Gene Test Indicates Who Will Benefit From Low-Carb or Low-Fat Diets
By Ron Winslow – WSJ
March 4, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO—In the long-running debate over diets—low-fat or low-carb—Stanford University researchers reported Wednesday that a genetic test can help people choose which one works best for them.

In a study involving 133 overweight women, those with a genetic predisposition to benefit from a low-carbohydrate diet lost 2 1/2 times as much weight as those on the same diet without the predisposition. Similarly, women with a genetic makeup that favored a low-fat diet lost substantially more weight than women who curbed fat calories without low-fat genes. The women were followed for a year.

“Knowing your genotype for low-carb or low-fat diets could help you increase your weight-loss success,” said Christopher Gardner, an associate professor of medicine at Stanford and a co-author of the study.

Data from a separate study indicate that 45% of white women have a low-carb genotype while 39% are predisposed to a low-fat diet, suggesting the test has the potential to yield a useful result for much of the population. The test is based on variations in three genes known to regulate how the body metabolizes fat and carbohydrates.

The findings need confirmation in a larger study, and additional research is also necessary to more clearly determine the usefulness of the test, including how it applies to men and different racial groups.

The results help explain a common phenomenon in the weight-loss wars: why two people decide to lose weight and go on the same diet and exercise plan, only to have one succeed while the other is frustrated.

The results suggest even strict adherence to a diet won’t matter if people’s diets are out of synch with their genetics, he added.

The test was developed by Interleukin Genetics Inc., a Waltham, Mass., developer of genetic tests that sponsored the study. The test uses a cheek swab to obtain cells for DNA analysis, and is on the market for $149.

In the past decade, about a dozen studies pitting low-fat vs. low-carb diets have been published in major medical journals. For the most part, no winner has emerged, and none of the diets resulted, on average, in weight loss exceeding 10 pounds in a year. Experts began to believe the type of diet didn’t matter.

“This makes the whole topic relevant again,” Dr. Gardner said.
Researchers said that determining a person’s genetic predisposition could become a new tool in the battle against overweight and obesity.

“This is one step forward to realizing personalized nutrition for weight loss,” said Mindy Dopler Nelson, a researcher at Stanford and lead author of the report. The researchers said they didn’t have any financial interest in the Interleukin Genetics test.

“To match individuals with a diet type will help us to better target interventions and help them be successful,” added Sachiko St. Jeor, a professor in the division of endocrinology, nutrition and metabolism at University of Nevada School of Medicine, Reno. Dr. St. Jeor wasn’t involved with the study.

The study, presented at the American Heart Association’s annual epidemiology and prevention conference, has just been submitted to a medical journal and thus hasn’t yet cleared rigorous peer review that precedes publication. But it was reviewed by a committee that approves papers for presentation at the meeting.

Despite the relatively small number of participants, the findings achieved strong statistical significance, researchers said, meaning it isn’t likely they were the result of chance. The findings are also based in part on an earlier paper, called the A to Z weight-loss study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2007.

Just matching the right diet with your genes doesn’t guarantee significant weight loss for everyone, Dr. Gardner cautioned. If low-carb people make a diet out of low-carb cupcakes, he said, they’re unlikely to see the results they want on a scale.

“It’s not the end of the obesity epidemic,” Dr. Gardner said. “But we need every leg-up we can get.”
The 133 women were among 301 participants in the A to Z study, which compared the effects of four popular weight-loss diets: the Atkins and Zone diets, which are low-carb, and the Learn and Ornish diets, which call for curbing fat calories.

In that study, the Atkins diet was slightly more effective than the other three, but on average, the total weight loss after one year was only about 10 pounds.

Yet, Dr. Nelson pointed out, within each diet group, a handful of women lost more than 30 pounds, while some others gained about 10 pounds. The new study examined whether genetics could explain part of the more than 40-pound swing.

Kenneth S. Kornman, president and chief scientific officer at Interleukin, said the company asked if the Stanford team could use its genetic test on the A to Z participants to see if their genetic makeup predicted their weight-loss experience.

Since Stanford researchers hadn’t obtained any DNA samples in the study, Dr. Nelson led an effort to track down the original participants. She said over 130 agreed to submit cheek swab samples to determine their genetic predisposition. The researchers re-analyzed the study based on the genetic results.

The Government has Your Baby’s DNA
By Elizabeth Cohen, CNN Senior Medical Correspondent

(CNN) — When Annie Brown’s daughter, Isabel, was a month old, her pediatrician asked Brown and her husband to sit down because he had some bad news to tell them: Isabel carried a gene that put her at risk for cystic fibrosis.

