http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h5Z6bJwtN_roGSIUQiQnfbf2NkhgD90C83LO0

Tibet activist group: China detains scores of Buddhist monks

By TINI TRAN – 1 hour ago

BEIJING (AP) — China has detained scores of Buddhist monks over the past month, a Tibet activist group said Wednesday, a day after six monks were sentenced in the first trial of rioters since deadly violence in Tibet last month.

The International Campaign for Tibet said more than 160 people were detained from several monasteries in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa and neighboring provinces during April.

Authorities removed at least six monks from the Nechung monastery, eight from the Nalanda monastery and rounded up at least 60 people, including monks from the Pangsa monastery, the Washington-based group said in a six-page statement.

The group also said up to 100 monks were detained at the Rongwu monastery in the neighboring province of Qinghai.

The U.S.-government funded Radio Free Asia also reported that two nuns in Sichuan province were detained for protesting.

There was no way of independently verifying either the activist group’s claims or the radio report. The International Campaign for Tibet said it received its information from Tibet sources but did not provide more details.

Their reports follow mass anti-government riots and protests in Lhasa last month. The riots and subsequent crackdown by Chinese authorities have drawn worldwide attention to China’s human rights record and its rule in Tibet ahead of August’s Beijing Olympics.

On Tuesday, a Chinese court in Lhasa sentenced 30 people, including six monks, to jail terms ranging from three years to life for their involvement in the riots that erupted in Lhasa on March 14.

Three of the people were given life sentences, including a Buddhist monk identified as Basang who led 10 people to destroy local government offices, burn down shops and attack policemen, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

The other two men given life sentences — a driver and a businessman — were convicted of inciting others to commit arson and loot shops during the riots, Xinhua said.

New York-based Human Rights Watch condemned the one-day trials in Lhasa, saying the defendants “were tried on secret evidence behind closed doors and without the benefit of a meaningful defense by lawyers they’d chosen.”

“Guilty or innocent, these Tibetans are entitled to a fair trial,” Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement Wednesday.

The White House said it had seen the reports about the sentencing, and is concerned.

“We don’t think that anyone should break the law, but we also believe in freedom of expression and assembly,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday.

The speedy trials are one sign that China is attempting to wrap up the punishment phase of its latest campaign to assert control in Tibet.

China has said 22 people died in the riots, while Tibet’s government-in-exile said Tuesday it believes at least 203 Tibetans were killed in the ensuing crackdown.

The estimate was compiled from a combination of the government’s own sources, Tibetan exile groups and official Chinese media. It was impossible to independently verify the information.

http://hstoday.us/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3120&Itemid=149

USA Today, 4/29/08:  Well before 8 o’clock on a late April morning, a line of about 30 eager customers forms at a modest bakery in this working-class neighborhood. With a global food crisis roiling countries from Asia to the edge of Europe, at least 11 people have been killed recently in such lines here, struggling to get their daily bread.

But today, the queue melts away within moments. Veiled women and men in worn shirts approach a small wooden shack at the end of a narrow alley, hand over the equivalent of a few cents and leave holding a plastic bag filled with nine flat loaves of bread. Over the next half-hour, until the bakery runs out of its only product, the line waxes and wanes.

There’s no panic, no desperate scrambling for sustenance — a tentative sign of success for an emergency government plan that involves dramatic increases in spending on bread subsidies and the use of Egyptian soldiers as bakers.

“Now we’re able to find bread,” says Dalia Hafez, 40, seated on a nearby curb in a cappuccino-colored headscarf. “Thanks God, the crisis is over.”

For now, anyway. But the aftershocks from the food trauma here are only beginning to be felt. Tensions are continuing to build in this key U.S. ally, evidence that the global food crisis — the product of factors ranging from unusual weather in producing nations to increased competition for grains from biofuels programs — is now about much more than food.

“This crisis threatens not only the hungry, but also peace and stability,” the head of the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), Josette Sheeran, warned in a recent speech.

