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An independent view of the world seen from Tokelau

The Independent New York Times

Tokelau, Saturday, February 14 2009 Summary of Weekly News - Editor - contact sumpinein@gmail.com

EDITORIAL:  Elections in Israel this week indicate the new government will be formed by the Likud, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Avigdor Lieberman, leader of Israel Is Our Home, this is a setback in the Obama administration's bid to mobilize efforts to bring peace to the Middle East. The surge in votes Tuesday for right and extreme right parties revealed declining support for negotiations with a divided Palestinian leadership. Analysts and officials said that whether the new government is formed by the Likud party or the Kadima, it probably would be too divided to conduct peace negotiations. Send your comments to sumpinein@gmail.com

OSCAR NOMINEES

Australia, starring Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, is shortlisted for Best Costume in 2009 Oscar awards

BURMA'S HUMAN EXPORTS

Her glasses were Gucci and her bag YSL. The smart Burmese businesswoman was perched neatly on a sofa in the lobby of a Rangoon hotel, delivering her sales patter to a small group of businessmen. Her product? Human beings. "We supply only strong bodies," she says crisply. "That is our guarantee." The woman is a supplier of workers for deep-sea trawlers, and her stock of men come from Burma's beautiful but impoverished Inle Lake area, where fishing the tranquil waters no longer makes enough to feed a family. "These are just simple fishermen; they are not educated, but what we promise you is strong bodies," she says, using a phrase she repeats again and again. It appears that the businesswoman's potential customers are middlemen, probably Chinese. Through a translator, they discuss placing the men on boats in the South China Sea, trawling for tuna. First, they will be flown to a Chinese city. In echoes of the slave trade, she describes a selection process worthy of a livestock market. In a 21st-century twist, she does so with the aid of pictures on her laptop. "We make them stand in the sun for one hour," she says. "In the middle of the day when it is very hot. We see how they manage, if they look uncomfortable." The group leans in to see the pictures on her computer. "We make them carry 20 kilos, like this," she continues, showing them photographs I cannot see. "For deep-sea fishing, they may need to carry very big fish for long distances across the ship." The group nods. The images of Burma's Rohingya boat people, fleeing oppression only to be allegedly abused and cast adrift by the Thai military, has drawn international attention to the plight of one of the world's most downtrodden people. The Muslim Rohingyas face particular persecution in military-ruled Burma, but throughout the country, impoverished men and women who see no future at home are embarking on risky journeys abroad in search of an income for their families. Hit by the global recession and the mismanagement and neglect of Burma's ruling generals, in power for nearly five decades, the country's farmers and fishermen are suffering as never before, say aid workers.

SEEN FROM SPACE

Inauguration Day, seen from space looked like warms of bees landed on a street somewhere? A huge colony of worker ants on the march? Or the effects of a Predator strike in some distant battlefield.? You're probably way ahead of us already. Those aren't just any old buildings: that's how the National Mall and the US Capitol looked from space during Barack Obama's inauguration when more than 2 million people, according to some estimates, came to hear him take the oath of office and deliver his inaugural address. What a passing Martian would have made of it is anyone's guess. How do they all crowd together like that without crushing each other? Don't they have televisions?

CULTURE

CREOLE STOMP

This band incarnates the traditional values of Cajun music in the USA. The Cajuns live mainly in Louisiana and are the descendants of Acadian exiles. Today, the Cajuns make up a significant portion of south Louisiana's population, and have exerted an enormous impact on the state's culture.

Every now and again a band comes along that redefines a genre of music and carries it even further...that group is Dennis Stroughmatt and Creole Stomp.  Always leaving audiences wondering "who are they?," and "where do they come from?," Dennis and CS are based in southern Illinois and happily tell audiences "we are from upper Louisiana."  While this may bring chuckles from many and nodding heads from others "in the know," this is the group that does represent "old upper Louisiana." Dennis learned to speak French and play French Creole music in a southeast Missouri French Creole community before moving to the state of Louisiana. Their unique sound and mix of ancient and modern Mississippi River valley musical tradition positions them as the only band to encompass French Creole and Folk Music from the entirety of the old Louisiana Territory.  And although Dennis continues to play with many of his Louisiana based friends on occasion, you can always find him at the helm of Creole Stomp playing somewhere from San Diego to Boston

