Africa
gregladen | June 16, 2009Here is the Guinea Worm Movie, and for more information and additional links, click here.
Minor Africa Story hidden below the fold.
A small Jimmy Carter story: A friend of mine got a job, while in his first or second year of graduate school, as in intern for the State Department. Since he was studying Africa, he got sent to Uganda where, one would think, an inexperienced intern would be at the bottom of the pecking order.
And he was at the bottom of the pecking order, but he was also at the top. For whatever reason, the Ambassador and all the other people who were under the Ambassador…
gregladen | June 9, 2009Royal Dutch Shell has agreed a $15.5m (£9.7m) out-of-court settlement in a case accusing it of complicity in human rights abuses in Nigeria.
It was brought by relatives of nine anti-oil campaigners, including author Ken Saro-Wiwa, who were hanged in 1995 by Nigeria's then military rulers.
The oil giant strongly denies any wrongdoing and says the payment is part of a "process of reconciliation".
bbc
Human rights experts around the world generally agree that Shell was in fact involved in the killing of these people.
The trial was about to start next week. As a trial judge once said to me: "…
gregladen | June 2, 2009-Activists concerned by this year's escalation of sexual violence in eastern Congo are trying to turn up the heat on those benefitting--directly or indirectly--from illicit mineral extractions.
"Conflict minerals power our entire electronic industry," John Prendergast, co-founder of the Enough Project, told U.S. senators at a May 13 hearing on sexual violence in eastern Congo and Sudan.
The Enough Project is a Washington-based organization campaigning against genocide and crimes against humanity, including rape in eastern Congo.
Women's eNews
gregladen | June 1, 2009Please read the following vignette of an actual incident.
I am a scientist observing the culture of the Namoyoma people. I am sitting in a shady spot just outside the village, writing up some notes, and I observe a disturbing event. Four men are trying to drag a young woman from the road into the nearby forest, and from what I hear them saying, they intend to rape her. There are also four older women trying to drag the young woman back to the village, and they are yelling that she must go back to her father's house where she will be protected. The battle over this young woman continues…
gregladen | May 26, 2009Have you been reading Digital Rabbit? Please add this site that addresses safe drinking water and basic sanitation to your list of links to check or your RSS feed.
And, have a look at the Q-Drum, which is profiled at DR.
eklemetti | May 15, 2009Volcano news ahoy, today brought to you by Islands.
Lake Kivu, located along the border the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda
A gorgeous satellite image (brought to us by the NASA EO) of a steam plume and ash from the ongoing eruption at Shiveluch in Kamchatka. The ash distribution stands out remarkably well on the white snow, with the central circle of ash near the vent/dome and then the wind-aided ash blanketing the terrain to the northeast of the volcano (and a little bit to the south).
Nature has a post reminding us that one of the big hazards at Nyiragongo/Nymuragira is not…
eklemetti | May 12, 2009
Redoubt emitting a large steam plume in April 2009. Image courtesy of Calvin Hall.
A few snippets from the world of volcanoes:
The current eruptive cycle at Galeras continues to go strong. Officials with INGEOMINAS, the Colombian Geology Survey, believe the volcano will erupt again in the next few "days to weeks". The volcano last erupted a few weeks ago (in spanish) and caused quite a bit of panic in the city of Pasto at the foot of the volcano. An Orange Alert has been issued (in spanish) for the volcano.
Another volcano have is on the verge of a larger eruption is Nyiragongo in the DR of…
sb admin | May 7, 2009
Oecophylla longinoda - Weaver Ants
St. Lucia, Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa
Technical details:
Lens: Canon 35mm f2.0 lens on a 12mm extension tube
Body: Canon EOS 20D dSLR
Flash: Canon MT-24EX twin flash, hand-held for backlighting.
Settings: ISO 400, f/13, 1/160 sec
eklemetti | May 6, 2009
Nyiragongo as seen from Goma, Congo in 2002.
There isn't much to go on so far, but there are indications that an eruption has started at Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Satellite images has found "thermal anomalies" at the summit and along a 3-km swath of the eastern and western slopes. The report mentions that these could be "fires and /or volcanic material" and more interestingly, noticed at least 6 times since April 10, 2009. From the sound of it, this might be multiple vents or a central summit vent with lava flows going to multiple sides of the volcano. The Volcanism…
ddobbs | May 6, 2009In a post titled "Dead, Your Majesty," H5N1, Crof ponders why we scramble to deal with swine flu while ignoring other problems ranging from cancer to the 3000 children a day who die of malaria in Africa :
Most of us are comfortably settled in rich industrial countries where problems like TB and AIDS are rarely in the news. Zimbabwe, like our own homeless, is a deplorable problem...but not our problem. We'd prefer to focus, via high-speed internet connections, on a conjectural disaster instead of the many real disasters killing people somewhere else.
