Typical of such victims is Zumera Bibi. The IRIN report describes how Zumera and her four daughters left their house temporarily after the quake. While she was gone, her dead husband’s nephews seized the property and claimed it as theirs. According to the IRIN story,

Zumera has no sons, and as tradition dictates she and her daughters have no right to the property, which would revert back to the brothers of her husband on his death. Even though, under the law, her daughters should get at least a share in the inheritance, this is frequently denied to women.

Well there’s a shock from a part of the world where women can be raped as a method of tribal revenge.

The IRIN story goes on to say that,

In some cases, the claims of the women to hte property have been challenged, and according to reports received by NGOs active in quake-hit areas of North West Frontier Province (NWFP), women without mail family members have been forced to vacate homes or else hand them over to male relatives in the hope that, in return, they will help care for them and their children.

With apparently no credible system of property rights, it is easy to understand why Pakistan’s per capita GDP sits at a pathetic $2,400. In the process of impoverishing women like Zumera, Pakistan is impoverishing the entire nation.

Source:

Pakistan: Female quake survivors losing property. Integrated Regional Information Networks, January 3, 2006.

Based on surveys conducted in 19,500 homes in the Democratic Republic of Congo conducted from April-July 2004, the researchers concluded there were an excess of 600,000 deaths during that period that would not have occurred in the absence of the civil war.

An estimated 4 million people have died in the DRC since fighting began in 1998.

By the Lancet’s measure, the civil war in DRC is the single deadliest humanitarian crisis in the world at the moment, and yet receives comparatively little coverage or focus. As the study’s lead author Richard Brennan told the BBC,

Congo is the deadliest crisis anywhere in the world over the past 60 years. Ignorance about its scale and impact is almost universal and international engagement remains completely out of proportion to humanitarian need.

The backdrop of DRC’s civil war goes back to the Hutu/Tutsi conflict that led to genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Fearing that Congo leader Mobutu Sese Seko was not doing enough to stop Hutus in the DRC that Rwanda believe were planning attacks against Tutsis, Rwanda and Uganda backed Laurent Kabila’s successful coup against Mobutu. When Kabila turned on his supporters and attempted to expel Rwanda military forces in 1998, a civil war developed that soon involved 9 African nations in what has been called Africa’s world war.

There have been a series of truces and cease-fires, but violence has proceeded largely unabated.

Sources:

The Lancet Publishes IRC Mortality Study from DR Congo; 3.9 Million Have Died: 38,000 Die per Month. Press Release, International Rescue Committee, January 6, 2006.

‘Thousands’ dying in DR Congo war. The BBC, January 6, 2006.

The NSB reviseed upward GDP growht estimates for every year from 1993 to 2004 except for 1998. Based on the new figures, China’s economy grew an average of 9.9 percent annually from 1993-2004.

And these new figures may still understimate the growth of China’s GDP since it is so difficult to accurately measure much of China’s economic activity which occurs in cash transactions.

Despite all this growth, China has maintained a very low inflation rate.

After decades of mismanagement under Communist management, China’s economy today is the sixth largest in the world. Despite the huge population it has, however, its economy is still only about half the size of the United States.

Source:

China lifts annual growth figures. BBC, January 9, 2006.

In a press release announcing publication of its 2006 State of the World, WorldWatch said,

“Rising demand for energy, food, and raw materials by 2.5 billion Chinese and Indians is already having ripple effects worldwide,” says WorldWatch President Christopher Flavin. “Meanwhile, record-shattering consumption levels in the U.S. and Europe leave little room for this projected Asian growth.” The resulting global resource squeeze is already evident in riots over rising oil prices in Indonesia, growing pressure on Brazil’s forests and fisheries, and the loss of manufacturing jobs in Central America.

Typical WorldWatch nonsense. Consider the Indonesian oil price riots. Presumably, WorldWatch is referring to disturbance that occurred in October 2005 when the government announced fuel price increases of 87 percent to 186 percent depending on the type of fuel.

But Indonesia’s fuel price problems have less to do with a global resource squeeze than a local excess of corruption and poor investment in that nation’s oil resources. Southeast Asia’s only OPEC member, Indonesia is forced to import oil because of the government’s longstanding mismanagement of its petroleum resources.

Those policies (or lack thereof) are then compounded by Indonesia’s tremendous outlay for fuel subsidies which artificially lowered the price of fuel for Indonesians. Indonesia spends up to 1/3rd of its total government budget on fuel subsidies.

Indonesia’s problem — like much of the poor in the Third World — is endemic mismanagement and corruption, not its increase in population and/or wealth.

Sources:

Indonesia clashes over fuel hike. The BBC, October 1, 2005.