While grateful to have the information — Isabel received further testing and she doesn’t have the disease — the Mankato, Minnesota, couple wondered how the doctor knew about Isabel’s genes in the first place. After all, they’d never consented to genetic testing.

It’s simple, the pediatrician answered: Newborn babies in the United States are routinely screened for a panel of genetic diseases. Since the testing is mandated by the government, it’s often done without the parents’ consent, according to Brad Therrell, director of the National Newborn Screening & Genetics Resource Center.
In many states, such as Florida, where Isabel was born, babies’ DNA is stored indefinitely, according to the resource center.

Many parents don’t realize their baby’s DNA is being stored in a government lab, but sometimes when they find out, as the Browns did, they take action. Parents in Texas, and Minnesota have filed lawsuits, and these parents’ concerns are sparking a new debate about whether it’s appropriate for a baby’s genetic blueprint to be in the government’s possession.

“We were appalled when we found out,” says Brown, who’s a registered nurse. “Why do they need to store my baby’s DNA indefinitely? Something on there could affect her ability to get a job later on, or get health insurance.”

According to the state of Minnesota’s Web site, samples are kept so that tests can be repeated, if necessary, and in case the DNA is ever need to help parents identify a missing or deceased child. The samples are also used for medical research.

Art Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, says he understands why states don’t first ask permission to screen babies for genetic diseases. “It’s paternalistic, but the state has an overriding interest in protecting these babies,” he says.

However, he added that storage of DNA for long periods of time is a different matter. “I don’t see any reason to do that kind of storage,” Caplan says. “If it’s anonymous, then I don’t care. I don’t have an issue with that. But if you keep names attached to those samples, that makes me nervous.”

DNA given to outside researchers
Genetic testing for newborns started in the 1960s with testing for diseases and conditions that, if undetected, could kill a child or cause severe problems, such as mental retardation. Since then, the screening has helped save countless newborns.

Over the years, many other tests were added to the list. Now, states mandate that newborns be tested for anywhere between 28 and 54 different conditions, and the DNA samples are stored in state labs for anywhere from three months to indefinitely, depending on the state. (To find out how long your baby’s DNA is stored, see this state-by-state list.)

Brad Therrell, who runs the federally funded genetic resource consortium, says parents don’t need to worry about the privacy of their babies’ DNA.

“The states have in place very rigid controls on those specimens,” Therrell says. “If my children’s DNA were in one of these state labs, I wouldn’t be worried a bit.”

The specimens don’t always stay in the state labs. They’re often given to outside researchers — sometimes with the baby’s name attached.

According to a study done by the state of Minnesota, more than 20 scientific papers have been published in the United States since 2000 using newborn blood samples.

The researchers do not have to have parental consent to obtain samples as long as the baby’s name is not attached, according to Amy Gaviglio, one of the authors of the Minnesota report. However, she says it’s her understanding that if a researcher wants a sample with a baby’s name attached, consent first must be obtained from the parents.

More Empowered Patient news and advice
Scientists have heralded this enormous collection of DNA samples as a “gold mine” for doing research, according to Gaviglio.

“This sample population would be virtually impossible to get otherwise,” says Gaviglio, a genetic counselor for the Minnesota Department of Health. “Researchers go through a very stringent process to obtain the samples. States certainly don’t provide samples to just anyone.”

Brown says that even with these assurances, she still worries whether someone could gain access to her baby’s DNA sample with Isabel’s name attached.

“I know the government says my baby’s data will be kept private, but I’m not so sure. I feel like my trust has been taken,” she says.

Parents don’t give consent to screening
Brown says she first lost trust when she learned that Isabel had received genetic testing in the first place without consent from her or her husband.

“I don’t have a problem with the testing, but I wish they’d asked us first,” she says.

Since health insurance paid for Isabel’s genetic screening, her positive test for a cystic fibrosis gene is now on the record with her insurance company, and the Browns are concerned this could hurt her in the future.

“It’s really a black mark against her, and there’s nothing we can do to get it off there,” Brown says. “And let’s say in the future they can test for a gene for schizophrenia or manic-depression and your baby tests positive — that would be on there, too.”

Brown says if the hospital had first asked her permission to test Isabel, now 10 months old, she might have chosen to pay for it out of pocket so the results wouldn’t be known to the insurance company.

