Hezbollah flags mask darker mood in Lebanon village

AITAROUN, LEBANON, Nov 21: Yellow Hezbollah flags flutter over the flower-strewn marble tombs of six men killed in combat with Israel during the July-August war in Lebanon.

The ''martyrs'' lie in a special section of the cemetery in the battered Shi'ite Muslim border village of Aitaroun, often lauded in speeches by Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah for the fierce battles his guerrillas fought here in the summer.

Aitaroun, only 3 km from the frontier, paid a heavy price in destruction. Hezbollah posters trumpet a ''divine victory'' over Israel, but many villagers are in sombre mood as they try to repair shattered houses and livelihoods.

Some openly criticise Hezbollah, whose capture of two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid sparked the 34-day war.

Others recall better economic times during Israel's 22-year occupation when men from Aitaroun found well-paid work in Israel or with its proxy Christian-led militia in the south.

All voice hope for a more peaceful and prosperous future, but in these stony hills where farmers eke out a living from olives, tobacco and goats, few seem convinced it's around the corner.

''After the war, life became very hard,'' said Nawal Murad, 33, gesturing with a smile at the disorder in her damaged home. ''We need lots of money for repairs. And there is no money.''

Murad, who fled the Israeli bombing with her five children aged 4 to 16, said she had received 2,600 dollars from Hezbollah to help with repairs and had borrowed more from relatives.

The salary of her husband Kamal, a 50-year-old elementary school teacher, covers day-to-day expenses, but she said the war had wiped out their tobacco crop, which normally yields enough extra income to pay their children's school fees.

Murad said nine months' hard work had gone up in smoke. ''We had been picking it at the time of the invasion. When we came back we found it all on the ground, spoiled. We burned it.''

SAUDI HOUSING

Some outside aid is visible on an isolated hillside outside Aitaroun -- a score of basic, prefabricated houses donated by Saudi Arabia. All are empty, awaiting their first occupants.

The white prefabs look unsuited to large families. ''Nobody can live in boxes,'' one man sniffed, saying most people whose homes were ruined by bombs had already moved in with relatives.

Squealing children in blue-and-grey uniforms play outside Ibrahim Toubeh's school. Classes are crammed into an annex hastily fixed up after a bomb flattened the main building.

''Now we have 500 pupils, all on top of each other,'' said Toubeh, 52, showing visitors the bare concrete floors and wood partitions thrown up in the basement to make extra classrooms. (AGENCIES)

Treatable diseases kill millions of Africans:WHO

GENEVA, Nov 21: Millions of mothers, newborn babies and children die each year in Africa from preventable diseases despite promises of better healthcare by Governments and donor countries, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said.

Because of AIDS and armed conflicts, the health situation in many countries has not improved in recent years and in some cases has worsened, the United Nations agency said yesterday.

Calling it Africa's ''silent epidemic,'' the WHO said African countries accounted for 19 of the 20 countries with the highest rates of maternal mortality worldwide.

It has the highest death rate worldwide for babies up to a month old, 43 per 1,000 live births or four times the rate in Europe, the WHO said in its African Regional Health Report.

While highlighting some successes, such as Uganda's AIDS programme and Mali's community health centres, the report spells out the health challenges facing the 46 countries belonging to its Africa region.

''We know what the challenges are, and we know how to address them -- but we also recognise that Africa's fragile health systems represent an enormous barrier,'' said Louis Gomes Sambo, WHO's regional director for Africa.

''African governments and their partners must make a major commitment and invest more funds to strengthen health systems,'' he added in a statement accompanying the report, the first WHO health snapshot of the whole region.

HIV/AIDS continues to devastate Africa, which has only 11 per cent of the world's population but 60 per cent of the people living with the HIV virus.

More than 90 per cent of the estimated 300-500 million malaria cases that occur worldwide, mainly children under 5, are in Africa.

Non-communicable diseases such as heart disease and diabetes, more usually associated with better-off countries, are also beginning to take a heavy toll.

Only 58 per cent of the people living in sub-Saharan Africa have access to safe drinking water, according to the report.

Nevertheless, there are some bright spots. River blindness has been all but eliminated and 33 of the 42 countries most affected by malaria have adopted the artemisinin-based combination therapy, which is the most effective, the WHO said.

Polio is close to eradication and measles deaths have declined more than 50 percent since 1999.

(AGENCIES)

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Bittersweet homecoming for Ghana's African Americans

ACCRA, Nov 21: African American Toni Manieson knows what it is like to sing the blues.

