Former Pres. Jonathan announced periodically that breakthroughs were being made in gaining the girls’ freedom but little action was seen. Reports of soldiers fleeing towns that they were tasked to defend made me wonder if they were cowardly. News has been trickling out that the soldiers were issued with scant ammunition and other weapons and had no tools to fight the well-armed terrorists.
Money for the purchase of helicopters, fighter jets, bombs and ammunition is missing. Recent video footage taken surreptitiously by an enlisted man shows the soldiers training in bare or sandaled feet, no uniforms and no weapons. Thousands of needless Nigerian deaths would have been avoided" if the money had been properly spent, Femi Adesina, an adviser to President Muhammadu Buhari, said in a statement on Tuesday. Al Jazeera Nigeria should be a wealthy country. It has been a major supplier of petroleum from the fields at the mouth of the Niger River Delta. Instead, those living in the Delta area are coping with the loss of livelihood from the widespread pollution. Endemic corruption by those in power has diverted billions of dollars into private hands. The sums are staggering. As much as $150 billion may have been stolen in the past decade. [Who or what is Boko Haram? Boko Haram is a militant extremist group that opposes any political or social activity that may be viewed as Western. This is why women or girls in the process of being educated are sometimes a target. The Islamist group or sect, Boko Haram, was founded by Mohammed Yusuf in 2002 but he was killed by authorities in 2009. The group reformed and in the last few years have escalated violence once again.] Sources: Al Jazeera The Telegraph
0 Comments
A road project with Uganda showed a USD $300 thousand difference in the per kilometre costs, much to the Ugandan officials chagrin.
Now Kagame’s methods have spawned a nickname – Kagamercracy. The recently elected Tanzania president, John Pombe Maqufuli, has taken a page from Kagame and has paid surprise visits to institutions and begun to get a handle on questionable spending by government employees. In order to bring Rwanda into the 21st electronic community, he instituted a law that requires new city buildings to be wired for fibre optics. The following is an excerpt from News of Rwanda that shows how far the country has come since the dark days of 1994. In Rwanda, people take so many things for granted because they feel entitled to anything. The latest craze; pedestrian sidewalks and cycling lanes are being dug out of road pavements. Kigalians now want space to ride their bikes! Not all is easy in the much changed country. They are coping with about 80 thousand refugees that have fled Burundi after their president flouted the two term presidential rule. Sources: Al Jazeera News of Rwanda Residents of Beijing and the north east part of China have had their first air pollution crisis of the winter ease with a cold front moving through the area. The new cold weather and winds has swept some of the filthy air out over the Pacific. N. America will receive a blast of coal generated pollution from Asia in a few days. The Chinese national observatory reduced the smog warning from yellow alert(second highest). Their alert levels are instituted at levels different from those recommended by the World Health Organization for air pollution. WHO recommends that exposure to the very tiny particles in pollution – those 2.5 microns or smaller – be limited to an average of 10 micrograms per cubic metre. Beijing issues air pollution alerts when pollution levels reach 35 micrograms per cubic metre. "Increases in risk are apparent in the city with the next-lowest long-term PM2.5 mean (i.e. 14.9 µg/m3 ), indicating that health effects can be expected when annual mean concentrations are in the range of 11–15 µg/m3" . WHO Over the past week Beijing residents have been exposed to an average of 190 micrograms of the harmful tiny particles. Beijing is not the hardest hit area. Northeast of the capital, Shenyang has recorded as much as 1400 micrograms per cubic metre. The government agencies responsible for health have advised that the very young and very old stay inside as much as possible and that people wear face masks when venturing outside. Unfortunately the 2.5 micron or less sized particles are not filtered out by ordinary gauze masks. The air pollution is made worse as the winter progresses. China’s leading source of energy is coal. While the laws mandate pollution controls on stacks, it often is not done or enforced. Air pollution can initiate or make worse heart disease, stroke and cancers. In addition to the air pollution that China is wrestling with, an estimated 60% of the country’s aquifers are polluted and unsafe. Some sources estimate that air pollution kills about 4000 Chinese every day. Many countries have become addicted to coal for industrial purposes. Some are moving away from that fossil fuel to using shale gas. Another source of energy is nuclear. Neither is without serious environmental problems. Sources: Guangdong News China Daily World Health Organization The team of Carlos Bernal and Nancy Guerra have founded a company with their patented device.
The future looks bright for the eventual widespread marketing of the new testing device. Currently there are approximately 400 million people world wide who have diabetes and that number is increasing every year. The University of Alberta ended a years long project to analyze the composition of urine. They concluded that there are at least 3000 metabolic compounds in our waste fluid. In the near future the taking of blood samples may be a thing of the past as new urine based tests are being developed. Lead scientist, David Wishart, in the Alberta investigation is quoted below: In particular, he notes that new urine-based diagnostic tests for colon cancer, prostate cancer, celiac disease, ulcerative colitis, pneumonia and organ transplant rejection are already being developed or are about to enter the marketplace, thanks in part to this work. Sources: Diabetes.co.uk GlucosAlarm Medical News When Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize for Chemistry, postulated that Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) could be useful in fighting cancer, he was shuffled off to the sidelines of mainstream medicine. I was fortunate to attend a lecture by the two time winner. I didn’t know anything much about chemistry and even less about blood chemistry, but when Dr. Pauling explained things it all made sense. Of course I forgot most of it upon leaving the lecture hall. In 1971 Pauling collaborated with a Scottish doctor who was treating some people for cancers. They administered large doses of Vit. C . Some people got better and some did not. Clinical trials failed to show improvement with vitamin C therapy. The therapy was pretty much shelved until recently. More knowledge and better tools have revived interest in the vitamin therapy. Some tumour cells mutate to produce more ‘gates’ for glucose into their cells. The same ‘gates’ also allow vitamin C into the tumour cells. It reacts with the glucose and makes it unavailable to the cancer cell, starving it to death. Mouse studies show a promising co-relationship between high intravenous doses of Vit. C and tumour shrinkage of some cancers. As in many early medical announcements, this is early days. Recent human trials have shown that quality of life may be improved in some cases. Patients with pancreatic and ovarian cancers showed improvement in quality of life and an extension of life for some months. That was not the case in all cancers. With some cancer types, the patient got worse with the vitamin therapy. Cancer directly affects the patient but also impacts on the world economy. It is the leading cause of death around the world. The loss of productivity by the cutting short of lives is the single largest drain on the global economy. In 2008 it was estimated to cost the world 1.5% of the global GDP. In 2010 the dollar amount spent to deal with and treat cancers was an estimated USD $2.5 trillion. Recently interest in treating some cancerous tumours with injections of bacteria have been revived and refined. Perhaps Vit. C therapy will be added to the oncologists’ tool kit as well. Sources: Science Magazine National Cancer Institute American Cancer Society |
Barbara McPherson
Blogger, gardener, farmer. Working toward food security and a 30 foot
diet. Addicted to reading. Love this planet, especially my little corner
on Vancouver Island, Canada Archives
October 2016
Categories
All
|