That’s certainly true in Egypt, the most populous Arab nation, recipient of $1.8 billion in annual U.S. foreign aid and a critical link in global trade sitting astride the Suez Canal. Its authoritarian government is faced with mounting labor unrest, profound public dissatisfaction over a yawning gap between rich and poor and questions over who will lead Egypt in the coming years.

In this deeply unsettled atmosphere, images of Egyptians scrapping for subsidized balady (bal-a-DEE) bread have left the government on edge. Proof of just how sensitive the issue remains could be seen in the response of Egyptian state security to a USA TODAY correspondent’s visit to a second bakery later that April morning.

As the reporter and his translator left the bakery in the Rod El Faroq neighborhood, they were blocked by a plainclothes security officer. The man demanded the memory card from the reporter’s camera, saying the images it contained — of men baking bread — posed “a threat to Egypt’s national security.”

The reporter and his translator were surrounded by at least seven policemen in white uniforms. Some threatened the bakery owner with prison for speaking with a foreign journalist.

The journalists were detained for five hours. Egyptian officials said no pictures could be taken in their country without advance government approval. The camera’s memory card was returned, damaged.

That Egyptian officials regard photos of bakers at work as potentially incendiary is a measure both of bread’s unrivaled importance in the Egyptian diet and of the government’s concern that continued public discontent over food supplies could metastasize into something more threatening.

Officials here have good reason to be worried. In 1977, an abortive government effort to reduce the bread subsidies that are a lifeline for most Egyptians sparked widespread rioting, which led to dozens of deaths and forced the government to abandon its plans.

“People in Egypt may be considered passive or silent, but there’s a limit to this. And when they reach that limit, one day there will be a popular explosion,” said lawyer Esam Salam, interviewed at a cafe near Cairo’s train station.

Former Pentagon official David Schenker, who lived in Cairo in the early 1990s and is with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, returned here recently for a visit and was stunned at the sour public mood.

“I was shocked,” he says. “I find it very scary.”

An emergence of chaos

The Egyptian government has provided heavily subsidized bread for decades as a way to guarantee social peace in a nation where the nasbaseeta, or simple folk, have little control over the larger forces that buffet their lives.

The frustrating bread lines are mostly gone, but soaring prices for other foods are adding another burden to a population already under enormous stress. More than 40% of Egypt’s 80 million people live on just $2 a day — what millions of Americans spend for a cup of coffee. Almost 20% get by on daily income of just $1.

On April 6, the latest in a string of mounting protests by disaffected workers seeking higher pay to keep up with double-digit inflation boiled over into riots in the textile capital of Mahalla.

Last week, in a rare show of public dissent, a Cairo University student heckled Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif during a speech.

The simmering unrest comes amid questions over Egypt’s political future. President Hosni Mubarak — in office since the 1981 assassination of his predecessor, Anwar Sadat — turns 80 on Sunday. He is grooming his son Gamal to succeed him, but in this nominally democratic nation, many Egyptians resent the notion of what they regard as a “Pharaonic” succession. Opposition groups have called for Egyptians to stage a general strike on the president’s birthday.

“We believe if the situation remains as it is, there will be the emergence of chaos in this country,” says Ashraf Badr El-Din, a member of parliament from the opposition Muslim Brotherhood.

A worldwide threat

Bread plays a unique, almost mystical, role in Egyptian life. This is the only Arab country where people call the staple aish, or life, rather than khubz.

In the simple dusty villages far from the major cities, Egyptians developed 82 different types of bread, using corn, sorghum and barley as well as wheat, says Ahmed Khorshid, the government scientist known as the “father of bread” after a lifetime of research on the subject.

With the introduction of state subsidies in the 1960s, wheat bread became the standard. Today, Egypt is the largest importer of wheat in the world, placing annual orders of about 7 million tons, or roughly half its annual consumption.

Egypt’s current predicament is just one facet of a global mosaic: 37 countries face a crisis over food, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.

