NightBlogger

Saudi amphetamine seizures increase to 28% of world total
Seizures of amphetamines have risen sharply in Saudi Arabia, suggesting a surge in consumption of the illegal stimulant in the kingdom, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported yesterday. Saudi Arabia accounted for 28 per cent of all global amphetamine seizures in 2006, the latest year for which data are available, according to the UNODC’s annual report. The quantities impounded in the kingdom started to rise sharply in 2004 and reached 12.3 tonnes in 2006. “This is equivalent to the sum of all UK seizures - the biggest amphetamine market in Europe - from 2000 to 2006,” the report said. A further two tonnes of amphetamines destined for Saudi Arabia were seized in neighbouring Oman. More

In South Korea, a new form of democratic expression has emerged via the internet. Its followers call themselves ‘Netizens’, and when demonstrating against the government, they carry their laptop to broadcast the event live. Almost every evening for the past month, thousands of people have been gathering at Seoul City Hall square. They don’t like the new President’s policy and they want to show it. And in these gatherings, laptops are a must have. Some people carrying computers film the crowd with their webcam and broadcast live videos thanks to high-speed wifi connections. “People who live in Seoul can go on the streets”, one of them says, “and some of those who do not live in the capital-city can come all the way here. But people who cannot, can at least see what is happening here live, through the internet.” More

Paul Chapman: DVDs selling fast on the streets of Yangon show the death and devastation wreaked by cyclone Nargis. The DVDs show bodies buried in rubble and survivors sitting in the open in stark contrast to state controlled television coverage which barely reports the scale of the destruction and concentrates mainly on reconstruction.

Well-researched and very interesting from cracked.com

So what did you do to earn your manhood? At the very worst, some of you had to read a prayer or two from a select holy book, maybe a distant uncle sent you a few bucks. Your parents start bugging you about getting a job and force you to move out by the time you’re 20, or maybe 35.

But in some parts of the world, manhood is still something you earn. More

CHENGDU (Reuters) - It was just an afternoon stroll down the streets of his hometown, but every step blogger “Yellow Peach” took was revolutionary. There were no placards or banners, no slogans or matching T-shirts, but by “taking a walk” together for a couple of hours, a few hundred citizens of a laid-back southwestern city were illegally challenging government plans for a new oil refinery.

They wandered in quiet clusters down a route circulated by Internet and mobile phone, watched by uniformed and plainclothes police who knew exactly why they were there and later punished six people for their role. “This was a victorious meeting, a rally. The kindling has already been scattered. What follows now depends on everybody,” Yellow Peach wrote, signing off on a string of messages to a fellow blogger giving a blow-by-blow account of the protest. More

The heaviest rainstorms in 50 years have hit south China. The heaviest rainstorms in 50 years have drenched parts of Guangdong province for two days, killing at least one student and causing widespread flooding. It comes as Chinese soldiers in Sichuan province use explosives to expand channels helping drain a dozen landslide-created dams caused by last month’s devastating earthquake.

LaTrobe University professor Alexandra Aikhenvald says contact with white people has not brought much good to Indigenous tribes in history so far. Prof Aikhenvald strongly doubts the tribe has never had contact with white people, but says it is not impossible. “Many of them had contact with white people at different times in the past [but] basically in the 19th Century and then during the rubber boom, many of them just fled,” she said. “Maybe they are descendants of those groups that fled from white supremacy maybe 100 or more years ago. More

In the midst of all this talk about a planned future war with Iran that the media refuses to address, we could have invaded Burma and ousted that arrogant junta, saving millions of lives in the process instead taking them in yet another proposed war.

In regards to the humanitarian crisis in Burma, if one thinks that things cannot get any worse, think again. A new startling revelation has been made. The people of Burma have been forsaken since the country has been struck by Cyclone Nargis. It is believed that between 75,000 and 100,000 have been killed in the devastation by the cyclone. But, millions more are at risk of dying of things that can be avoided.

