Sunday, July 17, 2011

Somalia crisis one of 'largest in decades'

US and Germany promise increased aid as East African drought victims continue to flood camps in Kenya and Ethiopia.

Last Modified: 16 Jul 2011 08:25

East Africa's hunger crisis has been described by a US official as one of the worst humanitarian crisis in decades amid stepped-up efforts by Western countries to provide relief aid and a decision by Kenya to open a fourth camp for starving refugees.

Tens of thousands of Somali refugees are flooding camps in Ethiopia and Kenya - at a rate of more than 3,000 new arrivals per day - in search of food after several seasons without rain killed livestock and destroyed crops in Somalia.

"There are many seasoned relief professionals who would tell you we haven't seen a crisis this bad in a generation," Reuben Brigety, the deputy assistant secretary responsible for state department assistance to refugees and conflict victims in Africa, said on Saturday.

"We anticipate that this crisis will get worse before it gets better."

The US was studying how much more it would give in addition to $5m promised on Friday to help Somali refugees, on top of a previously budgeted $63m, Reuben said.

For its part, Germany said it is donating an additional 5m euros ($7m) in humanitarian aid.

'Great worry'

Dirk Niebel, the German development minister, said in Berlin on Saturday that "the famine and the humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa are a cause of great worry".

He said the emergency aid is in addition to the 3.6m euros ($5m) pledged earlier this year.

Duncan Harvey, the acting country director for Save the Children in Ethiopia, said: "In terms of the sheer numbers of people affected, this is one of the worst droughts the world has seen in a long time."

In Video

Robert McCarthy, a UNICEF emergency adviser in Nairobi, discusses the humanitarian crisis

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday it had sent by air emergency nutrition supplies and water equipment into Somalia.

UNICEF said in an update to the media that the supplies were delivered to Baidoa, a town in the Bay region of south-central Somalia, as part of the agency's life-saving assistance for drought-affected children.

At the same time, a senior UN official also warned on Saturday that the plight of millions of people left hungry was set to worsen, with the next rains expected in October and harvests months away.

"We are possibly seeing a perfect storm in the coming months ... We are going to do everything we can to ameliorate it," Anthony Lake, the UNICEF director, told the AFP news agency on his way to the drought-hit northern Kenya region of Turkana.

"We are scaling up in every way we can ... It is very bad now. There will be no major harvests until some time next year. The next six months are going to be very tough."

Little help in Somalia has reached those in the worst-hit area because an al-Qaeda-linked group, al-Shabab, had banned aid work though it recently said it would lift that ban.

Official's account

Over the last several days, Brigety, the US administration official, has visited camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, and talked to mothers and children who walked for days with little food or water.

Levels of malnutrition among refugees arriving at the camps are very high.

The overall mortality rate at the camps in Ethiopia is seven people out of 10,000 per day, when a normal crisis rate is two per day, Brigety said.

At Kenya's Dadaab refugee camp, the largest in the world, Brigety spoke to a mother who arrived at the camp with six children, including a 7-year-old who has polio that she carried on her back.

The crisis has swelled Dadaab's numbers to nearly 440,000 people, UNHCR said on Friday.

Against this backdrop, the Kenyan government announced on Friday a fourth camp had been opened in Dadaab in an effort to ease congestion.

Antoine Froidevaux, a field co-ordinator for the Medecins Sans Frontieres humanitarian agency, welcomed the new camp, but said the humanitarian organisation was "still very worried about the situation of the new arrivals that are coming in".

And Tarek Jasarevic, a World Health Organisation spokesman, said at least 462 cases of measles, including 11 deaths, had been confirmed in recent months among Somali refugee children in Dadaab.

The aid group Save the Children said on Friday that it had started feeding malnourished refugee children in pre-registration sites at camps in southern Ethiopia.

Because of the overwhelming numbers, refugees are waiting days or weeks to get into the camps, Save the Children said, making the feeding programmes outside a necessity.

Mass psychosis in America

Mass psychosis in the US

How Big Pharma got Americans hooked on anti-psychotic drugs.

James Ridgeway Last Modified: 12 Jul 2011 06:20

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Drug companies like Pfizer are accused of pressuring doctors into over-prescribing medications to patients in order to increase profits [GALLO/GETTY]

Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux.