Caplan says taking DNA samples without asking permission and then storing them “veers from the norm.”

“In the military, for instance, they take and store DNA samples, but they tell you they’re doing it, and you can choose not to join if you don’t like it,” he says.

What can parents do
In some states, including Minnesota and Texas, the states are required to destroy a baby’s DNA sample if a parent requests it. Parents who want their baby’s DNA destroyed are asked to fill out this form in Minnesota and this form in Texas.

Parents in other states have less recourse, says Therrell, who runs the genetic testing group. “You’d probably have to write a letter to the state saying, ‘Please destroy my sample,’” he says.

He adds, however, that it’s not clear whether a state would necessarily obey your wishes. “I suspect it would be very difficult to get those states to destroy your baby’s sample,” he says.

Bringing Virtual Objects into the Real World
If you own an iPhone, you are already using augmented reality with the application Monocle. By combining the phone’s camera view with tiny tags indicating the names, distances and user ratings of nearby bars, restaurants and stores, you are using augmented reality.

With video-see-through technology, AR hand-held devices such as tablet PC’s, PDA’s, or camera cell phones, (or in many cases just a webcam and our standard computer monitor), you hold the device up and “see through” the display to view both the real world and the superimposed virtual object. You can move around and see the virtual object, model, animation, or game from different views as the AR system performs alignment of the real and virtual cameras automatically. All you need is a computer, printer, and a webcam.

More at How Stuff Works

Breaking America’s Addiction to Oil

Imagine a world where super-efficient cars are desirable, affordable and everywhere…
where gasoline no longer makes history, but is history…

The $10 Million Dollar X Prize Competition
The X Prize Foundation is a public-private partnership that is conducting incentivized competitions to stimulate innovation in automotive, space and genomic technologies.

In 2004, the Foundation captured world headlines when Burt Rutan, backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, built and flew the world’s first private vehicle to space to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize.

Progressive Insurance, along with a $5.5 million grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, created the competition to inspire a new generation of viable, super fuel-efficient vehicles.

Competitor must design, build and race super-efficient vehicles that will achieve 100 MPG and produce less than 200 grams/mile CO2 emissions. They must be capable of being produced for the mass market.

43 teams will participate in the formal vehicle challenges, which will begin in the spring of 2010 and winners will be announced in September 2010.

The DOE contributed an additional $3.5 million award to fund a two-year national education program that engages students and the public in learning about advanced vehicle technologies, energy efficiency, climate change, alternative fuels and the science, technology, engineering and math behind efficient vehicle development.

According to UK scientists, the technique uses fluorescent markers which attach to dying cells that can be seen in the retina and give an early indication of brain cell death.

Research has been carried out on mice, with human trials ready to begin. The research, which is published in the journal, Cell Death and Disease, could enable scientists to overcome the difficulty of investigating what is happening inside the brains of those with Alzheimer’s. Currently the only tests we have are expensive MRI scans or post-mortems.

Fluorescent Dye
The new technique enables scientists to track the progress of brain disease by looking at dying cells in the retina, which show up as green dots. The dying and dead cells absorb the fluorescent dye.

So far research has only been carried out on mice, but scientists are optimistic that the technique can be translated to humans.

Professor Francesca Coredeiro, from University College London Institute of Ophthalmology said: “Few people realise that the retina is a direct, albeit thin, extension of the brain. It is entirely possible that in the future a visit to an optician to check on your eyesight will also be a check on the state of your brain.”

Dr. Coredeiro said she hopes that screening for Alzheimer’s will be available within five years.
The first clinical trials will begin by the end of2010.

Rebecca Wood, Chief Executive of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, said: “These findings have the potential to transform the way we diagnose Alzheimer’s, greatly enhancing efforts to develop new treatments and cures. If we spot Alzheimer’s in its earliest stages, we may be able to treat and reverse the progression of the disease as new treatments are developed.”

700,000 people in the UK live with Alzheimer’s and dementia, and that number is set to double within a generation unless scientists make rapid progress in their race for a cure.”

The Land Where Children Eat Mud
TimesOnline – By Alex von Tunzelmann

Haiti is mired in historic debt and in danger of complete collapse. It is stricken by flood and famine, and kidnap, rape and child abuse are rife. So what is the West doing to rescue the ‘nightmare republic’?

