"Hoppy" Leap Day from Toasterhead's Jihadosphere!

Panamanian Golden Frog Photo by Jeff Kubina

This February 29th, there's a lot more to commemorate than Dennis Farina's 16th birthday. That's because 2008 has been declared the Year of the Frog by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and other organizations. According to the Wildlife Conservation Society, 120 species of frogs have gone extinct since 1980, most recently the Panamanian golden frog, and half of the world's 6,000 frog species are endangered.

The AZA explains the full extent of the problem:

The combined effect of habitat destruction, climate change, pollution, and Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis cannot be addressed solely in the wild. Captive assurance populations have become the only hope for many species faced with imminent extinction and are an important component of an integrated conservation effort. AZA-accredited zoos and aquariums, with their demonstrated expertise in endangered species breeding programs, have been called upon to meet this conservation challenge.

The World Conservation Union has classified four amphibians in the U.S. to be critically endangered, the Mississippi gopher frog, the Chiricahua leopard frog, the mountain yellow-legged frog, and the Wyoming toad. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has listed thirty-seven amphibian species under the Endangered Species Act. AZA-accredited zoos and aquariums may be their only hope for survival.

Africa to WTO: Enough With The Liberalising Already, Sheesh!

ActionAid is urging World Trade Organization leaders to quit pushing harmful "aid-for-trade" deals on developing countries. According to ActionAid, deals such as the Duty-Free, Quota-Free market access deal proposed at the 2005 WTO ministerial in Hong Kong would actually cost developing countries some $15 billion in potential trade.

Aftab Alam Khan, head of ActionAid's Trade Justice campaign, said: "From the start of this process, rich countries have talked about development but never delivered.

"Even when they announced a 'development package' at the last big WTO meeting it turned out to be a small carrot attached to a huge stick - a cynical attempt to get poor countries to sign up to a damaging deal."

Colina Group Death Squads Describe Barrios Altos Massacre

The Amnesty International blog today has a chilling translation of an article in La República from the trial of former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori. Colina members describe their roles in the infamous Barrios Altos Massacre of November 3, 1991

"So all the agents had already left, but Wilmer Yalenqué [Sub-Group Leader] was taking a long time, and I entered to see what was happening. I found him shooting the victims over again and, at that moment, he killed the little boy when he tried to protect his father. Upon arriving back at La Tiza Beach, I had strong words with Yarlequé. I asked why he killed the boy . . . . The response that he gave me was that the kid would grow up and would want to take revenge.

"Who gave the order to kill? If the order had not been followed, heads would have rolled for Martin Rivas' mistake at Barrios Altos. But since they didn't do anything, it had to have been approved by Rivero Lazo [Director of Military Intelligence], General Hermoza Ríos [General Commander of the Army], and him, the accused [Fujimori]."--Julio Chuqui Aguirre

Development 2.0: Where Relentless Innovation Meets Relentless Reality

The recent trend in online philanthropy of Development 2.0 sites such as Kiva, Network for Good, and GlobalGiving has tremendous potential to harness the power of the long tail to radically transform global development. But only if they can overcome a very Development 1.0 problem - evaluating their results.

This is the finding of a new study by the Aspen Institute. The study finds that while online philanthropy markets can reach a new donor base, establish long-term donor-recipient relations, and shift giving from immediate relief to sustainable development, there is not yet a uniformly-reliable system for evaluating the effectiveness of the programs funded. The authors suggest a very Web 2.0 solution:

To accelerate progress on these issues, the markets could establish a ‘performance data commons’ to enable a pooling of data on performance, donor behaviour, and other key data points. Fostered by an independent broker, such a commons could allow markets to compare the success of their own offerings to those of other giving platforms. The performance data commons could make a significant contribution to a global conversation about performance, its ends and underlying norms and standards. In addition, once a critical mass of data was formed, the commons could allow long-term analysis to see what capabilities turn out to correlate to actual performance, helping to identify present capabilities that best predict future impact.