Read DEATH OF A FINANCIER by JOHN FRANCIS KINSELLA

Tom Barton, a City mortgage broker, decides to quit his business in the wake of the subprime crisis and arrives in Kovalam, in the south of India. In the Maharaja Palace he finds himself in the company of holiday makers from the UK, Scandinavia and Russia. Stephen Parkly, the CEO of a successful City bank, and his young wife Emma are taking a well earned year end break. Parkly falls gravely ill with a mysterious infection, whilst back in the City, unknown to him his mortgage and investment bank, West Mercian Finance is in grave difficulties. Ryan Kavanagh, a doctor, comes to Emma’s aid with the help of Barton, after an attempted cover-up by the Indian authorities, who fear for their tourist industry and more especially medical tourism, as the disease threatens the resort with the tourist season in full swing. Thousands of British tourists enjoying the sun are unaware of the pending disaster, many are equally unaware their savings about are to be wiped out in the West Mercian collapse.

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More books by John Francis Kinsella from Vincennes Books: Borneo Pulp, The Legacy of Solomon, Offshore Islands, The Lost Forest

LONDON TO TIMBUKTU BY FLYING-CAR

A voyage to fabled Timbuktu in a flying car may sound like a magical childhood fantasy. But this week a British adventurer will set off from London on an incredible journey through Europe and Africa in a souped-up sand buggy, travelling by road - and air. With the help of a parachute and a giant fan-motor, Neil Laughton plans to soar over the Pyrenees near Andorra, before taking to the skies again to hop across the 14-km (nine-mile) Straits of Gibraltar.

WORST BUSH FIRES IN HISTORY

The death toll from bush fires in southern Australia has reached an estimated 200, the worst in the country's history.  Thousands of fire-fighters, aided by the army, are battling several major fires, and the number of dead is expected to rise as fires are put out. Arsonists responsible for lighting the fires could be charged with murder, police have said. Entire towns have been destroyed in the fires, fanned by extremely high temperatures and unpredictable winds. Temperatures are dropping now, but officials fear they will not be able to get the fires under control until there is substantial rain. Fire-fighters have been battling against what are described as the worst conditions in the state's history. Witnesses described seeing walls of flames four storeys high, trees exploding and the skies raining ash, as fires tore across 30,000 hectares of forests, farmland and towns.

 'GREAT' BRITAIN?

 Mini-Madoff

A City trader has been arrested over a £40million "mini-Madoff" investment fraud - the largest of its kind since the start of the financial crisis. Terry Freeman, 60, was apprehended at his home in Buckhurst Hill, Essex, on Monday. It is thought detectives are investigating claims that the company the foreign exchange trader worked for, GFX, was running a Ponzi scheme similar to the £35 billion one Bernie Madhoff is accused of operating in the US. Under the schemes, investors are promised huge returns on their investments but are simply paid instalments on the money they invested in the first place. The frauds are only uncovered when stakeholders try to get their original deposits back.

Extinct ibex is resurrected by cloning

The Pyrenean ibex, a form of wild mountain goat, was officially declared extinct in 2000 when the last-known animal of its kind was found dead in northern Spain. Shortly before its death, scientists preserved skin samples of the goat, a subspecies of the Spanish ibex that live in mountain ranges across the country, in liquid nitrogen. Using DNA taken from these skin samples, the scientists were able to replace the genetic material in eggs from domestic goats, to clone a female Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo as they are known. It is the first time an extinct animal has been cloned. Sadly, the newborn ibex kid died shortly after birth due to physical defects in its lungs. Other cloned animals, including sheep, have been born with similar lung defects. But the breakthrough has raised hopes that it will be possible to save endangered and newly extinct species by resurrecting them from frozen tissue. It has also increased the possibility that it will one day be possible to reproduce long-dead species such as woolly mammoths and even dinosaurs. Dr Jose Folch, from the Centre of Food Technology and Research of Aragon, in Zaragoza, northern Spain, led the research along with colleagues from the National Research Institute of Agriculture and Food in Madrid. He said: "The delivered kid was genetically identical to the bucardo. In species such as bucardo, cloning is the only possibility to avoid its complete disappearance."