If you ever hear of Haiti, it is usually because of something frightening. It is famous for hurricanes, deforestation, poverty, drug smuggling, violence, dictatorships, voodoo and slavery. Half a century ago, when it was under the tyranny of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his “zombie” militia, Graham Greene called Haiti the “nightmare republic”. Though Papa Doc has long gone, the nightmares have never ended in this Caribbean dystopia. Haiti is the poorest country and only Third World nation in the western hemisphere, and it’s getting worse.

Two centuries ago, the political economist Robert Malthus postulated that a society in which the population grew too fast could reach a point where people simply could not be fed, leading to a total collapse. Over the past five years, Haiti has not only met but exceeded the conditions for a Malthusian catastrophe. The only things keeping the country from absolute disaster are imported food and charity. With a global economic crisis afoot, the question is how long that can be sustained. I had plenty of reservations about going to Haiti. It is a place born out of the darkest days of slavery: a country where white people have always been regarded, with some reason, as the enemy, and where, in some areas, half of all women and girls have been the victims of rape. 

I am a historian, not a foreign correspondent or aid worker, but I wanted to see for myself what life was like in this haunted nation. Notables including Ban Ki-moon, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton have visited Haiti in the past couple of months, highlighting the fact that the country is poised on the brink of what could be a humanitarian crisis of terrifying proportions.

In the 1960s, Papa Doc decorated the “Welcome to Haiti” sign at Port-au-Prince’s airport with the dismembered corpses of his enemies. At least they’ve taken those down. Instead there’s a calypso band playing for tips, and a swarm of hustling taxi drivers. Immediately I hear the epithet by which I will be known for the next week: la blanche, the white woman.

At the hotel in the relatively affluent suburb of Pétionville, there is a long list of rules. Don’t go out alone. Don’t walk more than two kilometres in any direction. Don’t go out after dark at all. If you hear gunshots, stay inside. Smile at the man toting an assault rifle who stands at the hotel entrance. He’s here for your protection.

Just why is Haiti in such a dire situation, so much worse than any other country in the Americas, and as bad as anywhere on Earth? Some blame the United Nations. Some blame the Americans. Some have theories about the collision of global warming with global capitalism. All are careful to point out that the Haitian elite deserves its reputation for being greedy, negligent and kleptocratic. “I think the Haitian people have been made to suffer by God,” Wilbert, a teacher, tells me, “but the time will come soon when we will be rewarded with Heaven.”

History tells a different story. The appalling state of the country is a direct result of having offended a quite different celestial authority — the French. France gained the western third of the island of Hispaniola — the territory that is now Haiti — in 1697. It planted sugar and coffee, supported by an unprecedented increase in the importation of African slaves. Economically, the result was a success, but life as a slave was intolerable. Living conditions were squalid, disease was rife, and beatings and abuses were universal. The slaves’ life expectancy was 21 years. After a dramatic slave uprising that shook the western world, and 12 years of war, Haiti finally defeated Napoleon’s forces in 1804 and declared independence. But France demanded reparations: 150m francs, in gold.

For Haiti, this debt did not signify the beginning of freedom, but the end of hope. Even after it was reduced to 60m francs in the 1830s, it was still far more than the war-ravaged country could afford. Haiti was the only country in which the ex-slaves themselves were expected to pay a foreign government for their liberty. By 1900, it was spending 80% of its national budget on repayments. In order to manage the original reparations, further loans were taken out — mostly from the United States, Germany and France. Instead of developing its potential, this deformed state produced a parade of nefarious leaders, most of whom gave up the insurmountable task of trying to fix the country and looted it instead. In 1947, Haiti finally paid off the original reparations, plus interest. Doing so left it destitute, corrupt, disastrously lacking in investment and politically volatile. Haiti was trapped in a downward spiral, from which it is still impossible to escape. It remains hopelessly in debt to this day.

Like all cities, Port-au-Prince has better and worse neighbourhoods. Unlike all cities, several of its worst neighbourhoods are declared conflict zones. Some slums are so dangerous that even the United Nations peacekeeping troops, who carry machineguns, do not venture in. The UN is not popular here. Peacekeepers are rumoured to have massacred unarmed slum-dwellers on several occasions. “A lot of people say the UN soldiers trade guns and drugs,” a Haitian student tells me while we walk around Champs de Mars, the park by the National Palace, a line of soldiers just in front of us. Many Haitians palpably mistrust foreigners. Pedestrians and peanut-sellers keep their eyes on me but stay back, as if I were a predator.

