How Long Will Ignorance Rule Humanities' Understanding of the Idea of 'Race'?

This post presents an abbreviated history of how we in the United States have arrived at the point where the article shared in the previous post could be considered headline news worthy to be broadcast and published by major news outlets.


The information is from Wikipedia, and I encourage you to donate to their request for contributions to enable them to provide online information to the public. I note the website this is taken from at the end of the post, as there's a wealth of additional information, bibliographies and sources to continue to free your mind of the American and European belief system of white superiority that infects all of our consciousness.

lovu all~
Kentke


Definitions of white have changed over the years, including the official definitions used in many countries, such as the United States and Brazil. Some people of color defied official regulations through the phenomenon of "passing", many of them becoming white people, either temporarily or permanently. Through the mid-to-late 20th century, numerous countries had formal legal standards or procedures defining racial categories. However, as critiques of racism and scientific arguments against the existence of race have risen, a trend towards self-identification of racial status has become more prominent.

The cultural boundaries separating white Americans from other racial or ethnic categories are contested and always changing. According to John Tehranian, among those not considered white at some points in American history have been: the Irish, Germans, Levantines (including diaspora Jews and Levantine Arabs), Italians, Spaniards, white Hispanics, Slavs, and Greeks. Studies have found that while current parameters officially encompassed Arabs as part of the White American racial category, many immigrants from the Gulf states feel they are not white and are not perceived as white by American society."

Professor David R. Roediger of the University of Illinois, suggests that the construction of the white race in the United States was an effort to mentally distance slave owners from slaves. By the 18th century, white had become well established as a racial term. The process of officially being defined as white by law often came about in court disputes over pursuit of citizenship. The Immigration Act of 1790 offered naturalization only to "any alien, being a free white person". In at least 52 cases, people denied the status of white by immigration officials sued in court for status as white people. By 1923, courts had vindicated a "common-knowledge" standard, concluding that "scientific evidence" was incoherent. Legal scholar John Tehranian argues that in reality this was a "performance-based" standard, relating to religious practices, education, intermarriage and a community's role in the United States.

In 1923, the Supreme Court decided in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that people of India were not "free white men" entitled to citizenship, despite anthropological evidence in "the extreme northwestern districts of India"there is present the "Caucasian or Aryan race" with an "intermixture of blood" from the "dark skinned Dravidian". A report from the Pew Research Center in 2008 projects that by 2050, Non-Hispanic White Americans will make up 47% of the population, down from 67% projected in 2005. White Americans made up nearly 90% of the population in 1950.

One-third of Americans classified as "white" in a study contained between two and twenty percent African genetic admixture, which can be extrapolated to about 74 million whites in America with this admixture.

One drop rule

The one drop rule–that a person with any amount of known African ancestry (however small or invisible) is not white–is a classification that was used in parts of the United States. It is a colloquial term for a set of laws passed by 18 US states between 1910 and 1931, many as a consequence of Plessy v. Ferguson, a Supreme Court decision that upheld the concept of racial segregation by accepting a separate but equal argument. The set of laws was finally declared unconstitutional in 1967, when the Supreme Court ruled on anti-miscegenation laws while hearing Loving v. Virginia, which also found that Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was unconstitutional. The one drop rule attempted to create a bifurcated system of either black or white regardless of a person's physical appearance, but sometimes failed as people with African ancestry sometimes passed as "white", as noted above. This contrasts with the more flexible social structures present in Latin America (derived from the Spanish colonial era casta system) where there were less clear-cut divisions between various ethnicities.

As a result of centuries of having children with white people, the majority of African Americans have European admixture, and many white people also have African ancestry. Robert P. Stuckert, member of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ohio State University said that the majority of the descendants of African slaves are white. Writer and editor Debra Dickerson questions the legitimacy of the one drop rule, stating that "easily one-third of black people have white DNA". She argues that in ignoring their European ancestry, African Americans are denying their fully articulated multi-racial identities.

The peculiarity of the one drop rule may be illustrated by the case of singer Mariah Carey, who was publicly called "another white girl trying to sing black", but who in an interview with Larry King, responded that—despite her physical appearance and the fact that she was raised primarily by her white mother—due to the one drop rule she did not "feel white".


White people, rather than being a straightforward description of skin color, is a term denoting a specific set of ethnic groups and functions as a color metaphor for race.

The definition of "white person" differs according to geographical and historical context. Various social constructions of whiteness have had implications in terms of national identity, consanguinity, public policy, religion, population statistics, racial segregation, affirmative action, eugenics, racial marginalization and racial quotas. The concept has been applied with varying degrees of formality and internal consistency in disciplines including sociology, politics, genetics, biology, medicine, biomedicine, language, culture and law  

History of the term

The notion of "white people" or a "white race" as a large group of populations contrasting with non-white or "colored" originates in the 17th century. Pragmatic description of populations as "white" in reference to their skin color[citation needed] predates this notion and is found in Greco-Roman ethnography and other ancient sources.

Antiquity and Middle Ages: occasional physical description

1820 drawing of a Book of Gates fresco of the tomb of Seti I, depicting (from left) four groups of people: Libyans, Nubians, Semitics, Egyptians.


In the literature of the Ancient Near East and Classical Antiquity, descriptions of the physical aspect of various nations in terms of color is commonplace.

The Sumerians referred to themselves as ùĝ saĝ gíg-ga, meaning "the black-headed people". Vicki Leone contrasts this in her book Uppity Women of Ancient Times, noting that the Sumerians paintings and mosaics depict a people possessing dark blue eyes. The Ancient Egyptian (New Kingdom) funerary text known as the Book of Gates distinguishes "four races of men". These are the Egyptians, the Levantine peoples or "Asiatics", the "Nubians" and the "fair-skinned Libyans".

Xenophon describes the Ethiopians as black, and the Persian troops as white compared to the sun-tanned skin of Greek troops.Herodotus similarly used Melanchroes "dark-skinned" for the Egyptians and he compared them to the Aithiopsi "burned-faced" for the Ethiopians. Herodotus also describes the Scythian Budini as having deep blue eyes and bright red hair.

These color adjectives are typically found in contrast to the "standard" set by the own group, not as a self-description. Classicist James Dee found that, "the Greeks do not describe themselves as "white people"—or as anything else because they had no regular word in their color vocabulary for themselves—and we can see that the concept of a distinct 'white race' was not present in the ancient world."

Assignment of positive and negative connotations of white and black date to the classical period in a number of Indo-European languages, but these differences were not applied to skin color per se. Religious conversion was described figuratively as a change in skin color. Similarly, the Rigveda uses krsna tvac "black skin" as a metaphor for irreligiosity.

The pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomica (2nd century BC) in keeping with the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean postulates that the ideal skin tone was to be found somewhere between very dark and very light:
"Those who are too black are cowards, like for instance, the Egyptians and Ethiopians. But those who are excessively white are also cowards as we can see from the example of women and Europeans, the complexion of courage is between the two."

Similar views were held by a number of Arabic writers during the time of the medieval Caliphate period. Some Arabs at the time viewed their "swarthy" skin as the ideal skin tone, in comparison to the darker Sub-Saharan Africans and the fairer "ruddy people" (which included Levantines, Persians, Turks, North Caucasians, South Caucasian and Europeans).

"White people" and modern racial hierarchies  

The term "white race" or "white people" entered the major European languages in the later 17th century, originating with the racialization of slavery at the time, in the context of the Atlantic slave trade and enslavement of native peoples in the Spanish Empire. While first a social category, it has repeatedly been ascribed to strains of blood, ancestry, and physical traits, and was eventually made into a subject of scientific research, which culminated in scientific racism, before being widely repudiated by the scientific community. According to historian Irene Silverblatt, "Race thinking … made social categories into racial truths." Bruce David Baum, citing the work of Ruth Frankenberg, states, "the history of modern racist domination has been bound up with the history of how European peoples defined themselves (and sometimes some other peoples) as members of a superior 'white race.'" Alastair Bonnett argues that 'white identity', as it is presently conceived, is an American project, reflecting American interpretations of race and history.

According to Gregory Jay, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee,

Before the age of exploration, group differences were largely based on language, religion, and geography. ... the European had always reacted a bit hysterically to the differences of skin color and facial structure between themselves and the populations encountered in Africa, Asia, and the Americas (see, for example, Shakespeare's dramatization of racial conflict in Othello and The Tempest). Beginning in the 1500s, Europeans began to develop what became known as "scientific racism," the attempt to construct a biological rather than cultural definition of race ... Whiteness, then, emerged as what we now call a "pan-ethnic" category, as a way of merging a variety of European ethnic populations into a single "race" ...
—Gregory Jay, "Who Invented White People?"