Millions are at risk of death by hunger and waterborne diseases. There has been much international aid being poured into Burma. But why are the people of Burma become forsaken? It is due to the actions taken by Burma’s junta. The junta continues to do actions that are considered inhumane to the international community. More

Photo Credit
“The Hopi and Mayan elders do not prophesy that everything will come to an end. Rather, this is a time of transition from one World Age into another. The message they give concerns our making a choice of how we enter the future ahead. Our moving through with either resistance or acceptance will determine whether the transition will happen with cataclysmic changes or gradual peace and tranquility. The same theme can be found reflected in the prophecies of many other Native American visionaries from Black Elk to Sun Bear.” –3rd Rare White Buffalo Born on Wisconsin Farm More

Photo jetalone
bookstove.com
IN THE classic novel Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, he describes a world in the future where Americans are addicted to electronic media for information and entertainment and the written word is no longer desired. Books are a thing of the past in Bradbury’s setting. Although this book was published in 1953, Bradbury did not miss the mark by much.

Americans are beginning to evolve into the setting and characteristics found in the novel Fahrenheit 451. In the book, the main character, Montag, has a home that is described as having walls made up of large television screens. This is not far-fetched from what can be found now in most American family rooms. Our society enjoys large televisions with flat screens, which can be mounted right onto the wall. Above fireplaces where wedding photos or beautiful family portraits were once found, there are instead plasma television sets. More

Amazon Indians from one of the world’s last uncontacted tribes have been photographed from the air, with images released showing them painted bright red and brandishing bows and arrows. The photographs, taken by Survival International near the border between Brazil and Peru, are rare evidence that such groups exist. A Brazilian official involved in the expedition said many such tribes are in increasing danger from illegal logging.

Photo Barry Geo
TIME.COM
Among Israel’s ultra-orthodox Jews, the Haredim, social workers are often called “child-snatchers” and the police “Cossacks,” harking back to the 19th century pogroms against Jews in Russia. These cloistered communities, in which women are expected to raise and financially support their large families while their husbands spend their days stooped over the Torah, make up 10% of Israel’s population and a third of Jerusalem’s, and consider themselves defenders of a core morality in Jewish society. But that moral authority has come under scrutiny since evidence began to emerge in March of incest, rape and child abuse in four different ultra-orthodox enclaves around the country.

Over the last few weeks the Cossacks have arrived wearing the uniform of the Israeli national police force. In a series of raids following tip-offs from victims’ relatives, neighbors and hospital workers, the police have arrested ultra-orthodox wives, husbands and yeshiva students. More

Photo rpoll
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) — Archaeologists exploring an old military road in the Sinai have unearthed 3,000-year-old remains from an ancient fortified city, the largest yet found in Egypt, antiquities authorities announced Wednesday. Among the discoveries at the site was a relief of King Thutmose II (1516-1504 B.C.), thought to be the first such royal monument discovered in Sinai, said Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. It indicates that Thutmose II may have built a fort near the ancient city, located about two miles northeast of present day Qantara and known historically as Tharu.

A 550-by-275-yard mud brick fort with several 13-foot-high towers dating to King Ramses II (1304-1237 B.C.) was unearthed in the same area, he said. Hawass said early studies suggested the fort had been Egypt’s military headquarters from the New Kingdom (1569-1081 B.C.) until the Ptolemaic era, a period of about 1500 years. The ancient military road, known as “Way of Horus,” once connected Egypt to Palestine and is close to present-day Rafah, which borders the Palestinian territory of Gaza. More

Lee Min Keong
In the aftermath of the nation’s general election in March, where Malaysian bloggers were deemed to have contributed to the ruling party’s dismal performance, government leaders offered an olive branch to bloggers and announced measures to reform the judiciary and strengthen the fight against corruption.

However, the subsequent arrest of two bloggers under the country’s sedition laws appear to have dampened hopes that the government may be softening its tough stance against the online medium.