Ceasefire Signed in Uganda

Peace talks in Juba, Sudan, between the Lord's Resistance Army and the Ugandan government have yielded a permanent ceasefire, according to the Kampala Sunday Monitor. A final peace agreement is expected next week. If this holds it could mark the end of the twenty-year Ugandan Civil War that has displaced 1.7 million people and seen as many as 66,000 children abducted by the LRA and used as combatants or sex slaves.

Smoking May Kill 100 Lakh (One Million) Indians Per Year in the Next Decade

A new study of the smoking habits of Indian households finds that smoking is the cause of death in one-in-five Indian men and one-in-20 Indian women. Published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, the study used population projections to predict that these deaths may top one million per year in the 2010s. It also found that one third of men and five percent of women smoke either cigarettes or bidis, and that many of the individuals who died from smoking were illiterate and/or from rural areas.

Smoking has become an epidemic in the developing world, according to a recent World Health Organization report, as tobacco companies have begun shifting their marketing efforts away from high-income countries with restrictive regulations. There already are one billion smokers in the world, and is a risk factor for six of the eight leading causes of death globally.

Iyuski Apetu Makoce Iyapi Huku!

Happy International Mother Language Day!

Today marks the ninth annual commemoration of International Mother Language Day and the start of the International Year of Languages.

Vital carriers of the identity of groups and individuals, languages are not all treated as equals. It is estimated that more than 50% of some 6,700 languages spoken in the world are threatened with extinction in the long term, and on the average of every two weeks, a language ceases to be spoken. According to experts, 96% of languages are spoken by only 4% of the population.

Although the situation for endangered languages seems grim, there is some hope on the horizon. Organizations such as the Living Tongues Institute are working to document and preserve endangered languages in language hotspots around the world, producing grammatical texts and story books.

A Recipient-Eye View of Foreign Aid

Does foreign aid work?

This is the question CDA Collaborative Learning Projects hopes to accomplish with The Listening Project. This project is sending teams of researchers to interview individuals in recipient societies and learn their views on recent aid projects. Delving deeper than the usual Monitoring and Evaluation reports, this project aims to interview not just project stakeholders, but others in the communities affected by aid projects.

Water, Water Everywhere? Burkina Faso to Find Out

A new geographic information system will help the landlocked West African country of Burkina Faso improve access to clean water, according to an article in the latest SDI-Africa newsletter. The system will build upon Ouagadougou's current water information database using sophisticated mapping tools to estimate the population covered by each well in the country and predict future damand trends. As the article points out, this project has a considerable chance of success in Burkina Faso due to the country's already existing database, a factor which may help this new GIS from becoming an expensive, sophisticated, and completely useless tool.

The State of the Oceans (in Lovely Shades of Puke)

A coalition of researchers has created a Global Map of Human Impacts to Marine Ecosystems, and the results are quite stomach-turning indeed. Combining maps of 17 different human activities with maps of 14 types of ecosystem, the scientists calculated the cumulative ecological impact in all the world's oceans, and found that very few parts are unaffected by human activity. From the pea-soup spew of the eastern Pacific to the lobster bisque upchuck of the north Atlantic to the bleeding-ulcer red of the English Channel and the South China Sea, human impact is evident nearly everywhere. The results were discussed in more detail in the February 25 issue of Science and on last week's Science Friday.

International Conference on Cluster Bombs Opens

The Wellington Conference on Cluster Munitions has opened in Wellington, New Zealand, with the aim of producing an international treaty on Happy Fun Machines. This conference is the fourth step in the Oslo Process towards an international ban on the weapons, which pose devastating consequences for civilian populations in and around the areas targeted. Cluster bomb victim Soraj Ghulab Habib of Afghanistan discussed these consequences in one of the opening addresses:

I ask you, please, stop for a moment and reflect on the effects that cluster munitions have on people and communities. Myself, I have lost both my legs and one finger because of an American made submunition, a BLU 97.

I have been through a double amputation and since the age of 10 I am a wheelchair user. I have been through pain, suffering and exclusion. I face all sorts of barriers, material and immaterial, that prevents me the full participation in community life.

Cluster munitions prevented me to go to school, play with kids, do social activities.