White people as a social category

A three-part racial schema in color terms was used in seventeenth century Latin America under Spanish rule. Irene Silverblatt traces "race thinking" in South America to the social categories of colonialism and state formation: "White, black, and brown are abridged, abstracted versions of colonizer, slave, and colonized. "The term white came into wide use in the British colonies in America from the 1680s.]

White people in the science of race

18th century beginnings

In 1758, Carolus Linnaeus proposed what he considered to be natural taxonomic categories of the human species. He distinguished between Homo sapiens and Homo sapiens europaeus, and he later added four geographical subdivisions of humans: white Europeans, red Americans, yellow Asians and black Africans. Although Linnaeus intended them as objective classifications, he used both taxonomical and cultural data in his subdivision descriptions.

In 1775, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach described the white race as "the white color holds the first place, such as it is that most Europeans. The redness of cheeks in this variety is almost peculiar to it: at all events it is but seldom seen in the rest... Color white, Cheeks rosy". He categorized humans into five races, which largely corresponded with Linnaeus' classifications, except for the addition of Oceanians (whom he called Malay). He characterized the racial classification scheme of Metzger as making "two principal varieties as extremes:(1) the white man native of Europe, of the northern parts of Asia, America and Africa..", and the racial classification scheme of John Hunter as having, "seven varieties:...  brownish as the southern Europeans, Turks, Abyssinians, Samoiedes and Lapps;  white, as the remaining Europeans, the Mingrelians and Kabardinski". Blumenbach is known for arguing that physical characteristics like skin color, cranial profile, etc., were correlated with group character and aptitude. Craniometry and phrenology would attempt to make physical appearance correspond with racial categories. The fairness and relatively high brows of Caucasians were held to be apt physical expressions of a loftier mentality and a more generous spirit. The epicanthic folds around the eyes of Mongolians and their slightly sallow outer epidermal layer bespoke their supposedly crafty, literal-minded nature.

Later in life, Blumenbach encountered in Switzerland "eine zum Verlieben schöne Négresse" ("a Negress so beautiful to fall in love with"). Further anatomical study led him to the conclusion that 'individual Africans differ as much, or even more, from other individual Africans as Europeans differ from Europeans'. Furthermore he concluded that Africans were not inferior to the rest of mankind 'concerning healthy faculties of understanding, excellent natural talents and mental capacities'. These later ideas were far less influential than his earlier assertions with regard to the perceived relative qualities of the different races, which opened the way to secular and scientific racism.

I also highly recommend Dr. Joy Degruy Leary's book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome Chapter 2 for deeper insight into Linnaeus, Blumenbach and others who put in place the cornerstones of the ignorance at the foundation of humanities' beliefs about race, skin color, attributes and capacities within the human family.

In a 1775 work, Von den verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen ("Of [About] The Different Races of Humans"), German philosopher Immanuel Kant used the term weiß (white) to refer to "the white one [race] of northern Europe".

Caucasian race

The study into race and ethnicity in the 18th and 19th centuries developed into what would later be termed scientific racism. During the period of the mid-19th to mid-20th century,[25] race scientists, including most physical anthropologists classified the world's populations into three, four, or five races, which, depending on the authority consulted, were further divided into various sub-races. During this period the Caucasian race, named after people of the North Caucasus (Caucasus Mountains) but extending to all Europeans, figured as one of these races, and was incorporated as a formal category of both scientific research and, in countries including the United States, social classification.   There was never any scholarly consensus on the delineation between the Caucasian race, including the populations of Europe, and the Mongoloid one, including the populations of East Asia. Thus, Carleton S. Coon (1939) included the populations native to all of Central and Northern Asia under the Caucasian label, while Thomas Henry Huxley (1870) classified the same populations as Mongoloid, and Lothrop Stoddard (1920) excluded the populations of the Middle East and North Africa as well as those of Central Asia, classifying them as "brown", and counted as "white" only the European peoples.

Some authorities, following Huxley (1870), distinguished the Xanthochroi or "light whites" of Northern Europe with the Melanochroi or "dark whites" of the Mediterranean.

21st century

Alastair Bonnett has stated that, a strong "current of scientific research supports the theory that Europeans were but one expression of a wider racial group (termed sometimes Caucasian), a group that included peoples from Asia and North Africa". Bonnett, does, however, note that this is not a commonplace definition: in Europe and North America the inclusion of non-Europeans is a "technicality little favoured outside certain immigration bureaucracies and traditional anthropology."

Raj Bhopal and Liam Donaldson opine that white people are a heterogeneous group, and the term white should therefore be abandoned as a classification for the purposes of epidemiology and health research, and identifications based on geographic origin and migration history be used instead.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terms_for_white_people_in_non-Western_cultures

I also highly recommend these books:
Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, by Joy Degruy Leary, Ph.D
Race and the Cosmos, by Dr. Barbara A. Holmes,
Order from: Marcus Books (S. F. Bay Area) or EsoWon Books/
 http://www.esowonbookstore.com/

Here's a 12-12-12 Prediction You Can Believe In~Census: Whites no Longer a Majority in US by 2043



(AP) Chart shows projections of future racial and hispanic origin breakdowns

Dec 12, 5:41 PM (ET)
By HOPE YEN
Jennifer Agiesta, AP Director of Polling contributed to this report.



WASHINGTON (AP) - White people will no longer make up a majority of Americans by 2043, according to new census projections. That's part of a historic shift that already is reshaping the nation's schools, workforce and electorate, and is redefining long-held notions of race.

The official projection, released Wednesday by the Census Bureau, now places the tipping point for the white majority a year later than previous estimates, which were made before the impact of the recent economic downturn was fully known.

America continues to grow and become more diverse due to higher birth rates among minorities, particularly for Hispanics who entered the U.S. at the height of the immigration boom in the 1990s and early 2000s. Since the mid-2000 housing bust, however, the arrival of millions of new immigrants from Mexico and other nations has slowed from its once-torrid pace.

The country's changing demographic mosaic has stark political implications, shown clearly in last month's election that gave President Barack Obama a second term - in no small part due to his support from 78 percent of non-white voters.

There are social and economic ramifications, as well. Longstanding fights over civil rights and racial equality are going in new directions, promising to reshape race relations and common notions of being a "minority." White plaintiffs now before the Supreme Court argue that special protections for racial and ethnic minorities dating back to the 1960s may no longer be needed, from affirmative action in college admissions to the Voting Rights Act, designed for states with a history of disenfranchising blacks.

Residential segregation has eased and intermarriage for first- and second-generation Hispanics and Asians is on the rise, blurring racial and ethnic lines and lifting the numbers of people who identify as multiracial. Unpublished 2010 census data show that millions of people shunned standard race categories such as black or white on government forms, opting to write in their own cultural or individual identities.

By 2060, multiracial people are projected to more than triple, from 7.5 million to 26.7 million - rising even faster and rendering notions of race labels increasingly irrelevant, experts say, if lingering stigma over being mixed-race can fully fade.

The non-Hispanic white population, now at 197.8 million, is projected to peak at 200 million in 2024, before entering a steady decline in absolute numbers as the massive baby boomer generation enters its golden years. Four years after that, racial and ethnic minorities will become a majority among adults 18-29 and wield an even greater impact on the "youth vote" in presidential elections, census projects.
"The fast-growing demographic today is now the children of immigrants," said Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, a global expert on immigration and dean of UCLA's Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, describing the rate of minority growth in the U.S. as dipping from "overdrive" to "drive." Even with slowing immigration, Suarez-Orozco says, the "die has been cast" for strong minority growth from births.

As recently as 1960, whites made up 85 percent of the U.S., but that share has steadily dropped after a 1965 overhaul of U.S. immigration laws opened doors to waves of new immigrants from Mexico, Latin America and Asia. By 2000, the percentage of U.S. whites had slid to 69 percent; it now stands at nearly 64 percent.

"Moving forward, the U.S. will become the first major post-industrial society in the world where minorities will be the majority," Suarez-Orozco said. With the white baby boomer population now leaving the workforce, the big challenge will be educating the new immigrants, he said.

The U.S. has nearly 315 million people today. According to the projections released Wednesday, the U.S. population is projected to cross the 400 million mark in 2051, 12 years later than previously projected. The population will hit 420.3 million a half century from now in 2060.

By then, whites will drop to 43 percent of the U.S. Blacks will make up 14.7 percent, up slightly from today. Hispanics, currently 17 percent of the population, will more than double in absolute number, making up 31 percent, or nearly 1 in 3 residents, according to the projections. Asians are expected to increase from 5 percent of the population to 8 percent.