Just 10 minutes’ drive from the National Palace, past a cemetery filled with elaborate pastel-coloured tombs, is Carrefour Feuilles. A perilous stack of breeze blocks, filth and human misery teetering on the hills overlooking the bay, it is considered to be among the most dangerous and deprived of the city’s slums. The streets are too narrow and rutted to drive. I walk up steep paths in between shacks of mud and rusting corrugated iron. At every turn, the route is obstructed by heaps of discarded packaging, decomposing rubbish and human waste, over which goats and children crawl, foraging for food. In the blazing midday sun, the stench is hard to endure.

This is a place where you come face to face with Haiti’s industrial collapse. Unemployment, which hovers around 75% nationally, is higher here. Most people are illiterate, unskilled and unhealthy. The only vaguely legal option open to the majority of residents is to buy a few items of cheap produce, and sell them at a tiny profit in the markets. Unfortunately, the city’s recent effort to clean up the streets in the centre has meant that many of these traders have been kicked out. The remaining jobs open to them make an unappealing list: selling drugs, selling weapons, robbery, blackmail, prostitution and kidnapping. It is the kidnappings that make headlines.

For the gangs, in a country that produces virtually nothing, terror is one of the few reliable sources of income. Gang members ambush an ordinary person, usually someone unlikely to resist, such as a woman or a child. They saw off one of the victim’s fingers or an ear, and take it to the family, along with a demand for money. Even if the ransom is paid, the victim often ends up dead. At one point, kidnappings were reported five times a day. There was another peak in the first few months of 2008, but some arrests of gang leaders were made over the summer, and now the official statistics have stabilised at something closer to one incident every couple of days.

Foreigners have been targeted, which is why nobody will let me walk around on my own, but the greatest danger is to ordinary Haitians. Even slum-dwellers are often abducted and tortured by the gangs, sometimes for a ransom as little as the price of a cocktail in London.

“Parents in Carrefour Feuilles are happy when their son joins a gang,” one Haitian woman, who runs an anti-violence project, tells me. “They are also happy when their daughters become child prostitutes. It means the family can afford to eat.” Posters advocating sexual abstinence can be seen on every street. So far, they do not appear to be having much impact: population growth is rising. Haiti was considered unsustainably overcrowded in the 1950s, when the population was 3m. Now it is 9m. Survival is a daily effort, and these starving slum-dwellers will seize on any opportunity to earn money, however unpleasant.

The new idea from the UN and the US is Hope II, a programme that would give Haitian companies duty-free access to the American market for nine years. The focus is on agriculture and garment factories. A similar scheme has been running since 2006, and the results look good on paper: 3,000 jobs are said to have been created. On the street, though, the word is not good. Pay is subsistence level at best, and does not keep pace with food prices. Conditions are dangerous and unsanitary. Workers are charged for going to the toilet. Abuse is widespread.

There are people who argue that rich countries, too, once went through a stage of sweatshop labour, and that this is some sort of necessary purgatory on the road to improvement. It is an easy argument to make from a comfortable armchair in the home counties, but it is ahistorical. Haiti’s path of development has been completely different from those of the rich countries. The reason it has not become sustainable is that, for two centuries, rich countries and their banks have menaced almost all of its wealth out of it. For how much longer should the Haitians do penance?

The country’s problems were only exacerbated when, in 1957, François Duvalier became president. Exploiting Haitian beliefs in the traditions of voodoo (most Haitians still practise it today), he established a personal militia, the Tonton Macoutes, rumoured to be zombies he had raised from the dead, who soon gained a chilling reputation for rape and torture.

Papa Doc himself affected the style of Baron Samedi, the spirit of the dead, appearing in a black top hat and pinstriped suit. Reports from Haiti brought forth disgust from the developed world, but the protests did not turn into action. Instead of moving to condemn and remove these dictators, the world’s richest countries opened their chequebooks. In 1967, American-owned plantations in the Dominican Republic paid Papa Doc directly for rounding up 20,000 Haitians to work on their lands. In 1972, his son and heir, Baby Doc’s minister of the interior, was exposed for literally selling Haitian blood to private American hospitals: $3 a litre, no questions asked. During the Duvaliers’ combined 28 years in power, up to 60,000 Haitians were “disappeared” by the regime. The Duvaliers swindled international creditors and aid agencies for enormous sums. The American government, via various agencies and banks, lent millions to both dictators.

Though there was anger in Washington about the Duvaliers and their 80% rate of aid embezzlement, no action was taken to remove them until 1986. The Duvaliers were always happy to sign up to new loans, and to give lucrative contracts to American corporations. Most of the projects went nowhere. Haiti is littered with half-built and abandoned schools, hospitals, bridges and roads.