Cluster munitions destroyed my dreams.

People laugh at me and have a negative attitude vis-à-vis me. They see me as a begger. They pity me. So do you still want to talk to me about transition periods or interoperability? Do you still want to talk to me about exceptions? Please stay focused on what is really important. I ask you to work for the strongest possible victim assistance provisions and to make sure that those provisions are urgently implemented.

UN Study: Shipping Worse Than We Thought

A new UN study leaked to the Guardian estimates that carbon emissions from the global shipping industry are almost three times greater than previously thought. Annual emissions from the world's merchant fleet total 1.12 billion tons per year - almost double the emissions from the airline industry, and about 4.5% of total global emissions. The new study calculated not just the total purchases of low-grade bunker fuel, but also engine size and the amount of time spent at sea.

Until now, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated shipping emissions to be a maximum 400m tonnes, but the new draft report by a group of international scientists is a more sophisticated measure, using data collected from the oil and shipping industries for the International Maritime Organisation, the UN agency tasked with monitoring pollution from ships. It not only shows emissions are much worse than feared, but warns CO₂emissions are set to rise by a further 30% by 2020.

Contacted about the contents of the report, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, said: "This is a clear failure of the system. The shipping industry has so far escaped publicity. It has been left out of the climate change discussion. I hope [shipping emissions] will be included in the next UN agreement. It would be a cop-out if it was not. It tells me that we have been ineffective at tackling climate change so far."

Just How Sweet Are Those Sweets For Your Sweetheart?

Happy Valentine's Day! We at Toasterhead's Jihadosphere are proud to celebrate this holiday by completely bumming you out.

Why? Because that heart-shaped box of chocolates you're buying for your sweetheart or receiving from your sweetheart or buying yourself and proceeding to consume by yourself while sitting on the couch watching The Princess Bride over and over and over just might have been produced by child labor.

In fact, it's quite likely. According to a report published recently in Fortune and reported on today's Democracy Now, despite voluntary efforts by the cocoa industry to end child labor in West Africa, origin of 70% of the world's cocoa, the practice is still widespread. A 2002 report by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture estimated that 284,000 children were working on cocoa farms in West Africa, often in hazardous conditions. Many of these children had no relative living near them, indicating possible trafficking. The situation since 2002 has so far failed to improve.

There is hope, however, thanks to the increasing availability of fair-trade chocolate and the power of concerned individuals to take action.

Poverty, Human Rights, and Landlessness in Cambodia

A new report by Amnesty International documents the plight of the landless poor in Cambodia, who live under constant threat of forced evictions with very little legal recourse. In sharp contrast to the government's stated pro-poor labor policies, an estimated 150,000 Cambodians live at risk of forced eviction.

Many of these mass evictions are conducted in the name of urban beautification, such as the displacement of over 30,000 slum-dwellers in Pnom Penh since 2003. While this removal of unsightly slums may help the bureoning tourism industry, it presents dire consquences for the thousands of Cambodians whose lives and livelihoods are disrupted by the mass evictions.

This is not just an urban problem - the number of landless rural households have grown in the past decade to almost 20%, with the poorest households having the least protection from forced eviction. From the Amnesty International report:

Linked to the problem of landlessness is the lack of security of tenure, particularly among people living in poverty. The likelihood of obtaining a secure land title increases with income: in 2004, among the poorest fifth of the population, only 40 percent had documentation to prove ownership, whereas around 60 percent of the richest fifth held such documentation. Although the perception of traditional possession rights remains strong and may provide a degree of tenure security despite the lack of documentation, it is specifically among the vulnerable, poorer households living on land contested by the state, that lack of legal title leads to insecure tenure.

News Flash: Antarctica Is Iceful

So if you've been dabbling in the enviro-political internettery for a while, you may have heard a science denier or two try to refute the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global climate change with the argument that, despite the efforts of indie-rock all-stars Nunatak to heat things up, the amount of Antarctic sea ice is increasing rather than decreasing. It's a compelling argument for those who dislike the complexities of science - global warming means that every single point on the globe must be warming, right?

Well, no.