Raja Petra Kamaruddin, Web master for news site Malaysia Today, was charged on May 6 with sedition over an article he wrote on the site. In the posting, titled Let’s send the Altantuya murderers to hell, Raja Petra implicated Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak and his wife in the murder case of Altantuya Shaariibuu, a Mongolian national. More

Photo babasteve
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
Two thousand and eight was to have been an auspicious year for China. But the year has been anything but. In January, a wave of polite demonstrations over planned urban development washed over Shanghai. Then freak snowstorms left 200,000 citizens stranded and angry over the government’s failure to deal with the emergency. Next, demonstrations and riots broke out in Lhasa, Tibet’s main city, and beyond. The flame of the Olympic torch relay was nearly doused by international protests and threats of a boycott. And now the catastrophic Sichuan earthquake has claimed as many as 80,000 lives, rendering millions homeless and raising fears of significant damage to the country’s infrastructure.

And it’s only May. No matter what happens next, 2008 is shaping up to be one of the most eventful and tragic years in recent Chinese history. And the way the Chinese people and the Communist Party leadership have risen to meet these unforeseen events challenges us in the West to rethink our often distorted view of China. Here are five lessons that are emerging: More

Timesonline
Hostility towards the Jewish state in Iraq is so strong that many parents refuse to travel to Tel Aviv for free life-saving hole-in-the-heart surgery. Some accept the offer but never reveal where their children were treated, even though the operation has not been available in Iraq since its leading cardiac clinic burnt down after the American-led invasion in 2003.

Other parents are seeking treatment elsewhere in the Arab world, despite prices of up to £15,000 for heart surgery in private clinics. They fear the stigma of being treated in Israel. Sara, 2, needs surgery for a defective heart valve. After taking her from Iraq to neighboring Jordan for preliminary tests, her mother, Shatha, 37, turned down treatment at the Wolfson centre. She said she had had no idea before she left for Amman, the Jordanian capital, that the operation would be in Israel. Read more

‘It’s a disease time-bomb’
Helen Bamford
A mob of angry South Africans attacked a mother and daughter who were handing out clothes to Zimbabwean asylum-seekers at the makeshift refugee camp on Cape Town’s Foreshore. The attackers beat Alison Goldberg of Green Point to the ground before smashing the window of their 4×4 with a hammer and trying to drag her 16-year-old daughter Lili out of the car.

Lili, a Grade 10 pupil at St Cyprian’s, had been sitting in the back of the car passing clothes and blankets through an open window to her mother who was distributing them to the refugees. “I told them there was enough for everyone but it was every man for himself,” said Goldberg, who was badly bruised in the incident. Read more

Photo worldsurfer
E. EDUARDO CASTILLO/AP
Homicides related to organized crime jumped 47 percent in 2008, Mexico’s attorney general said Friday in a rare confirmation of how bad violence has become. Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora told Radio Formula that 1,378 people have been killed so far this year, compared with 940 in the same period last year.

The statistic reflected what many in Mexico already knew: Drug-related killings have soared in recent months. But the details were the first official snapshot on the rise in killings. The Mexican government has been reluctant to release homicide statistics, leaving the public to rely on informal tallies by the news media. Read more

BBCNews
Eleven elderly people accused of being witches have been burned to death by a mob in the west of Kenya, police say. A security operation has been launched to hunt down villagers suspected of killing them in Kisii District. The BBC’s Muliro Telewa in the region says the gang had a list of the victims and picked them out individually.

The area has witnessed similar attacks in the past when people suspected of engaging in witchcraft have been killed or ostracised. But our reporter says that this is a surprisingly large number of people to be attacked at the same time. Anthony Kibunguchy, the provincial police officer, told the BBC that the eight women and three men were all aged between 80 and 96 years old.
Read more

Photo PhotoFusion

MARI YAMAGUCHI
TOKYO (AP) — A Japanese farmer who committed suicide by drinking pesticide vomited the poison at a hospital before he died, releasing toxic fumes that sickened more than 50 people, the hospital said Thursday. Doctors were trying to pump the 34-year-old man’s stomach when he threw up, spraying his rescuers with chloropicrin, causing 54 doctors, nurses and patients to develop breathing problems and eye sores.