Once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses - primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder - to treat such symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, or formal thought disorder. Today, it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of anti-psychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics. Americans with symptoms ranging from chronic depression to anxiety to insomnia are now being prescribed anti-psychotics at rates that seem to indicate a national mass psychosis.

It is anything but a coincidence that the explosion in antipsychotic use coincides with the pharmaceutical industry's development of a new class of medications known as "atypical antipsychotics." Beginning with Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Seroquel in the 1990s, followed by Abilify in the early 2000s, these drugs were touted as being more effective than older antipsychotics like Haldol and Thorazine. More importantly, they lacked the most noxious side effects of the older drugs - in particular, the tremors and other motor control problems.

The atypical anti-psychotics were the bright new stars in the pharmaceutical industry's roster of psychotropic drugs - costly, patented medications that made people feel and behave better without any shaking or drooling. Sales grew steadily, until by 2009 Seroquel and Abilify numbered fifth and sixth in annual drug sales, and prescriptions written for the top three atypical antipsychotics totaled more than 20 million. Suddenly, antipsychotics weren't just for psychotics any more.

Not just for psychotics anymore

By now, just about everyone knows how the drug industry works to influence the minds of American doctors, plying them with gifts, junkets, ego-tripping awards, and research funding in exchange for endorsing or prescribing the latest and most lucrative drugs. "Psychiatrists are particularly targeted by Big Pharma because psychiatric diagnoses are very subjective," says Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, whose PharmedOut project tracks the industry's influence on American medicine, and who last month hosted a conference on the subject at Georgetown. A shrink can't give you a blood test or an MRI to figure out precisely what's wrong with you. So it's often a case of diagnosis by prescription. (If you feel better after you take an anti-depressant, it's assumed that you were depressed.) As the researchers in one study of the drug industry's influence put it, "the lack of biological tests for mental disorders renders psychiatry especially vulnerable to industry influence." For this reason, they argue, it's particularly important that the guidelines for diagnosing and treating mental illness be compiled "on the basis of an objective review of the scientific evidence" - and not on whether the doctors writing them got a big grant from Merck or own stock in AstraZeneca.

Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and a leading critic of the Big Pharma, puts it more bluntly: "Psychiatrists are in the pocket of industry." Angell has pointed out that most of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of mental health clinicians, have ties to the drug industry. Likewise, a 2009 study showed that 18 out of 20 of the shrinks who wrote the American Psychiatric Association's most recent clinical guidelines for treating depression, bipolar disorders, and schizophrenia had financial ties to drug companies.

"The use of psychoactive drugs - including both antidepressants and antipsychotics - has exploded...[yet] 'the tally of those who are disabled...increased nearly two and a half times."

Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine

In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, Angell deconstructs what she calls an apparent "raging epidemic of mental illness" among Americans. The use of psychoactive drugs—including both antidepressants and antipsychotics—has exploded, and if the new drugs are so effective, Angell points out, we should "expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising." Instead, "the tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007 - from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling - a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children." Under the tutelage of Big Pharma, we are "simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one." Fugh-Berman agrees: In the age of aggressive drug marketing, she says, "Psychiatric diagnoses have expanded to include many perfectly normal people."

Cost benefit analysis

What's especially troubling about the over-prescription of the new antipsychotics is its prevalence among the very young and the very old - vulnerable groups who often do not make their own choices when it comes to what medications they take. Investigations into antipsychotic use suggests that their purpose, in these cases, may be to subdue and tranquilize rather than to treat any genuine psychosis.

Carl Elliott reports in Mother Jones magazine: "Once bipolar disorder could be treated with atypicals, rates of diagnoses rose dramatically, especially in children. According to a recent Columbia University study, the number of children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder rose 40-fold between 1994 and 2003." And according to another study, "one in five children who visited a psychiatrist came away with a prescription for an antipsychotic drug."

