Monday - 11 May 2009

What do the people want?

Desperation in Pakistani hospitals, refugee camps
The Associated Press

MINGORA, Pakistan — Civilians cowered in hospital beds on Saturday and refugees looted U.N. supplies — all of them desperate for relief from the fighting that has engulfed a northwestern valley as troops and warplanes try to drive out Taliban militants.

The prime minister, directing millions of dollars to help the residents of a region where backing for the central government has sometimes been tenuous, described the offensive launched this week as a "war of the country's survival" but said the military alone could not be victorious in the Swat Valley.

The army "can only be successful if there is support of the masses," Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, who authorized the Swat offensive on Thursday, told a news conference after an emergency Cabinet meeting.

Further south, a suspected U.S. missile strike killed nine people, mostly foreigners, in another militant stronghold near the Afghan border, officials said. The identities of the victims were not immediately unclear.

Ghafar Khan, who was injured by shell fragments during fighting in Pakistan's northwest Buner district a month ago, cries in a hospital in Mardan, Pakistan, Saturday, May 9, 2009. Ghafar, and his brother Akhter Ali Khan, right, were brought to Mardan by their parents in recent days as fighting intensified in Pakistan's latest offensive against Taliban militants. (AP Photo/Greg Baker)

The army said it killed as many as 55 more Taliban fighters in Swat on Saturday.

Encouraged by the United States, Pakistan's leaders launched the full-scale offensive this week to halt the spread of Taliban control in districts within 60 miles (100 kilometers) of the capital. Pakistan's army is fighting to wrest Swat and neighboring districts from militants who dominate the adjoining tribal belt along the Afghan frontier, where U.S. officials say al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden is likely holed up.

But the fighting has caused the flight of hundreds of thousands of terrified residents, adding a humanitarian emergency to the nuclear-armed nation's security, economic and political problems. The government is appealing for international aid to ease the plight of the multitude of weary, traumatized people who have abandoned their homes in search of safety.

Witness accounts indicated that scores of civilians have already been killed or injured in the escalating clashes in Swat and the neighboring Buner and Lower Dir districts.

Read more

"For now, the US is keeping its forces on the Afghanistan side of the border..."

Good News Friday

Wow, finally! Some good news. It seems that the playing board has been cleared and now, drum roll please...The games can begin:

GENEVA – The U.N. refugee agency says half a million people have fled fighting in northwestern Pakistan in the past few days, bringing the total displaced in recent months to 1 million.

A spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees says the fighting has led to massive displacement in the area.

Ron Redmond says up to 200,000 people have arrived in safe areas in the past few days and that another 300,000 are on the move or are about to flee.

Redmond told reporters in Geneva on Friday that the numbers are in addition to 555,000 already counted by the U.N. since August.

I'll have to check my COIN manual but I think that since this is Paki military operating within its own borders, no COIN operations are needed.

Also, that Secretary Clinton...she kicks Paki butt two weeks ago and now they're going after the bad guys with a vengenance. No one listened to George Bush but now that he's out the way, we'll see some real progress from the progressives.

More Good News?

US denies report that 147 died in Afghan violence

KABUL – The U.S. military said Friday that reports that as many as 147 civilians died in fighting involving American forces and the Taliban were "extremely over-exaggerated," and said the investigators were still analyzing the data collected at the site.

Officials said preliminary findings of the joint U.S.-Afghan investigation into the deaths in the villages of Ganjabad and Gerani in the western Farah province could be released as early as Friday but have yet to schedule an announcement.

A local official said that he collected from residents the names of 147 people killed during fighting on Monday night and Tuesday. If true, it would be the deadliest case of civilian casualties in Afghanistan since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion that ousted the Taliban regime.

But the U.S. military described that toll from the fighting as over the top.

"The investigators and the folks on the ground think that those numbers are extremely over-exaggerated," U.S. military spokeswoman Capt. Elizabeth Mathias said. "We are definitely nowhere near those estimates."

That should settle that.

The news is crazy, the whirled insane.

Thousands flee Fighting in Pakistani Valley

Two days ago, the headlines were trumpeting the possible half million refugees expected as a result of new found Pakistani backbone in the Swat region.  I thought to myself, "Now this is what one would expect to see; a column of refugees fleeing before an advancing army."   

Historically, it is the prudent thing to do.  Gather up essential possessions, put them on a push cart and get out before all hell breaks loose.  

An entire generation has lived with the aberration of the Palistinians who are held firmly imprisoned by the United Nations or would simply rather sacrifice themselves to the Jews.  The thought of hundreds of thousands of Swat refugees was a perversely comforting reminder of the way things should be.