The incident came amid a string of suicides in Japan by people mixing household chemicals to create lethal fumes. Many bystanders in recent months have been sickened by fumes that escaped into adjoining rooms, apartments or homes. Read more

Caroline McCarthy
CNET
According to a briefing detailed by The New York Times’ Brad Stone, the Wiesenthal Center flagged about 8,000 “problematic” sites on the Web pertaining to terrorism and hate, a 30 percent increase from last year.

In addition to religious terror groups, the sites identified also pertain to anti-Semitic, racist, xenophobic, and various anti-religion and anti-government sentiments. And social media is a particular concern, with games, Facebook groups, and Second Life having been identified as potential communication and event-planning tools for terrorist and hate groups.

“Every aspect of the Internet is being used by extremists of every ilk to repackage old hatred, demean the ‘Enemy,’ to raise funds, and since 9/11, recruit and train Jihadist terrorists,” the report detailed.
Read more

By HANNAH BEECH
Time
Naypyidaw — (see photo) the name translates as “Abode of Kings” — was built from scratch just three years ago, on 1,800 square miles of land carved out of scrubland on the orders of the ruling junta. Naypyidaw doesn’t even exist in the Lonely Planet’s latest Burma travel guide; there’s not much tourist charm in a dusty bunker town that is little more than the wish fulfillment of paranoid generals.

Naypyidaw is very big, and very empty. Even after cyclone Nargis devastated Rangoon, Burma’s former capital, a metropolis of 5 million, still teemed with life. The authorities claim that Naypyidaw, untouched by the storm, is home to almost 1 million. But a recent visit found no more than a couple dozen people, outside of the gangs of manual laborers painting crosswalks and sweeping spotless boulevards. The 20-minute drive from the airport to the Hotel Zone finds just three other vehicles on the road, one of them a horse and buggy. Read more

Photo Bob Jagendorf

John Carlin
The Observer
Highest birth rate in Europe + highest divorce rate + highest percentage of women working outside the home = the best country in the world in which to live. There has to be something wrong with this equation. Put those three factors together - loads of children, broken homes, absent mothers - and what you have, surely, is a recipe for misery and social chaos.

But no. Iceland, the block of sub-Arctic lava to which these statistics apply, tops the latest table of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Index rankings, meaning that as a society and as an economy - in terms of wealth, health and education - they are champions of the world. To which one might respond: Yes, but - what with the dark winters and the far from tropical summers - are Icelanders happy?

Actually, in so far as one can reliably measure such things, they are. According to a seemingly serious academic study reported in the Guardian in 2006, Icelanders are the happiest people on earth. (The study was lent some credibility by the finding that the Russians were the most unhappy.)
Read more

Sky News
An angry mob has set two muggers on fire after the men tried to rob a group of bus passengers. The pair were in the middle of fleecing the passengers in the Pakistani city of Karachi when they were attacked by a group of bystanders. The group sat on the men while others fetched cans of gasoline.

The pair were then doused and set alight. One of the men died while the other is being treated for burns. “They were robbing passengers on a bus when people from the neighbourhood caught them and beat them. They then set them on fire,” said Aleem Jafri, the local police chief. The incident follows a similar attack this week in which another mob burnt three robbers to death. Read more

Photo a2gemma

In some prominent pre-Columbian cultures child sacrifice, the ritualistic killing of children, was a part of the religious practices. The practice of child sacrifice in historical Mesoamerican and South American societies is well documented both in the archaeological records and in written sources. The exact ideologies behind child sacrifice in different pre-Columbian cultures are unknown but it is often thought to have been performed in order to placate certain gods.

