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.
---_
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.”

Got a Minute to Read This? Or are you Too Busy??

The ‘Busy’ Trap

By TIM KREIDER

June 30, 2012, 3:15 am — Updated: 2:53 pm

If you live in America in the 21st century you've probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It's become the default response when you ask anyone how they're doing: "Busy!" "So busy." "Crazy busy." It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: "That's a good problem to have," or "Better than the opposite."

Notice it isn't generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It's almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they've taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they've "encouraged" their kids to participate in. They're busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they're addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.

Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren't either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.'s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications. I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn't have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation; this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.

Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another's eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.

The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it's something we've chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist's residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn't consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college - she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: "Everyone's too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.") What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality - driven, cranky, anxious and sad - turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It's not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school - it's something we collectively force one another to do.

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn't allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d'être was obviated when "menu" buttons appeared on remotes, so it's hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn't performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I'm not sure I believe it's necessary. I can't help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn't a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn't matter.

I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won't maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, what time?

But just in the last few months, I've insidiously started, because of professional obligations, to become busy. For the first time I was able to tell people, with a straight face, that I was "too busy" to do this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy this complaint; it makes you feel important, sought-after and put-upon. Except that I hate actually being busy. Every morning my in-box was full of e-mails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve. It got more and more intolerable until finally I fled town to the Undisclosed Location from which I'm writing this.

Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check e-mail I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I've remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and the stars. I read. And I'm finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It's hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it's also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration - it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. "Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do," wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes' "Eureka" in the bath, Newton's apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren't responsible for more of the world's great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking.

"The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system." This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write "Childhood's End" and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that'll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.

Perhaps the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved as I do. But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world's endless frenetic hustle. My role is just to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play. My own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I've always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love. I suppose it's possible I'll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn't work harder and say everything I had to say, but I think what I'll really wish is that I could have one more beer with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh with Boyd. Life is too short to be busy.

(Anxiety welcomes submissions at anxiety@nytimes.com.)
Tim Kreider is the author of "We Learn Nothing," a collection of essays and cartoons. His cartoon, "The Pain - When Will It End?" has been collected in three books by Fantagraphics.

Kenyan Authorities to Arrest Lion Killers

Kenyan Wildlife Service (KWS) spokesman Paul Mbugua speaks to journalists in Nairobi, Kenya, Friday, June 22, 2012. Maasai warriors who speared to death six lions in the outskirts of Nairobi will be arrested because they did it to satisfy a cultural tradition that ranks killing a lion with a spear as one of the highest honors a man can achieve, Mbugua said Friday.

Photo: Khalil Senosi / AP

BY TOM ODULA Associated Press News Fuze
Updated Friday June 22, 2012

NAIROBI, Kenya—Maasai warriors who speared to death six lions in the outskirts of Nairobi will be arrested for killing wildlife, which is a crime in Kenya, an official said Friday.

The warriors killed the lions to satisfy a cultural tradition that ranks killing a lion with a spear as one of the highest honors a man can achieve, said Paul Mbugua, a spokesman with Kenya's wildlife authority, the Kenya Wildlife Service. After the warriors killed the lions they cut off the end of their tails to keep as trophies of their achievement, said Mbugua.

The Maasai of Ilkeek-Lemedung'I village—a collection of mud, stone and iron-sheeting homes 40 kilometers (25 miles) outside Nairobi near edges of Nairobi National Park —said Wednesday they grew tired of waiting for veterinarians to arrive while the lions devoured their goats, a precious commodity in their community.

Mbugua said the warriors did not heed calls by rangers to wait for vets to tranquilize the lions. Two adult lionesses, two younger lions and two cubs were then killed.

"We are reviewing footage and pictures from the killing to identify who did it. Even the perpetrators of the heinous act know that they have done wrong and have taken to their heels," Mbugua said.

According to U.S.-based Maasai Association, a group trying to preserve Maasai culture, lion hunting is a sign of bravery and personal achievement but hunting a female lion is prohibited unless she has posed a threat to humans or livestock. The association's website says that when the lion population was high, the community encouraged solo lion hunting.