Weak or embattled governments in some of the world’s poorest nations could be pushed to the brink of anarchy or beyond by the life-or-death pressures of scarce or expensive food.

Already, Haiti’s government has been driven from office by violent protests over prices that are 50% to 100% higher than last year. Seven other countries — Egypt, Cameroon, the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Indonesia and Madagascar — have suffered food riots.

Global food prices have risen 73% since 2006, but the increase for certain products has been even more dramatic. Edible oils are up 144%; cereals, including wheat and rice, are up 129%; dairy products have doubled in price.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick says the developing world’s higher food bill will erase the past seven years of progress in reducing poverty. And prices are expected to remain elevated at least through 2009.

In Egypt, soaring food costs are straining government budgets and threatening to undermine 4-year-old economic reforms. Those market-oriented initiatives have spurred economic growth to an annual rate of 7% but are predicated upon sharp reductions in Egypt’s bloated public subsidy bill.

The government was preparing to reduce spending that keeps food artificially cheap, but the global crisis forced Mubarak to reverse course.

Now, instead of cutting subsidies, he’s dramatically increased them, staving off public discontent at the cost of a larger government deficit.

A government-fed problem

The WFP has labeled the spreading food crisis a “silent tsunami.” But Egypt’s food problem is no natural disaster. It’s been compounded by government policies that distort markets.

The government keeps bread almost free — one loaf costs less than a penny — by subsidizing the wheat used to produce it.

However, the system is vulnerable to widespread corruption.

In recent months, as the global market price of wheat rose steadily higher, bakers began selling their subsidized flour to private bakeries rather than using it to make bread for the poor. Fifty-pound sacks of flour purchased from the government at a steep discount could be resold on the black market for roughly 10 times the subsidized price.

Diversions of subsidized flour occurred even as rising prices at the private bakeries caused more people to switch from buying their higher-priced bread to the cheaper version sold at the subsidized stores.

Market-priced bread, which had cost about 4 cents per loaf, jumped to almost 10 cents apiece as world grain prices soared. With less flour available to make bread even as more customers demanded it, the result was scarcity and long lines.

In March, Mubarak ordered the army to begin baking bread and distributing it through hastily established kiosks. Officials promised an end to bakery lines by the end of April.

By last week, there were indications that the acute phase of the episode had passed. But with food prices rising across the board at better than 20% annually, grumbling remains.

“The people are angry with the increase in prices. We don’t know how to make ends meet,” says Om Hashem Shaban, balancing on her head a torn white sack full of fresh bread.

Like the poor elsewhere, Egyptians cope with higher food prices by cutting back on expenditures for education and health care, says Bishow Parajuli, WFP country director.

To cope with fast-rising prices, Shaban says her family, including five children, eats less and occasionally skips meals. Most days, the menu usually consists only of bread.

Rice, Shaban says, “is more of a luxury item.”

About 60 miles north of the Egyptian capital lies the country’s agricultural heartland. Less than 3% of Egypt’s territory is arable land. The best of it is found in the rich farmland of the Nile Delta.

Under a broiling sun, farmers trade rumors of the next move in commodities prices. Despite high prices for their crops, farmers here feel beset on all sides.

Their irrigation systems lack adequate maintenance. The cost of seeds and fertilizer has skyrocketed. Many pay rich landowners ever-higher rents for the right to work their modest lands. Those who own their own simple farms end up with smaller and smaller plots as each generation’s inheritance subdivides farms among several sons.

Standing in a wheat field amid dive-bombing flies, farmer Samy Halim quotes a peasant proverb to explain his survival strategy: “Stretch your legs as far as your blanket. If you have a short blanket, don’t stretch too much.”

Smiling wanly, he adds, “We try to make a living. Sometimes, it’s hard, but we do what we can.”

Intro:  iT’S ABOUT TIME!  MEANWHILE, HOW ABOUT A BILL THAT PROTECTS ALL HEALTHCARE WORKERS?

