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Sep. 2nd, 2009
Inter Press Service's Zoltán Dujisin goes to eastern Tajikistan, the Gorno-Badakhshan region, one of the poorest regions in one of the poorest countries in the world, and finds that the residents of this region are positively--and understandable--nostalgic for the Soviet Union.
Living conditions are dire.
Remittances from migration to Russia, permanent or otherwise, might be the only things keeping the country afloat.
The country of seven million went from being the poorest Soviet republic to being one of the world's poorest nations. Independence brought the end of state farms, mines, irrigation channels, transport networks and energy plants.
Some Western analysts celebrate the locals' return to "ancestral traditions", but many adapting to the realities of the free market see it quite differently.
"I wouldn't be here if I didn't have to," says Timurbek, formerly a Russian philologist and now a pensioner who has taken to animal husbandry. "Before, nomadism was a matter of choice, now it's one of necessity," he told IPS.
Timurbek set up his yurt, a big tent made of wool and with an interior richly decorated with wall coverings, horse bags and carpets, on one of the few grassy fields left on the Pamir's high plateaus, at an altitude of 4,100 metres.
The Pamirs lie mostly in the Gorno Badakhsan province. The province is home to a mere 3 percent of Tajikistan's population - little more than 210,000 - but which constitutes almost half the country's territory.
The Pamirs are among the highest mountain ranges in the world, with altitudes ranging from 3,000 to 7,500 metres. Extreme climatic conditions make this one of the least densely populated areas on the planet.
Living conditions are dire.
"Under the Soviets we had all sorts of food in the shops, cheap fuel, buses and roads in good shape," says Aziz, a semi-nomadic farmer at the yurt camp, as his wife quietly runs a rudimentary machine producing butter and yoghurt from Yak milk.
"It doesn't mean we liked Stalin, but everyone here misses the Soviet Union," Aziz, a Kyrgyz of Sunni Muslim confession told IPS. "We couldn't practice our religion freely, but there was food and work."
[. . .]
At Murgab's "bazaar", where people often cover their faces with veils as strong winds lift clouds of dust, shopping choices are limited to imported cookies, bread, chocolate bars and mostly expired fish and meat cans sold at exorbitant prices.
The poverty affects education; some children do not go to school because their parents cannot afford school material and uniforms.
Fuel is scarce, and locals are forced to use the scarcely available tersken bush to heat households, leading to desertification.
Remittances from migration to Russia, permanent or otherwise, might be the only things keeping the country afloat.
The Irish Times has an article examining the history and current position of the Cham people, a Muslim Austronesian-speaking people living in diaspora in Vietnam and Cambodia.
The nondescript river town of Chau Doc is home to one of Vietnam’s less likely attractions, Islam. It’s an easy sell for tourists who are surprised to find a Muslim village on the Hau river, a wide brown-watered branch of the Mekong often depicted in Vietnam war film scenes of patrol boats fading into a jungle sunset. This is also home to the Cham, one of oldest, most idiosyncratic Muslim communities in Asia.
Colourful apparitions amid the banana and coconut trees of this tropical town, the Cham women’s long, flowing dresses and veils set them apart in socialist Vietnam, where working women wear a simple blouse over three-quarter length trousers. Leant over motorbikes, their men set themselves apart with white skull caps and the sarong-style wraps more common to south Asia.
This settlement of 10,000 Muslims traces its roots to the early Arab caliphs, leaders of Islam and free traders who encouraged Arab sailors to spread the faith across the Asian seas. They found willing converts in Chinese south coast cities.
Converts were plenty in today’s Malaysia and in the seaports of Cambodia and Burma. Similarly among the Cham, an Indic people with a kingdom sprawling across southern Vietnam and eastern Cambodia. The fall of the Cham kingdom in 1471 to Vietnamese forces triggered an exodus into Cambodia and southward across the strait to Malaysia. Those who remained retained their religion, although in an increasingly syncretic form that meshed local Buddhist and animist beliefs.
[. . .]
While they’ve been able to practise their faith, the Cham have been sidelined economically compared to the country’s Kinh ethnic majority. “They lack education, connections and access to state power,” according to Philip Taylor, a Vietnam expert at the National University of Australia, who has published a book on the Cham. He points to the Cham’s inability to cash in on a boom in aquaculture on Mekong tributaries like the Hau. The Cham lack the know-how and access to credit enjoyed by the Kinh, who dominate business and officialdom. Though there’s money coming in from tourism, local Muslim communities have come to rely on overseas aid to build mosques and madrassahs.
This news makes me happy, and not only because I know any number of HIV-positive people.
This doesn't correspond necessarily that well for people who've been infected for a while, before the advent of modern HAART, but this is still wonderful news.
People with HIV in the developed world are no more likely to die in the first five years following infection than men and women in the general population, British researchers said on Tuesday.
The risk for people infected through sex creeps up after that, according to the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that highlights the power of AIDS drugs introduced in the mid-1990s.
The findings did not include men and women infected through injected drug use, and their death risk remained higher in the five years after infection, said Kholoud Porter of Britain's Medical Research Council, who led the study.
"This is looking really good that life expectancies are becoming close to the uninfected population," said Porter, an epidemiologist. "It also underscores the importance that people are identified and treated early."
[. . .]