In 2001, Jiang was sentenced to six years in jail for publishing details about alleged corruption by Liaoning provincial governor Bo Xilai as well as details of corruption by other officials. Bo, meanwhile, was promoted to commerce minister.

For his efforts, Jiang was charged with revealing state secrets and sentenced to eight years in jail, which was later reduced to six years.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, China currently imprisons more journalists than any other country in the world, with 32 journalists in jail in 2005.

Sources:

China frees corruption journalist. The BBC, January 4, 2006.

The Price of Integrity. Press Release, Committee to Protect Journalists, 2001.

Journalists In Prison. Committee to Protect Journalists, 2006.

“Environmental scientist have been saying for some time that the global economy is being slowly undermined by environmental trends of human origin . . .,” says Brown, President and Founder of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based independent environmental research organization.

Although it is obvious that no society can survive the decline of its environmental support systems, many people are not yet convinced of the need for economic restructuring. But this is changing now that China has eclipsed the United States in the consumption of most basic resources, Brown notes in Plan B 2.0, which was produced with major funding from the Lannan Foundation and the U.N. Population Fund

China the world’s major consumption of basic resources? How can this be when Brown assured us in 1995′s Who Will Feed China? A Wake-Up Call for a Small Planet that China was on course for an imminent food disaster that, would see China’s food production fall drastically off.

China had, at the time, gone from being a net grain exporter to a net grain importer, and as far as Brown was concerned it was all downhill from there leading to massive worldwide increases in food prices.

Instead, China has done what Brown suggested was impossible — it has gone back to being a net food exporter and last year was taken off of the World Food Program’s list of countries that it provides food aid to, saying the Communist country no longer needed such aid.

As Robert L. Paarlberg noted in a 1996 review of Who Will Feed China? for Foreign Affairs, Brown was playing a bit fast and loose with his interpretations of data related to Chinese agriculture,

Brown justifies his extraordinary pessimism about China by predicting a massive loss of land now used for growing grain — roughly half by 2030 — through degradation or conversion to other uses. He argues that better crop yields will not be enough to offset the loss. This is misleading because switching from grain to high-value crops, such as vegetables, should be viewed as a gain for Chinese farmers, not a loss, and it is unjustified because it is based on an imperfect analogy to the experiences of countries such as Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. They converted land away from farming, including grain production, as their economies developed, but did so because they had fewer options for growth in agricultural production than China has today.

Not to say Brown ever changes his tune. In Plan B 2.0 Brown points to various rates of resource consumption — such as China’s voracious consumption of oil that has fueled steep increases in the price of that commodity over the past few years — and notes that if things continue as they are today (the one refrain from doomsayers that never changes) then the world is headed for a catastrophe.

But some of these alleged catastrophes are so silly that it is hard to believe Brown would even bring them up. For example he notes that if China reaches the U.S. level of per capita resource consumption,

China’s paper consumption would be double the world’s current production. There go the world’s forests.

Not. Most paper is harvested from trees specifically planted for such purposes (i.e., these trees would not even exist if it weren’t for the anticipated demand for paper). All that will happen if China starts demanding more paper is that paper companies will purchase land formerly used for other purposes and plant trees their for paper production.

The doomsayer formula is always the same. Take some trend that is current at a moment in time — the number of Pokemon cards being bought by kids is increasing by 250 percent annually. Then project that trend out over the next 30 years and note that if that trend keeps going then all of the world’s forests will be used up just printing Pokemon cards. And at no point ever take into account that people might grow tired of Pokemon cards (what economists call an elastic demand) or find different ways of obtaining them (these new fangled computers and portable game consoles) or find more capacity to produce them (planting more trees for Pokemon production).

The thing that distinguishes Homo sapiens is our incredible ability to quickly adapt and modify our behavior to ever-changing conditions. We’ve been doing it for 50,000 years rather successfully, and the doomsayers argument essentially says, “yes, but this time we’re really screwed” and the only solution is to adopt, as Brown pleads for in Plan B, “a restructuring of the global economy so that it can sustain civilization.”

Instead, perhaps Brown should focus on writing a book that could sustain its argument past a 24-month window when everything changes and his wild extrapolations are shown to have been for naught.

Sources:

Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble. Earth Policy Institute, Accessed: January 10, 2006.

Rice Bowls and Dust Bowls: Africa, Not China, Faces a Food Crisis. Robert L. Paarlberg, Foreign Affairs, May/June 1996.

In all, Western countries and NGOs wrote off over $1 billion in debt owed by Zambia. When all is said and done, according to the BBC, Zambia’s debt is likely to fall from around US $7 billion to around US $500 million.