A remarkable series published in the Palm Beach Post in May true revealed that the state of Florida's juvenile justice department has literally been pouring these drugs into juvenile facilities, "routinely" doling them out "for reasons that never were approved by federal regulators." The numbers are staggering: "In 2007, for example, the Department of Juvenile Justice bought more than twice as much Seroquel as ibuprofen. Overall, in 24 months, the department bought 326,081 tablets of Seroquel, Abilify, Risperdal and other antipsychotic drugs for use in state-operated jails and homes for children…That's enough to hand out 446 pills a day, seven days a week, for two years in a row, to kids in jails and programs that can hold no more than 2,300 boys and girls on a given day." Further, the paper discovered that "One in three of the psychiatrists who have contracted with the state Department of Juvenile Justice in the past five years has taken speaker fees or gifts from companies that make antipsychotic medications."

In addition to expanding the diagnoses of serious mental illness, drug companies have encouraged doctors to prescribe atypical anti-psychotics for a host of off-label uses. In one particularly notorious episode, the drugmaker Eli Lilly pushed Zyprexa on the caregivers of old people with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, as well as agitation, anxiety, and insomnia. In selling to nursing home doctors, sales reps reportedly used the slogan "five at five"—meaning that five milligrams of Zyprexa at 5 pm would sedate their more difficult charges. The practice persisted even after FDA had warned Lilly that the drug was not approved for such uses, and that it could lead to obesity and even diabetes in elderly patients.

In a video interview conducted in 2006, Sharham Ahari, who sold Zyprexa for two years at the beginning of the decade, described to me how the sales people would wangle the doctors into prescribing it. At the time, he recalled, his doctor clients were giving him a lot of grief over patients who were "flipping out" over the weight gain associated with the drug, along with the diabetes. "We were instructed to downplay side effects and focus on the efficacy of drug…to recommend the patient drink a glass a water before taking a pill before the meal and then after the meal in hopes the stomach would expand" and provide an easy way out of this obstacle to increased sales. When docs complained, he recalled, "I told them, ‘Our drug is state of the art. What's more important? You want them to get better or do you want them to stay the same--a thin psychotic patient or a fat stable patient.'"

For the drug companies, Shahrman says, the decision to continue pushing the drug despite side effects is matter of cost benefit analysis: Whether you will make more money by continuing to market the drug for off-label use, and perhaps defending against lawsuits, than you would otherwise. In the case of Zyprexa, in January 2009, Lilly settled a lawsuit brought by with the US Justice Department, agreeing to pay $1.4 billion, including "a criminal fine of $515 million, the largest ever in a health care case, and the largest criminal fine for an individual corporation ever imposed in a United States criminal prosecution of any kind,''the Department of Justice said in announcing the settlement." But Lilly's sale of Zyprexa in that year alone were over $1.8 billion.

Making patients worse

People and Power: Drug Money

As it turns out, the atypical antipsychotics may not even be the best choice for people with genuine, undisputed psychosis.

A growing number of health professionals have come to think these drugs are not really as effective as older, less expensive medicines which they have replaced, that they themselves produce side effects that cause other sorts of diseases such as diabetes and plunge the patient deeper into the gloomy world of serious mental disorder. Along with stories of success comes reports of people turned into virtual zombies.

Elliott reports in Mother Jones: "After another large analysis in The Lancet found that most atypicals actually performed worse than older drugs, two senior British psychiatrists penned a damning editorial that ran in the same issue. Dr. Peter Tyrer, the editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry, and Dr. Tim Kendall of the Royal College of Psychiatrists wrote: "The spurious invention of the atypicals can now be regarded as invention only, cleverly manipulated by the drug industry for marketing purposes and only now being exposed."

Bottom line: Stop Big Pharma and the parasitic shrink community from wantonly pushing these pills across the population.

tal disorder. Along with stories of success comes reports of people turned into virtual zombies.

Elliott reports in Mother Jones: "After another large analysis in The Lancet found that most atypicals actually performed worse than older drugs, two senior British psychiatrists penned a damning editorial that ran in the same issue. Dr. Peter Tyrer, the editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry, and Dr. Tim Kendall of the Royal College of Psychiatrists wrote: "The spurious invention of the atypicals can now be regarded as invention only, cleverly m

Somalia crisis one of 'largest in decades'
US and Germany promise increased aid as East African drought victims continue to flood camps in Kenya and Ethiopia.
Last Modified: 16 Jul 2011 08:25
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East Africa's hunger crisis has been described by a US official as one of the worst humanitarian crisis in decades amid stepped-up efforts by Western countries to provide relief aid and a decision by Kenya to open a fourth camp for starving refugees.

