controversial terrain of race.
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In pushing the case for Burris, Rep. Bobby L. Rush (D-Ill.), who is black, made inflamed references to lynching — arguing that criticizing Burris was akin to lynching a black man — and to the “plantation politics” of the Senate. Rush illustrated perfectly the kind of cynical manipulation of race that President-elect Barack Obama rejected throughout his campaign, especially in his speech on race last March. But Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s gambit worked. The Illinois House voted overwhelmingly to impeach him on Friday, but it does appear as though whatever else happens, on the point of Sen. Burris, he will prevail.

Thus, on the cusp of a historic inauguration, one Illinois politician has dared us to believe that we can see beyond our racial divisions, and two others have shown us precisely why those divisions have endured for so long.

In the buffet of absurdities surrounding the Burris nomination, Rush managed to distinguish himself for verbal audacity. Between 1880 and 1910, more than 3,000 African Americans were lynched in the United States. The brutal rites involved shooting, dragging, castrating and frequently setting fire to blacks who violated the Byzantine social code of the Old South. A black candidate being damned by his connection to a corrupt governor just doesn’t fall into the same category — which is perhaps why Rush made the comment in the first place.

What makes Rush’s statements even more egregious is the fact that representatives from 49 other states could credibly make the argument that blacks stand little chance of being elected to the Senate. The track record is dismal: Only three blacks have served in the Senate since Reconstruction — two of them elected in the past 20 years, both from Rush’s home state of Illinois. In short, Rush complained about an all-white Senate in the only state with a track record of electing black senators. But this is what makes race-card politics so intractable: In the high-decibel discussions that follow any racial reference, we seldom include the actual details. The card grants its dealer immunity from his own record (for all his indignation, Rush did not even initially support Obama’s 2004 Senate bid). It’s difficult to assess how big a role Rush’s comments played in the Burris affair because the Senate Democrats were on shaky legal footing, but the race card is there — a potent ingredient in the brew of law, political calculation and spin.

While most of the country spent the past year pondering Obama’s relationship with white voters, it was his relationship with black leaders that held my attention. Last year, during the primaries, I talked to an old-school black politician who complained that the Obama campaign had not provided him with any “street money” — cash traditionally paid to local leaders and community organizers to get people to the polls. This would inevitably hurt the senator’s chances of winning because, he said almost gleefully, “The change Obama wants is not here yet.” The very fact of Obama’s election in a country that once denied blacks the right to vote is a barometer of change. But in other ways, the old-schooler was right. Obama’s attempt to change the tone of American politics runs into one cold reality: Divisiveness still works.

A week ago, Senate Democrats said that it would be very difficult to seat anyone appointed by Blagojevich. By Wednesday, we were treated to the sight of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid doing everything but composing sonnets to Burris: “He presents himself very well. He’s very proud of his family. He’s got two Ph.D.s and two law degrees.” This was, of course, shortly after the media spectacle of a harried and harassed Burris struggling to make his way to the Senate chamber. It didn’t take much imagination to conjure visions of Little Rock in 1957 or black voters being turned away at the polls.

It’s precisely because that history remains so vivid in our memory that Blagojevich’s choice of Burris stings. African Americans have spent centuries struggling for inclusion, not for the right to be political cover for indicted governors. A scarier thought is that being connected to political grime is precisely what inclusion means. Take a random tour through the scrapbook of racial politics, from Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” reference in 1980 to Bill Clinton and Sister Souljah in 1992. The race card has always yielded political benefits for those who deal it.

The irony, of course, is that after decades of white politicians using racial division to whip up their constituents, it has morphed into a card for black politicians to play as well. Last year, in the midst of the sex scandal that eventually drove him from office, former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick wailed that he had been the victim of numerous N-word assaults. (This may have been the case, but racism — in a majority-black city — did not compel him to have sex with a staffer and lie about it under oath.) Kilpatrick was forced to resign anyway, but he did succeed in momentarily knocking his political enemies back on their heels.

The Burris fiasco is no exception to the race card’s ability to fluster. Following Rush’s preemptive strike with “plantation politics,” Reid appeared on “Meet the Press” and tried to argue that the Senate’s opposition had nothing to do with race. But he ended up resembling one of those white liberals who mistakes a black CEO for a secretary and then launches into the story about how he founded the campus NAACP chapter in college.

Taken together, all these ironies might make for a kind of absurdist theater were there not real consequences for voters. Blagojevich knew that he would have had a more difficult time pushing a white candidate, but the truth is that anyone appointed by the Illinois governor would effectively be filling half a seat and would have very little prospect of reelection. It will be exceedingly difficult for Burris to be an effective representative for the people of Illinois, and state Republicans are virtually guaranteed to play the Blago card in 2010.

Only Burris knows why he accepted the Blagojevich offer (losing three runs for the governorship, one for the U.S. Senate and one for mayor of Chicago might have had something to do with it), but the benefits to Blagojevich are clear. The governor gets to thumb his nose at indignant Senate Democrats, at Obama (who said he thought Blagojevich should resign) and at Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. (who informed on him). Rush gets to appear like a valiant crusader for black representation in the upper house of Congress. Everyone wins, except the people.

jelani1906@gmail.com

William Jelani Cobb is an associate professor of history at Spelman College and the author of the forthcoming “Change Has Come: The End of the Civil Rights Movement and the New Black America.”

Player ripped for Palestine T-shirt

MADRID–Sevilla striker Frederic Kanoute is facing a fine from the Spanish football federation for revealing a T-shirt expressing support for Palestine during a match.

Kanoute lifted his Sevilla shirt over his head after scoring in the team’s 2-1 Copa del Rey win over Deportivo La Coruna on Wednesday to display a black T-shirt on which the word “Palestine” was printed in several languages. He was given a yellow card for the display.

Kanoute, who was born in France but plays internationally for Mali, is a practising Muslim.

Associated Press

Military coup follows death of Guinea’s president

The Army dissolved government offices just hours after President Lansana Conte’s death on Tuesday.
By Huma Yusuf

Hours after the death of Guinea’s President Lansana Conte Tuesday, the Army dissolved the government and suspended the Constitution.

The African Union is monitoring developments in the wake of the military takeover as an ensuing power struggle could destabilize the country, which is divided along ethnic lines.

President Conte had been ill for several years, reports the BBC.

According to the Associated Press, a group called the National Council for Democracy announced the dissolution of the Constitution on Tuesday morning, hours after Mr. Conte’s demise.

President Lansana Conte … died Monday night, the country’s National Assembly president announced at about 2 a.m.

A uniformed spokesman for a group calling itself the National Council for Democracy began broadcasting its announcement of the takeover at around 7:30 a.m. local time on state-run radio and TV.

“The constitution is dissolved,” the unidentified spokesman said. “The government is dissolved. The institutions of the republic are dissolved,” he went on. “From this moment on, the council is taking charge of the destiny of the Guinean people.”

He said presidential elections will be organized shortly, but did not elaborate.

The identity of the National Council for Democracy spokesman could not be immediately ascertained, reports Reuters Africa.

Journalists at state radio headquarters contacted by Reuters said a group of soldiers had entered the building and forced staff to broadcast the communique….

The identity of the soldiers who made the broadcast was not immediately known and it was not immediately possible to establish whether other government locations and institutions had been taken over by the military.

In the early morning radio address, the spokesman for the council, since identified as Capt. Moussa Dabiss Camara, emphasized the need for a new, ethnically balanced Guinean government, reports Bloomberg. He added that a military official would serve as president alongside a civilian prime minister.

In a statement read on state radio, [Camara] cited “the incapacity of the republican institutions to resolve the crises, the incapacity of the government to supply Guineans with basic social services.” He also criticized the government’s inability to revise contracts with mining companies.

Before the dissolution of the government was announced, “Prime Minister Ahmed Tidiane Souare appeared on state television where he appealed for calm among the ‘brave Guinean people’ and called on the Army to help keep the peace,” reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).

In fact, during the televised broadcast in which the government announced Conte’s death, the president of the National Assembly Aboubacar Sompare was seen standing next to the head of the armed forces, suggesting that the military would allow a peaceful, constitutional transfer of power, reports Reuters. By law, Mr. Sompare should lead the country until an election is held within 90 days.

Sompare asked the country’s Supreme Court to name him president in line with the Constitution. He was expected to subsequently organise elections to choose a new president.

According to the BBC, Conte’s rule had become more oppressive and unconstitutional in the years before his death.

He came to power in 1984 at the head of a military coup to fill the power vacuum that had been left by the sudden death of his predecessor, Sekou Toure, who had been president since independence from France in 1958.

He eventually oversaw a return to civilian rule and was elected three times, although critics said the votes were never free or fair.

As his health declined over the last five years, it was often far from clear who was in charge and the government barely functioned, [a BBC] correspondent says. Some political parties were allowed to operate, but many opposition leaders were either intimidated by the authorities or jailed.

Conte’s government was also facing increased protests against its rule, reports Bloomberg.

In early 2007, at least 110 people were killed by security forces after protests demanding Conte’s resignation, according to Human Rights Watch. The year before soldiers shot dead 13 unarmed people during demonstrations against rising food prices, the New York-based group said.

The international community is concerned that the ethnically divided Guinea is vulnerable to civil war and may destabilize the region in the wake of Conte’s death, reports Al Jazeera.

Richard Cornwell, the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa, said: “We’ve been expecting for some years that Lansana Conte’s health would eventually give in … and there had been no preparation for any sort of succession….