Early Friday, one male lion killed a donkey a few miles (kilometers) from where the goats were killed, said Michael Mbithi of the conservation group Friends of Nairobi National Park. Kenya Wildlife Service rangers prevented members of the community from killing the lion in retaliation.

As Nairobi continues to grow, small towns on its outskirts are cropping up and expanding, in part fuelled by the demand for low-cost housing from the city's working class.

As Nairobi enjoys a boom in apartment and road construction, an expanding population center is putting heavy pressure on the animals, especially big cats. Nairobi National Park is the only wildlife park in the world that lies in a country's capital.

Killing lions is a crime in Kenya, but those who lose livestock to big cats frequently retaliate. About 100 lions are killed each year, and the country's lion population has dropped to about 2,000. Lions, especially ones who leave Nairobi National Park, which is not completely fenced in, are at risk. After Wednesday's killings, the park had 37 left, Kenya Wildlife Service estimates.

Black Folks - Ya'll ain't even thought about in this~ WHITE WORKING CHAOS

Where do you see yourself in the America that is taking shape out of the current resources and collective consciousness that will make the future?

You might have gotten jubilant, shoutin' and singing Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come" when Obama got elected. So how are you feeling now? The past couple of years have been a good example of how silly it is to make judgements based only on appearances. The need to sharpen one's ability to see more clearly beneathe the surface of social and political games has never been more critical.

Clarity and strength was the message I received from a hexagram of a recent IChing reading. I know how to interpret that message for my life. How about how it might apply to your Dear Life?

Be sure you are able to identify old negative paradigms arising again. Whether they are your own negative thoughts and habits, or something you experience in your external environment, inwardly say, "No" to these. Now is the time to pay attention to your inner guidance, in order that from a position of solid conviction and confidence, you can take the right actions so that YOUR Life thrives, as it has always been meant to do. Here's some information to integrate in your understanding.

I'm also attaching links to two other stories that I feel tie in with this issue. And that is the issue of how America is changing, and basically, what this will mean for white people unable to shed their notions of white supremacy operating at some levels in their lives.

never forget to say I
lovu,
Kentke



The Untold Future of American Politics
By ZOLTAN HAJNAL and TAEKU LEE
June 4, 2012, 10:05 pm — Updated: 9:04 am -->68 Comments
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/the-untold-future-of-american-politics/?nl=opinion&emc=edit_ty_20120605

Hello, Heterogeneity
By THOMAS B. EDSALL
June 4, 2012, 12:05 am — Updated: 1:12 pm -->182 Comments
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/hello-heterogeneity/

White Working Chaos

June 25, 2012, 12:13 am

Sorry that the graphs did not copy over to my blog, so Click here for the article where you can see the four graphs that illustrate the statistics presented here. But more important, skim through the Comments of NY Times readers at the article's end. They are most interesting:


http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/25/white-working-chaos/


By THOMAS B. EDSALL
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Political analysts, journalists and academics are fighting over white working-class voters – over how to define them and what their political significance is. Part of the reason for the furious tone of the argument is that this is an issue of central importance in American politics. And it’s not just crucial for the presidential election: understanding what the white working class is and where it is going is fundamental if we want to understand where the country is going.

One side of the argument contends that the Democratic coalition retains much of its low-to-middle-income white working-class core. The other side argues that this alliance has been fractured by the defection of working-class whites and that the traditional Democratic coalition is permanently gone.

Part of the problem is that different people mean different things when they are talking about the working class. Is this cohort made up of those without college degrees; those in the bottom third of the income distribution; or those in occupations described by the federal government as “blue-collar”? (The government’s list of blue-collar jobs includes “heavy mobile equipment mechanic,” “pipefitter,” “welder” and “food service” workers.)