In 2005 a mass grave of one- to two-year-old sacrificed children was found in the Maya region of Comalcalco. The sacrifices were apparently performed for consecration purposes when building temples at the Comalcalco acropolis. There are also skulls suggestive of child sacrifice dating to the Maya periods. Mayanists believe that, like the Aztecs, the Maya performed child sacrifice in specific circumstances. Read more

Photo by Alejandro Nunez / POLY

The Bullet
In Haiti, where most people get 22% fewer calories than the minimum needed for good health, some are staving off their hunger pangs by eating “mud biscuits” made by mixing clay and water with a bit of vegetable oil and salt.

Meanwhile, in Canada, the federal government is currently paying $225 for each pig killed in a mass cull of breeding swine, as part of a plan to reduce hog production. Hog farmers, squeezed by low hog prices and high feed costs, have responded so enthusiastically that the kill will likely use up all the allocated funds before the program ends in September.

Some of the slaughtered hogs may be given to local Food Banks, but most will be destroyed or made into pet food. None will go to Haiti. This is the brutal world of capitalist agriculture – a world where some people destroy food because prices are too low, and others literally eat dirt because food prices are too high. Read more

ScienceDaily
The researchers found that girls have different levels of understanding of sexism and sexual harassment, which may affect reporting data. Older girls and those from a lower socioeconomic background reported more sexism than did their peers.

Latin and Asian American girls reported less sexual harassment than did girls of other ethnic groups. Girls who had been exposed to feminist ideas, either through the media or an adult such as a mother or teacher, were more likely to identify and report sexist behavior than were girls who had no information about feminism.

Girls who reported feeling pressure from their parents to conform to gender stereotypes were also more likely to perceive sexism. Girls who felt atypical for their gender and/or were unhappy with stereotypical gender roles were most likely to report sexism and harassment. Read more

Photo Ahron de Leeuw

Paul Salopek
chicagotribune
There are, according to child-rights activists, an estimated 50 million Tihuns scattered across the world: young teen or even preteen girls whose innocence is being sacrificed to arranged marriages, often with older men.

Coerced by family and culture into lives of servility and isolation, and scarred by the trauma of too-early pregnancy, child brides represent a vast, lost generation of children.

While humanitarian campaigns have focused global attention on childhood AIDS in Africa, female genital mutilation and child labor, one of the underlying sources of all these woes remains largely ignored. Child marriage, an ancient, entrenched practice long hidden in shadow, was only denounced by the United Nations as a serious human-rights violation in 2001. Read more

Photo Spoon

Thanks to Sheila

Olivia Ward
TheStar.com
In spite of real progress in women’s rights around the globe – better laws, political participation, education and income – the bedrock problems that have dogged women for centuries remain. Even in wealthy countries, there are pockets of private pain where women are unprotected and under attack.

Some countries, often the poorest and most conflict-ridden, have a level of violence that makes life unbearable for women. Richer ones may burden them with repressive laws, or sweep the problems of the least advantaged under the carpet. In any country, refugee women are among the most vulnerable.

Here are 10 of the worst countries in the world to be a woman today.

Photo ernoldino

The New York Times
Residents say children as young as 12 have been recruited by child labor rings, equipped with fake identification cards, and transported hundreds of miles across the country to booming coastal cities, where they work 12-hour shifts to produce much of the world’s toys, clothes and electronics.

Labor recruiters — government investigators and some local residents portray them as con men — have connected two radically different parts of China’s turbulent society. They have brought together ethnic minorities untouched by economic development in their mountainous isolation, and factory owners in the prime export manufacturing zones of southern Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong. Read more

Thousands of Tons of Aid for Burma blocked by Junta
The Independent
The news from the disaster experts about Burma’s devastated delta region confirms the grim reality. An internal report by an international relief organisation says: “The situation at the temporary relief camps is horrific. There is no food. People have been relying on porridge. There is not enough shelter.

“People have just one set of clothes; some are even wearing jute bags. There is not enough drinking water. There are no sanitation facilities whatsoever. Many people have wounds that are not being attended. The estimated number of people in these 26 camps is 100,000.” Sheri Villarosa, the senior US diplomat in Burma, said she feared the death toll could reach 100,000.