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Chrysler in Hand, Fiat turns to Opel

The Little Italian automaker, Fiat, is apparently gorging on the table scraps thrown off by the recent economic "downturn".  Yes, we are led to believe that a miracle manager, a senor Sergio Marchionne, has led his company to economic prosperity even as his industry peers face ruin.  I know that I can be skeptical, somewhat pessimistic and a bit negative but I'm sorry, I'll believe this miracle when I see it. My gut tells me that there is more going on here than meets the eye. It sounds like some sort of Italian job.

The First US Non-Victim of Swine Flu

HARLINGEN, Texas – This week should have been a joyous time for Judy Trunnell, a 33-year-old teacher who had just given birth to a healthy baby girl. But the friends and relatives whose cars lined the quiet street in front of her home in a quiet subdivision Tuesday instead were mourning her, the first American citizen with swine flu to die.

Trunnell died after being hospitalized for two weeks. She slipped into a coma, and her baby was delivered by Cesarean section, said a cousin, Mario Zamora.

"She was just a beautiful person, warm at heart. She worked with disabled children as a teacher," Zamora told WMAR-TV in Baltimore. "Those that knew her will always remember her."

Texas health officials stopped short of saying that swine flu caused Trunnell's death. State health department spokeswoman Carrie Williams said the teacher had "chronic underlying health conditions" but wouldn't give any details.

Apparently, we can only conclude that she had swine flu when she died. Do not conclude that swine flu killed her. As has been done in Mexico recently, the death will be ascribed to something like pneumonia or pulmonary failure. Anything except the influenza.  

It seems that in addition to the actual deceased, there are two victim groups impacted by this particular strain of virus. 1. Mexicans. and 2. The porcine population. A few people get sick in the whirled and Mexicans have to suffer more humiliation, impoverishment and discrimination and pigs have to die by the hundreds of thousands.   

Woe unto he that is reincarnated as a pig or a Mexican.

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Mountain Warfare 101

The Taliban are said to be within 70 miles of Islamabad. Pakistan is preparing to take on the Taliban, but they will not be doing that in the flat lands around Islamabad. The Taliban are men of the mountains. That is where they fight. That is where they retreated to when they confronted the Americans after 911. That is where they defeated the Russians.

This video clip has an edge to it and talks naively about an electronic fence, but it does give an insight into the difficulties involved with mountain warfare.

Surprise, surprise, Georgian troops launch a spontaneous mutiny. Russia astounded.

A tank battalion has mutinied at a military base near Georgia's capital, Tbilisi, the government has said. BBC

Tanks and armoured personnel carriers are being sent to quell the rebellion at the Mukhrovani base, witnesses say.
The authorities say the mutiny is part of an attempted coup - linked to Russia and aimed at assassinating President Mikhail Saakashvili.

Russia's envoy to Nato described the charges as "mad". The trouble comes a day before Nato exercises in Georgia.
Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev has condemned Nato for planning military exercises in a country "where there was just a war".

Georgia and Russia have poisonous relations, and fought a war over Georgia's breakaway territory of South Ossetia last August.

In a separate development, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he would not attend a planned meeting of the Nato-Russia Council later this month following the alliance's expulsion of two Russian diplomats last week.

They were expelled reportedly in retaliation for a spy scandal involving an Estonian official.

'Plotter at large'

The mutiny at the Mukhrovani base, some 30km (20 miles) from Tbilisi, erupted on Tuesday morning, when soldiers began disobeying orders, Georgian officials said.

The soldiers were aiming at "disrupting Nato exercises and overturning the authorities militarily", Georgian Defence Minister David Sikharulidze told Georgian television.

It was not immediately known how many soldiers were taking part in the mutiny.

"The rebellion continues. Law enforcement agents are on the scene," Mr Sikharulidze said.

The mutiny broke out as the government announced it had disrupted a coup plot.

The interior ministry told the BBC that the plotters wanted to destabilise Georgia and assassinate President Saakashvili.

Interior Ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili said one of the suspected coup leaders - former special forces commander Georgy Gvaladze - was arrested. But he an alleged co-plotter - former chief of special forces Koba Otanadze - was still at large.

The spokesman said the government had been aware of the plot for two months.

The rebellion appeared to be "co-ordinated with Russia", the interior ministry said.

But Dmitry Rogozin, Moscow's ambassador at military alliance, said the mutiny in Georgia was the result of "crazy politics of President Saakashvili".

In a separate development, opposition protests are continuing in Tbilisi.