Most of the money lent to the Duvaliers found its way into private bank accounts. When Baby Doc fled, he took millions with him: estimates go as high as $900m. The debts incurred by the Duvaliers make up 45% of Haiti’s total current debt. None of the creditors finds the fact of their complicity a compelling argument for cancellation. Those creditors include the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, the IMF and the governments of the US and France.

Debt relief is at the discretion of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, run by the World Bank and the IMF. Haiti must meet certain conditions, including poverty reduction and inflation controls, before any debt can be written off. By international standards, the sums are small, but for Haiti they are enormous. The World Bank alone demands an estimated $1.6m a month.

On April 14, in a speech at a conference on Haiti’s social and economic development, Robert B Zoellick, president of the World Bank Group, announced: “We are working closely with the authorities and the IMF to help expedite debt cancellation while ensuring that monies released go directly to support poverty reduction.” At the spring meeting of the World Bank and the IMF less than two weeks later, Haiti was judged again as having failed to show sufficient progress towards macroeconomic stability to qualify for debt cancellation. In a surprise move, however, the US government stepped in to cover Haiti’s debt service payments for the rest of this year.

Undoubtedly, the American gift is a boon, and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton do seem to be making a genuine effort to help. Obama’s tax return for this year revealed a personal donation of $2,000 to a Christian organisation working in Haiti. Clinton has also announced that she will re-examine US policy on Haitian migrants. At the moment, unlike the Cuban refugees who are given asylum, Haitians are considered economic migrants, and are imprisoned and deported.

Haiti’s record on political freedom is far from spotless, though it is in theory now a democracy. The most popular party among the impoverished majority, Fanmi Lavalas, was banned from contesting elections this month on the grounds that its leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, did not meet a very short deadline unexpectedly imposed for signing the hard copy of his party’s lists. He could not have done so: he is in exile in South Africa, having been ousted in a highly controversial UN intervention in 2004. There is some hope Clinton will award temporary work permits to Haitian illegals in the US. “But, at the same time,” she added in her announcement, “we don’t want to encourage other Haitians to make the dangerous journey across the water.” Both George W Bush in 2004 and Bill Clinton in 1994 justified military intervention in Haiti, partially on the basis that unmanageable numbers of “boat people” were turning up on their shores. “There is only one solution to Haiti’s problems, and that’s mass emigration,” one senior American foreign-policy expert told me. “But nobody wants to talk about it.” So Haiti remains in debt, relieved for now, but not for ever. And the question of France repaying some or all of the compensation it extracted for Haitian independence is not even on the agenda.

The Artibonite valley is the rural heart of Haiti. The potholed road out of the capital runs north through miles of bleak marshland. We drive past Titayen, a dumping-ground for the bodies of people murdered by political groups or criminal gangs. The hot air is oppressive with the weight of storm clouds. Near the town of Cabaret is a tent-city full of refugees. On both sides of the road, houses are stoved in, with walls and roofs ripped off, and whole floors of concrete folded in on themselves like origami. This is the parting gift left by Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike, four storms that devastated Haiti in three weeks last summer. All around the valley rise high mountains. Fifty years ago, these were covered in dense tropical jungle. Now, there is nothing but brownish scrub. Eighty per cent of Haitians live below the poverty line, and cook on charcoal from scavenged wood. As the population has shot up, the forests have been cut down. Haiti is now 98% deforested. The roots of those trees held the land together. Now, every time a hurricane hits Haiti, the rains and floods sweep topsoil and soft clay from these hills down to the valleys and the coast. Arable land is stripped back to barren rubble, while whole towns such as Gonaives — until last August a city of 250,000 people — are buried under sludge.

At a nearby village, Robuste, dozens of excited children ambush me. Not many strangers come here, and they are intrigued. Even in the middle of horrific poverty, the people have not lost their sense of humour. I raise my camera to take a picture, and an old woman immediately begins weeping and howling. Shocked, I lower the camera, and she points at me and roars with laughter. It was a joke, and a clever one: she was satirising the usual news-agency photos. But most of the devastation here is all too real. In the hurricanes, half the houses in Robuste were washed away.