Among children, the point when minorities become the majority is expected to arrive much sooner, by 2018 or so. Last year, racial and ethnic minorities became a majority among babies under age 1 for the first time in U.S. history.

At the same time, the U.S. population as a whole is aging, driven by 78 million mostly white baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964. By 2030, roughly 1 in 5 residents will be 65 and older. Over the next half century, the "oldest old" - those ages 85 and older - will more than triple to 18.2 million, reaching 4 percent of the U.S. population.

The actual shift in demographics will be shaped by a host of factors that can't always be accurately pinpointed - the pace of the economic recovery, cultural changes, natural or manmade disasters, as well as an overhaul of immigration law, which is expected to be debated in Congress early next year.

"The next half century marks key points in continuing trends - the U.S. will become a plurality nation, where the non-Hispanic white population remains the largest single group, but no group is in the majority," said acting Census Bureau Director Thomas Mesenbourg.

Republicans have been seeking to broaden their appeal to minorities, who made up 28 percent of the electorate this year, after faring poorly among non-whites on Election Day, when Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney carried only about 20 percent of non-white votes.

The race and ethnic changes are already seen in pockets of the U.S. and in the younger age groups, where roughly 45 percent of all students in K-12 are Hispanics, blacks, Asian-Americans and others. Already, the District of Columbia and four states - Hawaii, California, New Mexico and Texas - have minority populations greater than 50 percent; across the U.S., more than 11 percent of counties have tipped to "majority-minority" status.

Last month, nearly all voters over age 65 were white (87 percent), but among voters under age 30, just 58 percent were white.

"Irrespective of future immigration and minority fertility patterns, the U.S. is facing a stagnating white population," said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. "The biggest shift will occur over the next 20 years as the mostly white baby boom generation moves into traditional retirement years. It is in the child and early labor force ages where we must be ready for the greatest changes as new American minorities take over for aging whites."

Economically, the rapidly growing non-white population gives the U.S. an advantage over other developed nations, including Russia, Japan and France, which are seeing reduced growth or population losses due to declining birth rates and limited immigration. The combined population of more-developed countries other than the U.S. has been projected to decline beginning in 2016, raising the prospect of prolonged budget crises as the number of working-age citizens diminish, pension costs rise and tax revenues fall.

Depending on future rates of immigration, the U.S. population is estimated to continue growing through at least 2060. In a hypothetical situation in which all immigration - both legal and illegal - immediately stopped, previous government estimates have suggested the U.S. could lose population beginning in 2048.

"Young families - many of them first or second-generation immigrants - have been the engine of U.S. population growth for several decades," said Mark Mather, associate vice president of the Population Reference Bureau.        

'Tree of life' constructed for all living bird species

Ambitious attempt to link geography to diversification ruffles some feathers.

A massive 'tree of life' for all known bird species shows their evolutionary relationships, and where they live today.

 Virginia Gewin
31 October 2012

Scientists have mapped the evolutionary relationships among all 9,993 of the world's known living bird species. The study, published today in Nature1, is an ambitious project that uses DNA-sequence data to create a phylogenetic tree — a branching map of evolutionary relationships among species — that also links global bird speciation rates across space and time.

“This is the first dated tree of life for a class of species this size to be put on a global map,” says study co-author Walter Jetz, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

But the endeavour is also controversial, owing to the large number of species for which no sequence data are available. “This is a conceptually brilliant attempt to link space with time while crafting a complete phylogeny,” says Trevor Price, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois. “But there are almost certainly introduced artefacts by lacking one-third of the sequences used to create it.” 
Branches of contention
Jetz and his colleagues built on an extensive phylogenomic study, published in 2008, to divide bird species into 158 clades, well-established groups believed to have evolved from a common ancestor2. Using ten fossils, the researchers dated and anchored that backbone, and placed all the living species on the tree, starting with the roughly 6,600 for which genetic information was available.

For the remaining 3,330 species for which no genetic data were available, the researchers used specific constraints — such as membership in the same genus — to identify where species would most likely be placed in the tree. They then created thousands of possible tree configurations and modeled estimates of speciation and extinction rates for each one to account for the uncertainty. The researchers found that although rapid radiations have occurred throughout time and space, the rate of speciation has sharply increased over the past 40 million years.

Some scientists question the finding. “For a tree this size, any small systematic biases in assumptions, integrated over 10,000 species, may result in the detection of trends that simply didn’t exist,” says Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, UK. But when the researchers repeated the analysis using only species for which genetic data exists, they saw roughly the same pattern.   Space and time

The researchers also found some unexpected geographical patterns. “Counter to popular explanations, diversification rate does not vary with latitude,” says Jetz. Instead, the rate varies by longitude, being faster in the Western than in the Eastern Hemisphere.

There are nearly 10,000 known species of birds.

Erica Olsen/FLPA

Species diversify over time, but it's difficult to account for a species past movements without complete fossil evidence. As a result, the model links a species' diversification rate to its present location — rather than to the time when the species originated, when climate and species distribution might have been very different. “This paper makes an attempt to account for how species disperse, but we aren’t quite there yet,” says Price. More fossils will be needed to verify past movements.

Nonetheless, Jetz says that he expects the tree will stand the test of time. “As more sequence data are added, some details will change, but I can’t really imagine a case where any of the core findings are turned upside down,” he says. “This is certainly not the last word on phylogeny of birds. We hope it will trigger additional efforts to continue improving our understanding of the avian tree of life.”

Amplats to reinstate 12,000 South Africa strikers/Anglo American's Female CEO Resigns

For those of us that years ago lobbied, prayed, marched, protested and fought the racist exploiting policies of South Africa's apartheid, I hope you've been following the current situation where the nation's miners have been on strike. Their labor is the very backbone of the prosperity of South Africa.  Two weeks ago, refusing to meet their demands, the mining company Amplant fired 12,000 striking miners.

This week things abruptly turned around, and these three articles give some insight into the situation as well as the fact that in Southern Africa (and here I mean South Africa and Angola) a luta continua ~'the struggle continues'.
Kentke


Oct 27, 11:39 AM (ET)

By RODNEY MUHUMUZA

Police disperse Anglo Platinum Workers at Olympia Stadium in Rustenburg, South Africa, Saturday Oct. 27 2012. Police fired rubber bullets at striking miners at the Anglo American Platinum mine in Rustenburg Saturday as the company announced it had agreed to reinstate 12,000 South African workers dismissed earlier this month for staging illegal strikes. The police fired on hundreds of miners in the North West province who had gathered near the Olympia Stadium, apparently to block another rally by the Congress of South Africa Trade Unions (COSATU). It was unclear if anyone had been injured. (AP Photo)

JOHANNESBURG (AP) - Anglo American Platinum agreed to reinstate 12,000 South African workers dismissed earlier this month for staging illegal strikes, a spokeswoman said Saturday, as police fired rubber bullets at some striking miners in Rustenburg.

The police fired on hundreds of Anglo American Platinum, or Amplats, miners in the North West province who had gathered near the Olympia Stadium, apparently to block another rally by the Congress of South Africa Trade Unions (COSATU). It was unclear if anyone had been injured.

The Amplats strikers, in the black T-shirts associated with the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) and armed with sticks and stones, threatened to attack COSATU marchers in red T-shirts, according to the South African Press Association, which reported Saturday that some of the miners had vowed not to return to work until their wage demands were met.

AMCU is a start-up union that represents strikers who regard COSATU and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) as too close to mine bosses and their capital. The miners said that representatives from NUM have not been properly representing them during the strikes.

Some of the Amplats miners had been threatening since their dismissal to make the company's three operations in Rustenburg ungovernable if they were not reinstated and their salaries increased. They want 16,000 rand (about $1,800) in monthly pay. Amplats only offered them a one-off "hardship allowance" of 2,000 rand (about $230) if they accepted to return to work.

Mpumi Sithole of Anglo American Platinum said the workers had until Tuesday to return to their jobs "on the same terms and conditions of employment" as before they went on strike.

Sithole said that a meeting Friday of "all parties expressed commitment for a return to work in the interests of the employees, their livelihoods and the company." Amplats' decision to reinstate the fired workers came the day after the chief executive of its parent company, Anglo American, announced her resignation. Earlier this month the rating service S & P's had lowered its outlook on Anglo American from "stable" to "negative" because of the turmoil in South Africa. Amplats is the world's top producer of platinum.