Tens of thousands of Somali refugees are flooding camps in Ethiopia and Kenya - at a rate of more than 3,000 new arrivals per day - in search of food after several seasons without rain killed livestock and destroyed crops in Somalia.

"There are many seasoned relief professionals who would tell you we haven't seen a crisis this bad in a generation," Reuben Brigety, the deputy assistant secretary responsible for state department assistance to refugees and conflict victims in Africa, said on Saturday.

"We anticipate that this crisis will get worse before it gets better."

The US was studying how much more it would give in addition to $5m promised on Friday to help Somali refugees, on top of a previously budgeted $63m, Reuben said.

For its part, Germany said it is donating an additional 5m euros ($7m) in humanitarian aid.

'Great worry'

Dirk Niebel, the German development minister, said in Berlin on Saturday that "the famine and the humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa are a cause of great worry".

He said the emergency aid is in addition to the 3.6m euros ($5m) pledged earlier this year.

Duncan Harvey, the acting country director for Save the Children in Ethiopia, said: "In terms of the sheer numbers of people affected, this is one of the worst droughts the world has seen in a long time."

In Video

Robert McCarthy, a UNICEF emergency adviser in Nairobi, discusses the humanitarian crisis
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said on Friday it had sent by air emergency nutrition supplies and water equipment into Somalia.

UNICEF said in an update to the media that the supplies were delivered to Baidoa, a town in the Bay region of south-central Somalia, as part of the agency's life-saving assistance for drought-affected children.

At the same time, a senior UN official also warned on Saturday that the plight of millions of people left hungry was set to worsen, with the next rains expected in October and harvests months away.

"We are possibly seeing a perfect storm in the coming months ... We are going to do everything we can to ameliorate it," Anthony Lake, the UNICEF director, told the AFP news agency on his way to the drought-hit northern Kenya region of Turkana.

"We are scaling up in every way we can ... It is very bad now. There will be no major harvests until some time next year. The next six months are going to be very tough."

Little help in Somalia has reached those in the worst-hit area because an al-Qaeda-linked group, al-Shabab, had banned aid work though it recently said it would lift that ban.

Official's account

Over the last several days, Brigety, the US administration official, has visited camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, and talked to mothers and children who walked for days with little food or water.

Levels of malnutrition among refugees arriving at the camps are very high.

The overall mortality rate at the camps in Ethiopia is seven people out of 10,000 per day, when a normal crisis rate is two per day, Brigety said.

At Kenya's Dadaab refugee camp, the largest in the world, Brigety spoke to a mother who arrived at the camp with six children, including a 7-year-old who has polio that she carried on her back.

The crisis has swelled Dadaab's numbers to nearly 440,000 people, UNHCR said on Friday.

Against this backdrop, the Kenyan government announced on Friday a fourth camp had been opened in Dadaab in an effort to ease congestion.

Antoine Froidevaux, a field co-ordinator for the Medecins Sans Frontieres humanitarian agency, welcomed the new camp, but said the humanitarian organisation was "still very worried about the situation of the new arrivals that are coming in".

And Tarek Jasarevic, a World Health Organisation spokesman, said at least 462 cases of measles, including 11 deaths, had been confirmed in recent months among Somali refugee children in Dadaab.

The aid group Save the Children said on Friday that it had started feeding malnourished refugee children in pre-registration sites at camps in southern Ethiopia.

Because of the overwhelming numbers, refugees are waiting days or weeks to get into the camps, Save the Children said, making the feeding programmes outside a necessity.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Top 3 Projector Mobile Phones

Projector Mobile Phones in India [Comparison]

Projector phone still sounds like a dream, but we already have four
phones launched with that capability. There is no dearth of innovation
in the thought to pack things into one single mobile phone. Intex,
TechBerry and Spice have launched their respective projector phones.
Intex was the pioneer in this field closely followed by Techberry.

But it was the late entrant Spice which popularized projector phone with its “Yeh boat nahin”
ad of Spice Popkorn. The timing of the phone launch and the ad is icing
on the cake. Spice Popkorn ad pops up in the middle of a world cup
match. And the ad surely stands out in the middle of bunch of
thoughtless ads.