Whites without college degrees have been steadily shrinking as a percentage of the electorate, but they remain a very substantial block: in 2008, they made up 39 percent of all voters
The current outbreak of hostilities within an all-star team of academics over the political allegiance of the white working class and even the definition of the white working class began with the publication on June 5 of an essay in the left-leaning British newspaper, The Guardian, “Why Working-class People Vote Conservative,” by Jonathan Haidt, author of “The Righteous Mind” and a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Unfortunately, as Haidt quickly acknowledged, he made the “careless mistake” of failing to specify that he “was talking only about the WHITE working-class.”

Before Haidt posted his correction, Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University, posted a critique of Haidt on June 8 on Monkey Cage, a forum for politically-inclined academics. Gelman’s piece was titled, “Lamentably ignorant psychology researcher spews political platitudes without realizing that he’s trying to explain a phenomenon that does not exist.” Gelman included a link to his own blog with the intriguing headline, “Stop me before I aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.”

Gelman pointed out that:
Ronald Reagan did about 20 percentage points better among voters in the upper third of income, compared to voters in the lower third. The relation between income and voting since 1980 is about the same as it was in the 1940s.

Gelman defines “working-class” as those in the bottom third of the income distribution. He is also including all races and ethnicities and not focusing on whites. This will prove important in the debate.

On June 17 Haidt amended his argument to refer specifically to white working-class voters. He broke white voters into four categories: those without college degrees who were working; those without degrees who were not working; those with college degrees and a job; and those with degrees but without a job.

Tracking Democratic and Republican self-identification among these four groups of whites, using findings from the American National Election Studies surveys conducted over four decades beginning in the 1970s, Haidt concentrated his attention specifically on employed whites without college degrees.

As a way of defining the white working-class, this category — whites without college who are working — has the advantage of eliminating students, the retired, those unable to work because of disability and those on welfare. The disadvantages of this definition include the failure to count unemployed blue-collar workers, who are certainly working-class, and the inclusion of highly successful businessmen who do not have college degrees. Bill Gates, for example, would be included in this category.

Nonetheless, Haidt’s results are striking. Democratic self-identification among employed whites without degrees (the red line) nosedives from roughly 37 percent to 25 percent over four decades.

Republican self-identification over the same period, among these same voters, grows from roughly 21 percent in the 1970s to 30 percent in the 2000s:
Courtesy of Jonathan Haidt
After Haidt posted his amended analysis, Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Vanderbilt, weighed in on the debate, posting an essay on Monkey Cage on June 17 called “The Party of the American Working Man and Woman.”

“How did a nice psychologist like Haidt wander into this minefield?” Bartels asked:
Ah, the white working-class, yet again. I wish some psychologist would study why this particular topic generates so much interest and emotion. Perhaps it has something to do with the resonance of the term ‘working-class’ — and with the flexibility of that term in successive iterations of the debate.

Bartels went on to raise a key question: is the white working-class defection limited to the South, and primarily an issue of race, or is the defection national in scope, involving the broader social, cultural, and moral revolutions of the past 50 years.

Bartels produced the following graphic to argue that the defection is entirely southern:

"While southern working whites without college degrees have become more Republican in their presidential voting behavior (by 4.5% per decade), non-southern working whites without college degrees have become more Democratic (by 1.6% per decade),” Bartels wrote.
Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist from Emory University who has written extensively about the changing composition of the two parties, countered Bartels in an e-mail to participants in the debate:

My view is that the single best indicator of ‘working-class’ status is occupation—white-collar vs. blue-collar. This excludes non-working respondents. And when you look at northern whites over time there is a very clear pattern — there has been a sharp decline in Democratic identification among blue-collar whites while Democratic identification among white-collar whites has remained stable.

A similar trend is evident when it comes to House voting. When it comes to presidential voting, there is a lot of year to year variation, but blue-collar whites used to be much more Democratic than white-collar whites. Recently, however, they have voted almost identically.