“What we were really worried about, more than even a coup was the fact that the army might split and this would result in civil war.

“And of course with Guinea, being where it is … with Sierra Leone and Liberia as its near neighbours, this would be very dangerous in that region.”

Specifically, it is feared that the Guinean Army may split along ethnic lines, leading to a conflict, reports the BBC.

The BBC’s Will Ross, in Ghana, says it is important to see whether the army is united on the way forward for Guinea, as a power struggle could be extremely dangerous given the deep ethnic divisions there….

The African Union is closely monitoring developments in Guinea, reports AFP.

The African Union is “preoccupied and keenly monitoring” political developments in Guinea after the death of President Lansana Conte, a senior official said on Tuesday.

“We pay homage to the memory of the departed head of state, but we are preoccupied and keenly following this development and the succession of president Conte,” the AU’s Peace and Security Commissioner Ramtane Lamamra told AFP.

From http://www.csmonitor.com

Supreme Court to hear challenge to voting rights act

By Joan Biskupic, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court announced Friday that it will hear a challenge to the landmark 1965 voting rights act, paving the way for a major decision this term on federal power to oversee state election laws.

In the backdrop is the recent election of Barack Obama and the question of whether America still needs an expansive law protecting against discrimination in voting now that a black man has won the presidency.

A decision in the case from Texas, to be heard in April, could impact the U.S. government’s authority to ensure that racial minorities — who were subjected to literacy tests and other devices to keep them from the polls for most of the 20th Century — continue to have as much of a chance as whites to elect candidates of their choice.

In dispute is the 2006 renewal of the Voting Rights Act, which Congress passed overwhelmingly and President Bush signed.

Richard Hasen, an election-law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said the dispute “has the potential to be the most important election case since Bush v. Gore.” That 2000 decision cut off Florida ballot recounts and ensured Bush the White House.

“The court has repeatedly upheld the constitutionality (of the disputed provision),” Hasen noted. “The question is whether the role of race in American politics has so changed in the last decade or two that remedies that were once constitutional are now considered impingements on state sovereignty.”

A Texas utility district says the provision known as Section 5, which gives the U.S. government authority to oversee state electoral-law changes, is no longer needed and is unconstitutional. The utility district uses the election of the first black president as evidence.

“The America that has elected Barack Obama as its first African-American president is far different than when Section 5 was first enacted in 1965,” say lawyers for the utility district.

Section 5 covers nine states and several counties and municipalities where, as Justice Department lawyers note, race discrimination “has been most flagrant.” Texas utility district lawyer Gregory Coleman says the continued use of that section attaches a “badge of shame … based on old data” and should be lifted.

Civil rights activists, backing the Justice Department’s defense of the renewed Voting Rights Act, have stressed that parts of the nation continue to vote along racial lines and argue that the law that opened the door to widespread black voting four decades ago is still needed.

“Obama’s election reflects an enormous advancement in race relations in the United States,” says Laughlin McDonald of the American Civil Liberties Union. “But voting, particularly in the southern states covered by the oversight provision, remains significantly polarized along racial lines.”

Exit polls from the Nov. 4 presidential election showed that whites in many southern states heavily favored John McCain to Obama. In Texas, 73% of whites favored McCain; in Georgia, 76%, and in Alabama, 88%. Nationally, the percentage of whites for McCain was 55%, exit poll data show.

Last May, a special lower court unanimously upheld the provision. U.S. Appeals Court Judge David Tatel wrote, “(G)iven the extensive legislative record documenting contemporary racial discrimination in voting in covered jurisdictions, Congress’s decision to extend Section 5 for another twenty-five years was rational and therefore constitutional.”

States covered by jurisdictions cannot make any changes to their electoral laws without getting approval from the Department of Justice or a federal district court in Washington. The requirement is designed to ensure that a local government does not draw new voting-district boundaries or enact rules that would dilute the votes of blacks or other minorities.

The law passed the Senate unanimously and the House by 390-33 in 2006.

U.S. Solicitor General Gregory Garre had emphasized in his filing to the court all the evidence Congress reviewed when it reauthorized the law, including “several instances of minority voters’ being threatened with arrest or prosecution for voting.” He said that significant gaps in registration rates between minorities and white citizens continue to exist and that the threat of Section 5 is a significant deterrent in states and municipalities where white majorities might want to adopt electoral plans that dilute the power of black voters.

The utility district, which conducts elections to select its board of directors, says its policies should not be subject to regular DOJ review. Coleman says federal law has sufficient protections for any voter racial bias that occurs.

The case is Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Mukasey.

Children use sticks to get termites to eat out of a mound near Murehwa, Zimbabwe, on Sunday.

Rebecca Chipika, a child of 9, prods a stick into a termite mound to draw out insects. She sweeps them into a bag for her family’s evening meal.

These scenes from a food catastrophe are unfolding in Doma, a district of rural Zimbabwe where journalists rarely venture. It’s a stronghold of President Robert Mugabe’s party and his enforcers and informants are everywhere.

At a school for villagers visited by The Associated Press, enrollment is down to four pupils from 20. The teachers still willing to work in this once thriving farming and mining district 160 miles (250 kilometers) northeast of Harare, the capital, say parents pay them in corn, cooking oil, goats or chickens. One trip by bus to the nearest bank to draw their government salaries costs more than teachers earn in a month.

Meanwhile, the country is in political paralysis following disputed elections in March. A power-sharing deal signed two months ago has stalled over the allocation of ministries between Mugabe’s party and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change.

Shingirayi Chiyamite is a trader from Harare who brings household goods to the countryside to barter for crops. He says a 12-inch bar of laundry soap exchanges for 22 pounds of corn. He crisscrosses the land in search of the few villages that have corn to spare, hauls his purchases to the highway and hitchhikes back to the city. Some of the corn will feed his family, the rest he sells. He is constantly on the move.

“If you rest, you starve,” he says.

Information is almost as scarce as food. Survival is the obsession.

Cell phones operate only sporadically. State radio has not been received since the district relay beacon broke down eight months ago.

Mhangura, a town of about 3,000 people, has had no running water for months. Power outages happen daily because of a lack of cash to maintain utilities. People walk about three miles to a dam to fill pails or gasoline cans.

Some of the scarce water is used to embalm the dead in wet sand, a centuries-old African tradition to preserve a body until family members gather for the burial.

“There’s nothing here. People are dying of illness and hunger. Burial parties are going out every day,” said Michael Zava, a trader in Mhangura.

The hospital that serves the district is closed, and so is its small morgue, so there’s no way of telling how many are dying, Zava said. Children’s hair is discoloring, a sign of malnutrition. Adults are wizened and dressed in rags — they have no cash for new clothes.

Zava said he has seen villagers plucking undigested corn kernels from cow dung to wash and eat. A slaughtered goat is eaten down to everything but hooves, bones and teeth. Crickets, cicadas and beetles also can make a meal.

The food crisis began after 2000, when Mugabe launched an often violent campaign to seize white-owned farms and give them to veterans of his guerrilla war against white rule over the former British colony.

Officials from Mugabe’s party toured the Doma district recently and told the new farm owners that the government could not supply their needs. People were advised to make do with what seed they had left, and with animal manure for fertilizer.

Ordinarily, after harvest the cotton fields are burned to protect the next year’s crop from disease. Not this year. People couldn’t afford to buy new seeds, and were hoping to get another season out of last year’s crop. Instead, the crops came up diseased.

Pasture has been burned by poachers to scare rabbits and rodents into traps. Deer are being hunted for food, and lions from remote parts of the Doma region and Chenanga nature reserve are killing cattle, donkeys and goats, villagers said.

Jackals, baboons and goats compete with villagers for roots and wild fruits.

The wild guava season is over and matamba, a hard orange-like fruit, cannot safely be eaten until ripe. Villagers pick the fruit and cover it with donkey or cow dung, leaving it in the sun to hasten ripening.

Katy Phiri, the grandmother collecting corn kernels, said she put her trust in God.

“There’s nothing else I can do,” she said. “I have never gone this hungry before.”

Source: www.cnn.com

Can We Save the Planet and Rescue the Economy at the Same Time?
By Al Gore

Our economy is in terrible shape and getting worse. Gasoline prices have been increasing. Jobs are being outsourced. Home mortgages are in trouble. Banks, automobile companies, and other institutions we depend upon are under growing pressure. The war in Iraq continues, and now the war in Afghanistan appears to be getting worse.

Meanwhile, the climate crisis is growing more dire—much faster than predicted. Scientists with access to data from Navy submarines traversing beneath the north polar ice cap have warned that there is now a good chance that within five years it will completely disappear during the summer months. And by the way, our weather sure is getting strange, isn’t it?

Yet when we look at these seemingly intractable challenges, we can see the common thread running through them. Our dangerous overreliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all of these challenges—the economic, environmental, and national security crises. We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change.

If we grab hold of that common thread and pull it hard, all of these complex problems will begin to unravel and we will find that we’re holding the answer to all of them right in our hands. The answer is to end our reliance on carbon-based fuels.

Scientists have confirmed that enough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth every 40 minutes to meet 100 percent of the entire world’s energy needs for a full year. Enough wind power blows through the Midwest corridor every day to meet 100 percent of US electricity demand. Geothermal energy is capable of providing enormous supplies of electricity.

But to make this exciting potential a reality, we need a new start. That’s why I’m proposing a strategic initiative designed to regain control of our own destiny. It’s not the only thing we need to do. But it’s the linchpin of a new strategy to repower America. I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years. This goal represents a challenge to all Americans, in every walk of life: political leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers, and every citizen.