If the Amplats miners return to work, it would bring an end to labor unrest that damaged South Africa's reputation as an investment destination. At the peak of the strikes, some 80,000 miners, representing about 16 percent of the mining workforce, were on strike across South Africa. The labor unrest originated in the platinum belts outside Johannesburg and later spread to gold and iron mines.

And behind the scenes.....

Anglo CEO Quits Amid Pressure by Investors

By DEVON MAYLIE, ALEX MACDONALD and JOHN W. MILLER
JOHANNESBURG—Anglo American PLC Chief Executive Cynthia Carroll broke through the male-dominated mining ranks to lead one of the world's biggest miners but resigned Friday after failing to meet pressure from investors to rein in costs and reduce dependence on South Africa.


Cynthia Carroll will leave her post after a successor is named.

The resignation of Mrs. Carroll, 55 years old, puts the focus on a company operating in some of the world's most volatile regions and shaken by protracted labor strikes and nationalist efforts—all at a time when the industry faces slowing demand and high development costs.

Founded in 1917, London-based Anglo American is the world's fifth-biggest mining company in terms of stock-market value, currently about $24 billion, and clings to an old-school corporate culture. In South Africa, it owns a picturesque vineyard where it likes to entertain clients. Enter, in 2007, Mrs. Carroll, a New Jersey geologist with a Harvard MBA and a strong track record of managing metal companies.

At Anglo, she earned plaudits for improving safety and recording record profits in 2008 and 2011. But analysts and institutional investors have criticized Mrs. Carroll's handling of the Minas Rio iron-ore mine in Brazil, acquired in two stages in 2007 and 2008 for a total of about $6.6 billion.

Cost estimates for developing the mine have soared since then, and iron-ore prices have recently fallen. Analysts at Deutsche Bank in London say Anglo American has spent about $9.85 billion on the project so far, including the original acquisition cost, but they estimate its current value at $4.3 billion.

A nickel mine in Brazil and a copper mine in Chile, two of the company's other major development projects, also are running over budget, according to Deutsche Bank, Macquarie First South and other analysts.


Trucks at an iron-ore mine operated by Anglo American unit Kumba Iron Ore in Shishen, South Africa.


"Anglo American prior to Cynthia Carroll was conservative, too conservative," said Patrice Rossouw, head of equities for Sanlam Investment Management, a South African investment firm with a 0.4% stake in Anglo that has been among the shareholders pushing for a change. When she was hired, "there was a change in risk appetite, but the investments were costly and came too late in the cycle."

In a statement, the South African government's Public Investment Corp., which owns a 7% stake n Anglo, said: "Poor capital allocation has eroded value in the company over the last few years." It cited a "long list of projects" that it said reduced the value of Anglo and made returns to shareholders unattractive.

Chairman John Parker denied on a conference call that Mrs. Carroll's resignation was prompted by disgruntled shareholders. "Inevitably there are differences of opinion on issues with CEOs" and investors, but "this is Cynthia's decision, and she was the one who first broached the subject of her departure with the company's board," said Mr. Parker.

On the conference call, Mrs. Carroll said, "there is never a good time to leave...but I think it's time to pass the baton to someone to take [Anglo American] even further."

Anglo has lost about a third of its market value since Mrs. Carroll became CEO on March 1, 2007, mining analyst Jeff Largey of Macquarie Research said in a note, while rivals have been able to preserve or increase their values.

Anglo shares rose more than 4% Friday in London trading.

Mrs. Carroll is to step down after a successor is named. JP Morgan Cazenove said it might take six to 12 months to replace Mrs. Carroll. Mr. Rossouw, the South African institutional shareholder manager, said Alex Vaneslow, a former chief financial officer of BHP Billiton Ltd., BHP.AU -1.48% and Mick Davis, CEO of Xstrata XTA.LN +0.57% PLC, should be among the candidates. Neither would comment, according to spokesmen.

Investors are looking at whether leading mining firms can navigate the current double whammy of spiraling costs and slipping commodity prices. Global mining rivals such as BHP Billiton, Xstrata and Rio Tinto PLC have reacted by reducing capital investment at certain mines and cutting jobs.

The new CEO will also have to deal with troubles in South Africa, where Anglo still earns half its revenues, partly from costly deep mines with declining ore grades. After months of violent strikes and protests, it laid off 12,000 striking workers at mines there this month, and production continues to be disrupted.

Mrs. Carroll received criticism for increasing the company's exposure to South Africa even as peers have retrenched there. Anglo has boosted its stake in Kumba Iron Ore Ltd. of South Africa and earlier this year bought majority control of De Beers, the world's largest diamond producer, with mines in South Africa, for $5.1 billion.

The sale in August of part of the company's Anglo Sur copper complex in Chile was also controversial. Mrs. Carroll drew fire from investors and analysts for having invested $2.8 billion to develop a copper mine there despite Anglo having a contractual agreement, signed before she arrived, that ultimately allowed Chilean state mining company Codelco to acquire a quarter of the venture at below market value.

Corrections & Amplifications

Anglo American CEO Cynthia Carroll has decided to step down. An earlier version of this article and headline incorrectly said she was retiring. She has for nearly six years been the only female CEO of a major global mining company. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said she had been there for seven years.


Write to Devon Maylie at devon.maylie@dowjones.com, Alex MacDonald at alex.macdonald@dowjones.com and John W. Miller at john.miller@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared October 27, 2012, on page B1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Anglo CEO Quits Amid Pressure by Investors.

And because you know I'm going to try to give you as much of the story as I can.....

What’s Behind Anglo CEO Carroll’s Abrupt Exit

Cynthia Carroll, chief executive of Anglo American PLC.
AP Photo.


By Joseph B. White

Cynthia Carroll’s resignation as CEO of mining giant Anglo American PLC is prompting hand-wringing about the run of departures among the already small cadre of women running big listed companies. But, pending more revelations, the circumstances appear to be a straightforward matter of a board of directors losing patience after a long run of trouble that hammered the stock.

As the WSJ’s Alex MacDonald and Devon Maylie report, Ms. Carroll’s six-year tenure at the top had some successes, but what’s stood out recently are costly setbacks and miscalculations. Labor conflict at its platinum mines in South Africa has cost the company nearly 1.9 billion South African rand (about $217 million) in lost production since July, MacDonald and Maylie report. In Chile, Ms. Carroll’s decision to invest $2.8 billion in a big copper mine even though state owned mining company Codelco had a right to acquire a quarter of the venture at a price below market value also drew investor criticism, they report.

Analysts and investors have soured on Ms. Carroll’s leadership. The company’s shares skidded from a high of 2,910 GBP in February to a low of 1,748 in August. They have popped up this morning since Ms. Carroll’s decision to resign was announced. Goldman Sachs earlier this month put a “sell” rating on the company’s stock, citing a litany of woes:


“Its platinum division has been negatively exposed to a very weak European autos market (hurting PGM prices) and more recently strikes at its major mines in South Africa (hitting production). These strikes have spread to Kumba from which the company made c.40% of its 1H12 EBITDA, and which has also seen the iron ore price fall 25% in 2012 to date. De Beers, its diamond unit, is currently experiencing weaker pricing, reflecting sales growth fears, and its copper unit is experiencing lower than planned production from Los Bronces (Chile) and its Collahuai JV (also Chile). Lastly, the met coal price has fallen sharply on the back of weaker global steel demand, from c.US$280/tonne at the beginning of 2012 to c.US$145/t currently. Anglo has also seen its major near-term growth project, Minas Rio (iron ore, Brazil) delayed by at least 18-months and perhaps by over two years.”


Ms. Carroll’s not alone in her troubles. The global mining industry has hit a downdraft as Europe’s economy has sagged, China’s industrial machine has slowed and the U.S. economy has continued to plod. As the WSJ reported earlier this month, big resource companies are slashing billions out of their capital budgets – conserving cash under pressure from investors who’ve dumped their shares. But cutting back today could mean crimped growth tomorrow. Whoever gets Ms. Carroll’s job will have plenty to dig through.

Guinea Pig Hearts Beat with Human Cells

When transplanted into guinea pig hearts, human heart muscle cells (pictured) can beat in time with resident cells.
MEDIMAGE / SPL

from nature International weekly journal of science
Nature News

Cardiac Cells Derived from Human Stem Cells can Integrate into Injured Hearts.

Monya Baker
05 August 2012

Damaged skin and liver can often repair themselves, but the heart rarely heals well and heart disease is the world's leading cause of death. Research published today raises hopes for cell therapies, showing that heart muscle cells differentiated from human embryonic stem cells can integrate into existing heart muscle[1].