The demonstrators say they plan to bloc three main roads into the capital later on Tuesday.

Contraction in Europe and shrinking wages in US. Bad news.

I see that the geniuses in the US Senate succumbed to the banks and failed to force the banks to adjust existing mortgages to realistic housing prices.

The UAW is told that they have to be realistic and downsize their paychecks in light of the reality of the market. Unions and labor are to take a hair cut as have most investors and anyone with a 401K. Everyone must adjust to the new reality except the banking industry and the US Senate.

Europe is shrinking.

Employment and prices are falling, all of this in the apparent face of massive deficits. 

There is a need to re inflate. 

That requires disposable income in the hands of the American public. A radical and equitable solution would be to force drop every residential mortgage in the US to 3%, regardless of size, location, and term. That would affect a massive tax decrease and permit increased  spending. It would preserve capital as it would not be necessary to reduce the face value of mortgages.

It would stabilize pricing and slow falling wages. 

Give the break to consumers, taxpayers and workers. If some banks fail as a result, hard bread to them.

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E.U. Says Europe Faces Deep Recession
NY Times
Published: May 4, 2009
Filed at 5:19 a.m. ET

BRUSSELS (AP) -- The European Union says Europe faces a "deep and widespread recession" and that unemployment will rise sharply over the coming two years.

It says both the 27-nation EU and the 16 countries that use the euro currency will shrink 4 percent this year, way more than its previous forecasts.

It says some 8.5 million jobs will disappear in the EU in 2009 and 2010, more than wiping out the number of new jobs created in the last two years.

It predicts a subdued recovery next year but only if the banking sector and world trade start to recover.

The EU says Germany's economy will contract 5.5 percent this year, Britain and Italy will shrink by between 4 percent to 4.5 percent, while Spain and France will post a 3-percent drop.

Falling Wage Syndrome

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: May 3, 2009

Wages are falling all across America.

Some of the wage cuts, like the givebacks by Chrysler workers, are the price of federal aid. Others, like the tentative agreement on a salary cut here at The Times, are the result of discussions between employers and their union employees. Still others reflect the brute fact of a weak labor market: workers don’t dare protest when their wages are cut, because they don’t think they can find other jobs.

Whatever the specifics, however, falling wages are a symptom of a sick economy. And they’re a symptom that can make the economy even sicker.

First things first: anecdotes about falling wages are proliferating, but how broad is the phenomenon? The answer is, very.

It’s true that many workers are still getting pay increases. But there are enough pay cuts out there that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average cost of employing workers in the private sector rose only two-tenths of a percent in the first quarter of this year — the lowest increase on record. Since the job market is still getting worse, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if overall wages started falling later this year.

But why is that a bad thing? After all, many workers are accepting pay cuts in order to save jobs. What’s wrong with that?

The answer lies in one of those paradoxes that plague our economy right now. We’re suffering from the paradox of thrift: saving is a virtue, but when everyone tries to sharply increase saving at the same time, the effect is a depressed economy. We’re suffering from the paradox of deleveraging: reducing debt and cleaning up balance sheets is good, but when everyone tries to sell off assets and pay down debt at the same time, the result is a financial crisis.

And soon we may be facing the paradox of wages: workers at any one company can help save their jobs by accepting lower wages, but when employers across the economy cut wages at the same time, the result is higher unemployment.

Here’s how the paradox works. Suppose that workers at the XYZ Corporation accept a pay cut. That lets XYZ management cut prices, making its products more competitive. Sales rise, and more workers can keep their jobs. So you might think that wage cuts raise employment — which they do at the level of the individual employer.

But if everyone takes a pay cut, nobody gains a competitive advantage. So there’s no benefit to the economy from lower wages. Meanwhile, the fall in wages can worsen the economy’s problems on other fronts.

In particular, falling wages, and hence falling incomes, worsen the problem of excessive debt: your monthly mortgage payments don’t go down with your paycheck. America came into this crisis with household debt as a percentage of income at its highest level since the 1930s. Families are trying to work that debt down by saving more than they have in a decade — but as wages fall, they’re chasing a moving target. And the rising burden of debt will put downward pressure on consumer spending, keeping the economy depressed.

Things get even worse if businesses and consumers expect wages to fall further in the future. John Maynard Keynes put it clearly, more than 70 years ago: “The effect of an expectation that wages are going to sag by, say, 2 percent in the coming year will be roughly equivalent to the effect of a rise of 2 percent in the amount of interest payable for the same period.” And a rise in the effective interest rate is the last thing this economy needs.