A few years ago, it would not have been possible to issue such a challenge. But the sharp cost reductions beginning to take place in solar, wind, and geothermal power—coupled with the recent dramatic price increases for oil and coal—have radically changed the economics of energy.

Of course there are those who will tell us this can’t be done. Some are the defenders of the status quo, those with a vested interest in perpetuating the current system, no matter how high a price the rest of us will have to pay. But even those who reap the profits of the carbon age have to recognize the inevitability of its demise. As one opec oil minister observed, the Stone Age didn’t end because of a shortage of stones.

We should speed up this transition by insisting that the price of carbon-based energy include the costs of the environmental damage it causes. I have long supported a sharp reduction in payroll taxes with the difference made up in CO₂ taxes. We should tax what we burn, not what we earn. This is the single most important policy change we can make.

America’s transition to renewable energy sources must also include adequate provisions to assist those Americans who would unfairly face hardship. We should guarantee good jobs in the fresh air and sunshine for any coal miner displaced by impacts on the coal industry.

To those who argue that we do not yet have the technology to accomplish these results: I ask them to come with me to meet the entrepreneurs who will drive this revolution. To those who say the costs are still too high: I ask them to remember that when demand for oil and coal increases, the price goes up. When demand for solar cells increases, the price often comes down. To those who say the challenge is not politically viable: I suggest they go before the American people and try to defend the status quo. Then bear witness to the people’s appetite for change.

A political promise to do something decades from now is universally ignored because everyone knows it is meaningless. But 10 years is about the time that we as a nation can hold a steady aim and hit our target. When President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely in 10 years, many people doubted we could accomplish that goal. Eight years and two months later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon.

That was 39 years ago, and since then, many Americans have begun to wonder whether we’ve lost our appetite for bold policy solutions. Folks who claim to know how our system works these days have told us we might as well forget about our political system doing anything bold, especially if it is contrary to the wishes of special interests.

I’ve got to admit, that seems to be the way things have been going. But I’ve begun to hear different voices in this country from people who are tired of baby steps and special interest politics. So I ask you to join with me to call on every candidate, at every level, to accept this challenge—for America to be running on 100 percent zero-carbon electricity in 10 years. This is a generational moment. We need to act now.

In July Al Gore launched his call for 100 percent clean electricity in 10 years with the speech from which this article is adapted.

Article courtesy of motherjones.com

Run Cars on Green Electricity, Not Natural Gas

Jonathan G. Dorn

With the dramatic increase in oil prices earlier this year translating into higher prices at the gas pump in the United States, concerns over U.S. dependence on foreign oil are once again part of the national discussion on energy security. Combined with the growing understanding that carbon emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels are driving global climate change, the debate is now focused on how to restructure the U.S. transport system to solve these two problems. While the idea of running U.S. vehicles on natural gas has lately received a great deal of attention, powering our cars with green electricity is a more sensible option on all fronts—national security, efficiency, climate stabilization, and economics.

Having a fleet of natural gas–powered vehicles (NGVs) would simply replace U.S. dependence on foreign oil with a dependence on natural gas, another fossil fuel. The United States has scarcely 3 percent of the world’s proved natural gas reserves, yet even without the increased demand that would result from an NGV fleet, the country already consumes nearly a quarter of the world’s natural gas. At current rates of consumption, U.S. proved reserves would only meet national demand for another nine years.

U.S. natural gas production has remained relatively constant over the last two decades and is unlikely to increase over the long run, despite growing consumption. Consequently, any rise in demand is likely to be met by increasing imports. Since the late 1980s, U.S. net imports of natural gas—primarily from Canada—have tripled. The U.S. Department of Energy projects that by 2016 the majority of U.S. natural gas imports will come from outside North America.

With Russia and Iran topping the list of countries with the largest proved reserves of natural gas, a growing reliance on imports would increase the strategic vulnerability of the United States. These two nations—which along with 14 others collectively control nearly three fourths of the world’s natural gas reserves—are members of a Gas Exporting Countries Forum that was established in 2001. While there is no direct evidence that these countries are seeking to form a natural gas cartel, at the Forum’s 2005 annual meeting they discussed how to maintain a satisfactorily high natural gas price. (See data).

Just like oil, natural gas is a finite, nonrenewable resource. This means that switching to a fleet of NGVs would be at best a short-term fix. As natural gas becomes more difficult to obtain and more costly, a fleet of NGVs and the 20,000 or so natural gas refueling stations that would be required to support them would simply be abandoned.

A better investment is one that supports a fleet of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), such as the Chevy Volt slated for sale in 2010, which can use the existing electric infrastructure. A study by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found that if all U.S. automobiles were PHEVs, the current U.S. infrastructure could provide power for more than 70 percent of the fleet. Battery charging would occur mostly at night, when demand for electricity is low. In the emerging energy economy—an economy built on domestic wind, solar, and geothermal energy sources—the greening of the grid by replacing fossil fuel–based electrical generation will also be a greening of the transport system. Beyond the grid, distributed power systems—solar cells on rooftops, for example—could also be used to power PHEVs.

With today’s energy mix, PHEVs running on electricity from the grid are nearly three times more efficient than NGVs on a “well-to-wheel” basis—that is, when considering the full life cycle of the energy source, from fuel extraction to combustion to vehicle propulsion. This is because internal combustion engines, such as those used in natural gas vehicles and in today’s gas-powered automobile fleet, are incredibly inefficient. Only 20 percent or so of the energy in the fuel is used to move the vehicle. The other 80 percent is wasted as heat. Thus, choosing electric vehicles over NGVs can sharply reduce energy demand.

This important fact seems to have escaped T. Boone Pickens, the legendary oil tycoon from Texas who is now promoting a plan to replace natural gas in the electric power sector with wind-generated electricity and use the freed up natural gas to power a fleet of NGVs. Burning natural gas in a new combined cycle power plant is three times as efficient as burning natural gas in a car. Even including electrical losses from transmission, distribution, and battery charging, running a car on electricity from a natural gas power plant is more than twice as efficient. Keeping natural gas in the electric sector to help power a fleet of PHEVs is therefore the logical choice. Wind-generated electricity should replace electricity from coal-fired power plants, the most polluting power source.

Under normal driving conditions, well-to-wheel carbon dioxide emissions for vehicles running on electricity from natural gas–fired power plants are one fourth as high as emissions from cars directly burning natural gas. Since a PHEV operating in electric-only mode has no tailpipe emissions, electrifying transport would move the majority of carbon emissions from millions of vehicles to centralized electricity-generating plants, greatly simplifying the task of controlling emissions. As fossil-based power generation is replaced with wind and solar power, cumulative carbon emissions from centralized power facilities will be greatly reduced.

Carbon pollution is not the only environmental concern. Over the last decade, the decline in U.S. conventional natural gas production has been offset by turning to more unconventional sources, such as coalbed methane, tight sandstones, and gas shales. Between 1998 and 2007, this unconventional production increased from 28 to 47 percent of total output. Growing reliance on gas shales in particular is raising concerns about water consumption and contamination. Extracting gas from this source involves hydraulic fracturing, a process that injects water, sand, and chemicals into the shale layer at extremely high pressures. The process can use millions of gallons of water per extraction well and is known to leak chemicals into surrounding aquifers. The Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection for New York City recently wrote to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation voicing concerns that drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale formation will contaminate New York City’s watershed, jeopardizing drinking water. Opposition to unconventional production is likely to rise as gas companies attempt to expand operations into increasingly sensitive areas.

On economics, driving with electricity is far cheaper than driving with gasoline or natural gas. The average new U.S. car can travel roughly 30 miles on a gallon of gasoline, which cost $3.91 in July 2008 (the latest date for which comparable price data for natural gas is available). Traveling the same distance with natural gas cost around $2.51, while with electricity, using the existing electrical generation mix, it cost around 73¢.

In addition to being cheaper, electricity is less vulnerable to price shocks than natural gas. Electricity is generated from many different energy sources, so the impact of a quick rise in the price of any one fuel is usually tempered by stable prices for other fuels. In the new renewable energy economy, electricity prices will be insulated against fuel shocks, since energy from the wind and the sun is abundant and free.

While the price of residential electricity in the United States has increased only 30 percent since 1995, the price of natural gas has more than tripled due to rising demand and production costs. With the fast-industrializing economies of China and India expected to compete with the United States for natural gas, prices will likely continue their sharp upward trend.

Choosing natural gas to power our vehicles would send the United States down the same expensive and inefficient path that created our addiction to foreign oil and our dependence on a resource that will ultimately run out. Choosing green electricity can take us in a new direction—one that leads to improved energy security and a stabilizing climate.

Copyright © 2008 Earth Policy Institute
For more from Jonathan G. Dorn, go to the Earth Policy Institute website.

3 Green Pre-Conditions for a Big Three Bailout
by Matthew McDermott

With all the talk about bailing Detroit’s Big Three automakers out of a mess seemingly of their own creation, a number of groups have put forward the idea that if Detroit wants monetary help there are going to have to be some serious conditions placed on how that money is used.

In a new piece for Yale Environment 360 Jim Motavalli nicely sums up how Detroit got to be between the rock and a hard place (reliance on an unsustainable bigger is better formula entirely dependent on a never ending supply of cheap oil), and some of the conditions which should be placed on them should funding be approved to support them.