“What we have done is prove that these cells do what working heart muscles do, which is beat in sync with the rest of the heart,” says Chuck Murry, a cardiovascular biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, who co-led the research.

It has been difficult to assess cell therapies in animal models because human cells cannot keep up with the heart rates of some small rodents. Cardiomyocytes derived from human embryonic stem (ES) cells typically beat fewer than 150 times a minute. External electrical stimulation can increase that rate, but only up to about 240 beats per minute, says Michael LaFlamme, a cardiovascular biologist at the University of Washington and the other co-leader on the project. Rats and mice have heart rates of around 400 and 600 beats per minute, respectively.

However, guinea pigs have a heart rate of 200–250 beats per minute, near the limit for human cardiomyocytes. After working out ways to suppress guinea pigs’ immune systems so that they would accept human cells, Murry, LaFlamme and their co-workers began transplantation experiments. They also devised a way to make assessing electrical activity straightforward: using recent genetic-engineering technology, they inserted a ‘sensor’ gene into the human ES cells so that cardiomyocytes derived from them would fluoresce when they contracted.

From the first experiment with the sensor in guinea pigs, it was obvious that the transplanted cells were beating in time with the rest of the heart, says LaFlamme. When he looked into the chest cavity, the heart “was flashing back at us”, he says.

Healing heart
The human cells seemed to aid healing: four weeks after the researchers killed regions of the guinea pigs’ hearts to simulate a heart attack, the hearts of animals that received cardiomyocytes exhibited stronger contractions than those that received other cell types. And cardiomyocyte transplants did not seem to cause irregular heartbeats, a common concern for cell-replacement therapy in the heart. In fact, the transplants seemed to suppress arrhythmias.

But it will be a long road from demonstrating this sort of integration to demonstrating possible therapeutic benefits, says Glenn Fishman, a cardiologist at New York University Langone School of Medicine, who was not involved in the work. “The conclusion that the human cells can connect with the guinea pig tissue is true,” he says, “but the clinical implications are a bit of a stretch.”

Cardiomyocytes engrafted in only a tiny percentage of scar tissue, Fishman explains, and the area seems too small to produce much additional pumping force. He suspects that the benefits seen stem from the 'paracrine effect', in which transplanted cells secrete factors that rejuvenate damaged host tissue. In fact, many researchers are exploring such strategies to prompt damaged heart tissue to restore itself, he says.

Extrapolating from results in guinea pigs is difficult, adds Ronald Li, who leads a programme in cardiac stem-cell engineering at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Li says that his recent unpublished work in dogs and pigs shows that transplanting cardiomyocytes derived from human ES cells can cause arrhythmias.

Both Murry and LaFlamme agree that much more work needs to be done before transplantable cardiomyocytes are ready for human trials. The more immediate goal, says LaFlamme, is to hunt for experimental conditions that allow cells to engraft in scar tissue more thoroughly. It's exciting “to see that the cells can couple electrically”, he says. “Now we can test new strategies to make more couple.” And although cell transplants to humans might be a long way off, he adds, “I think it's a nut we can crack.”

References
1. Shiba, Y. et al. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature11317 (2012).
Journal name:
Nature
DOI:
doi:10.1038/nature.2012.11123

How Some People Think.......

I've decided to add a new feature to the blog. You know I like sharing what's beautiful and interesting in the world of nature under my Nature At It's Best headline. Well I'm adding a new one, and it's called How Some People Think.....

Under this heading, I'll share some of the odd, funny, unusual and bizarre thoughts that are swirling around in the heads of the human race.

Here's the first entry. I'm sharing this one because no matter what the state of affairs in our personal lives or in the world, we all need to laugh more. I ran across this one in the Comments on a right-wing site under a blog entitled: Mitt Romney in Israel. The comment was submitted by Towson, Maryland lawyer, E. David Silverberg.

en-Joy!
Kentke

BULLETIN: THIS JUST IN: EIGHT ISRAELIS DECLARE WAR ON IRAN:

STORY BELOW

The President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was wondering who to invade when his telephone rang.

“This is Mendel Schlepper in Tel Aviv. We’re officially declaring war on you!”

“How big is your army?” the Iranian president asked.

“There’s me, my cousin Moishe, Avi Goldberg and our pinochle group, Max, Larry, Jacob, Ari and Joshua !”

“I have a million in my army,” said the president.

“I’ll call back!” said Mendel .

The next day, he called. “The war’s still on!” We have now a bulldozer, and Simcha Goldberg’s tractor.”

“We have 16,000 tanks, and the Iranian army is now two million men.”

” Oy gevalt !” said Mendel . “I’ll call back.” He phoned the next day.

“We’re calling off the war.”

Why?” asked the president.

“Well,” said Mendel , “we’ve had a little chat, and there‘s no way we can feed two million prisoners.

Turn off the Lights, See the Brilliance of "The City Dark"

I caught the end portion of this on TV the other night, and loved what I was able to see. Science is learning that all this constant artifical light is having a serious negative effect on our health. I was describing the program to an acquaintenance that also loves the dark starry night. Well good newz for both of us, and now you also because I discovered the program is available online until August 5th!!

Scroll down for an article about it, then click this link to watch: http://www.pbs.org/pov/citydark/
en-joy!
Kentke

The Advance of Electric Light Has Sent Nighttime into Retreat, With Astonishing Effects on Humans and Wildlife

"A documentary about light pollution that is entertaining and thought-provoking? It hardly seems possible, but that's what Ian Cheney has made in The City Dark. . . . This film makes you want to go find a starry sky to camp under quickly, before it's all gone."—Neil Genzlinger

New York Times
NEW YORK, June 27, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/

The town in rural Maine where Ian Cheney spent much of his childhood has about 4,000 residents. Waldoboro had electric lights, but on a cloudless and moonless night, it was impossible not to be struck by the incredible array of stars visible above. Cheney became deeply curious about the stars, as humans have been for millennia. He followed his passion into amateur astronomy, fashioning his own homemade telescope, and then into astrophotography to capture the wondrous scenes that revealed themselves at night.

But when Cheney moved to New York City, his familiar world of light and dark was upended. In this metropolis, light was everywhere—but starlight was much harder to find. New York's brilliance was undeniably alluring, yet for Cheney the glare of streetlights also suggested a deep loss. The City Dark follows Cheney's journey to discover the surprising and alarming costs of light pollution and the disappearance of the night sky.

The City Dark had its national broadcast premiere on Thursday, July 5, 2012 at 10 p.m. during the 25th anniversary season of the award-winning PBS series POV (Point of View). (Check local listings.) The film will stream on POV's website July 6-Aug. 5. American television's longest-running independent documentary series, POV is the winner of a Special News & Documentary Emmy Award for Excellence in Television Documentary Filmmaking and two International Documentary Association Awards for Continuing Series.

The world's first light bulb was switched on in 1879, and since then artificial illumination has spread across an increasingly urban globe, radically changing humanity's relation to the night.

Yet light pollution is a phenomenon little noted except by those, like astronomers, whose endeavors have been directly hindered by the changes. Meditating on his dwindling connection to the stars, Cheney wonders about the global consequences of artificial lighting, and in The City Dark he sets out to discover what ecologists, cancer researchers, astrophysicists, philosophers and designers have to say about it. Cheney weaves these interviews with time-lapse images of the night sky, culled from tens of thousands of high-resolution still images shot around the world.
The filmmaker discovers an informative and intriguing cast of characters. Irve Robbins, a Brooklyn-born astronomer running the last remaining observatory in Staten Island, N.Y., is a surprising reminder that stars could once be studied in New York City. Now only the brightest objects shine through the light-polluted sky. Robbins says, "I've seen the Milky Way twice—when there were blackouts." At a vast Hackensack, N.J., warehouse filled with myriad light bulbs, owner Larry Birnbaum shows off antique bulbs, including an original Edison that still works, and explains that successive generations of bulbs have exponentially increased in brightness. Today's bulbs produce thousands more lumens than earlier ones—often many more lumens than we need.

The effect has not been lost on Manhattan Boy Scout Troop 718, whose leader jokes that wayfinding in a dark forest now means following the pinkish glow in the night sky. These Scouts must embark on a trip far from the city to see the Milky Way for the first time. Another native New Yorker, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, describes falling in love with the stars during his first visit to the Hayden Planetarium in Manhattan—noting the irony of being smitten with an artificial night sky while the real sky above his own Bronx neighborhood revealed just a handful of stars.