But despite the obvious suffering, massive devastation and pressing need for urgent action, the Burmese authorities were continuing to insist yesterday that everything was under control. On the front page of the New Light of Myanmar – a state-run government publication – was a picture of the Prime Minister, Thein Sein, handing over 20 television sets and 10 DVD players as part of the “relief” operation. This, in a region where there has been no electricity since the 130mph storm struck. Read more
BBC Photos
See: “Another Storm Heading for Burma”

Video direct from Chile. Lava started to spew from an erupting volcano in southern Chile ordering the immediate evacuation of all remaining residents and journalists.

The Seattle Times
Charles Stern, a volcanologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder who has studied Chaiten, told The Associated Press that the five-day-old eruption is the first in 9,370 years. He said the nearby town could end up buried, much like the Roman city of Pompeii after Mount Vesuvius’ eruption in 79 A.D. Reports from the zone described Chaiten as a virtual ghost town covered in ash where only domestic animals roamed. Officials said there was no sign of the lava cascading down the side of the mountain. Read more

globeandmail.com
The toll continued to rise Tuesday in the aftermath of a catastrophic cyclone in Myanmar, with 22,000 people dead and officials acknowledging that 41,000 more are missing. More than a million survivors are without food, water, electricity or telephones.

Relief workers who finally reached the survivors of Myanmar’s cyclone Nargis Tuesday were stunned to find scars on their faces, evidence of the ferocity of the rain storm.

“They had visible scars, almost burns, on their faces from the driving force of the rain,” said Paul Risley, a spokesman for the United Nations World Food Program. “The rain had pelted them at such a velocity that it left marks on their faces. Our workers had never seen that before.” More

Chaitén Volcano in southern Chile erupted on May 2nd for the first time in over 9000 years with a plume of ash and steam that reached altitudes of over 15 kilometers. Earth Observatory has a satellite image showing the eruption plume drifting into neighboring Argentina.
Stunning Slide show from Chile here

Thousands of angry Somalis rioted Monday over rising food prices and the collapse of the nation’s currency, culminating in clashes with government troops and armed shopkeepers that killed at least five protesters, witnesses and officials said.

Shops and markets throughout Mogadishu quickly shut their doors as protesters, including many women and children, stoned storefronts and chanted slogans accusing traders of cheating them. “I’ve never demonstrated before, but I’m not ashamed because if you can’t eat, you will do whatever you can,” said Abdullahi Mohammed, 57, of Mogadishu. “Before I was eating three times a day, but now sometimes it’s not even once.”
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Burma’s isolated and xenophobic generals appealed for international help yesterday after a catastrophic cyclone killed at least 10,000 people and made hundreds of thousands homeless in the country’s agricultural heartland.

United Nations agencies were preparing last night to fly in emergency food, shelter and medical supplies to prevent epidemics and starvation inflicting a second disaster on the survivors of Cyclone Nargis, which ripped across Burma on Saturday at 120mph (193km/h), destroying buildings and fields, toppling trees and washing away roads in the city of Rangoon and the Irrawaddy delta.
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According to the 1933 obituaries in both Time Magazine and the New York Times, Li Ching-Yun was reported to have buried 23 wives and fostered 180 descendants by the time he died at the age of 256. The Secrets to an Interminable Life. “Keep a quiet heart, sit like a tortoise, walk sprightly like a pigeon and sleep like a dog.” These were the words of advice Li gave to Wu Pei-fu, the warlord, who took Li into his house to learn the secret of extremely long life. Read more
Additional Source: Wikipedia

Chaitén Map
The Patagonian community of Chaitén became a ghost town on Saturday after Chilean authorities removed thousands of residents as a long-dormant volcano, left, spewed ash a day after it erupted. Most of the town’s 4,500 residents have fled – many going by boat to Chiloé island, slightly farther north, and to Puerto Montt on the mainland. Some are staying in guesthouses, while schools have been turned into makeshift shelters packed with stores of bottled water after the ash contaminated ground water.
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