As RealClimate explains today, this is not news to climate scientists. In fact, it's been predicted by climate change models for several decades:

When the first rudimentary models of climate change were developed in the early 1970s, some modelers pointed out that as the increase of greenhouse gases added heat to the atmosphere, much of the energy would be absorbed into the upper layer of the oceans. While the water was warming up, the world’s perception of climate change would be delayed. Up to this point most calculations had started with a doubled CO₂ level and figured out how the world’s temperature would look in equilibrium. But in the real world, when the rising level of gas reached that point the system would still be a long way from equilibrium. “We may not be given a warning until the CO₂ loading is such that an appreciable climate change is inevitable,” a National Academy of Sciences panel warned in 1979.(

Abu Dhabi Breaks Ground on Carbon-Free City

The emirate of Abu Dhabi has embarked on an ambitous $22-billion project to build a zero-carbon, zero-waste, car-free city. Masdar City, which shares a name with the frustratingly complex gerund tense, will be powered entirely by renewable energy sources and is expected to be funded primarily by outside investors. The completed city will house 50,000 residents, 1,500 businesses, and the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology (Mist), the world's first graduate school dedicated to renewable energy.

The Corporate Line of Defense

In a frightening echo of two of the defining characteristics of fascism, the FBI has now deputized over 23,000 business leaders with shoot-to-kill authority in a national emergency, according to a report on Democracy Now.

A Collection of Great Love Songs

This Week!
This week on Dance, You Fools! For This Is Club Toasterhead! we celebrate Valentine's Day with a collection of great love songs. Or songs that are just love-ish.

• Salif Keita – Ana Na Ming
• Logan Whitehurst & The Jr. Science Club – Calculator Love
• Souad Massi – Enta Dari
• Built to Spill – The Weather
• Dan Bern – Rolling Away
• Louis Jordan – Knock Me a Kiss
• Buddy Guy – I Found a True Love
• Iron & Wine – Love and Some Verses
• Simon & Garfunkel – Cecilia
• Seu Jorge – Una Mujer
• Marc Broussard – The Beauty of Who You Are
• Stevie Ray Vaughan – Lenny
• Louis Prima – Buona Sera
• New Orleans Jazz Vipers – Them There Eyes
• Otis Redding – That's How Strong My Love Is
• No More Kings – About Schroeder
• Erin McKeown – Rhode Island is Famous for You
• Buena Vista Social Club – Dos Gardenias
• Albert King – Phone Booth

Saving The Planet, One Shit At A Time

A new power plant in China's Inner Mongolia region is using an innovative alternative energy source to generate 30,000 kilowatt-hours per day: cow shit.

The power plant, built by China's biggest milk producer, Mengniu Daily, captures methane from the waste products of 10,000 cows on Mengniu's farms. In addition to electricity, the plant also produces irrigation water, heating for Mengniu's farm facilities, and 200,000 tons of organic fertilizer per year.

Methane capture has the potential to solve two problems - it provides a renewable energy source, and helps remove one of the largest greenhouse gases from the atmosphere:

Methane gas is the second-largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide after carbon dioxide. An adult cow emits 80 to 110 kilograms of the gas over its lifetime. Worldwide, 1.2 billion large ruminants, including cows, produce an estimated 80 million tons of methane annually, accounting for some 28 percent of global methane emissions from human-related activities, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In total, the livestock sector is responsible for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Happy New Year!

恭喜发财

Happy Year of the Rat! May you make lots of money!

Sierra Leone Seeks To Ban Female Genital Mutilation

Just in time for the International Day of Zero Tolerance to FGM, Social Welfare Minister of Sierra Leone has expressed her government's commitment to ban the harmful practice. Female circumcision affects 35-40% of women in the country and up to 140 million women worldwide, and is often erroneously believed to be a requirement of Islamic or Christian doctrine.

Why Nuclear Is Not An Option

In recent years, many pundits and even countries (Iran, I'm looking in your direction) have proposed the use of nuclear power as a carbon-free power alternative. Co-op America offers a list of reasons why nuclear is not an option.