Emergency Management Alert , 45/29/08:  NY Senate passes bill to protect nurses from workplace violence

A bill designed to protect nurses from workplace violence and abuse was recently passed by the New York Senate.The bill, promoted by the New York State Nurses Association, makes it a Class C felony to assault or cause physical injury to an on-duty RN. It now awaits decision by the State Assembly, reported the Binghamton Press & Sun Bulletin. Similar laws have been enacted in Alabama, Arizona, Illinois, Nevada, and New Mexico and have been introduced in several other states, the newspaper said.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 430,000 nurses become victims of violent crime every year while on the job. This number is expected to be low, as many incidents are thought to go unreported.

EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT ALERT, 4/29/08:  Safety concerns for Ontario nurses A patient waiting in the emergency department of the Rouge Valley Centenary Hospital in Scarborough, ONT, for many hours because of a bed shortage entered the nurse’s lounge earlier this month, grabbed a knife, and stabbed himself, reported the Toronto Sun.  He suffered serious injuries.The incident, which temporarily shut down the emergency department, left the nurses directly involved traumatized and every nurse in the hospital shaken, the Sun reported. Ironically, the day before the incident, a nurse who is the local representative of the Ontario Nurses Association had met with the hospital president to express concerns about the effects cutbacks on security were having on the safety of nurses, the newspaper said.

The nurses’ union is seeking amendments to Canada’s Occupational Health and Safety Act to make psychological harassment and bullying workplace hazards, the Sun reported.

AP, 4/28/08:  Lifetime Brands Inc. is recalling certain patterns of plates and bowls because they could be contaminated with the toxic heavy metals lead and cadmium. The company’s Nautica J Class Red dinner plates, Nautica J Class Red salad plates and Pfaltzgraff Villa della Luna dinner plates were recalled for containing high levels of cadmium. In addition. Pfaltzgraff Villa della Luna soup and cereal bowls were recalled for containing high levels of lead. No injuries or illnesses have been reported. The recalled products were sold individually and in sets both online and at stores around the country. Details: by phone for Pfaltzgraff products at 800-499-1976; by phone for Nautica products at 866-928-0060.

…1999, London:  Soho nail bomb kills 3 and injures dozens.  David Copeland, a 23-year-old engineer from Hampshire, was arrested at the beginning of May, and charged with murder and causing three explosions. During his trial, the court heard he told police he was a Nazi, and believed in a master race. The jury found him guilty, and he received six life sentences.

BBC, 1999:  Two people have been killed and at least 30 injured in the third nail-bomb attack in London in two weeks.

 Admiral Duncan Pub

The bomb went off in the Admiral Duncan pub, in Soho, just after 1830. The bar was packed with drinkers at the start of the bank holiday weekend.

The pub is in Old Compton Street, at the heart of London’s gay community. Police are linking this bomb with last Saturday’s explosion in Brick Lane and the previous week’s attack in Brixton, which injured 39 people.

Eyewitnesses spoke of a “huge bang” as the bomb went off, hurling glass and debris into the street. Jason Everton had just left his job in nearby Frith Street to buy a sandwich, when he saw the front of the pub “coming straight off”.

“There were people running out, all covered in dust and bruises and cuts. It was quite horrific,” he said.

‘War scene’

Jean Pierre Trevor, who was working in an editing suite in offices just behind the pub, was blown three feet by the force of the blast. He went to offer his help, and found the street outside “like a war scene”.

“There were people lying everywhere,” he said. “Those who were around were putting thermal blankets over them. A lot of them had severe burns, so we were putting water and ice cubes on their skin.”

Nearby Soho Square, usually packed with office workers, became a makeshift treatment centre for the injured.

The police cleared nearby streets amid fears that there might be a second device.

‘Despicable’

At a press conference at Scotland Yard shortly after the attack, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Condon condemned the attack as “despicable” and “cowardly”, and appealed for help in catching those responsible.