HELP MICHAEL MOORE

KOALAS SUFFER IN BUSH FIRES

THE INDEPENDENT NEW YORK TIMES PRESENTS A ROUNDUP OF THE WEEKLY NEWS

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CONTACT OUR EDITOR AT sumpinein@gmail.com

LABOUR LEADERS AND THEIR CRONIES

DAILY MAIL LONDON - Labour's intimate relationship with the financial industry has seen dozens of bankers given honours, appointed as ministers and given jobs on Government taskforces, reviews and quangos. An analysis by the Daily Mail reveals that while ministers are now railing against the role of bankers in causing the economic crisis, they have spent the last decade cosying up to the industry. Labour has given 23 bankers honours, brought three into the Government as ministers and involved 37 in commissions and advisory bodies. Seven have got jobs on quangos and agencies, ten have been appointed to various councils, and four were given life peerages. Two banking chiefs have been appointed to senior posts inside Number Ten. In addition, banks have been awarded a string of Government contracts and bankers have paid for hospitality events enjoyed by ministers. When Labour came to power in 1997, it was desperate to be seen as being on the side of big business and assiduously courted the City. Ministers delivered light-touch regulation that left the banks free to pursue aggressive lending and investment strategies. In a 2007 speech to the City, Mr Brown even claimed bankers had forged an ‘era that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age for the City of London’. Of the finance chiefs honoured by the Government, eight were given knighthoods, seven CBEs, four OBEs and four MBEs. Those who were knighted include Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, who has been blamed for expected losses of up to £28billion – the biggest in British corporate history. In 2004, Sir Fred received his knighthood, on the advice of Mr Brown, for services to banking. Two years later he was a member of the Chancellor’s International Business Advisory Council. Nicknamed ‘Fred the Shred’, he instigated the acquisition of Dutch bank ABN Amro that placed a toxic loan timebomb at the heart of one of Scotland’s oldest financial institutions. Mr Brown now says he is ‘angry’ about the ‘irresponsible risks’ taken by RBS. Other bankers knighted since Labour came to power include Sir James Crosby, head of HBOS, who was forced to quit yesterday as deputy chairman of the Financial Services Authority watchdog; Sir Philip Hampton, chief financial officer for Lloyds TSB; and Sir Mervyn Pedelty, chief executive of Cooperative Financial Services. The others are Sir George Mathewson, group chief executive of RBS; Sir John Bond, group chairman of HSBC Holdings; Sir Keith Whitson, group chief executive of HSBC Holdings; and Sir Peter Burt, executive deputy chairman of HBOS.

SATELLITES COLLIDE IN SPACE

A US and a Russian satellite have collided in space hundreds of miles above Earth in what is believed to be the first major crash of two spacecraft in orbit. The collision – which occurred nearly 500 miles over Siberia on Tuesday – caused massive debris clouds to shoot out into the atmosphere and posed a risk to astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Nasa said that it would take weeks to determine the full magnitude of the crash, during which an Iridium commercial satellite from a Maryland-based company was destroyed after it was struck by a spent Russian satellite. “We knew this was going to happen eventually,” said Mark Matney, an orbital debris scientist at Johnson Space Centre in Houston. Nasa believes that any risk to the space station and its three astronauts is low as it orbits about 270 miles below the collision course. There also should be no danger to the space shuttle scheduled to launch with seven astronauts later this month, officials said, but that would be re-evaluated in the coming days. The Russian satellite, which was launched in 1993 and weighed nearly a tonne, was out of control. The Iridium commercial satellite was launched in 1997 and weighed 1,235 pounds. No one has any idea yet how many pieces were generated or how big they may be. “Right now, they’re definitely counting dozens,” Mr Matney said. “I would suspect that they’ll be counting hundreds when the counting is done.” The Bethesda-based company that owns the Iridium commercial satellite said that it had "lost an operational satellite”.

