Mexican telecommunications titan Carlos Slim Helu now tops Forbes’ list of world’s richest people, with a net worth of $53.5 billion.
For the second time since 1995, Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ name was not at the top of the list. Gates came in second with a net worth of $53.0 billion.
I am often asked as a foreigner living in the United States, what makes the United States different? How to explain the vast differences in societal norms between the United States and Europe, between the United States and Canada?
My answer generally takes the form about the deeply religious nature of many Americans. Among other advanced industrialized countries, only Ireland, Poland, Portugal and Italy have a higher rate of weekly Church attendance. But each of those have a mainstream Church, in case Catholic. What makes the US different is not just the higher rate of Church attendance but the type of religious services they attend.
While Catholics in the United States are the largest single denomination with about 50 million, but less than half of American Catholics attend services on weekly basis. The highest attending denominations are the Mormons (Church of Jesus Latter Day Saints) at 71 percent, the Assembly of God at 69 percent and the Pentecostals at 66 percent. Baptists are another high attendance group at just shy of 60 percent.
Cindy Jacobs is a self-proclaimed prophet and a nutcase who believes in supernatural creatures showing up in her bedroom. But her influence as evidenced by the above is unfortunately vast. It’s an act but it’s also a highly profitable one that preys on the wholly ignorant. The reality is that only in the United States is this sort of religious practice a multi-billion industry and it’s tax-free.
And her politics is very right-wing. She’s a regular on Pat Robertson’s, Christian Broadcasting Network. Here’s her take on the election of President Obama.
“The Holy Spirit spoke to me … and He said, ‘Cindy, you’re a general. Don’t let the prayer movement rupture over this election. … I thought back to when we were fighting for pro-life issues, as we have been now. And God is not a Democrat or a Republican. I’m very concerned about the Supreme Court, and people think ‘Oh, we’ve lost the Courts.’ No, we haven’t lost the Courts. We haven’t lost anything. Because the heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord. … And God said to me, ‘Remember what happened when the Clinton’s went in. And I’m not speaking negatively about the Clinton’s. I’m speaking ideologically, we are pro-marriage, one man and one woman. We are pro-life. We don’t want babies to be aborted. … So God said to me, ‘Speak to the people of God and say to them, it is not over.’”
“…The Lord showed me that there is a demonic oppression of depression trying to come against people in panic and fear. Satan wants to panic the troops. Satan wants to say to you, ‘It’s not gonna work. It’s over. You can’t do anything. We’ve lost the nation.’ I just see some people in panic, panic, panic. I just want to say, ‘Stop!’ Don’t do it. We can still pull this out.”
The British game show Quite Interesting hosted by the comedic actor Stephen Fry tackles the subject of the American gaol (the Oxford Dictionary spelling of jail) population. As always, the erudite QI uncovers some statistical gems demonstrating how insane our criminal justice policy is.
Here are some other disturbing facts:
You can learn more at the Prison Policy Initiative and at Drug War Facts.
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The last known speaker of the Bo language in the Andaman Islands has died. The Andaman & Nicobar Islands are a group of volcanic islands in the Bay of Bengal, and are part of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Union Territory of India.
There are 576 islands in the group, only 26 of which are inhabited. The length of the island chain is 352 km and its greatest width is 51 km. The total land area of the Andamans is 6408 square kilometre|km². Though part of India, the islands are closer to Sumatra (part of Indonesia) than to India.
The Bo language forms part of an ancient family of human language found in the Andamans called Great Andamanese. These languages, ten in all, are believed to have originated in Africa, with some possibly 70,000 years old. In other words, they date back to pre-Neolithic times. The Bo language was part of the Northern Group and was spoken on the east central coast of North Andaman and on North Reef Island.
The story on the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of yet another human language from the UK Guardian:
The last speaker of an ancient tribal language has died in the Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world’s oldest cultures.
Boa Sr, who lived through the 2004 tsunami, the Japanese occupation and diseases brought by British settlers, was the last native of the island chain who was fluent in Bo.
Taking its name from a now-extinct tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic human settlement of south-east Asia.
Though the language has been closely studied by researchers of linguistic history, Boa Sr spent the last few years of her life unable to converse with anyone in her mother tongue.
Even members of inter-related tribes were unable to comprehend the repertoire of Bo songs and stories uttered by the woman in her 80s, who also spoke Hindi and another local language.
