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POPSMutating vaccine causes polio outbreak in Nigeria The agency discussed the first 16 cases it knew of at meetings early this year and posted information on its Web site in April, "but only in places where lab people would look," he said. Outbreaks of vaccine-derived polio are unusual but not unheard of. Individual cases have been known for years. For example, a former lieutenant governor of Virginia was partly paralyzed in 1973, apparently after changing the diapers of his son, who had received an oral vaccine. The first spreading outbreak of a vaccine-derived strain, in which 22 children were paralyzed, was detected in 2001 in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Experts now believe that another took place in Egypt in the late 1980s but went unnoticed amid the much larger numbers of wild-type infections. There have been others in the Philippines, Madagascar, China and Indonesia.
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POPSThere are more Slaves Today Than at Any Time in Human History
During the four years that Benjamin Skinner researched modern-day slavery, he posed as a buyer at illegal brothels on several continents, interviewed convicted human traffickers in a Romanian prison and endured giardia, malaria, and dengue. But Skinner is most haunted by his experience in a brothel in Bucharest, Romania, where he was offered a young woman with Down syndrome in exchange for a used car. We in America are not affected by this, right? On average, every half-hour, one more person will have been trafficked to the US into slavery. About 14,000-17,000 are trafficked into the U.S. each year and forced to work within U.S. borders under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence. Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking and Free the Slaves both work to bring attention to this modern day horror. Barack Obama is still setting his foreign policy agenda. He needs to hear from all of us that the true abolition of slavery needs to be a part of his legacy.
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POPSThe Fog-catchers more: FogQuest, a Canadian charity that promotes fog net technology, has been involved in dozens of projects across South America as well as Israel, Nepal, Haiti and even in the deserts of Namibia. In Peru a string of nets have recently been erected on the slopes above Lima. Rain rarely falls on the Peruvian capital or the surrounding hills where many of its poorest citizens live, forcing the population to get water from Andes glaciers many miles away. But the glaciers are shrinking, prompting fears of serious water shortages. As in other parts of the world where unscrupulous water suppliers are squeezing supply, local people in Lima are being forced to pay up to six times the usual price for unclean water brought in by lorry.
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POPSBill Made Her Do It * No cruel remarks about how the Chicago native who spent most of her adult life in Arkansas got elected to the Senate from New York, please.
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POPSThe Obama opiate: Crisis deepens, crowds cheer
"The destabilization of Iran, a product of massive US covert operations (and overt political manipulation) continues unabated, built upon the pretext of “restoring democracy”—a “stolen election” hoax, and an aggressive “color revolution” spearheaded by Anglo-American surrogates, aspiring puppets, and hordes of intelligence assets and so-called “liberals” touting “democracy”. The Iranian corridor remains critical, for the control of Central Asian and Middle East energy, and the Anglo-American empire is intent upon controlling it. A blatant coup in Honduras has been carried out in the classic fashion, according to the same intelligence playbook that has been at the core of US-Latin America policy since the Iran-Contra era; the same destabilization tactics used in recent years to topple the governments of Venezuela and Haiti. Domestically, Obama has endorsed the continued surveillance of the American people, and an even more ironclad electronic police state. While the average Ameri
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POPSNOAH When your voice isn't being heard you have to make a louder sound.
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POPSAmerican Ingenuity in Haiti
Frankly, I was taken aback when, 10 minutes after they had met me, they pulled out a Ziploc bag and proudly declared that it was compost made from their own toilet. They were so impressed with what they had accomplished that I felt obliged to take a whiff and hold it in my fingers; it simply felt and smelled like rich potting soil, and I would never have guessed its origins. Haitian farmers use virtually no fertilizer — less than a pound per acre, compared with about 90 pounds in the United States — and soils are severely depleted. But Sasha calculates that if half of Haitians’ human waste could be used as fertilizer, that would amount to a 17-fold increase in fertilizer use, more than doubling the country’s agricultural production. Sasha and Sarah have deployed 45 of their toilets, and now they are trying to introduce a municipal composting system in Cap Haitien. I don’t know if this is feasible. But I love the idea that even when the needs of the United States are so immense
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