Abramowitz produced the following two charts to show that the sharp movement away from the Democratic Party by white working-class voters occurred in the North as well as the South.
First, by party identification:
Party Identification by DecadeNorthern Whites Blue-collar (green line) White-collar (blue line)
Courtesy of Alan Abramowitz
Second, in actual voting:
House VoteNorthern Whites
Courtesy of Alan Abramowitz

Enter Sam Best, of the University of Connecticut, and Brian Krueger, of the University of Rhode Island, political scientists who work with election day exit polls conducted by television networks and cable news stations. Best and Krueger provided exit poll evidence to The Times supporting the argument made by Abramowitz that white working class support for the Democratic Party declined across the board, but that it declined at a much sharper rate in the South than in the North. They show that in two election years, 1984, with Reagan at the top of the ticket, and in 1994, when Newt Gingrich loyalists gave the Republican party control of the House for the first time in 40 years, that Democratic House candidates took a beating in both the North and South.

In the South, Democratic House candidates in 1984 lost the white non-college vote by 39.7 – 60.3, and by 35.6 – 64.4 in 1994. In the North, Midwest and West, the white non-college vote for Democratic House candidates was just 44 – 56 in 1984, and fell to 40.8 – 59.2 in 1994. Since 1994, according to the Best- Krueger data, Democrats have not been able to break 50 percent with either group, losing northern non-college whites by an average of 46.9 – 53.1 and southern non-college whites by 34.4 – 65.6.

Although this is an intra-academic dispute, the stakes are high. Differing stands determine competing interpretations of the past 40 years of American politics, conflicting analyses of the 2012 election, and alternative projections of the near-term future of American politics.
White working class voting trends are obviously of vital interest to key players in this November’s election. Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster, noted that last year Obama’s already weak support among non-college whites was dropping. “Working-class white voters were a Republican opportunity,” Garin said in an interview with The Times.

In 2010 – the year of a decisive Democratic rout — non-college whites, North and South, cast only 33 percent of their ballots for House Democratic candidates, the lowest level in exit poll history.

With that constituency ready and waiting, “Republicans this year picked their worst possible candidate,” Garin argues, contending that Romney’s wealth and background provoke animosity to Republican elites among white working-class voters, partially counterbalancing the hostility of many of these voters to President Obama.

William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, published a study last month assuming three different scenarios for turnout and voting margins among whites and minorities in the upcoming November election.

In the first of Frey’s scenarios, 2012 will replicate the turnout and voting patterns of 2008 among both whites and minorities. “If that occurs, Obama wins with 29 states and 358 electoral votes,” Frey writes.

The second Frey scenario provides that both white and black turnout and voting patterns of 2004 are repeated in 2012. Under this Frey scenario, Romney beats Obama with 286 electoral votes in 30 states.

The third Frey scenario calls for white turnout and voting patterns to replicate those of 2004, and for minority turnout and voting patterns to replicate 2008 — “something closer to what this year’s election promises – strong partisan participation by both whites and minorities.” In this case, Frey writes, “results favor an Obama win – but barely.”

According to Frey’s third scenario, “Obama squeaks by with 292 electoral votes spread among 24 states,” but his victory depends on winning by very slim margins in four key states — Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Oregon — which together have 66 electoral college votes, far more than enough to tip the contest to Romney if they go the other way.

Frey’s analysis demonstrates a crucial fact about current presidential politics: that white voters (76 percent) and minorities (24 percent), despite making up vastly different percentages of the electorate, are both key to the outcome. Little shifts in behavior in either group matter.

In an e-mail to The Times, Bartels described the strategic choices facing both campaigns:
If the Democratic Party can do something to win one more non-college white vote, without alienating anyone else, it is exactly one vote closer to winning. If it can do something to win one more college white vote, or Latino vote, or Asian vote, without alienating anyone else, it is exactly one vote closer to winning. If it wins one more non-college white vote and loses one college white vote, or Latino vote, or Asian vote in the process, it is not any closer to winning.

The interesting strategic questions have entirely to do with the marginal shifts in vote probabilities produced in different groups by different sorts of appeals, and their collateral political costs (whether alienation or opportunity costs).

In other words, the white electorate remains central to the strategic choices of both the Romney and Obama campaigns, but so does every other significant slice of the population.



Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics,” which was published in January.