“Her loss is not just the loss of the Great Andamanese community, it is a loss of several disciplines of studies put together, including anthropology, linguistics, history, psychology, and biology,” Narayan Choudhary, a linguist of Jawaharlal Nehru University who was part of an Andaman research team, wrote on his webpage. “To me, Boa Sr epitomised a totality of humanity in all its hues and with a richness that is not to be found anywhere else.”
The Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, are governed by India. The indigenous population has steadily collapsed since the island chain was colonised by British settlers in 1858 and used for most of the following 100 years as a colonial penal colony.
Tribes on some islands retained their distinct culture by dwelling deep in the forests and rebuffing would-be colonisers, missionaries and documentary makers with volleys of arrows. But the last vestiges of remoteness ended with the construction of trunk roads from the 1970s.
According to the NGO Survival International, the number of Great Andamanese has declined in the past 150 years from about 5,000 to 52. Alcoholism is rife among the survivors.
“The Great Andamanese were first massacred, then all but wiped out by paternalistic policies which left them ravaged by epidemics of disease, and robbed of their land and independence,” said Survival International’s director, Stephen Corry. “With the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of the Bo language, a unique part of human society is now just a memory. Boa’s loss is a bleak reminder that we must not allow this to happen to the other tribes of the Andaman Islands.”
Boa Sr appears to have been in good health until recently. During the Indian Ocean tsunami, she reportedly climbed a tree to escape the waves.
She told linguists afterwards that she had been forewarned. “We were all there when the earthquake came. The eldest told us the Earth would part, don’t run away or move.”
There are some 7,000 languages worldwide. At least half of these are expected to disappear in this century marking the greatest extinction of human knowledge in history. At present, a human language disappears once every 14 days. India has a particularly rich linguistic tapestry accounting for 10 percent of all the world’s languages.
Eighty percent of people living in the world today speak the just 83 languages with Han Chinese having the most speakers. Only two-tenths of one percent interact in rare 3,500 languages.
Languages are under pressure worldwide. In Australia, there are 153 languages down to under 100 speakers. In Central and South America 113 languages are in danger of immediate extinction. Even in North America’s Northwest Pacific Plateau that includes British Columbia, Washington and Oregon there are 54 under pressure.
About a half of all world languages have never been written down. When the last person speaking a language dies, an entire body of knowledge is lost. Learn more at National Geographic’s Enduring Voices project.
Why Is It Important?
Language defines a culture, through the people who speak it and what it allows speakers to say. Words that describe a particular cultural practice or idea may not translate precisely into another language. Many endangered languages have rich oral cultures with stories, songs, and histories passed on to younger generations, but no written forms. With the extinction of a language, an entire culture is lost.Much of what humans know about nature is encoded only in oral languages. Indigenous groups that have interacted closely with the natural world for thousands of years often have profound insights into local lands, plants, animals, and ecosystems—many still undocumented by science. Studying indigenous languages therefore benefits environmental understanding and conservation efforts.
Studying various languages also increases our understanding of how humans communicate and store knowledge. Every time a language dies, we lose part of the picture of what our brains can do.
Psychiatrists estimate that one in three US soldiers who served in Iraq or Afghanistan may develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The film, The War Within, addresses the US army’s Human Resources dilemma and features the stories of those who have had to come to terms with the physical and psychological wounds suffered from fighting a war that is increasingly unpopular in their home country and around the world.
Here are a few facts and figures:
The military suicide rate for 2009 was the highest level among soldiers since the Pentagon began tracking it three decades ago. Suicides among active US soldiers in 2009 rose for the fifth year in a row.
A Pentagon study revealed that 10% of the returning soldiers met the military’s criteria for PTSD.
The New England Journal of Medicine studied four combat units and found that 17% of Iraq war veterans and 11% of Afghanistan war veterans suffered from PTSD. In addition, 25% of returning soldiers were drinking excessively.
A study by the RAND Corporation revealed that 20% of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan will suffer from PTSD or severe depression; sadly, only about 50% of these veterans will get the treatment they need.
An older study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) discovered that only 20% of Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans who test positive for combat related stress disorders are actually referred by the Pentagon for mental health treatment.
On average, 18 US Veterans commit suicide each day. Veterans account for one in five suicides in the United States even though veterans account for only 8 percent of the US population.
They are punished for behaviour that’s said to bring shame on their families, and the price can be severe.
It could be theft, drugs, sex outside marriage or just marriage without the familys consent, but for some Yemeni women, such issues will remain with them for their whole life.