1. Nuclear waste -- The waste from nuclear power plants will be toxic for humans for more than 100,000 years.
   
2. Nuclear proliferation – In discussing the nuclear proliferation issue, Al Gore said, “During my 8 years in the White House, every nuclear weapons proliferation issue we dealt with was connected to a nuclear reactor program.”
   
3. National Security – Nuclear reactors represent a clear national security risk, and an attractive target for terrorists. In researching the security around nuclear power plants, Robert Kennedy, Jr. found that there are at least eight relatively easy ways to cause a major meltdown at a nuclear power plant.
   
4. Accidents – Forget terrorism for a moment, and remember that mere accidents – human error or natural disasters – can wreak just as much havoc at a nuclear power plant site. The Chernobyl disaster forced the evacuation and resettlement of nearly 400,000 people, with thousands poisoned by radiation.
   
5. Cancer -- There are growing concerns that living near nuclear plants increases the risk for childhood leukemia and other forms of cancer – even when a plant has an accident-free track record.
   
6. Not enough sites – Scaling up to 17,000 – or 2,500 or 3,000 -- nuclear plants isn’t possible simply due to the limitation of feasible sites. Nuclear plants need to be located near a source of water for cooling, and there aren’t enough locations in the world that are safe from droughts, flooding, hurricanes, earthquakes, or other potential disasters that could trigger a nuclear accident.
   
7. Not enough uranium – Even if we could find enough feasible sites for a new generation of nuclear plants, we’re running out of the uranium necessary to power them.
   
8. Costs – Due to dwindling sites and uranium resources, each successive new nuclear power plant will only see its costs rise, with taxpayers and consumers ultimately paying the price.
   
9. Private sector unwilling to finance – Due to all of the above, the private sector has largely chosen to take a pass on the financial risks of nuclear power, which is what led the industry to seek taxpayer loan guarantees from Congress in the first place.
   
10. No time – We have the next ten years to mount a global effort against climate change. It simply isn’t possible to build 17,000 – or 2,500 or 17 for that matter – in ten years.

Report: Israeli Cluster Bombs Violated International Law

An Israeli committee of inquiry appointed to investigate the 2006 war against Lebanon finds that Israel's use of over four million cluster bomblets in populated areas violated Israeli and international law. The committee, led by retired judge Eliyahu Winograd, found that 90 percent of these 4 million Good Time Capsules were fired during the last few days of the war, when it was clear that a cease-fire would soon be announced. Since the end of the war in September 2006, at least thirty people have been killed and over 200 injured in Lebanon by unexploded bombs.

An important announcement from Toasterhead's Jihadosphere

Go Giants!

HRW: Beware of the Democracy Charade

Human Rights Watch has released its World Report 2008, highlighting human rights abuses in more than 75 countries. In addition to the usual suspects - China, Israel, Sudan, Burma, and the United States - this year's report documents worldwide electoral abuses. From outright fraud in Kazakhstan and Nigeria to opposition-blocking in Iran and Belarus to violence in Cambodia and the DRC, a great number of governments are regularly violating domestic and international law and making their democracy a mere charade. From HRW's press release:

States claiming the mantle of democracy, including Kenya and Pakistan, should guarantee the human rights that are central to it, including the rights to free expression, assembly and association, as well as free and fair elections. But in 2007 too many governments, including Bahrain, Jordan, Nigeria, Russia and Thailand, acted as if simply holding a vote is enough to prove a nation “democratic,” and Washington, Brussels and European capitals played along, Human Rights Watch said. The Bush administration has spoken of its commitment to democracy abroad but often kept silent about the need for all governments to respect human rights.

Warning: Dutch Disease May Be Contagious

A new study of fiscal and exchange-rate policy in Zambia from the International Poverty Centre examines the effect of IMF-mandated neoclassical trade policies in a period of currency appreciation. In the mid-2000s, a rise in demand for copper, Zambia's primary export, caused the Zambian Kwacha to appreciate rapidly. This then sparked fears that Zambia was catching the Dutch Disease, a production shift to the booming market that causes a lag in other industries.