The village pastor takes me into his church, a comfortless hall in which over 200 refugees have been sleeping rough. One woman lies here, suffering from unidentified sickness in the aftermath of the floods. There is no doctor. Her year-old baby is left unattended on the concrete floor. He crawls up to me, wide-eyed. Slavery did not end with the revolution. A grim fate awaits many of the children in Robuste. When destitute Haitian families cannot feed their children, they send them to the towns. There are 300,000 such children in Haiti, around 10% of the entire child population. They are known as restaveks — a Creole word from the French rester avec, to stay with. Host families provide restaveks with food, clothing, shelter and in some cases education, in return for having the child work as a servant. Often these children are beaten, sexually abused, starved, denied medical treatment. In a couple of years the baby in front of me could be given up to this modern form of slavery. Restaveks as young as three have been found in Port-au-Prince. His mother rolls over in her sleep. She looks desperately ill. Soon, nobody in this village will have enough to eat. At that point the sending away of their children will begin.

Even before the hurricanes hit, Haiti was in the grip of a food crisis. A year ago, when the price of rice soared across the world, Haitians began to starve. There were confirmed reports of people being reduced to eating dirt. Cookies made of mud mixed with vegetable oil were all they could scrape together. In the slums of Port-au-Prince, Oxfam is funding community restaurants in an attempt to provide something more nutritious. People bring tin pots and pay 10 gourdes (16p) to have them filled with rice, beans and vegetables. It is thought that charging a small sum preserves people’s dignity, and avoids giving them the impression that they can rely on hand-outs.

The restaurant is at a busy intersection, surrounded by a huge mass of people, mostly young men, shouting, banging their tin pots and jostling to get to the front. Food riots are common.

A little boy of about eight wanders up to us. He looks even thinner and more nervous than the other children, and is barefoot, dressed in a worn-out black string vest and threadbare shorts. Ian, Oxfam’s British press officer, is good with children. He leans down, smiles and shakes the boy’s hand. The boy wanders back to join the people waiting for food. He goes to a woman in her late thirties. “Get away from me!” she screams at him, smacking him across the face. “You shook hands with the blanc! Koko rat!” The crowd gasps. The name she has called him is one of the strongest insults in Creole, literally a crude expression for the genitals of a female rat, but the implication is worse. The woman means that the little boy is a traitor. Ian is aghast, but of course it’s not his fault. The little boy runs off. Moments later, he appears beside me again. He looks lost, and wears an expression of unbearable sadness. He had a tin bowl before, but it has gone. “Where’s his bowl?” I ask my Creole translator. She asks him. “Someone took it from him.” “We’ve got to find him another one,” I say. “He hasn’t had any food yet.” “There aren’t any around,” she replies.

It’s true. Nobody has a spare, and everyone here needs to eat. Just down the street, market stalls display mouldy vegetables and half-rotten meat crawling with flies. Even rotting food is too expensive for most slum-dwellers. By now the crowd is getting seriously aggressive. Men are shoving each other, and punches are thrown. The organiser hurries back to us. “We have to leave. Now.” At another roadside stall I see a painting of a pregnant Haitian woman crying tears of blood, while demonic white babies with sharpened teeth scramble to suckle from her breasts.

Graham Greene’s “nightmare republic” has become a literal fact. The next morning I board a bus to make the long journey through the mountains to Santo Domingo, the capital of the neighbouring Dominican Republic. Driving through Haiti, there are almost no trees to be seen. The roads are lined with scrub, thorns and piles of refuse. At the exact point of the border line, the world surges back into life. Suddenly the road is thick with towering mature trees, their branches heavy with lush green leaves, fat blossoms, singing birds. It is beautiful but heartbreaking, a reminder, if any were necessary, that things need not be as they are.

The facts

• last year’s hurricanes devastated more than 70% of Haiti’s agricultural land

• more than 80% of the population lives on less than £2 a day

• some 3.8% of the population is HIV-positive, according to Save the Children; among them 17,000 minors. Medical provisions are scarce. There is one doctor for every 3,000 patients.

• life expectancy at birth is 61 years. The survival rate of newborns

is the lowest in the western hemisphere. One-third are born underweight.

There are 80 deaths per 1,000 live births. The mortality rate for children under five is 120 in 1,000

The Mojave Phone Booth
Life, in general, is more complicated and we seem to spend more time fixing things that are suppose to make my life easier – and less time enjoying them.

15 years ago we never really thought about talking on the phone while we were driving. If we needed to make a call we looked for a phone booth and pulled over. Simple.

Blackberry
Now we have cell phones. Cell phones are great because you don’t have to stop the car and get out to make a call. Simple.