Al Jazeera’s Mohamed Vall travelled to southern Yemen to visit one woman whose determination to help those she sees as victims of injustice is making a real difference.
Religious tensions are rising in Malaysia following a High Court ruling which declared non-Muslims could use the Arabic word ‘Allah’ when referring to God.
Here are the thoughts of one Malay writer, Art Harum writing in The Malay Insider:
The controversy surrounding the usage of “Allah” by non-Muslims, particularly the Christians, in Malaysia continues to rage even as at the time of writing this article. The Malaysian Insider just reported that a ninth church — this time in Kota Tinggi, Johore — had been vandalised.
The year 2009 was about to end when Yang Ariff Justice Lau Bee Lan held that the word “Allah” may be used by the Herald in its newspaper. That decision has almost redefined the phrase “ending the year with a bang.”
Viewed with the benefit of hindsight, there were of course political opportunity loss on the part of the Barisan Nasional. In a land where everything from the slaughtering of cows for distribution to the poor and needy to the building of a free trade zone are perfect fodders for politics, the Allah issue was never far from being one as well.
In the last half of 2009, I actually thought that the Prime Minister was in the political driving seat. He was in control. His 1 Malaysia concept and sloganeering, although leaving much to be desired from the view point of the urbanites, was gaining support from the heartland. The Chinese and Indian supports were slowly coming back to him and his government despite the impotence and lameness of the two most important protagonists which were supposed to represent the two races within the government, namely the MCA and MIC respectively.
The public relation machinations of the government were working full steam and in overdrive. The Prime Minister and his men were all over the place, winning nods of approvals from the people on the street.
In the meantime, power base in Umno was being broaden. And his hard line approach towards the opposition was well received within the Umno circle, especially at the grass root level. The Perak power grab, orchestrated and executed by him, although crude and almost unrefined, served to cement the belief among Umno members that in Datuk Seri Najib Razak, Umno has a powerful leader who is not afraid to use his power for the benefit of Umno. Gone were the days of the lembik leadership that they had under the stewardship of Tun Abdullah Badawi.
And so, despite various issues ranging from Teoh Beng Hock’s death at the MACC state head office to the PKFZ debacle, the Prime Minister was looking good.
Hoy en las ferias de Sampués en Sucre en la costa norte de Colombia hubo un muerto por garrote.
Today in the Festival in Sampués, a town in the northern Colombian province of Sucre, a man was killed after a brutal goring by a bull.
I’m not much for this aspect of Colombian culture. I much prefer the vibrant music of the region which like its people is a rich mixture of African, Iberian and native influences. Here’s la Cumbia Sampuesana.
In a 1955 essay entitled The Role of Government in Education, Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist and a leading member of the neoliberal Mount Pelerin Society, argued that universal vouchers for elementary and secondary schools would usher in an age of educational innovation and experimentation, not only widening the range of options for students and parents but increasing all sorts of positive outcomes. Thankfully this idea hasn’t been widely adopted though it is being tested in Florida with less than stellar results so far. In his essay, Friedman also touched on the role of government in higher education arguing that government should play no role in subsiding education but rather a free market should govern the sector. He envisioned human capital contracts – an “equity-like” financial instruments – which individuals would use to finance their own higher education. In his conclusion, he wrote that:
The result of these measures would be a sizable reduction in the direct activities of government, yet a great widening in the educational opportunities open to our children. They would bring a healthy increase in the variety of educational institutions available and in competition among them. Private initiative and enterprise would quicken the pace of progress in this area as it has in so many others. Government would serve its proper function of improving the operation of the invisible hand without substituting the dead hand of bureaucracy.
Whereas Milton Friedman’s vision for elementary and secondary education has been mercifully been kept at bay, his free market ideas have come to increasingly define higher education in the United States as the GOP successfully cut federal subsidies to education and as state governments also curtailed their sponsorship of public and land grant colleges. For example, since 1986 the purchasing power of the federal Pell Grant program, the nation’s largest need-based financial aid program for college students, has decreased by 57 percent. Since 1980, federal financial aid has been transformed-with little explicit policy debate-from a system characterized mainly by need-based grants to one dominated by loans. In 1981, loans accounted for 45 percent and grants for 52 percent of federal student financial aid. In 2000, loans represented 58 percent of federal student financial aid, and grants represented 41 percent. The results have been an unmitigated disaster for the American middle class.