Intex V.Show

Intex V.Show uses tiny Pico which is the latest in the LED technology to project on to a36 inch screen size for 3 hours. 20,000 hours of play time on the projector is possible. After
which it will cease to be a projector and starts to be a phone-only. It
is a touch screen phone with 3.2 inch screen size. It is a dual SIM
phone (GSM+GSM). As per mainstream media this is a 3G enabled phone. As per blogosphere this is a dual SIM
phone. It has a dual camera – one in the front, one in the back and it
has dual memory card slots which can read up to 8 GB each.

TechBerry ST 200

ST in the phone name stands for Sachin Tendulkar. I am not kidding.
That’s what the press release said. This phone which was launched
immediately after Intex V.show has some amazing double features. In
addition to the projector of course.

It packs in dual-SIM capability, dual memory card capability and dual
camera of 2 megapixel each. ST200 has a 3.2 inch QVGA full touch
screen. ST200 is a GSM phone with Bluetooth on-board.

Spice PopKorn

Spice M-9000 is a dual SIM phone with a in-built projector. It also
comes with a analogous TV which will help you stream free-to-air
channels, you know like the good old Doordarshan. There is a document
viewer, in case you want to project a presentation on the side wall in
the middle of a Christopher Nolan movie. Spice M-9000 aka Popkorn, has a 3.2 megapixel camera, FM with recording, Bluetooth, video player and a 6 cm QVGA screen. All of this comes at a measly price of Rs. 6999.

Intex V.Show Mini

Intex V.Show Mini has a 2.4 inch QVGA screen, dual SIM capability, 2
megapixel camera and an internal memory of 87 MB. Memory can be jacked
up to 16 GB through a SD card. Bluetooth, 3.5 mm audio jack, FM radio
are on-board. Pre-loaded apps like Facebook and Opera Mini should take
care of the browsing needs. V.Show Mini has a document reader which
would make it easy to project the presentations in case you office
projector acts kinky. Price : Rs. 6300

For the price, features and marketing, Spice Popkorn
should be the winner all the way. It packs in impressive features at
affordable price. With its TV on-board feature, it has went past all
other projector phones. Even if the TV is for free to air channels like
Doordarshan. Phone replacing TV isn’t very far.

Monday, July 11, 2011

Top 20 Handpainted wallpapers

Art Wallpapers

Wednesday, July 06, 2011

Survey finds 'News channels biased against Islam'

9:34am Monday 4th July 2011

An independent poll carried out by Consumer PI has found that the

vast majority of British Muslims perceive the three mainstream TV news
channels (BBC, ITV and Sky) to be biased against their
religion when reporting current affairs.

The TV channels’ reporting of terror cases, news pieces on Iraq and

Afghanistan and coverage of the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings have been cited
as examples of anti-Muslim bias.

Furthermore, British Muslims believe that other topical issues such as

the Israeli raid on the flotilla, it’s continued occupation of, and
raids into, Palestinian territories, the dropping of
terror cases by the police as well as positive stories about Islam
generally are either not given enough prominence or simply not covered.

The poll also found that British Muslims were offended by some of the
terminology used in news reports.

Terms such as ‘jihadist’ or ‘moderate Muslims’ are often used in the
wrong context or in a generalised manner, indicating there was a severe
lack of understanding of Muslim communities on the part
of news reporters. Many believe this type of reporting does play some
part in fanning the flames of extremism.

Shakir Ahmed, Director of Passion Islam Media said: “The reporting by

the mainstream TV news channels of stories concerning Muslims is at
times unbalanced, ill-informed and sensationalist. I would
expect this type of coverage in the tabloid press, not from respected
news organisations at the BBC, ITV or Sky. However, this is not entirely
surprising since these three news channels employ very
few reporters who follow the Islamic faith and who would truly
understand the Muslim communities and their culture and practices.

Worryingly, the perception by some British Muslims of an unjust Islamophobic
mainstream media may well fuel radicalism.”

Tuesday, July 05, 2011

Sudan splits!!

Sudan's south will become an independent country on July 9, but fighting along the ill-defined border has raised tension ahead of the split. North and south have yet to resolve issues such as how to manage the oil industry and divide debt. Here’s a look at the current situation in Sudan through Reuters photographer Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah’s lens.