For the past couple of years I contemplated getting a Blackberry. My thinking was that it would simplify my life if I had a phone/camera/email/internet/text device all rolled into one.

Ordering the phone and service plan was simple. Setting up the account (using the land line) not so much. It took 2 hours.

Programming the damn thing took another 3 hours. After my 5 hour ordeal I had a headache and was on “tiny-type overload” from trying to read the instructions on the 2.5 inch screen. Simple? Not so much.

Remember When Flying was Fun?
Remember when half the fun of travel was getting there? Most of us can still remember when people actually dressed up to get on a plane. Food was served on china plates – even in coach, and the flight attendants – stewardesses, were young and good looking. The changes started long before 9-11. It was gradual, but things started going downhill with discrimination lawsuits. Political correctness began taking control and the first noticeable change came with the age lawsuits. By the mid 1980’s, half the flight attendants were sharing pictures of their grandchildren! The sex discrimination really wasn’t a big deal. The hiring of male flight attendants was really a non-event. Female pilots, again, no big thing.

The latest challenge to the status quo came about last year when Delta and Northwest merged. In a little reported issue, there has been much deliberation going on regarding flight attendant’s uniforms. Delta hired designer Richard Tyler to redesign its attendants uniforms, which debuted 2006.

Richard Tyler’s designs have graced many Hollywood stars, including Julia Roberts, Heather Locklear and Jamie Lee Curtis. His designs for Delta promised a classier — and in some cases, sexier — look for flight attendants, airport agents and other workers.” The collection includes a navy blue pant suit and the signature red dress. So what’s the problems, you ask?

Size Matters
The navy blue pant suits are provided up to size 28. The red dresses are provided up to size 18.

The AFL-CIO CWA said the dresses had to be offered up to size 28. The union says it’s discriminatory if they don’t allow larger sized women to wear any uniform available. The airline and the union are in mediation.

Enjoy Michael Bublé singing Come Fly with Me:

Balochistan
According to renowned nuclear scientist, Dr. Samar Mubarakmand, Pakistan has gold and copper reserves worth trillions of dollars in Balochistan Province. The province is also rich in gas, oil and coal.

From Pepe Escobar’s Asia Times article, Rebranding the Long War:
“Balochistan is totally under the radar of Western corporate media. But not the Pentagon’s. An immense desert comprising almost 48% of Pakistan’s area, rich in uranium and copper, potentially very rich in oil, and producing more than one-third of Pakistan’s natural gas.

Strategically, Balochistan is mouth-watering: east of Iran, south of Afghanistan, and boasting three Arabian sea ports, including Gwadar, practically at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz.

Gwadar – a port built by China – is the absolute key. It is the essential node in the crucial, ongoing, and still virtual Pipelineistan war between IPI and TAPI. IPI is the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, also known as the “peace pipeline”, which is planned to cross from Iranian to Pakistani Balochistan – an anathema to Washington. TAPI is the perennially troubled, US-backed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline, which is planned to cross western Afghanistan via Herat and branch out to Kandahar and Gwadar. Washington’s dream scenario is Gwadar as the new Dubai.

Pakistan as a key transit corridor to either Iranian gas from the monster South Pars field or a great deal of the Caspian wealth of “gas republic” Turkmenistan. “

It’s All About the Pipeline
Just like Iraq, the money/power is using American troops and American taxpayer money to clear the way for the international corporations to go into Pakistan for their own benefit. When we see who sets up business in the area in the future we will see who really gives the Pentagon and the politicians their marching orders.

From the Same Duo that Brought You the Fannie Mae Failure

“In January, Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank will propose universal voter registration. What is universal voter registration? It means all of the state laws on elections will be overriden by a federal mandate. The feds will tell the states: ‘take everyone on every list of welfare that you have, take everyone on every list of unemployed you have, take everyone on every list of property owners, take everyone on every list of driver’s license holders and register them to vote regardless of whether they want to be…” – John Fund, WSJ

What the Dems know that we don’t: Universal Voter Registration
By James Simpson – DC Examiner
Many are puzzled that Democrats persist in ramming unpopular and destructive legislation down our collective throats while seemingly unconcerned by their plummeting poll numbers. A widespread belief is that the Democrats are committing political suicide and will be swept from one or both houses of Congress with unprecedented electoral losses next November. But since Democrat politicians rarely do things that will not ultimately benefit themselves, this column asked two weeks ago: “what do they know that we don’t?”
We may have found out. It’s called universal voter registration.
Read the whole story here.