Cheney leaves New York City seeking darker skies and finds his way to Sky Village, a dark-sky haven for astronomers in rural Arizona. While the village's denizens come from all walks of life, what draws them together is their need to be close to a dark night sky. Cheney visits a mountaintop in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, considered the best site for professional astronomy in the world. Astronomers rely on Pan-STARRS, the world's newest, largest telescope-camera to detect Earth-killing asteroids, but even here, urban growth in the valley below creates a luminous haze that impedes their work. "It's as though you're looking through fog," says John Tonry of the University of Hawaii.

But astronomers are far from the only ones affected by the worldwide retreat of the night. Biologists along the Florida coast have determined that thousands of hatching sea turtles die every year because they fail to make it to the ocean after they confuse the light-polluted horizon of the land with the starlit horizon of the sea and head the wrong way. Similarly, millions of birds, evolved to navigate by the stars, crash into brightly-lit city buildings each year during migration season. This raises the question: Do humans also need the dark?

Suzanne Goldklang for years worked a night shift selling jewelry on television. Now a breast cancer patient, she is surprised to learn about epidemiologist Richard Stevens' suggestion of a link between persistent exposure to light at night and increased breast cancer risk. Indeed, Stevens' research shows that female night-shift workers are almost twice as likely as day-shift workers to develop breast cancer. The disruption of humanity's millennial cycle of light and dark may have profound physiological consequences; the World Health Organization has even deemed shift work a probable carcinogen.

Artificial light has undoubtedly revolutionized life in numerous positive ways—beating back humanity's fears of the dark, extending the active day and facilitating productivity and social interaction. Historian Roger Ekirch notes that every civilization has expressed a fear of the dark.

Criminologist and former policeman Jon Shane says, "History is replete with examples of poorly lit areas that are transformed by light," and goes on a nighttime visit to a Newark, N.J., park once riddled with crime. Neighbors attest that the installation of more lighting has made the park markedly safer. But the extent to which increased lighting reduces crime remains controversial; and though Cheney acknowledges that humans are drawn to the light, he also asks if there's such a thing as too much light.

Notes astrophysicist Tyson, "When you look at the night sky, you realize how small we are within the cosmos. It's kind of a resetting of your ego. To deny yourself of that state of mind, either willingly or unwittingly, is to not live to the full extent of what it is to be human."

"Spending a lot of my childhood in rural Maine, I fell in love with the night sky and wanted to try and capture it as best I could," says director Cheney. "I used a Pentax camera borrowed from my dad, a high school photography teacher, and used an unforgivable amount of his Kodak Gold film. But when I moved to brightly lit cities, my connection to stars faded and I began to feel I was losing something important. I asked myself, 'Why do we need the stars?'"Cheney continues, "The City Dark took three years to make. I began by speaking with astronomers, which pushed me toward two other lines of inquiry: the intangible idea of our spiritual and emotional connection to the stars and the science of the night, including the effect on humans and wildlife.

The film carries these themes forward by weaving together more poetic, meditative footage of the night sky with handheld footage of people exploring these issues by day. My hope is that the film will inspire people to look up more; to reconsider the way their houses, streets and cities are lit; and to realize that tiny changes in the way we light our world can make a big difference."

The City Dark is a production of Wicked Delicate Films.

Produced in Association with American Documentary POV

About the Filmmaker:Ian Cheney (Director, Producer, Co-cinematographer, Co-editor) Ian Cheney is a Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker. He grew up in New England and earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at Yale University. He co-created and starred in the Peabody Award-winning theatrical and PBS documentary King Corn (2007); directed the feature documentary The Greening of Southie (Sundance Channel, 2008); co-produced the Planet Green documentary Big River (2009); and directed the whimsical 2011 documentary Truck Farm, starring the farm Cheney planted in the back of his '86 Dodge pickup. He has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Men's Journal, as well as on CNN, MSNBC and ABC's Good Morning America.

Cheney is a co-founder of FoodCorps, a national service program launched in 2011 that places young people in communities of need to plant and tend school gardens, teach nutrition education and source healthful foods for school cafeterias. In 2011, Cheney and longtime collaborator Curt Ellis received the Heinz Award for their innovative approach to environmental advocacy.
An avid astrophotographer, Cheney travels frequently to show his films, lead discussions and give talks about sustainability, agriculture and the human relationship to the natural world. He is currently working on two projects: The Search for General Tso, a documentary about the cultural history of Chinese food in America, and BLUESPACE, a feature documentary about the degradation and renewal of urban waterways and the search for water in outer space.

Credits:Director/Producer: Ian CheneyCo-producers: Tamara Rosenberg, Colin Cheney, Julia MarchesiCinematographers: Ian Cheney, Taylor GentryEditors: Ian Cheney, Frederick ShanahanOriginal Music: The Fishermen Three, Ben Fries
Running Time: 56:46
POV Series Credits:Executive Producer: Simon KilmurryCo-Executive Producer: Cynthia LopezVice President, Programming and Production: Chris White Series Producer: Yance Ford Coordinating Producer: Andrew Catauro

Awards and Festivals:
Jury Award, Best Score/Music, SXSW Film Festival, 2011
Grand Jury Prize, Best Feature, Environmental Film Festival at Yale, 2011
Best Professional Documentary Award, Real to Reel Film Festival, 2011
Best Documentary Award, Hardacre Film Festival, 2011
Audience Award, Kandy International Film Festival, 2011
Official Selection, Abu Dhabi International Film Festival, 2011
Official Selection, Independent Film Festival Boston, 2011
Official Selection, Maui Film Festival, 2011
Official Selection, Environmental Film Fest in the Nation's Capital, 2012
Official Selection, Green Film Festival in Seoul, 2012
For a complete list of awards and screenings, go to

www.thecitydark.com.
Source: PR Newswire (http://s.tt/1g3AW)

More Mali - A Government Unraveling - A Tale that'll have you Shaking your Head

In this April 1, 2012 file photo, coup leader Capt. Amadou Haya Sanogo addresses the media at his headquarters in Kati, outside Bamako, Mali. The ease of the junta's takeover in March, just six weeks before a presidential election, shows how quickly the course of a nation in this part of the world can change, despite or even partly because of funding and training from the U.S. It also underscores how fragile democracies remain in Africa, and how the fate of an entire country can still be bent by the ambitions of a single man.

(AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)

Jul 7, 7:12 PM (ET)

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI


SEGOU, Mali (AP) - On the morning three months ago when the fate of Mali was irrevocably changed, Mamadou Sanogo awoke in the house here where he and his wife had raised six children, including a 39-year-old son, now a captain in the nation's army.


It was still dark outside. The elderly man got up and turned on the TV, setting the volume to low so as to not disturb his sleeping wife, according to relatives and friends. What he saw next made him shake her awake. "Come see what your imbecile son is doing," he yelled.


Instead of the normal newscast, they saw a group of soldiers huddled in front of the TV camera. It took them a moment to recognize their son, Capt. Amadou Haya Sanogo, who was announcing that the military had overthrown the government of Mali.


If the coup was a shock to his parents - his mother subsequently fainted - it seems also to have come as a surprise to Sanogo himself, who by all accounts had no plans for it. Perhaps most of all, it was like a bucket of ice water over the heads of Mali's 15.4 million people, who saw two decades of democracy collapse in just a few hours into what is rapidly becoming an ungovernable hole and a haven for al-Qaida-linked terrorists.

The ease of the takeover, just six weeks before a presidential election, shows how quickly the course of a nation in this part of the world can change, despite or even partly because of funding and training from the West. And it underscores how fragile democracies remain in Africa, and how the fate of an entire country can still be bent by the ambitions of a single man.


"This is considered a thing of the past in Africa. If you look at the video, it looks like a caricature of a 1970s coup," said Jennifer Cooke, director of the Africa program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. "This is why this is so tragic and disappointing - the trend for this kind of ham-handed power grab has been, fewer and fewer."


Mali is a landlocked nation twice the size of France that has long taken pride in its democratic track record, despite chronic poverty and repeated rebellions in the north.


In the past decade, the U.S. alone has poured close to $1 billion into Mali, including development aid as well as military training to battle an al-Qaida offshoot in the north. In doing so, the U.S. unwittingly also helped prepare the soldiers for the coup: Sanogo himself benefited from six training missions in the U.S., the State Department confirmed, starting in 1998 when he was sent to an infantry training course at Fort Benning, Ga.


He returned in 2001, 2002, 2004, 2008 and 2010 to attend some of the most prestigious military institutions in America, including the Defense Language Institute at the Lackland Air Force Base, Texas. He took a basic officer course at Quantico, Virginia, and learned to use a light-armored vehicle at Camp Pendleton, Calif.