Three green pre-conditions for an auto bailout are as follows:

Stop Trying to Block Environmental Regulations

“The first requirement is that the automakers should drop their four-year legal attack against the global warming laws in California and other states,” says Ailis Aaron Wolf of 40mpg.org, a project of the Civil Society Institute.

The argument by the Big Three, and supported by the Bush administration, is that only the Federal government has the right the set fuel economy standards and therefore any effort by states to set higher standards in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are invalid.

Establish More Competitive Business Plans

Luke Tonachel, a transportation analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, also wants to see some tough love for the auto industry. “Any money that helps the automakers deal with their current economic situation should be conditioned on their establishing a business plan that will make them competitive in the future,” he said. “They have to make dramatically cleaner, high-mileage vehicles if they want to be competitive in a world of insecure and volatile oil markets and intensifying global warming.”

Tonachel went on to list off-the-shelf technology and methods that could be implemented to improve environmental performance: streamlined body designs, more efficient 6 or 7 speed transmissions, low rolling-resistance tires.

Mandate Greater Commitment to Hybrids & Greater Fuel Efficiency
Ailis Aaron Wolf of 40mpg.org and Jim Kliesch of the Union of Concerned Scientists weighed in on fuel efficiency. Wolf first:

Obviously, the more forward-thinking automakers that have built hybrids and concentrated on fuel efficiency have done better in the marketplace. Any bailout funding should be tied to requirements that they commit to building hybrids, clean diesels and other highly fuel-efficient vehicles.

Kliesch advocated a 4% per year increase in fuel efficiency,

Jim Kliesch, a senior engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists, thinks automakers should commit to a four-percent-per-year improvement in fuel economy across their entire product lines, from big trucks to compact cars. “We’re saying the taxpayers should be getting a return on their investment,” he said. “Consumers are clamoring for more fuel-efficient vehicles, and sadly there aren’t many of them out there right now. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but one of the biggest problems is that the industry has dragged its heels too long.”

So what do TreeHugger readers think? After all it’d be your money (if you pay taxes in the US at least…), what green conditions should be placed upon any Big Three bailout money?

More at: Yale Environment 360

Article courtesy of treehugger.com

Rapper Jim Jones talks to The Daily Beast’s Touré about how the new president-elect inspired him to clean up the language in his music.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-11-20/what-up-my-obama/

by Touré

Soulja Boy.

What. Were. You. Thinking?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-30/a-rapper-salutes-the-slave-trade/

I asked him, “What historical figure do you most hate?
He said, “Shout out to the slave masters! Without them we’d still be in Africa.”

Here at SoulGen, we like to highlight progressive, creative, highly-intelligent, impactful change makers who embody the SoulGen mission… “making conscious cool.” SoulGenesis is proud to feature one of our earliest members and supporters, Brian Peterson.

Brian is an author and educator. He holds a Bachelors of Science and Engineering (Computer Science) and a Masters in Education from the University of Pennsylvania (www.upenn.edu).

Currently, you’ll see Brian’s blog, Obamantary, featured on our home page.

On his blog, Brian says “I am a writer caught up in a whirlwind of activity, forced to pick and choose moments for reflection. This slice of time - two years ago, an improbable dream for most, is one to tell the grandchildren about. I’m trying my best to capture the stories and my underlying thoughts, and praying the world is really ready for change.”

As the former Executive Director of The Ase Academy (www.aseacademy.org), Peterson has displayed a tremendous passion and commitment to the education of youth. He also has extensive experience in supporting college students. He served as the Education Fellow in W.E.B. Du Bois College House (dubois.house.upenn.edu) on Penn’s campus for five years, developing outreach and academic support programs for House residents and the entire African American community on campus. He also designed and co-teaches an African American studies course at Penn, and was an active leader of several student groups while in college.

Peterson has written two novels, Move Over Girl (2000) and Spoken Words (2004) (www.chance22.com), both receiving critical acclaim and wide appreciation. He is also a former staff writer at Okayplayer.com (www.okayplayer.com), the online music community for the Grammy-award winning group The Roots, Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, Common, Talib Kweli, and others. There he founded and edited a literature appreciation section called “Okay Books,” in addition to providing news content for the site and interviewing artists.

In 2003, Peterson co-founded and launched Lion’s Story (www.lionsstory.org), a non-profit educational research and development collaborative to develop and assess life-long learning strategies for people of color, specifically incorporating technology and innovative content. The African American Student’s Guide to Excellence is one of Lion’s Story’s first projects.

Peterson currently resides in Philadelphia with his wife and three children.

Dear Partner!

As passionate and dedicated youth development professionals, we all have an inherent responsibility to ensure that our youth have a very clear path to success. However, over the recent months we’ve increasingly heard about a disturbing trend affecting our nation’s high schools. Students are dropping out of school at an alarming rate, and if not addressed immediately, this crisis will swallow the hopes and dreams for the future of the very communities we reside in and serve on a daily basis. Below are just a few of the disheartening statistics:

• Each year approximately 1.23 million students fail to graduate from high school; more than half of whom are from minority groups.
• In 2005, only 55 percent of all black students graduated from high school on time with a regular diploma, compared with 78 percent of whites.
• About half of poor, urban ninth graders read at only a fifth or sixth-grade level.
• Approximately two thousand high schools (14 percent of American high schools) produce more than half of the nation’s dropouts. In these “dropout factories,” the number of seniors enrolled is routinely 60 percent less than the number of freshmen three years earlier.
• Over a lifetime, an 18-year old who graduates earns $260,000 more than a person without a high school diploma and contributes $60,000 more in federal and state income taxes.
• Teachers, school leaders, parents and students have all been grappling with this issue, but very few organizations have been able to offer tangible solutions.

We would like to introduce you to the “All Things are Possible” Campaign (ATAP), presented by SoulGenesis and Chris “Kazi” Rolle, star of the critically-acclaimed documentary, The Hip Hop Project.

This monumental and innovative campaign will bring together two things that youth need: 1) positive role models who care about them and are dedicated to their success, and 2) tangible and useable information that motivates them in a way they can easily grasp and understand.

Our keynote speaker, Chris “Kazi” Rolle, has dedicated his life work to inspiring youth through Hip Hop. He is most well known for his work with the Hip Hop Project, a powerful youth program that spawned the award-winning documentary called The Hip Hop Project. Kazi is the star of the film which chronicles his life as an adolescent who didn’t have much growing up, and his meteoric rise to becoming a community leader, Hip Hop artist and main character of The Hip Hop Project. Click the following link to see a brief video that gives a great perspective on who Kazi is, and the inspirational power he brings to audiences young and old.

The Hip Hop Project is the main component of the ATAP campaign, and was produced by film legend Bruce Willis and Hip Hop pioneer Queen Latifah. We have screened this very powerful film in front of youth audiences around the world consistently invoking deep emotion, healing and uplifting conversations. You can see the trailer of the film by clicking HERE.

The ATAP campaign uses the power of the film coupled with inspiring workshops by Kazi and other SoulGenesis staff to accomplish the following:

• Motivate young people to stay in school through Kazi’s film, music and inspirational life story.
• Provide teachers, administrators and youth workers with tools that have been proven to help engage disconnected youth.
• Establish new Hip Hop Project programs in your school. The Hip Hop Project program has been proven to motivate young people and to incentivize them to work harder in school in order to continue participation in the Hip Hop Project.
• Expose students and staff to more socially responsible media, music and networks.

Join us in our mission to directly address the high school dropout crisis! Together we can impact 1,000,000 youth before the end of 2010. For booking or for more information about ATAP, please contact us at 215.432.7396 or by email at Isaac@soulgen.com.

Thank you kindly for your support.

Sincerely,

The ATAP Team

KAZI Speaks at the United Nations

1 Alliance for Excellent Education: High School Dropouts in America - EPE (2007)
2 Editorial Projects in Education, Diplomas Count (2008)
3 Neild & Balfanz an Extreme Degree of Difficulty: The Educational Demographics of the 9th Grade in Philadelphia (2001)
4 Balfanz, - Locating & Transforming the Low Performing High Schools (2007)
5 Rouse, C.E. (2005).

I think I am probably going to die any minute now. An inflamed, deceived mob of about 50 desperate men are crowding round the car, some trying to turn it over, others beating at it with large rocks, all yelling insults and curses.

They have just started to smash the windows. Next, they will pull us out and, well, let’s not think about that …

I am trying not to meet their eyes, but they are staring at me and my companions with rage and hatred such as I haven’t seen in a human face before. Those companions, Barbara Jones and Richard van Ryneveld, are - like me - quite helpless in the back seats.

If we get out, we will certainly be beaten to death. If we stay where we are, we will probably be beaten to death.

Our two African companions have - crazily in our view - got out of the car to try to reason with the crowd. It is clear to us that you might as well preach non-violence to a tornado.

At last, after what must have been about 40 seconds but that felt like half an hour, one of the pair saw sense, leapt back into the car and reversed wildly down the rocky, dusty path - leaving his friend behind.

By the grace of God we did not slither into the ditch, roll over or burst a tyre. Through the dust we churned up as we fled, we could see our would-be killers running with appalling speed to catch up. There was just time to make a crazy two-point turn which allowed us to go forwards and so out-distance them.

We had pretty much abandoned our other guide to whatever his fate might be (this was surprisingly easy to justify to myself at the time) when we saw that he had broken free and was running with Olympic swiftness, just ahead of pursuers half hidden by the dust.