Since the early 1980’s, the cost of an education at American universities has been rising steadily, at two to three times the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Since 1980, through 2005, after adjusting for inflation, the average cost of tuition plus room and board at a four year public university has increased by over 120 percent. For the private 4-year institutions, tuition prices have increased by over 140 percent. The College Board reports that private college tuition rose most sharply in the early and mid 1980’s, while public tuition increased the most in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. If a gallon of milk in 1980 had sustained this level of increase, it would now run just over $15.00; if a gallon of gas in 1980 had sustained this level of increase, it would now run over $9.50. While the cost of a college education has more than doubled, median income in the United States has risen by 18 percent.
This is what Milton Friedman has wrought:
Most American families have lost ground in college affordability. Over the last two decades, the cost of attending two- and four-year public and private colleges (including tuition and other education-related expenses) has grown more rapidly than inflation, and faster than family income as well. As a result, the share of family income that is needed to pay for tuition and other college expenses has increased.The principal driver of the increased cost of attending college is higher tuition, and only the wealthiest families have seen their incomes keep pace with increases in tuition. The lowest-income families have lost the most ground, and this is a major factor in their lower rates of college attendance. For example, for the lowest-income families in 1980, tuition at public two-year colleges represented 6% of their family income. For the lowest-income families in 2000, tuition at these colleges represented 12% of their income. Likewise, tuition at public four-year colleges and universities represented 13% of income for the lowest-income families in 1980. In 2000, tuition at these colleges and universities equaled 25% of their income.
Today the Washington Post has a story on the impact of all this. I can normally write with an academic detachment on free market disasters but on the subject of education, how does one one quantify the damage inflicted? Milton Friedman wasn’t just wrong; he was spectacularly wrong and thanks to his nefarious and frankly crackpot ideas millions are paying the price with dreams deferred and freedoms curtailed.
The implications are actually severe. Because the costs of attending college have risen so fast, students are choosing majors and careers that are remunerative since they are coming out with higher debt loads. So whereas Milton Friedman predicted this flourishing of ideas with positive benefits for society, in fact the very opposite has occurred. English accounted for almost 8 percent of degrees in 1971, but had sunk to 4 percent by 2002; history had 5 percent back then but now gets 2 percent. The number of degrees in foreign languages and literatures has been cut in half, from 2.4 percent to 1.2 percent. Meanwhile, business degrees accounted for 13.6 percent of the nation’s bachelor’s degrees in 1971, by 2002 they accounted for almost a quarter of all degrees. The outcome has been anything but positive.
The film shows the hidden reality of rural India. A world of child marriage, child labour and domestic abuse. It also shows how some women use video cameras to challenge traditional ways of life.
India introduced laws against child marriage in 1929 and set the legal age for marriage at 12 years. The legal age for marriage was increased to 18 years in 1978.
While the practice of child marriage has decreased slowly, its prevalence remains unacceptably high, and rural, poor, less educated girls and those from central or eastern regions of the country were most vulnerable to the practice, the researchers wrote.
Such findings indicate that child marriage affects not only adolescents aged 16 to 17 years, but also large numbers of pubescent girls aged 14 to 15 years, and show that existing policies and economic development gains have failed to help rural and poor populations, the researchers wrote.
They attributed the high numbers of sterilization in young women married as children to them having their desired number of children at an earlier age.
But it was also indicative of inadequate fertility control, which was evident from the high numbers of unwanted pregnancies among these women.
They also warned that sterilization might reduce condom use in such couples, which would heighten the risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.
Child-marriage prevention programmes should be broadened to include interventions for women married as children and men who might pursue children for marriage, the researchers added.
UNICEF defines child marriage as marriage before 18 years of age and such a practice has been increasingly viewed as a violation of human rights.
Marriage at a very young age carries grave health consequences for both the girl and her children and it is well documented that adolescent mothers are more likely to experience complications such as obstetric fistula.
Researchers analyzed data from a national family health survey that was conducted from 2005 to 2006 in India. The survey involved 22,807 Indian women who were aged between 20 and 24 at the time of the survey.
Of these, 22.6 percent were married before they were 16, 44.5 percent were married when they were between 16 and 17, and 2.6 percent were married before they turned 13.
“Women who were married as children remained significantly more likely to have had three or more childbirths, a repeat childbirth in less than 24 months, multiple unwanted pregnancies, pregnancy termination, and sterilization,” wrote the researchers, led by Anita Raj at the Boston University School of Public Health.