Before 1996 when the drug cocktails were not widely available, the heightened death risk ranged from nearly 8 percent to 20 percent depending on age before falling each year to zero in the year 2000 for all age groups, Porter said.
The risk rises again after five years, possibly because people become less likely to take the drugs regularly or maybe because they are less able to tolerate the drugs, Porter said.
"From a practical point of view, people with HIV infections want to know how long they can expect to live for," she said in a telephone interview.
The youngest group - people aged 15 to 24 when infected - had a 5 percent higher risk of dying at 10 years following infection and a 7 percent greater risk at 15 years than average healthy people.
For people over 45, the raised risk was 5 percent at 10 years and 12 percent at 15 years, Porter said.
This doesn't correspond necessarily that well for people who've been infected for a while, before the advent of modern HAART, but this is still wonderful news.
[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Lithium and conflict
Sep. 2nd, 2009 07:48 pmLithium: element #3 on the periodic table and the lightest metal. The metal is probably most famous for its role in the treatment of psychological illnesses, especially bipolar depression. The element's fame in this role is such that it inspired the 1992 Nirvana song of the same name.
Of late, however, lithium has attracted public attention thanks to the possibility of the element serving in lithium-ion batteries, these being powerful enough to accumulate the energy needed for sustained use of electric cars. At Foreign Policy, as part of an extended analysis of the consequences facing the world if oil stopped being as critical to our society as it is now, David J. Rothkopf wonders if lithium might drive conflicts. It can only be extracted from salt pans and brine lakes in a select number of locals.
Could, Rothkopf wonders, competition over lithium create a Chilean-Bolivian conflict? Bolivia-Chile relations are quite strained, with ambassadorial relations between the two countries being disrupted since 1978 and Bolivia's sustained, impossible insistence that the territories lost by Bolivia in the War of the Pacific be returned. Will there be war?The Chileans seem to me unlikely to start a conflict with Bolivia, since they already have the frontiers that they want. Will the Bolivians? Certainly the anger persists, but is Bolivia likely to lose its good sense? The Chilean military is one of the most powerful in South America, with a rather richer Chile spending a good deal more money, absolutely and relatively, on its military and on equipping its military. Should Bolivia actually try to invade, I'd expect the war to end up like--well--the outcome of the August 2008 Russia-Georgia war. At best. I hardly see Evo Morales or his successors wishing their regimes' destruction.
There's another, more likely, source of lithium-related conflict. What's the other large countries with large economical lithium deposits? China, actually. These resources will surely come in handy when Chinese automobile manufacturers manufacture their own battery electric cars. Where in China are the deposits located? Tibet. Already, it's a source of some conflict on the Internet. Given past protests and riots, is it unlikely that the lithium mines in Tibet won't become a major local and international issue?
Of late, however, lithium has attracted public attention thanks to the possibility of the element serving in lithium-ion batteries, these being powerful enough to accumulate the energy needed for sustained use of electric cars. At Foreign Policy, as part of an extended analysis of the consequences facing the world if oil stopped being as critical to our society as it is now, David J. Rothkopf wonders if lithium might drive conflicts. It can only be extracted from salt pans and brine lakes in a select number of locals.
In Asia, Europe, and the United States, people are getting excited about the electric car -- and for good reason. Electric cars will enable greater independence from oil and could play a significant role in lowering carbon dioxide emissions. But the major fly in the ointment for the electric car is the battery.
Many solutions are being considered, including "air" batteries that produce electricity from the direct reaction of lithium metal with oxygen. The most likely option for now, though, is the lithium-ion battery used in cameras, computers, and cellphones. Lithium-ion batteries offer better storage and longer life than the older nickel-metal hydride models, making them ideal for a space-constrained, long-running vehicle.
All this means that lithium is likely to be a hot commodity in the years immediately ahead. It so happens that about three quarters of the world's known lithium reserves are concentrated in the southern cone of Latin America-to be precise, in the Atacama Desert, which is shared by two countries: Chile and Bolivia. Other than these reserves and the Spanish language, the one thing these two countries have in common is a historical animosity, cemented by their late 19th-century War of the Pacific. Chile was able to cut off Bolivia's access to the sea, a maneuver that rankles bitterly in La Paz to this day.
Could, Rothkopf wonders, competition over lithium create a Chilean-Bolivian conflict? Bolivia-Chile relations are quite strained, with ambassadorial relations between the two countries being disrupted since 1978 and Bolivia's sustained, impossible insistence that the territories lost by Bolivia in the War of the Pacific be returned. Will there be war?The Chileans seem to me unlikely to start a conflict with Bolivia, since they already have the frontiers that they want. Will the Bolivians? Certainly the anger persists, but is Bolivia likely to lose its good sense? The Chilean military is one of the most powerful in South America, with a rather richer Chile spending a good deal more money, absolutely and relatively, on its military and on equipping its military. Should Bolivia actually try to invade, I'd expect the war to end up like--well--the outcome of the August 2008 Russia-Georgia war. At best. I hardly see Evo Morales or his successors wishing their regimes' destruction.
There's another, more likely, source of lithium-related conflict. What's the other large countries with large economical lithium deposits? China, actually. These resources will surely come in handy when Chinese automobile manufacturers manufacture their own battery electric cars. Where in China are the deposits located? Tibet. Already, it's a source of some conflict on the Internet. Given past protests and riots, is it unlikely that the lithium mines in Tibet won't become a major local and international issue?