We flung open a rear door so he could scramble in and, engine grinding, we veered off, bouncing painfully over the ruts and rocks.

We feared there would be another barricade to stop our escape, and it would all begin again. But there wasn’t, and we eventually realised we had got away, even the man whose idiocy nearly got us killed.

He told us it was us they wanted, not him, or he would never have escaped. We ought to be dead. We are not. It is an interesting feeling, not wholly unpleasant.

Why did they want to kill us? What was the reason for their fury? They thought that if I reported on their way of life they might lose their livings.

Livings? Dyings, more likely.

Peking power: A Chinese supervisor cajoles local workers as they dig a trench in Kabwe, Zambia

These poor, hopeless, angry people exist by grubbing for scraps of cobalt and copper ore in the filth and dust of abandoned copper mines in Congo, sinking perilous 80ft shafts by hand, washing their finds in cholera-infected streams full of human filth, then pushing enormous two-hundredweight loads uphill on ancient bicycles to the nearby town of Likasi where middlemen buy them to sell on, mainly to Chinese businessmen hungry for these vital metals.

To see them, as they plod miserably past, is to be reminded of pictures of unemployed miners in Thirties Britain, stumbling home in the drizzle with sacks of coal scraps gleaned from spoil heaps.

Except that here the unsparing heat makes the labour five times as hard, and the conditions of work and life are worse by far than any known in England since the 18th Century.

Many perish as their primitive mines collapse on them, or are horribly injured without hope of medical treatment. Many are little more than children. On a good day they may earn $3, which just supports a meagre existence in diseased, malarial slums.

We had been earlier to this awful pit, which looked like a penal colony in an ancient slave empire.

Defeated, bowed figures toiled endlessly in dozens of hand-dug pits. Their faces, when visible, were blank and without hope.

We had been turned away by a fat, corrupt policeman who pretended our papers weren’t in order, but who was really taking instructions from a dead-eyed, one-eared gangmaster who sat next to him.

By the time we returned with more official permits, the gangmasters had readied the ambush.

The diggers feared - and their evil, sinister bosses had worked hard on that fear - that if people like me publicised their filthy way of life, then the mine might be closed and the $3 a day might be taken away.

I can give you no better explanation in miniature of the wicked thing that I believe is now happening in Africa.

Out of desperation, much of the continent is selling itself into a new era of corruption and virtual slavery as China seeks to buy up all the metals, minerals and oil she can lay her hands on: copper for electric and telephone cables, cobalt for mobile phones and jet engines - the basic raw materials of modern life.

It is crude rapacity, but to Africans and many of their leaders it is better than the alternative, which is slow starvation.

The Congolese risk their lives digging through mountains of mining waste looking for scraps of metal ore

It is my view - and not just because I was so nearly killed - that China’s cynical new version of imperialism in Africa is a wicked enterprise.

China offers both rulers and the ruled in Africa the simple, squalid advantages of shameless exploitation.

For the governments, there are gargantuan loans, promises of new roads, railways, hospitals and schools - in return for giving Peking a free and tax-free run at Africa’s rich resources of oil, minerals and metals.

For the people, there are these wretched leavings, which, miserable as they are, must be better than the near-starvation they otherwise face.

Persuasive academics advised me before I set off on this journey that China’s scramble for Africa had much to be said for it. They pointed out China needs African markets for its goods, and has an interest in real economic advance in that broken continent.

For once, they argued, a foreign intervention in Africa might work precisely because it is so cynical and self-interested. They said Western aid, with all its conditions, did little to create real advances in Africa, laughing as they declared: ‘The only country that ever got rich through donations is the Vatican.’

Why get so het up about African corruption anyway? Is it really so much worse than corruption in Russia or India?

Is it really our business to try to act as missionaries of purity? Isn’t what we call ‘corruption’ another name for what Africans view as looking after their families?

And what about China herself? Despite the country’s convulsive growth and new wealth, it still suffers gravely from poverty and backwardness, as I have seen for myself in its dingy sweatshops, the primitive electricity-free villages of Canton, the dark and squalid mining city of Datong and the cave-dwelling settlements that still rely on wells for their water.

After the murderous disaster of Mao, and the long chaos that went before, China longs above all for stable prosperity. And, as one genial and open-minded Chinese businessman said to me in Congo as we sat over a beer in the decayed colonial majesty of Lubumbashi’s Belgian-built Park Hotel: ‘Africa is China’s last hope.’

I find this argument quite appealing, in theory. Britain’s own adventures in Africa were not specially benevolent, although many decent men did what they could to enforce fairness and justice amid the bigotry and exploitation.

Taking over: Chinese building workers in Zambia

It is noticeable that in much former British territory we have left behind plenty of good things and habits that are absent in the lands once ruled by rival empires.

Even so, with Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Uganda on our conscience, who are we to lecture others?

I chose to look at China’s intervention in two countries, Zambia and the ‘Democratic Republic of the Congo’, because they lie side by side; because one was once British and the other Belgian.

Also, in Zambia’s imperfect but functioning democracy, there is actual opposition to the Chinese presence, while in the despotic Congo, opposition to President Joseph Kabila is unwise, to put it mildly.

Congo is barely a state at all, and still hosts plenty of fighting not all that far from here.

Statues and images of Joseph’s murdered father Laurent are everywhere in an obvious attempt to create a cult of personality on which stability may one day be based. Portraits of Joseph himself scowl from every wall.

I have decided not to name most of the people who spoke to me, even though some of them gave me permission to do so, because I am not sure they know just how much of a risk they may be running by criticising the Chinese in Africa.

I know from personal experience with Chinese authority that Peking regards anything short of deep respect as insulting, and it does not forget a slight.

I also know that this over-sensitive vigilance is present in Africa.

The Mail on Sunday team was reported to the authorities in Zambia’s Copper Belt by Chinese managers who had seen us taking photographs of a graveyard at Chambishi where 54 victims of a disaster in a Chinese-run explosives factory are buried. Within an hour, local ’security’ officials were buzzing round us trying to find out what we were up to.

This is why I have some time for the Zambian opposition politician Michael Sata, known as ‘King Cobra’ because of his fearless combative nature (but also, say his opponents, because he is so slippery).

Sata has challenged China’s plans to invest in Zambia, and is publicly suspicious of them. At elections two years ago, the Chinese were widely believed to have privately threatened to pull out of the country if he won, and to have helped the government parties win.

Peking regards Zambia as a great prize, alongside its other favoured nations of Sudan (oil), Angola (oil) and Congo (metals).

Fighting back: Peter Hitchens with Michael Sata, the opposition politician nicknamed ‘King Cobra’

It has cancelled Zambia’s debts, eased Zambian exports to China, established a ’special economic zone’ in the Copper Belt, offered to build a sports stadium, schools, a hospital and an anti-malaria centre as well as providing scholarships and dispatching experts to help with agriculture. Zambia-China trade is growing rapidly, mainly in the form of copper.

All this has aroused the suspicions of Mr Sata, a populist politician famous for his blunt, combative manner and his harsh, biting attacks on opponents, and who was once a porter who swept the platforms at Victoria Station in London.

Now the leader of the Patriotic Front, with a respectable chance of winning a presidential election set for the end of October, Sata says: ‘The Chinese are not here as investors, they are here as invaders.

‘They bring Chinese to come and push wheelbarrows, they bring Chinese bricklayers, they bring Chinese carpenters, Chinese plumbers. We have plenty of those in Zambia.’

This is true. In Lusaka and in the Copper Belt, poor and lowly Chinese workers, in broad-brimmed straw hats from another era, are a common sight at mines and on building sites, as are better-dressed Chinese supervisors and technicians.

There are Chinese restaurants and Chinese clinics and Chinese housing compounds - and a growing number of Chinese flags flapping over factories and smelters.

‘We don’t need to import labourers from China,’ Sata says. ‘We need to import people with skills we don’t have in Zambia. The Chinese are not going to train our people in how to push wheelbarrows.’

He meets me in the garden of his not specially grand house in the old-established and verdant Rhodes Park section of Lusaka. It is guarded by uniformed security men, its walls protected by barbed wire and broken glass.

‘Wherever our Chinese “brothers” are they don’t care about the local workers,’ he complains, alleging that Chinese companies have lax safety procedures and treat their African workers like dirt.

In language which seems exaggerated, but which will later turn out to be at least partly true, he claims: ‘They employ people in slave conditions.’

He also accuses Chinese overseers of frequently beating up Zambians. His claim is given force by a story in that morning’s Lusaka newspapers about how a Zambian building worker in Ndola, in the Copper Belt, was allegedly beaten unconscious by four Chinese co-workers angry that he had gone to sleep on the job.

I later checked this account with the victim’s relatives in an Ndola shanty town and found it to be true.
Chinese sign in Zambia

Evidence of China is never very far away

Recently, a government minister, Alice Simago, was shown weeping on TV after she saw at first hand the working conditions at a Chinese-owned coal mine in the Southern Province.

When I contacted her, she declined to speak to me about this - possibly because criticism of the Chinese is not welcome among most of the Zambian elite.

Denis Lukwesa, deputy general secretary of the Zambian Mineworkers’ Union, also backed up Sata’s view, saying: ‘They just don’t understand about safety. They are more interested in profit.’

As for their general treatment of African workers, Lukwesa says he knows of cases where Chinese supervisors have kicked Zambians. He summed up their attitude like this: ‘They are harsh to Zambians, and they don’t get on well with them.’