MICHELLE OBAMA

Michelle Obama has ended a period of relative seclusion to grace the cover of Vogue magazine and detail her new life as “Mom-in-Chief”. In an extensive and at times gushing interview, the First Lady talks about her young children’s schooling and her desire to open up the White House to a new generation of hip-hop-loving youngsters.
Much of the interview centres on the Obamas’ two daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7. “I’m going to try to take them to school every morning as much as I can,” Mrs Obama says. The two girls attend Sidwell Friends, a Washington private school that costs more than $28,000 annually for each child. “But there’s also a measure of independence. And obviously there will be times I won’t be able to drop them off at all. I like to be a presence in my kids’ school. I want to know the teachers; I want to know the other parents.” Although Vogue has photographed every First Lady since Lou Hoover in 1929 — except for Harry Truman’s wife, Bess — Mrs Obama is only the second to have graced the cover. The first was Hillary Clinton, in December 1998.

SENTENCED TO BLINDING

TEHRAN: An Iranian man has been sentenced to be blinded under Islamic laws in retribution for blinding a woman by throwing acid on her face for rejecting his marriage proposal, press reports said on Thursday.
A Tehran criminal court on Wednesday issued the ruling against the jilted suitor identified as Majid, 27, who confessed to throwing acid on Ameneh Bahrami's face four years ago, Kargozaran newspaper said.
Despite years of treatment in Spain, Bahrami has lost sight in both eyes and still bears serious injuries to the face and body, the report said. The newspaper did not say whether the convict would appeal against the ruling that he also be blinded by acid.
Under the Sharia-based law practised in the Islamic republic, those convicted of causing intentional physical injury are punishable by "qisas", or the eye-for-an-eye Islamic penalty.

SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP?

Barack Obama’s grandfather was imprisoned and brutally tortured by the British during the violent struggle for Kenyan independence, according to the Kenyan family of the US President-elect. Hussein Onyango Obama, Mr Obama’s paternal grandfather, became involved in the Kenyan independence movement while working as a cook for a British army officer after the war. He was arrested in 1949 and jailed for two years in a high-security prison where, according to his family, he was subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing insurgency.

IMAMS AND RABBIS GATHER TO PROMOTE PEACE

logo_IR_Small.gifParis, 15 December 2008, the Foundation Hommes de Parole inaugurated the Third World Congress of Imams and Rabbis for Peace at UNESCO. The theme of the Congress is The Sacredness of Peace.
Abdoulaye Wade, President of the Republic of Senegal and President of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and Mr Koïchiro Matsuura, Director general of UNESCO opened the proceedings.

 

 FRAUD SQUAD TO INVESTIGATE CITY BANKERS

The Serious Fraud Office is investigating at least six cases of alleged swindling by financial institutions linked to the credit crunch. The news of the fraud inquiries will send fear spreading through the City. The probes are in a preliminary stage and have been carried out by small teams before full-scale inquiries are ordered. However, politicians believe that criminal charges will be brought against some financiers involved. The SFO is also in talks with the City regulator and the Scottish Crown Office after leader of the Liberal Democrats in Scotland, Tavish Scott MSP, called for the Royal Bank of Scotland to be investigated to find out whether shareholders were misled over last year’s £12 billion rights issue. There is no evidence that RBS or any other banks have committed any offences. The SFO has already announced that it has launched an investigation into the UK activities of Bernard Madoff, the American fund manager accused of a £33 billion fraud. Meanwhile, banking regulator Sir James Crosby faced calls to resign today amid new claims that he tried to silence warnings about the risks being run by greedy banks. Sir James, currently deputy chairman of the Financial Services Authority and one of Gordon Brown’s favoured City advisers, is now accused of trying to stop Lib-Dem Treasury spokesman Vince Cable from issuing warnings about the dangers of a crash. The revelation is a new blow to Sir James, who was yesterday accused of firing a senior risk regulator at HBOS who tried to warn that the industry was heading for disaster owing to its excessive lending and over-rapid expansion. Yesterday the former bosses of Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS offered their "profound" apologies for their part in the banking crisis, despite vigorously defending their individual actions.

GUNMEN ATTACK KABUL

Not much hope for the security services if the 2 men illustrated are the elite troops. The guy on the windowsill is perfectly silhouetted and can't see in whilst his compatriot below is climbing the ladder one-handed whilst pointing an automatic rifle (no doubt with the safety off) at the guy above!A suicide bomber and several gunmen launched co-ordinated attacks in Kabul this morning, leaving the Government in confusion and 'many dead' according to local officials. At least two government ministries, both connected to the rule of law, were targeted in the attacks, which began mid-morning in the Afghan capital. Reports also indicated that a police station had been attacked. Reports from the Ministry of Justice, in the centre of the city, suggested gunmen supported an initial assault by a suicide bomber. A Justice Ministry official, Mohammad Ali, told reporters that the fighting was still ongoing around the ministry with at least five gunmen holed up in the building.