A call to the BBC two hours after the attack attributed the bomb to the “White Wolves”. Four different right-wing extremist groups have admitted planting the Brixton bomb, but police say they have no specific corroboration that any particular group are behind the attack.

Emeregncy Management Alert, 4/29/08:  U.S. and Canadian agencies to test emergency preparedness Emergency responders in the United States and Canada will start an eight-day exercise April 30 to test their response to simultaneous terrorist attacks and natural disasters, the Associated Press (AP) reported.Emergency responders will be tested by exercises that include terrorist attacks in Washington state, an accident chemical release in Oregon, a hurricane on the mid-Atlantic coast and the Washington, D.C. area, and “aerospace events” throughout North America, according to the AP.

U.S. agencies participating in the exercise include the North American Aerospace Command, the U.S. Northern Command, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Transportation Command, and the National Guard.

Intro:  I was surfing the FDA website and came across “Andy’s Take.”  Apparently, it’s the Commissioner’s chance to have a Fireside Chat with the American people.  Apart form this puerile endeavor there is a brief bio on the good doctor.  You tell me whether he’s qualified to “right” a sinking Federal agency.

Andrew C. von Eschenbach, M.D., was sworn in as the 20th Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on December 13, 2006.  As Commissioner, he leads the nation’s premiere consumer protection and health agency, with regulated products that account for more than 20% of consumer spending.

As the former Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), Dr. von Eschenbach is a nationally recognized urologic surgeon and oncologist.  His distinguished career as a key leader in the fight against cancer spans nearly three decades.

Prior to being appointed to lead the NCI in January 2002, Dr. von Eschenbach served as Executive Vice President and Chief Academic Officer of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, leading a faculty of more than 1,000 cancer researchers and clinicians.  At M.D. Anderson he also served as Vice President for Academic Affairs and held the Roy M. and Phyllis Gough Huffington Clinical Research Distinguished Chair in Urologic Oncology.

Dr. von Eschenbach, as founding director of the Prostate Cancer Research Program, was instrumental in fostering integrated research programs in the biology, epidemiology, prevention, and treatment of prostate cancer at M.D. Anderson where he also directed the Genitourinary Cancer Center.  He joined M.D. Anderson as a urologic oncology fellow in 1976 and was invited to join the faculty the following year.  Just six years later – in 1983 – he was named chairman of the Department of Urology.  Other positions held at M.D. Anderson include Consulting Professor of Cell Biology and Professor of Urology.

Dr. von Eschenbach, himself a cancer survivor, has had an impact on the fight against cancer that extends beyond the clinical and academic communities.  He is a founding member of C-Change and was president-elect of the American Cancer Society at the time of his appointment to the NCI.  In addition, he has made significant contributions to the scientific literature — more than 200 articles, books, and book chapters.  Dr. von Eschenbach has also served as an editorial board member of several leading journals and on several organizational boards.

Many influential organizations have recognized Dr. von Eschenbach for his leadership and accomplishments; among them the American Medical Writers Association, the American Urological Association, and the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences. He also has been included in “The Best Doctors in America” publications. Included among his many honors are the 2003 Carpe Diem Award from the Lance Armstrong Foundation; the Achievement Award from the 100 Black Men of Metropolitan Houston for his significant contributions to prostate cancer programs in the African-American community, the Julie Rogers “Spirit of Love” Award for demonstrating unparalleled dedication, commitment, and spirit in the fight against cancer, and the American Radium Society Janeway Medal for outstanding contribution to cancer research and the care of cancer patients. In 2006, Time Magazine chose Dr. von Eschenbach as one of the 100 most influential people to shape the world. 

A native of Philadelphia, Dr. von Eschenbach earned a B.S. from St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia in 1963 and his medical degree from Georgetown University School of Medicine in 1967.  Dr. von Eschenbach completed internship at Philadelphia General Hospital and residency in urologic surgery at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia and then was an instructor in urology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He also served as a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy Medical Corps.