Concern about falling wages isn’t just theory. Japan — where private-sector wages fell an average of more than 1 percent a year from 1997 to 2003 — is an object lesson in how wage deflation can contribute to economic stagnation.

So what should we conclude from the growing evidence of sagging wages in America? Mainly that stabilizing the economy isn’t enough: we need a real recovery.

There has been a lot of talk lately about green shoots and all that, and there are indeed indications that the economic plunge that began last fall may be leveling off. The National Bureau of Economic Research might even declare the recession over later this year.

But the unemployment rate is almost certainly still rising. And all signs point to a terrible job market for many months if not years to come — which is a recipe for continuing wage cuts, which will in turn keep the economy weak.

To break that vicious circle, we basically need more: more stimulus, more decisive action on the banks, more job creation.

Credit where credit is due: President Obama and his economic advisers seem to have steered the economy away from the abyss. But the risk that America will turn into Japan — that we’ll face years of deflation and stagnation — seems, if anything, to be rising.

The first face of European man or woman.

35,000-year-old skull fragments found in Romania are made flesh by scientists

Revealed: the face of the first European. Forensic artist Richard Neave used skull and jawbone fragments found in a cave to build this likeness of an early European

By Steve Connor, Science Editor Independent
Monday, 4 May 2009

This is the face of the first anatomically-modern human to live in Europe. It belonged to a man – or woman – who inhabited the ancient forests of the Carpathian Mountains in what is now Romania about 35,000 years ago.

The artist's reconstruction – a face that could be male or female – is based on the partial skull and jawbone found in a cave where bears were known to hibernate. The facial features indicate the close affinity of these early Europeans to their immediate African ancestors, although it was still not possible to determine the person's sex.

Richard Neave, the forensic artist who reconstructed the facial features in this clay model, based his assessment on a careful measurement of the bone fragments and his long experience of how the soft tissues of the face are built around the bones of the skull.

The reconstruction was made for the forthcoming BBC 2 series The Incredible Human Journey which documents human origins and evolution, from our birthplace in Africa to the long migratory routes that led us to populate the most distant parts of the globe. It is impossible from the bones to determine the skin colour of the individual, although scientists speculate it was probably darker than modern-day Europeans, reflecting a more recent African origin.

Mr Neave's clay head of the "first modern European" now sits on the desk of Alice Roberts, the Bristol University anthropologist who will introduce the BBC series, which is scheduled for screening next Sunday evening on BBC 2. "It's really quite bizarre. I'm a scientist and objective, but I look at that face and think 'Gosh, I'm actually looking at the face of somebody from 40,000 years ago', and there's something weirdly moving about that," Dr Roberts told the Radio Times.

"Richard creates skulls of much more recent humans and he's used to looking at differences between populations. He said the skull doesn't actually look European, or Asian, or African. It looks like a mixture of all of them. And you think, well, that's probably what you'd expect of someone who was among the earliest populations to come to Europe."

Potholers discovered the lower jawbone of the first modern European in 2002 in Pestera cu Oase, the "cave with bones", located in the south-western Carpathians. The remaining fragments of skull were unearthed in 2003.

Scientists have dated the bones using radiocarbon analysis to between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago when Europe was occupied by both Neanderthal man, who had lived in the region for tens of thousands of years, and anatomically-modern humans – Homo sapiens – who had recently arrived on a migratory route from Africa via the Middle East.

Although the skull shares many modern feature of human anatomy, it also displays more archaic traits, such as very large molar teeth, which led some scientists to speculate the skull may belong to a hybrid between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals – an idea discounted by other experts.

Erik Trinkaus, professor of anthropology at Washington University in Missouri, and one of the first specialists to study the bones in detail, said the jaw was the oldest, directly-dated modern human fossil. "Taken together, the material is the first that securely documents what modern humans looked like when they spread into Europe," he said.



Neanderthal man

*Lived in Europe for 300,000 years, surviving a number of ice ages before dying out 25,000 years ago. No one is sure why. Original fossil remains were found in 1856 in the Neander valley, near Dusseldorf, Germany. Socially advanced but left no signs of art, decoration or jewellery. But archaeologists have discovered a flute and have tested their toolmaking skills, suggesting a higher level of sophistication than first thought.

Homo sapiens

*Arrived in Europe some 35,000 years ago, competing with Neanderthal man for 10,000 years. DNA studies suggest the two species did not interbreed. First remains of Homo sapiens – modern humans – found in 1868 in a cave in the Dordogne, France, and known as Cro-Magnon man. Left cave paintings at Chauvet, Lascaux and Altamira, suggesting a sudden development of art.