Just a few weeks before the March takeover, Sanogo made a trip to Segou to say goodbye. He'd been accepted into a peacekeeping training course abroad and was due to leave sometime in April, said his cousin, Salif Sanogo.


What happened next is described by those who know him as an "accidental coup."


It started at the Kati military camp, where Sanogo lived in a decrepit housing unit with cement walls and a tin roof, just 10 kilometers (6 miles) over a barren hill from the presidential palace.


Sanogo, an English-language teacher at a military college, had failed several exams in officer school, according to Lt. Col. Oumar Diawara, an officer also stationed at the camp. However, because of his training in the United States and because he spoke and taught English, he gave off a worldly air. The rank-and-file soldiers looked up to him because he frequently socialized with them, unlike other officers who adhered to the strict hierarchy of military life.


Sanogo, officers said, was among the instructors fired last fall at a military college where five recruits died in a widely publicized hazing incident. He was sent back to Kati, said Diawara.

"He was there with no function," he said. "He had absolutely nothing to do."


In the meantime, anger was growing at the corruption that had spread like a tumor across the arteries of Mali's government and military: In recent years, the country dropped from No. 78 out of 182 countries to No. 118 on Transparency International's index tracking corruption.
In the military, generals sat in lavishly decorated offices while soldiers were routinely sent to the battlefield without proper boots. Earlier this year, an entire company of several dozen soldiers was wiped out after fighting a new rebellion in Mali's north without enough ammunition.


The troops at Kati started to plan a march to protest how the government had handled the rebellion. At around 1 p.m. on March 21, Minister of Defense Gen. Sadio Gassama came to the Kati barracks to ask them to call it off.


Soldiers who were present said the general talked down to them, and the crowd became angry. The mutiny erupted when the minister's bodyguard shot into the air in an effort to push back the mob.


"The minister spoke in a way that was not polite," said George Coulibaly, a civilian who lives in the Kati camp and accompanied the soldiers during the coup. "He said things like, 'You want to march? You're a bunch of uneducated people. I'll educate you.'"


The renegade troops stoned the defense minister's car as his driver floored the gas to get away. They forced the doors of the armory and emptied it out. Then they began hunting down the other officers, nearly all of whom fled or hid - except Sanogo, whose recent dismissal as an officer had given him credibility with ordinary soldiers.


The crowd, led by Sanogo, initially planned to march to the palace to dress down President Amadou Toumani Toure, said several soldiers. Instead, the president fled. They found themselves inside the seat of government.


"Our objective was not a coup d'etat," said Lt. Samba Timbo, one of the leaders of the putsch. "Not at first."


By late afternoon, around 100 soldiers had arrived at the state television station. They sent the employees home, and television screens across the country went black.


"The presidential palace fell in their laps," said the cameraman who helped them broadcast their first message, and who requested anonymity for his safety. "For two hours, not a single person, not a single interlocutor, tried to contact them to see what they wanted. To negotiate. It was after that they got the idea for a coup."


By the time Sanogo's father turned on the TV the next morning in Segou, some 240 kilometers (150 miles) northeast of the capital, the intentions of the soldiers had become clear. So had their leader.


When his mother saw him on TV, she at first refused to believe it was her son, called "Bolly" by friends and family. Shaken, she left the house and crossed a sandy courtyard to the home of his cousin, Salif Sanogo.


Salif Sanogo was brewing his morning tea on a bed of charcoal when she knocked. "She asked, 'Is it true? Is it true that Bolly did this?'" recalled the cousin. "We said, 'Yes, Ma. It's true.'"
She screamed. She got hysterical, and then she fainted. They carried her in and fanned her until she woke up.


If Sanogo's parents were initially mortified, they quickly became used to their new status. Just days after the coup, visitors started to line up outside their house on Road 270 in Segou.
In the capital, the soldiers were looting government buildings. A businessman with ties to the junta estimates that they raked in between $2 and $3 million in the first three days after the coup, from government safes they pried open.


Most of the ministries no longer have computers. And the normally 1 1/2-hour-long evening news hour is now just 40 minutes because all but a few of the cameras at the state television station were stolen.


Even while Sanogo said the army had only seized power to address rebellion in the north, the rebels took advantage of the confusion to seize half the country. Among the groups that invaded the north is Ansar Dine, or "Defenders of the Faith," an Islamic faction with ties to al-Qaida.


In the capital, Bamako, Sanogo and his men quickly made themselves at home. The captain held court from the office of the Zone 3 commander at Kati, a rundown colonial structure that became increasingly well-equipped. Each week, construction crews poured cement, updated the electrical wiring and hauled in new office chairs, their metallic legs still covered in plastic.


Months later, the future of both Mali and Sanogo remains uncertain.


A poll of 1,100 residents of the capital found that after the initial shock, about 60 percent were either "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with the coup because it put an end to a regime viewed as corrupt.


"Our democracy? It was a facade," said 54-year-old Soumara Kalapo, who took part in pro-coup demonstrations after the putsch. "Our democracy needed this coup so that it could right itself. ... It was a democracy run by, and benefiting, a mafia."


But in his last blog post before leaving Mali for the U.S., anthropologist Bruce Whitehouse lists the disastrous consequences of what happened, including the suspension of more than a billion dollars in aid, the closing of Bamako's flagship Grand Hotel and the government's loss of control of half its territory. Last month, Islamic fundamentalists announced that they now hold the major towns in the north.


"In the 90 days since the coup, it's hard to look at any area and see anything good," said Whitehouse, an assistant professor at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Penn. "Some of us were looking for a silver lining. Months later, we can't see any reason for hope."


After countless diplomatic interventions, a round of sanctions and a library's worth of condemnations from world leaders, Sanogo finally agreed to step aside on April 6. But the young captain continued to meddle in state affairs until May, when he signed a second agreement promising to leave in return for the status of a former head of state. A diplomat versed on the matter said that status includes a salary of $9,000 a month, more than 30 times the salary of an army captain.


The former head of the national assembly, Dioncounda Traore, took over as interim president of a transitional government. In May, a mob of pro-Sanogo youth forced their way into his office and beat him. Traore was evacuated to France for treatment on May 23, and has not returned since.


Even the Wikipedia entry on Mali is confused about who is now in charge. In the box naming the head of the government, the online encyclopedia lists both Sanogo, as chairperson of the military junta, and Traore, as acting president.


Repeated attempts to speak to Sanogo for this article were unsuccessful.


On Wednesday, the body representing nations in western Africa sent notice that it does not recognize Sanogo's status as a former head of state, and threatened sanctions against him if he continues to obstruct the return to constitutional rule. But diplomats say businessmen are still waiting in front of the former commander's office to see him, with the customary suitcase of cash, a sign of his enduring influence.


Those around him still call him "Le President." And a framed portrait on the wall shows Sanogo, a green beret cocked to one side, next to the title, "Head of state."
---
Associated Press writer Baba Ahmed contributed to this report from Bamako, Mali.

Mali Islamists to Continue Destroying Timbuktu World Heritage Cultural Sites

Fighters from Ansar Dine, an al Qaeda-linked Islamist group in northern Mali, have destroyed historic Sufi shrines in the ancient desert city of Timbuktu, triggering international outcry.

I've been terribly upset by the news of the African Islamist group Ansar Dine's actions in the Malian city of Timbuktu. I wrote about their presence in the African nation in December 2011. That post is a good introduction to the this week's escalation of their objectives. (http://knewzfrommeroewest.blogspot.com/search?q=Islam+in+Africa)

They have embarked on a campaign to destroy all of the ancient tombs and Mosques which are both the heart of the local people's religion, and a much needed source of revenue for the remote area. The awesome buildings attract tourists from all over the world for their unique architectural design. The tombs and buildings that date back to the 15th century have been designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and the destruction which began Friday has attracted world attention and alarm.

To familiarize you with the region and situation, here are two articles about what's currently happening, and a very informative 7 minute video made in 2000 that shows the efforts Timbuktu was focused on accomplishing before these invaders arrived area with their agenda of wiping out indigenious culture and establishing the sharia law. I'm also going to add an article link at the end I hope you'll be sure to click as it gives an understanding behind the Ansar Dine group and their leader Ag Ghali.
Keep your head up.
Louv,
Kentke
Sorry about this post's layout. After the first article, please scroll down for the rest of the post.

Photo: A still from a video shows Islamist militants attacking a shrine in Timbuktu on Sunday. Credit: AFP / Getty Images

L A Times

July 2, 2012
Carol J. Williams in Los Angeles

Islamist rebels who have seized control of northern Mali used axes, shovels and automatic weapons to destroy tombs and other cultural and religious monuments for a third day on Monday, including bashing in the door of a 15th century mosque in Timbuktu, news agencies reported.