HIC! DID YOU SAY ALKA-SELTZER?

THE GREAT DEPRESSION

FRANCE'S TOXIC AIRCRAFT CARRIER

A former French aircraft carrier is due to arrive at a shipyard in Teeside to join a fleet of so called 'ghost ships'. The ship, called the Clemenceu, is to be dismantled and recycled at Graythorp, after being rejected by India and Egypt for being too toxic.

DUBAI HEADS INTO CRISIS

An abandoned car in a parking garage in Dubai. One report said 3,000 cars were sitting abandoned at the Dubai Airport.

USA AID FAILS IN UGANDA

DUNGU, Congo — The American military helped plan and pay for a recent attack on a notorious Ugandan rebel group, but the offensive went awry, scattering fighters who carried out a wave of massacres as they fled, killing as many as 900 civilians. Dungu used to be tranquil but is now surrounded by chaos. The operation was led by Uganda and aimed to crush the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal rebel group that had been hiding out in a Congolese national park, rebuffing efforts to sign a peace treaty. But the rebel leaders escaped, breaking their fighters into small groups that continue to ransack town after town in northeastern Congo, hacking, burning, shooting and clubbing to death anyone in their way. The United States has been training Ugandan troops in counterterrorism for several years, but its role in the operation has not been widely known. It is the first time the United States has helped plan such a specific military offensive with Uganda, according to senior American military officials. They described a team of 17 advisers and analysts from the Pentagon’s new Africa Command working closely with Ugandan officers on the mission, providing satellite phones, intelligence and $1 million in fuel. No American forces ever got involved in the ground fighting in this isolated, rugged corner of Congo, but human rights advocates and villagers here complain that the Ugandans and the Congolese troops who carried out the operation did little or nothing to protect nearby villages, despite a history of rebel reprisals against civilians. The troops did not seal off the rebels’ escape routes or deploy soldiers to many of the nearby towns where the rebels slaughtered people in churches and even tried to twist off toddlers’ heads. “The operation was poorly planned and poorly executed,” said Julia Spiegel, a Uganda-based researcher for the Enough Project, which campaigns against genocide. The massacres were “the L.R.A.’s standard operating procedure,” she said. “And the regional governments knew this.”

READING DEATH OF A FINANCIER

THE CREDIT CRUNCH SONG

DON'T LOOK AT THIS IF YOU HAVE A WEAK HEART AND YOUR ARE WORRIED ABOUT YOUR BANK

HALIFAX BANK OF SCOTLAND LOSES £10 BILLION?

The British banking group HBOS stunned the City by warning of £10 billion in annual losses, which it rescued with Government backing at the height of the financial turmoil last autumn. The taxpayer already owns 43% of the group after pumping in some £17 billion into the two banks, and was left with paper losses of more than £2.5 billion at one stage yesterday as Lloyds' shares tumbled up to 40%. The Chancellor Mr Darling has defended the Government decision to broker the merger of Lloyds and HBOS and offer financial backing, saying that failure to do so would have brought down HBOS and potentially collapsed the whole UK banking system. Speaking from the G7 finance ministers summit in Rome, the Chancellor said the immediate priority was to identify banks' bad assets and "put them out of the system", warning that without this step normal lending to businesses and individuals cannot resume. Asked on two occasions during an interview with BBC2's Newsnight whether he could rule out nationalisation of the Lloyds Group, Mr Darling did not do so. Instead, he responded: "I said in January there is a range of options that we will be deploying, a range of levers that can be pulled to help all banks, because I have made it very, very clear that the integrity of the banking system is very, very important. "What we are focusing on at the moment is making sure that we can identify these bad assets and then deal with that problem. That's our focus at the moment and that will continue not just here but it will continue across the world as well." Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Vince Cable said: "It looks increasingly as if Lloyds is being dragged under by the dead weight of HBOS, a financial disaster created by Andy Hornby and his predecessor, Sir James Crosby. "Obviously we need to digest the detail, but it looks increasingly as if Lloyds HBOS will now go into majority public ownership, followed inevitably by nationalisation."