Sata warns against the enormous loans and offers of help with transport, schools and health care with which Peking now sweetens its attempts to buy up Africa’s mineral reserves.

‘China’s deal with the Democratic Republic of the Congo is, in my opinion, corruption,’ he says, comparing this with Western loans which require strong measures against corruption.

Everyone in Africa knows China’s Congo deal - worth almost £5billion in loans, roads, railways, hospitals and schools - was offered after Western experts demanded tougher anti-corruption measures in return for more aid.

Sata knows the Chinese are unpopular in his country. Zambians use a mocking word - ‘choncholi’ - to describe the way the Chinese speak. Zambian businessmen gossip about the way the Chinese live in separate compounds, where - they claim - dogs are kept for food.

There are persistent rumours, which cropped up in almost every conversation I had in Zambia, that many of the imported Chinese workforce are convicted criminals whom China wants to offload in Africa. I was unable to confirm this but, given China’s enormous gulag and the harshness of life for many migrant workers, it is certainly not impossible.

Sata warns that ’sticks and stones’ may one day fly if China does not treat Zambians better. He now promises a completely new approach: ‘I used to sweep up at your Victoria Station, and I never got any complaints about my work. I want to sweep my country even cleaner than I swept your stations.’

Some Africa experts tend to portray Sata as a troublemaker. His detractors whisper that he is a mouthpiece for Taiwan, which used to be recognised by many African states but which faces almost total isolation thanks to Peking’s new Africa policy.

But his claims were confirmed by a senior worker in Chambishi, scene of the 2005 explosion. This man, whom I will call Thomas, is serious, experienced and responsible. His verdict on the Chinese is devastating.

He recalls the aftermath of the blast, when he had the ghastly task of collecting together what remained of the men who died: ‘Zambia, a country of 11million people, went into official mourning for this disaster.

‘A Chinese supervisor said to me in broken English, “In China, 5,000 people die, and there is nothing. In Zambia, 50 people die and everyone is weeping.” To them, 50 people are nothing.’

This sort of thing creates resentment. Earlier this year African workers at the new Chinese smelter at Chambishi rioted over low wages and what they thought were unsafe working conditions.

When Chinese President Hu Jintao came to Zambia in 2006, he had to cancel a visit to the Copper Belt for fear of hostile demonstrations. Thomas says: ‘The people who advised Hu Jintao not to come were right.’

He suspects Chinese arrogance and brutality towards Africans is not racial bigotry, but a fear of being seen to be weak. ‘They are trying to prove they are not inferior to the West. They are trying too hard.

‘If they ask you to do something and you don’t do it, they think you’re not doing it because they aren’t white. People put up with the kicks and blows because they need work to survive.’

Many in Africa also accuse the Chinese of unconcealed corruption. This is specially obvious in the ‘Democratic Republic of the Congo’, currently listed as the most corrupt nation on Earth.

A North-American businessman who runs a copper smelting business in Katanga Province told me how his firm tried to obey safety laws.

They are constantly targeted by official safety inspectors because they refuse to bribe them. Meanwhile, Chinese enterprises nearby get away with huge breaches of the law - because they paid bribes.

‘We never pay,’ he said, ‘because once you pay you become their bitch; you will pay for ever and ever.’

Another businessman shrugged over the way he is forced to wait weeks to get his products out of the country, while the Chinese have no such problems.

‘I’m not sure the Chinese even know there are customs regulations,’ he said. ‘They don’t fill in the forms, they just pay. I try to be philosophical about it, but it is not easy.’

Unlike orderly Zambia, Congo is a place of chaos, obvious privation, tyranny dressed up as democracy for public-relations purposes, and fear.

This is Katanga, the mineral-rich slice of land fought over furiously in the early Sixties in post-colonial Africa’s first civil war. Brooding over its capital, Lubumbashi, is a 400ft black hill: the accumulated slag and waste of 80 years of copper mining and smelting.

Now, thanks to a crazy rise in the price of copper and cobalt, the looming, sinister mound is being quarried - by Western business, by the Chinese and by bands of Congolese who grub and scramble around it searching for scraps of copper or traces of cobalt, smashing lumps of slag with great hammers as they hunt for any way of paying for that night’s supper.

As dusk falls and the shadows lengthen, the scene looks like the blasted land of Mordor in Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings: a pre-medieval prospect of hopeless, condemned toil in pits surrounded by stony desolation.

Behind them tower the leaning ruins of colossal abandoned factories: monuments to the wars and chaos that have repeatedly passed this way.

There is something strange and unsettling about industrial scenes in Africa, pithead winding gear and gaunt chimneys rising out of tawny grasslands dotted with anthills and banana palms. It looks as if someone has made a grave mistake.

And there is a lesson for colonial pride and ambition in the streets of Lubumbashi - 80 years ago an orderly Art Deco city full of French influence and supervised by crisply starched gendarmes, now a genial but volatile chaos of scruffy, bribe-hunting traffic cops where it is not wise to venture out at night.

The once-graceful Belgian buildings, gradually crumbling under thick layers of paint, long ago lost their original purpose.

Outsiders come and go in Africa, some greedy, some idealistic, some halfway between. Time after time, they fail or are defeated, leaving behind scars, slag-heaps, ruins and graveyards, disillusion and disappointment.

We have come a long way from Cecil Rhodes to Bob Geldof, but we still have not brought much happiness with us, and even Nelson Mandela’s vaunted ‘Rainbow Nation’ in South Africa is careering rapidly towards banana republic status.

Now a new great power, China, is scrambling for wealth, power and influence in this sad continent, without a single illusion or pretence.

Perhaps, after two centuries of humbug, this method will work where all other interventions have failed.

But after seeing the bitter, violent desperation unleashed in the mines of Likasi, I find it hard to believe any good will come of it.

Article By PETER HITCHENS for www.dailymail.co.uk

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By Vernon Clark, Inquirer Staff Writer

Declaring a new day in the struggle to reduce crime and violence in the black communities of Philadelphia, civic, community, government and religious leaders yesterday urged thousands of black men to step forward to help patrol streets.

At an event billed as “A Call to Action: 10,000 Men” at the Liacouras Center in North Philadelphia, nearly 10,000 men - most of them dressed in black - gathered to volunteer to be “peacekeepers” in their communities. Many were lined up at tables with sign-up forms. A number already had registered online, organizers said.

Looking out at the large audience, Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson, a strong supporter of the effort, said, “We can make a major difference.

“We have to learn how to live together and work together. We are all in this together,” he said.

Johnson was among about a dozen speakers who addressed the gathering. On the stage, about 50 leaders, many of them elected officials, sat facing a sea of black men.

Organizers did not give an exact count of those who showed up yesterday. The Liacouras Center has a capacity of 10,200 and it appeared that nearly all seats were taken. Details about the effort, including how it would be organized and controlled, have not been made public.

The organizing effort began this year after Philadelphia’s rising number of homicides appeared to be on track to surpass last year’s total.

The city has been getting national attention as a murder capital, even though the homicide rate - the number of killings per 100,000 residents - is below those of some other major cities and the homicide count has recently dipped below last year’s. As of midnight Thursday, 321 homicides had been reported this year, compared with 323 last year.

Robert Massey, 30, of Germantown, who brought his 9-year-old son, Rahim, said: “This is the only place I had to be today. I want my son to hear all of this. I want him to know his father cares about his neighborhood.”

Mayor Street praised the crowd for coming out in support of their communities.

“This day is a launching day. This is the day when we are going to do something different in this city,” Street said. “Every one of us is going to make a personal commitment today that . . . ‘I’m going to do the work to make this a better community.’ It’s a new day.”

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From 1991 to 2002, Sierra Leone, West Africa experienced a civil war that devastated the country. The last several years the country has focused on maintaining peace, rebuilding infrastructure and bringing millions of displaced people home. One of the amazing initiatives to emerge has been the Sierra Leone Refugee All-Stars, a group of Sierra Leonean refugees that used music to bring healing, raise awareness and promote action.

SoulGenesis is particularly interested in supporting this initiative and others that help empower the local community. We seek initiatives that do not provide handouts but create opportunities for local people and economies to become self-sustaining. As such we have partnered with three dynamic organizations, Empowerment Works, Evil Twin Bookings and Christie Communications.

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Organizers of the drive to put at least 10,000 volunteers on the streets said preliminary indications were that they met their target, and would in the next 30 days be able to send patrols into trouble spots to deter crime.

Volunteers will be unarmed and have no powers of arrest but will be trained in conflict resolution and mentoring in a city where 85 percent of homicide victims are young black men.

Backers, including Philadelphia Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson and record industry boss Kenny Gamble, say the initiative has a better chance of succeeding than earlier anti-violence campaigns because it is broadly representative of the black community, and is not led by city government or the police, who are mistrusted in some inner-city areas.

It has been endorsed by more than 80 community groups, businesses, churches and government agencies, organizers say.

The homicide rate, which rose to a nine-year high of 406 in 2006, has defied repeated appeals by police and civic and community leaders, and has led national media to dub Philadelphia “Killadelphia” instead of its official title, the City of Brotherly Love.

In a two-hour rally at a Temple University auditorium, black leaders urged men to take responsibility for their communities and their families, and to stop blaming others for a history of economic underachievement.

“Slavery, at this late time, is no longer an acceptable excuse,” said A. Bruce Cawley, a prominent black businessman. He said that in the 325 years since blacks have lived in Philadelphia, they had been overtaken in prosperity by immigrant Irish, Jews, Italians, and now Asians and Hispanics.