Now the only issue is what the hell Zambia will do with this sudden lowering of debt. Zambia’s debt problems originated largely from widespread corruption within its government. Former president Frederick Chiluba drove the country into the ground during his 10 year reign that ended in 2001, and if Zambia is going to succeed it will take more than just debt relief — it will take a complete change in its political culture.

Of course, Chiluba’s corruption trial is a very good start, but too often reformers have come to power in African nations only to find the culture of corruption to entrenched to over come, and in some cases find themselves quickly compromised by that culture. For example, current Zambia president Levy Mwanawasa hold his office thanks to winning just 28 percent of the vote in a 2001 election that was deemed unfair by independent election monitors, including the Carter Center and Mwanawasa rejected proposed changes to Zambia’s constitution that would modify election rules to make such outcomes less likely.

Not exactly the sort of person ideal to lead basic reforms to overcome official corruption.

Sources:

US boosts Zambia with debt relief. Martin Plaut, The BBC, December 31, 2005.

President Mwanawasa backtracks on constituent assembly. IRIN, February 3, 2006.

As Smith notes, at the beginning of 2005 British Prime Minister Tony Blair focused on debt relief as a means of lifting African nations out of poverty, but debt relief will do little if not coupled with a liberalizing of African regimes.

In 2005, though, a number of prominent African nations saw liberal democratic advances reversed. Take two African leaders, Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi and Tanzania’s Chama Cha Mapinduzi. Both were appointed by Blair to his Africa Commission, and both were responsible for egregious anti-democratic actions in 2005.

Mapinduzi helped rig Zanzibar’s election in late 2005. Meles initiated a crackdown on opposition members after a disputed election that led to more than 80 deaths and thousands of arrests. According to Smith, Britain is also the largest donor to Yowerie Museveni’s regime in Uganda, who has remained in power for more than 20 years and recently had the leader of the largest opposition party arrested.

As Smith writes,

That raises more awkward questions as 2005, which UK Prime Minister Tony Blair had said would be the year of Africa, draws to a close.

The campaigners in Africa and the West who called for more aid, less debt and fairer trade for Africa and bolstered British government efforts to negotiate a better deal for Africa from the rich countries’ G8 club have won important concessions.

But in most states, regime security trumps the development imperative.

The sad thing is that even the more liberal democratic states in Africa go out of their way to legitimize the illiberal anti-democratic ones. Nothing epitomizes this m ore than the African Union’s decision to hold its January 2006 summit in Khartoum, Sudan despite Sudan’s genocidal war in Darfur.

Source:

Africa’s year of democratic reverses. Patrick Smith, BBC News, December 29, 2005.

In December, China announced that it approved 13 foreign and domestic banks who would be market movers for the yuan. If it follows through, this will change China’s long-standing micromanagement of its currency designed to keep its value from rising against the yen, pound and dollar.

Having a number of banks that are market movers for the currency would, in theory, limit the ability of China to intervene to keep the value of the yuan down.

There are a lot of reasons that China should stop such intervention, but one of the odd things is watching U.S. officials complain about the cheap yuan. The argument goes that the cheap yuan is largely responsible for the U.S. trade deficit in which the United States imports far more goods from China than it exports to that nation.

But if China is crazy enough to essentially subsidize exports to the United States, why should the United States object? The United States get goods far cheaper, raising the effective buying powers of wages, and China gets cash it uses for the capital investment necessary to continue its economic growth.

Source:

China reforms its currency market. BBC, December 30, 2005.

Essentially, the parasite has a number of cloaking mechanisms, and keeps most of them in reserve. As it encounters resistance from the human immune system the parasite is capable of tailoring its cloaking to the immune system. The parasite has dozens of genes designed to get past the immune system, and what the researchers found was that as one gene was activated, that also trigger the suppression of the others. In this way, the malaria parasite is able to try one method after another to infect the host, and reduce the risk that the host might quickly develop an immunity against most or all of the parasite’s cloaking methods.

As HHMI researcher Alan Cowman put it in a press release announcing the discovery,

It’s like a leopard being able to change its spots. New forms come up, and the immune system beats them down again. Because of this a lot of people think you need five years of constant exposure to malaria in its different disguises to gain immunity.

Unfortunately too many people, especially children, die long before they can develop immunities to the malaria parasite’s numerous tricks. Even among people who develop immunity, that immunity can be quickly lost if the individual is not consistently exposed to malaria parasites.

This sort of research could one day lead to a treatment for malaria that might, for example, defeat this mechanism and allow for those exposed to malaria to quickly develop immune responses to all of its cloaking mechanisms.

Sources:

How malaria dupes immune system. BBC, December 29, 2005.

Scientists Lift Malaria’s Cloak of Invisibility. Press Release, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, December 28, 2005.