EURO PUT STRAINS ON WEAKER ECONOMIES

“The Italians, the Spaniards, the Greeks, we all have been living in happy land, spending what we did not have,” said George Economou, a Greek shipping magnate, contemplating his country’s economic troubles and others’ from his spacious boardroom. “It was a fantasy world.” In Greece, another of the euro zone nations in trouble, stores like this one in Athens are offering deep discounts to stay open. For some of the countries on the periphery of the 16-member euro currency zone — Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain — this debt-fired dream of endless consumption has turned into the rudest of nightmares, raising the risk that a euro country may be forced to declare bankruptcy or abandon the currency. The prospect, however unlikely, is a hum

THE OPEN SOCIETY

THE TIMES LONDON: In the maelstrom of the financial crisis it seems, at times, as if all fixed positions have been abandoned. The temporary expedients required to deal with a credit crunch, the like of which the world has not seen for 75 years, have altered the course of arguments about the relationship of government to markets, the appropriate level and type of regulation. But not everything solid has melted into air. There is a genuine danger that the financial crisis is used as a cover under which a revived economic nationalism is smuggled back. The great policy triumph of the past thirty years has been the gradual triumph of free trade and open economies over tariff walls, protectionism and variations on economic autarky. The result has been the most extraordinary growth in prosperity in all of human history. And neither has this prosperity been confined to the rich economies. More people ceased to be poor in the latter half of the 20th century than in any 50-year period previously. The emergence of China and India promises that the next half-century will be, on that score, even better. In the same period there has been peace in Europe, a continent that had known constant conflict before. The same terrain on which two bloody world wars were fought is now covered by a single market in which free nations trade with no regard for national borders. Across the world, the West's greatest export has been not its goods but its best idea - democratic representation. There are still very many tyrannies in the world, but far fewer than there were, and only the most egregious do not feel the need to clothe themselves in the rhetoric of liberal democracy. Prosperity has a tendency to beget democracy. Open economies require open societies that in turn liberate the potential of their peoples to contribute to the continuing prosperity of the nation. The gravest error, even in the seemingly exceptional circumstances of crisis, would be to yield on the basic principles that have served the world well for a generation. President Bush did not always encapsulate ideas clearly but he did on the occasion that he warned the world not to give way to the temptations of protectionism, nativism and isolationism. Exactly the attitudes that he deplored have been on display in recent weeks. President Obama's stimulus package, which is currently going through a bruising passage in the Senate, contains a Buy America clause that curtails competition for steel. President Sarkozy of France offered help for Renault on condition that production was repatriated. The dispute at the Lincolnshire oil refinery was a demand for special protection for British workers on the ground of their nationality rather than their productivity. Much recent political debate in the advanced industrial economies has centred on the way that international events disrupt long-established social ties. The objection to the free movement of labour is that it tends to dissolve settled communities that have been built around a particular skill or industry. The argument is not frivolous - but it is misguided. Small communities can be oppressive as well as sustaining. Social ferment in the United States has been stimulated by huge advances in racial integration and the opening of institutions - the armed forces, the professions and now the presidency - to a far wider pool of talent. The important political point is that these debates straddle the old political division of Left versus Right. The new division in international politics is between those who wish their nation to be open to the world and those who wish to close the door and turn away. A time of crisis is a difficult moment to stress again that the open economy and the open society are the best options - so all the more reason for doing so.
HELP THOSE IN NEED IN THE CONGO

Since food prices began to rise 100 million more people have been pushed into poverty, according to the World Bank, with as many as two billion on the verge of disaster. Almost half the world's population, let's remember, live on less than $2.50 per day. Millions die annually of hunger and starvation, and more than a billion do not have access to fresh water.

GIVE GENEROUSLY - DIRECTLY TO THESE CHARITIES

With the world financial crisis these numbers are poised to rise dramatically with population growth, dwindling natural resources and higher consumer prices across all goods and services. So as the stock market tumbles and the world economy falters, it's important to remember that it's more than financial losses we are talking about, it's the loss of life.