“And where are we? We are sitting on the sidelines,” Cawley said.

Johnson, whose department has been criticized for failing to curb the homicide epidemic, said police cannot be blamed for its root causes such as poverty, unemployment, poor education, and weak gun control. “Traditional policing is not working,” he said.

Chandlan Crawford, 38, a forklift truck driver from southwest Philadelphia, said he had already volunteered to join a street patrol, and was optimistic that the estimated 8,500 who attended Sunday’s rally would generate more support. “The people that are here will take the message out there,” he said.

Gamble, the chairman of the campaign, described the homicide epidemic as “a war” that can only be won by overcoming what he said was the “ignorance” and “self-hatred” that affect some black men.

“There are no more excuses,” Gamble said. “We need a code of conduct and a standard of behavior that will outline what’s right and what’s wrong in our community. We as black men have to be able to enforce it.”

© Reuters2007 All rights reserved

By Jon Hurdle

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University of East Anglia researchers gauged CO2 absorption through more than 90,000 measurements from merchant ships equipped with automatic instruments.

Results of their 10-year study in the North Atlantic show CO2 uptake halved between the mid-90s and 2000 to 2005.

Scientists believe global warming might get worse if the oceans soak up less of the greenhouse gas.

Researchers said the findings, published in a paper for the Journal of Geophysical Research, were surprising and worrying because there were grounds for believing that, in time, the ocean might become saturated with our emissions.

‘Saturated’ ocean

BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin said: “The researchers don’t know if the change is due to climate change or to natural variations.

“But they say it is a tremendous surprise and very worrying because there were grounds for believing that in time the ocean might become ’saturated’ with our emissions - unable to soak up any more.”

He said that would “leave all our emissions to warm the atmosphere”.

Of all the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere, only half of it stays there; the rest goes into carbon sinks.

There are two major natural carbon sinks: the oceans and the land “biosphere”. They are equivalent in size, each absorbing a quarter of all CO2 emissions.

© BBC MMVII

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California will file a lawsuit against the EPA demanding the right to set its own limits on vehicle emissions that are stricter than national standards, spokesman Aaron McLear said.

California, which has become a leader on environmental issues in the United States, passed a state law in 2005 that would require new vehicles to meet progressively tighter standards for greenhouse gas emissions starting with 2009 models.

But the state needs a waiver from the federal government to implement the law and says it has run out of patience awaiting it. Schwarzenegger set an Oct. 22 deadline six months ago for a decision and threatened to sue if the EPA failed to act by then.

“It is almost two years since we asked for this waiver. The governor feels we have been patient enough. He has met with the EPA administrator and with the president on this and has sent letters to them both. We have done everything we can and now it is time for action,” McLear said.

The EPA said earlier this month it expected to make a decision on California’s request by the end of 2007.

Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has said repeatedly that the US government is moving too slowly on climate change issues and that states like California must lead the way.

US automakers are fighting California’s plans in the courts. In a separate case, a US federal judge last month threw out a California lawsuit that had sought for the first time to hold vehicle manufacturers responsible for damages caused by climate-changing greenhouse gases.

Last year, California passed the most far-reaching greenhouse gas emissions reductions in the United States, saying it would cut global warming gases to 1990 levels by 2020 — or by 25 percent from current levels.

© Reuters News Service 2007

When I approached Ethel Cee about being featured in this Music Issue, her emotions went from shock to excitement to a chilled, relaxed vibe. “Cool,” she decided finally. “I don’t feel I did anything paper-worthy before.”

Let’s see, this year alone she’s opened up for Sean Kuti, Little Brother, Rah Digga and recently recorded a segment for Bahamadia’s upcoming DVD.

Paper-worthy? I’d say so.

Before getting into who Ethel Cee is, you’ll first need to know who she’s not. Being a black female MC in the underground automatically makes her stand out, but she doesn’t make that the foundation of her music.

“I don’t get caught up in all that, really. I understand how important it is, but it is not a crutch. I can’t be the face of black female MCs everywhere, or even the face of hip-hop. When I go onstage I need to represent myself,” she says.

Her peers know her as one of the hardest-working MCs in Philly. Originally from Mount Airy and now living in West Philly, Ethel Cee saw her career blossom when she became a regular at the Painted Bride’s spoken-word and slam nights. This was around 2001, when the thriving Philly neo-soul scene was led by names like Jill Scott and Ursula Rucker. Cee befriended another MC named Nikkie, and together they formed the duo, Versus, who mixed rap, singing and spoken word to spit out political and social issues.
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“I didn’t know who I was back then, really,” she laughs. “Once I joined Versus, it all started moving pretty fast.” Later she became part of the Squadzilla collective, who performed and promoted projects together. Currently she’s building her name as a solo artist and one-third of the Nuthouse crew with established artists Dave Ghetto and Fel Sweetenberg. “In Nuthouse, I can still concentrate on Ethel Cee while also doing projects with Dave and Fel,” she says. “Both have a natural swagger about them that translates so easily and clearly onto a track. … They push me to be better than I already am.”

After all these creative transitions, Cee came to realize hip-hop could be a permanent outlet of expression for the rest of her life. “Those were all positive stepping stones for me. Being around all those people taught me the importance of writing and rehearsing. They helped me to become a seasoned MC,” she says. “The girl who is Ethel Cee has independence and a completely different confidence that wasn’t there before — it’s empowering.”

While she performs frequently, and can be heard on various mix tapes, it’s her solo album, due out spring 2008, that will officially introduce Ethel Cee to the masses. Her lyrics are a reflection of her life, experiences and travels, so she’s taking her time making sure it truly represents her. “I’m not just going to put out anything to have something out there,” she says. The as-yet-untitled CD will include production by C-Rock from Diverse Soundscapes. There’s talk of getting DJ Skipmode from Ill Vibe Collective involved, too. Everything else is still being worked out, or she’s just keeping hush-hush about it.

Taking risks is her priority. For example, the beats she chooses to rhyme over aren’t strictly hip-hop; there’s also break beat, house and electronic. Her flow tends to lean on the smooth side (credit that spoken-word background), but on some rhymes she gets aggressive. “I tend to write better when I’m angry. It would be a gross misrepresentation if you heard the same thing from me all the time. I decided when I went solo that if this is something that I’m going to do for a long time then I have to challenge myself and do something that is going to keep my attention. It’s important for the crowd to be enthralled in what I do, but it’s more important for me to be enthralled in what I do.”

She runs down her roster of performances and hosting duties for the next three months and it made me tired just listening. With a smirk, she says, “I’m not here just because I’m cute.”

Courtesy of Deesha Dyer, Philadelphia City Paper

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democratic lawmakers denounced federal authorities Tuesday for not intervening in the Jena Six case, citing racist noose-hanging incidents far beyond the small Louisiana town where a school attack garnered national attention.

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing with federal officials and community activists examining the case of the six black teenagers charged with the beating of a white student. The incident happened after nooses were hung from a tree on a high school campus there — a symbol of the lynching violence of the segregation era.

Democratic lawmakers, many of them black, blasted federal authorities for staying out of the local prosecutor’s case against the six, particularly that of Mychal Bell, who is currently in jail after a judge decided he violated the terms of his probation for a previous conviction.

“Shame on you,” Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, said to Justice Department officials, directing most of her fury at Donald Washington, the U.S. attorney for Louisiana’s western district — and the first black person to hold that position.

“As a parent, I’m on the verge of tears,” Jackson Lee said.

“Why didn’t you intervene?” she asked repeatedly, raising her voice and jabbing her finger in the air as some in the audience began to applaud.

Committee chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., called for quiet before Washington spoke.

“I was also offended, I too am an African-American,” Washington told the panel. “I did intervene, I did engage the district attorney. At the end of the day, there are only certain things that the United States attorney can do.”

Following that exchange, Conyers pointed out he had invited the local district attorney, Reed Walters, to testify, but he declined. At that, some in the audience yelled out, “subpoena him!”

Since the Jena case made headlines, there have been a number of other nooses found in high-profile incidents around the country — in a black Coast Guard cadet’s bag, on a Maryland college campus, and, last week, on the office door of a black professor at Columbia University in New York.

The Department of Justice has created a task force to handle noose-hanging investigations in five states. It investigated the Jena matter but decided not to prosecute because the federal government typically does not bring hate crimes charges against juveniles, Washington said.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, a New York-based civil rights activist, said there was unfairness in a criminal justice system that declined to charge white students for a hate crime because they are minors, but initially chose to charge the six teens in the beating case as adults.

“These nooses were hung over a year ago sir. So I know that the wheels of justice turn slow, but they seem to be at a standstill,” said Sharpton. “That’s why we’re seeing nooses all over America.”

The senior Republican on the panel, Lamar Smith of Texas, said, “more than anything what we need is an effort to reduce racial tension… What we do not need is stoking racial resentment.”

According to a CNN-Opinion Research Corp. poll released Tuesday, 79 percent of blacks said the black teenagers in Jena were treated unfairly. Whites were more evenly divided, with 33 percent saying they were treated unfairly, 29 percent fairly and 38 percent saying they were unsure.

The survey, conducted Oct. 12-14, involved telephone interviews with 762 whites and 307 blacks. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3.5 percentage points for the whites and plus or minus 5.5 percentage points for the blacks.