Rebels of the Ansar Dine faction fighting to assert Sharia law over the African nation at the crossroads of ancient trade routes ignored the appeals of United Nations officials over the weekend to cease the "wanton destruction" of the region's cultural heritage.

In New York, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Sunday called on "all parties to exercise their responsibility to preserve the cultural heritage of Mali," saying the attacks "are totally unjustified.”

Irina Bokova, head of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, on Saturday urged the Ansar Dine fighters “to stop these terrible and irreversible acts” after militants smashed mud-walled tombs in Timbuktu.

On Monday, the Islamists, who claim allegiance to Al Qaeda, tore open the door to the Sidi Yahia mosque, telling townspeople they were wiping out "idolatry" at the monuments to Sufi Islamic saints and scholars.

"In legend, it is said that the main gate of Sidi Yahia mosque will not be opened until the last day [of the world]," said the town imam, Alpha Abdoulahi, according to Reuters news agency, which reached him in Timbuktu by telephone.

In radio and television interviews from Senegal, the newly appointed chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, warned the rebels that destruction of religious and cultural heritage could lead to war crimes charges.

“The only tribunal we recognize is the divine court of Sharia,” the Associated Press quoted Ansar Dine spokesmen Oumar Ould Hamaha as saying in response to Bensouda's warning.

The AP said Hamaha justified the destruction as a divine order to pull down idolatrous constructions "so that future generations don't get confused, and start venerating the saints as if they are God.”

Timbuktu had been developed as a tourist attraction, with locals operating hotels, guest houses and guided tours for visitors to the ancient sub-Saharan trading post and Islamic educational center.

Hamaha told the AP that Ansar Dine opposes tourists' coming to the religious sites, saying they "foster debauchery."

UNESCO put Timbuktu and the nearby Tomb of Askia on its List of World Heritage in Danger last week, after the Ansar Dine rebels seized the region that has been beset by a three-way civil war since a March 22 coup deposed Mali's government. The Islamist radicals have been fighting for territory with Taureg separatists since the latter defeated Mali government troops in the spring, leaving the capital Bamako rudderless and incapable of putting down either rebellion in the remote north.

"Timbuktu was an intellectual and spiritual capital and a center for the propagation of Islam throughout Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries," UNESCO notes on its website. "Its three great mosques, Djingareyber, Sankore and Sidi Yahia, recall Timbuktu's golden age."

The sites designated as important cultural heritage represent "the power and riches of the empire that flourished in the 15th and 16th centuries through its control of the trans-Saharan trade," UNESCO recalls in its description.

Fundamentalist Salafist Muslims have also attacked Sufi heritage sites in Libya and Egypt over the past year, and Al Qaeda-allied Taliban militants a decade ago blew up two 6th Century Buddha figures carved into a mountainside near Bamiyan, in central Afghanistan, on the same grounds that they idolized false gods.

Jul 1, 5:32 PM (ET)
By BABA AHMED

BAMAKO, Mali (AP) - Islamist rebels said Sunday they will continue to destroy historic sites in Mali's northern city of Timbuktu before they implement strict Shariah law, as Mali's government compared the destruction to "war crimes" and said they would seek international justice.

"Timbuktu was an Islamic city since the 12th century, and we know what the religion says about the saints' tombs," he said. "Contrary to what the Islamists or the Wahabis of Ansar Dine say, here in Timbuktu, the people don't love the saints like God, but just seek the saints' blessings because they are our spiritual guides."

Ansar Dine spokesman Sanda Abu Mohamed said Sunday that Islamists will continue the destruction they started Saturday. "We're going to destroy everything before we apply Shariah in this city," he said.

Resident Moussa Maiga said the Islamists have expressed disapproval of what they think is worship of the tombs of the Muslim saints. "They say that the population loves the saints like God," he said.
But resident Bouya Ould Sidi Mohamed said the historic city has long had Muslim roots.

Mali's government condemned the destruction, which they say is akin to "war crimes."

"The council of ministers has just approved, in principle, the referral to the International Criminal Court and a working group is working to this end," the government said in a statement.

The U.N. cultural agency on Saturday called for an immediate halt to the destruction of three sacred Muslim tombs. Irina Bokova, who heads the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, cited in a statement Saturday reports the centuries-old mausoleums of Sidi Mahmoud, Sidi, Moctar and Alpha Moya had been destroyed.

On Thursday, UNESCO's World Heritage Committee, meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, placed the mausoleums of Muslim saints on its list of sites in danger at the request of Mali's government.

Islamist fighters from the Ansar Dine group have declared that they now control the northern half of Mali after driving out an ethnic Tuareg separatist group. The rebel groups took advantage of a power vacuum created by a March coup in the capital to seize ground in the north.

The Islamists' growing reach is more worrying news for the landlocked West African nation.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the attacks on the mausoleums "totally unjustified" and urged all sides to preserve Mali's cultural heritage, according to a statement from his spokesperson.

" The secretary general reiterates his support for the ongoing efforts of ECOWAS, the African Union and countries in the region to help the government and people of Mali resolve the current crisis through dialogue," the statement said.
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Edith M. Lederer contributed from the United Nations in New York.

Click link for video: ON THE LINE: MALI: INTERNET: ITN Source

Here are some facts about Ansar Dine and its leader, Iyad Ag Ghali:

ANSAR DINE:

* The name means “Defenders of the Faith” and it follows the puritanical form of Islam known as Salafism, which looks to the religion’s 7th-century origins as a guide to conduct.

* Along with Tuareg separatist movement MNLA, Ansar Dine and other Islamists were among rebels who seized northern Mali following a March 22 coup in the capital Bamako, in the south of the country, which paralysed the Western-backed Malian army.

* Diplomats say Ansar Dine – with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), originally from Algeria, and al Qaeda splinter group MUJWA – have hijacked the MNLA’s secular separatist uprising and now control two thirds of Mali’s desert north, territory that includes the regions of Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu.

* Ansar Dine’s leader, renegade Tuareg chieftain Iyad Ag Ghali, has links with AQIM through a cousin who is a local commander, according to diplomats.

* In direct opposition to MNLA’s stated aims, Ag Ghali has rejected any form of independence of the northern half of Mali and has vowed to pursue plans to impose sharia, Islamic law, throughout the now divided west African nation in the Sahel.
* Ansar Dine’s turbaned fighters, who operate under the black Islamist flag, initially gained a reputation in the north for keeping order after outbreaks of looting. But when they started enforcing sharia – making women wear veils, shutting bars and shops selling alcohol, and lashing offenders – they earned hostility from locals who have a long history of practising a more liberal, tolerant style of Islam.
* Niger’s President Mahamadou Issoufou said last month that Afghan and Pakistani jihadists were training recruits for Islamist groups in the Malian north.
* Diplomats and analysts say Ag Ghali, long known as a power broker in the north of Mali, formed Ansar Dine late last year after failing in separate attempts to become head of the MNLA and of his Ifoghas Tuareg clan.
* The Islamist allies said last week they had now secured full control of the north after pushing the Tuareg separatists out of Gao in a battle that killed at least 20 people.

(The black flag of the Ansar Dine Islamic group is posted on a road sign in Kidal in northeastern Mali, June 16, 2012. REUTERS/Adama Diarra)

AG GHALI:
* Ag Ghali, an Ifoghas of the Kel Ireyakkan faction of northern Mali’s Tuareg nomads, was a commander in a 1990 rebellion against the central government in Bamako launched by the fiercely independent “blue men of the desert” warriors, who are known for their distinctive indigo-coloured robes and veils.
* He helped negotiate a peace deal with the Malian government, establishing his reputation as an influential, yet notoriously inscrutable figure among the Tuaregs.
* A leaked U.S. diplomatic cable from 2007 said the Malian government appointed Ag Ghali an adviser to its consulate at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, an Israeli think-tank, says it was at this time that Ag Ghali adopted Salafism before being expelled by the Saudi authorities.
* On his return to Mali he was again involved in 2008 as a mediator in helping to end another Tuareg rebellion, and took part in negotiations to free foreign hostages seized by AQIM.
* Another U.S. diplomatic cable says of the Tuareg leader: “Like the proverbial bad penny, Ag Ghali turns up whenever a cash transaction between a foreign government and Kidal Tuaregs appears forthcoming … Ag Ghali is … adept at playing all sides of the Tuareg conflict to maximize his personal gain.”