If a thousand people died in the US…
tlambert | May 1, 2009A recent peer-reviewed scientific paper in Malaria Journal by Yukich, Lengeler, Tediosi, Brown, Mulligan, Chavasse, Stevens, Justino, Conteh, Maharaj, Erskine, Mueller, Wiseman, Ghebremeskel, Zerom, Goodman, McGuire, Urrutia, Sakho, Hanson and Sharp compared several large vector control programs to prevent malaria, including both insecticide-treated nets (ITN) and indoor residual spraying (IRS). The results:
Method
cost per child death averted
Conventional ITNs
$438-$2199
Long-lasting ITNs
$502-$692
IRS
$3933-$4357
Even using IRS, DDT was not the most cost effective…
razib | April 30, 2009I've been fine tuning Ubuntu all day with goodies and getting drivers to work right, so I missed this paper on African genetics:
Africa is the source of all modern humans, but characterization of genetic variation and of relationships among populations across the continent has been enigmatic. We studied 121 African populations, 4 African American populations, and 60 non-African populations for patterns of variation at 1327 nuclear microsatellite and insertion/deletion markers. We identified 14 ancestral population clusters in Africa that correlate with self-described ethnicity and shared…
gregladen | April 27, 2009Did he take a bribe? Did he try to buy a senate seat? Did he misuse campaign funds?
NO! He was trying to save the lives of thousands, make life better for countless people living under the oppressive regime of the Sudanese government. Minnesota Fifth District Congressman Keith Ellison was arrested along with others at the Sudanese Embassy where they were protesting the current situation in Darfur. Details are available here at MN Progressive Project.
Ellison's office has released the following statement regarding Darfur:
Today, I join with my Congressional colleagues and advocates from…
razib | April 17, 2009In light of the relatively recent interaction of Bantu farmers and Pygmies in Central Africa, this paper is of note, Genetic and demographic implications of the Bantu expansion: insights from human paternal lineages:
The expansion of Bantu languages, which started around 5,000 years before present (YBP) in west/central Africa and spread all throughout sub-Saharan Africa, may represent one of the major and most rapid demographic movements in the history of the human species. Although the genetic footprints of this expansion have been unmasked through the analyses of the maternally-inherited…
razib | April 16, 2009Another response by Etienne Patin, lead author of Inferring the Demographic History of African Farmers and Pygmy Hunter-Gatherers Using a Multilocus Resequencing Data Set, to a follow up post:
As to your hypothesis represented by the cladogram, this is a quite reasonable and interesting idea. Actually, the only method that we could use to prove it is to find human remains of Pygmies dating back to Bantu expansions, in regions that were colonized by Bantus. Population genetics cannot infer the presence of extinct populations. However, as stated in our article, Western and Eastern Pygmies may…
gregladen | April 14, 2009... but seriously ... even though we all hate it when a bunch of armed and desperate people board a ship of humanitarian relief supplies that they don't own and demand large sums of money, we also know that few people grow up to become pirates without a reason.
So let's get some perspective, and start with an overview by Rachel Maddow:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
To this I'd like to add the important fact that over the last several years, more "acts of piracy" that have occurred in this region have come from bases NOT in Somalia than those in…
gregladen | April 14, 2009 Violence in Nigeria's oil region left 1,000 people dead and cost $24bn (£16bn) last year, a report says, according to an official and activist.
Ledum Mitee, chairman of the Niger Delta Presidential Technical Committee, says the figures only cover the first nine months of 2008.
Militants and criminal gangs often attack oil installations, leading to reprisals from the military.
The unrest has cut Nigeria's oil output by about 25% in recent years.
Last week, President Umaru Yar'Adua said his government was considering granting amnesty to violent groups if they disarm.
Hat Tip, Elle. Read the…
gregladen | April 11, 2009One afternoon I was sitting by the hearth writing notes on the morning's data collection, and a cassette player was running nearby. The Beatles White Album was on. Happiness is a Warm Gun was playing.
Lengotu, an Efe man I had been working with, who had made the claim to be a rain shaman (which in the case of the Rain Forest, meant someone who could stop the rain from being so severe) came over to me and said "You have to turn off that song."
"Why?" I said. Then, right after I said that I took in the look on his face. He was clearly disturbed. Without saying another word, I walked over…
razib | April 11, 2009The leader author of the PLoS Genetics paper Inferring the Demographic History of African Farmers and Pygmy Hunter-Gatherers Using a Multilocus Resequencing Data Set, which I blogged a few days ago left a clarifying comment:
I just have few remarks. I do not expect that the Bantu expansions are responsible for the separation of Western and Eastern Pygmies. In a recent article in Current Biology, Paul Verdu and colleagues showed that the separation of Pygmy groups, but only those from the Western part of sub-Saharan Africa, diverged concomitantly with Bantu expansions (3,000-5,000 years ago…
sciencepunk | April 7, 2009
The Associated Press reports that lawyers working on a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against Pfizer are close to reaching a settlement.
Nigerian authorities allege that Pfizer conducted deadly drug experiments in Nigeria's northern Kano state during devastating meningitis outbreak. They claim that the pharmaceutical giant used children there for an unlicensed trial of what it hoped would be a new "blockbuster" drug - a broad spectrum antibiotic that could be taken in tablet form. Pfizer disagrees, insisting that it acted with approval from the Nigerian government and with the consent of…