In an Associated Press-Ipsos poll taken late last month, nearly nine in 10 blacks said that blacks and other minorities cannot receive equal justice to whites under the nation’s justice system. Whites agreed, but by a much narrower 50 percent to 44 percent.

Last week, a judge sentenced Bell to 18 months in jail after determining he violated the terms of his probation for a previous conviction.

Racial tensions began rising in Jena in August 2006 after a black student sat under a tree known as a gathering spot for white students. Three white students later hung nooses from the tree. They were suspended by the school but not prosecuted.

Associated Press Writer Alan Fram contributed to this report.

The family of J. Dilla is calling on fans to support the J Dilla Project, a new initiative designed to raise money and awareness about lupus, the disease which took the famed producer’s life on February 10, 2006.

Fans are being encouraged to start their own “J Dilla Project” teams across the United States to join The Alliance for Lupus Research’s annual Walkathon, which raises money and awareness to treat lupus, which is an incurable blood disease.

Frank Nitty, of Detroit rap group Frank N Dank, was a childhood, lifelong friend of J. Dilla. The group recently released the DVD Frank N Dank & J. Dilla’s European Vacation, which chronicles the producer’s last tour, as well as his final days alive.

“It’s always a good thing to support a good cause and for the fans of Dilla, you are not only supporting Lupus research but also the legacy of one of the greatest producers of our time, J. Dilla,” Frank Nitty told AllHipHop.com. “You can’t go wrong, so just go support.”

J. Dilla, born James Dewitt Yancy, suffered with Lupus for three years.

Fans are also being encouraged to sponsor individual walkers and to give donations to help further the cause of Lupus research in an attempt to find a cure for the deadly disease.

The Alliance for Lupus Research was founded in 1999 by Robert Wood Johnson IV with the support of the Arthritis Foundation.

Johnson is an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune and since its inception, the foundation has raised over $42 million dollars earmarked for lupus research.

Fans in almost every major metropolis in the U.S. who wish to support The J Dilla Project and ALR’s Walkathon can participate, as events are taking place in New York (October 13), Chicago (October 20), Atlanta (October 20), San Francisco, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Houston and other cities.

For more information visit: http://walk.lupusresearch.org/site/PageServer

Courtesy of Nolan Strong, AllHipHop.com

Mychal Bell, 17, who was freed two weeks ago after his adult criminal conviction for beating a white classmate was overturned, was sent to the Renaissance Home for Youth in Alexandria, Louisiana, the source said.

The decision came at the end of a two-day juvenile court hearing that was closed to the media and public.

Carol Powell-Lexing, one of Bell’s attorneys, said the judge’s decision would be appealed.

Bell was freed on $45,000 bail on September 27, after an appeals court threw out his conviction on battery and conspiracy charges in adult court and remanded the case to juvenile court.

But Judge J.P. Mauffrey agreed with prosecutors that Bell had violated the probation he was given for four previous juvenile offenses, including two simple battery charges, the sources said.

Bell had been placed on probation until he turned 18.

Civil rights activist Al Sharpton, who has championed Bell’s case, denounced Thursday’s decision as “revenge” by the judge and called on Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco to intervene.

Demonstrators in September took to the streets of the small town of Jena to protest how authorities handled the cases of Bell and five other teens accused of beating white student Justin Barker in December 2006. The incident was a culmination of fights between blacks and whites.

Many said they were angry that the students, dubbed the “Jena 6,” were being treated more harshly than three white students who hung nooses from an oak tree on Jena High School property.

The white students were suspended from school but did not face criminal charges. The protesters said they should have been charged with a hate crime.

Rapper. Singer. Producer. Songwriter. Dancer. Entertainer. However you describe him, one thing is undeniable: tU pHAce will bring the house down. tU pHAce’s music incorporates unique blends of emo, electronica, hip-hop, and soul. Whether in front of rock fans at the Vans Warped Tour, hip-hop heads at Cypress Hill shows, or mixed crowds at MTVu’s Campus Philly festival, tU pHAce and his five-piece band break the musical monotony inflicting much of today’s mainstream and independent music.

1. “Jupiter”

2. “Looking Away”

3. “You and Me”

At SoulGenesis, we believe that every individual has the potential to be an agent of positive change and we want to help make that happen. By partnering with various mentoring organizations in the Philadelphia region, we hope to connect SoulGenesis community members with young people across the city to provide them with positive influences and role models.

Photo courtesy of www.unitedwaycwv.org

In a show of support and unity, many people and organizations from around the country are planning to mobilize in Jena on September 20th – the day of Mychal Bell’s sentencing. On September 16 – 21, the NAACP Youth & College Division is requesting NAACP units and community supporters to participate in the “Jena 6 National Week of Solidarity & Action”. Attached you will find a plan of action to assist you in implementing activities during this week.

Remember that the Jena 6 cases are not just isolated incidents that occurred in one small, Southern town in America. In fact, many injustices disproportionately impacting Black youth are occurring in big cities, small towns and rural areas everyday. The Jena 6 cases show us how criminal/juvenile justice, education and voter empowerment can all intercede to impact the lives of young people for better or for worse.

It is imperative that your education and activism continue well past when the final decisions in the Jena 6 cases are rendered. Additional information regarding logistics for September 20th is forthcoming. Please review the actions attached to see how you can continue the fight for justice and equality in your local community.

If we don’t stand up for the Jena 6 and fight to end racism in America who will?

We’ve all heard it and we’ve heard a lot about it, but are we ready to act? You may have already seen some of the tips below, but have you incorporated them into your everyday life yet? (awkward pause) We know. Let’s do it together. Check out our top seven tips for greener, happier living. For the month of July, SoulGenesis presents SoulGen GreenLife^TM, our seven simple steps to a greener, happier life.

Save. Reuse. Recycle. - Kick the bottled water and plastic bag habit. Get a reusable water bottle and refill it. Keep a reusable bag with you and take it to the shopping market. Consume less. Waste less.

Offset - For pennies a day you can offset your CO2 emissions. Visit www.terrapass.com or www.planktos.com to find out how you can sponsor the planting of new trees and other energy saving projects to help reduce global warming.

Unplug - Unplug your phone charger and other items when not in use. This is a huge and completely uneccesary pollutant and drain of energy.

Lights Off and Out - Change your light bulbs. Ride your bike to your local home goods store and purchase energy saver light bulbs for your most used lights! They may be more expensive, but they last for like 30 years! You’ll be taking your kids to college before you have to change your light bulbs again. (Slight exaggeration, they’ll be at least finishing middle school.)

Go Green Transportation - Don’t go out as much (or car pool to parties), bundle your trips, car pool, ride your bike or skateboard to work! If you can, consider a hybrid, fuel efficient or alternative energy vehicle. Also, consider a car share.

Enough Water - Turn off sink while brushing your teeth. Take shorter showers. Shower with a friend or partner (18 and over only please).

Nibble Differently - Would you believe that the best way to reduce global warming is to adjust your eating. By consuming more locally grown, organic food, you are not only reducing carbon emissions from transportation but also from pesticides and food production. Also, consuming less meat (particularly beef) is another great way to reduce carbon emissions because of the tremendous amount of energy required to manufacture beef. According to several recent studies, the production and consumption of beef is one of the planet’s largest pollutants!

See, not so bad. This is easy for you and we will do it together. Check back regularly to hear how we are doing greening our lives at the SoulGen blogs and let us know how you are doing.

Like what you read, send this page to a friend. Spread the love. Spread the GreenLife.

Music and Media

The Graphical Dissertation of Mims’ “This is why I’m hot” - You haven’t seen Hip-Hop broken down until you have seen a Venn diagram of why you specifically will never be hot according to Mims.

So let me get this straight…there are now 8 companies that control all major media?!?! Find out how this happened and why independent media should be important to you now.

News and Politics

Curious what really is going on between the Sunni’s and Shiite’s…oh and the Kurds too? Want to sound smart in conversation? Come to class at Iraq 101.

Climate Change and Global Warming

US budges only slightly in making real change to address global warming. Come on Bush administration! It’s gettin’ hot out here. Read more at www.treehugger.com.

Looking forward to that Caribbean vacation? Let’s try to keep looking forward to them. Find out how our oceans are at risk and what needs to happen to save them. (Disclaimer for lazy readers: It’s a long article but very interesting.)

Community

Howard Coeds Helping in New Orleans Get an Earful on the Racial Disparities in Recovery

Education

Could HipHop actually help educate young people? A lot of people think so, including SoulGen Co-founder, Isaac Ewell.

We believe that it is all of our responsibilities to first understand this impact then to make a concerted impact to help to create more balance in popular images and messages. SoulGenesis has partnered with Mother’s Day Radio in this important effort. Mother’s Day Radio, a non-profit based in Los Angeles, has spearheaded a national effort to bring more responsible programming to the airwaves. Please visit our partner organization’s website at www.mothersdayradio.com to learn about their important work and how you can get involved today.

The other great way to help create an industry shift is to show that you, as a listener, want to hear more responsible and balanced media. In short, support your artists by purchasing their products! We have a host of wonderful artists featured right here at SoulGenesis and more to come very soon.
Simple things you can do now to make an impact:

Other Feature Causes
Each month we will have a featured cause. Throughout the course of the month, we will offer important information such as how this issue affects you and how you can help. In upcoming months we will tackle such critical issues as Global Warming, Fair Trade and Labor and Politics and Voting. Our goal is to help our members become more aware of these issues so that we can begin to collectively make a positive impact on the world around us. Check back soon for updates and more causes and action steps.