In African dress and with dyed-blond cropped hair, she croons and sways in the bar she owns in the town she has made her home: Jazztone in Accra, the sweaty oceanside capital of the West African country of Ghana.

Nine years in the city, she is one of several African Americans who have come back to the continent of their ancestors, some by accident and some by choice.

Millions of West Africans were shipped from whitewashed slave forts on the Ghanaian coastline to a life of slavery in Brazil, America and the Caribbean.

The journey back to Africa is one the Ghanaian government hopes many people of African origin will make next year, which is Ghana's 50th birthday and the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain.

Members of the Ghanaian diaspora will be granted a ''diaspora stamp'', granting them visa free access to Ghana and will be encouraged to buy land and invest.

But for some, the trip to Ghana accentuates the difficulty of having a foot in two such vastly different cultures.

For Manieson, who has come to cherish Accra, the trip following in the footsteps of her Ghanaian husband Victor proved bittersweet. Her husband's family found it difficult to get used to his independent American wife and their relationship entered a downward spiral, ending in divorce.

''They felt he couldn't control me,'' she says in her slow drawl. ''It took a lot of adjusting, what with not all the women having a lot of rights and the men controlling everything.''

JOSEPH PROJECT

The tourism and investment drive is called the Joseph project after the Biblical slave, who was freed by his Egyptian master and rose to become adviser to the pharaoh.

Implicit in the project is an apology for the role played by many Ghanaians in selling their fellow Africans into slavery, in an era when tribal chiefs sold captives to European slave ships.

''We have a shared heritage; we think all Africans are from Africa one way or the other,'' said Victoria Sarpong, from the Ministry of Tourism and Diasporan Relations.

''We need to invite people so we can move forward. We are saying we should forgive and forget and move forward.''

For many, the return to Africa represents a long-cherished dream. More (AGENCIES)

Genetically modified cottonseed may provide human food

WASHINGTON, Nov 21: Cotton, for thousands of years one of the most important crops for clothing and shelter, might also become a source of food.

A chemical called gossypol makes cottonseed inedible for humans, although some of it is used in feed for cattle, which are less affected by the toxin.

Now, researchers at Texas A&M University have genetically modified cotton to produce seeds with little or no gossypol.

It is a step they say could help provide valuable protein to millions of people. Their findings are reported in today's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Keerti Rathore of the university's Institute for Plant Genomics and Biotechnology, said the modified plants continue to have gossypol in their stems and leaves where it helps resist insects, but the chemical is significantly reduced in the seed.

Worldwide, 44 million tons of cottonseed is produced annually. Cotton is grown in 80 countries, and the seeds are 23 per cent protein, Rathore said.

They are pressed for oil, and in the United States about half of the remaining meal goes into animal feed, he said.

But, with the gossypol removed, the meal can be ground into flour and used in cooking, he said.

Rathore said he has not tasted the cottonseed meal, but researchers who had bred a different gossypol - free cottonseed had. They reported it had a pleasing taste, he said.

Unfortunately, he said, that earlier version removed gossypol from all parts of the plant, which was then attacked by a variety of insects.

Jodi Scheffler, a research geneticist at the US Agriculture Department's Agricultural Research Service center in Mississippi, said the development has potential.

"It definitely gives us new hope," said Scheffler, who was not part of Rathore's research team.

"This is an age-old problem," she explained: the protein in cottonseed is good but cannot be used by people or most animals because it contains this toxin.

The potential problems that have to be worked out, she said, are to determine whether the genetic change is stable trough generations and to overcome regulatory and public acceptance problems that ca face genetically modified foods.

One reason it is important is for regions such as West Africa, where many small farmers grow cottonas a cash crop and would like to be abe to use the seed to feed themselve and their livestock, she said.

Rathore's research was funded by the Texas Cotton Biotechnology Initiative, Cotton Inc, and the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station. Texas ranks among the largest-producing US states. (AGENCIES)

‘War on terror’ could last 30 years or more: Report

LONDON, Nov 21: The fight against terrorism could last 30 years or more, according to a report by a British think tank that specialises in international security.

"There is every prospect of the ‘war on terror’ extending for 30 years or more," the report by the Oxford Research Group said yesterday.

"What is required is a complete re-assessment of current policies but that is highly unlikely, even with the recent political upheavals".

The US Democrats triumphed in legislative elections on November 7 in which they reclaimed the House and the Senate, at the expense of President George W. Bush’s Republicans.

"Most people believe that the recent elections mark the beginning of the end of the Bush era but that does not apply to the war on terror," said Professor Paul Rogers, who wrote the report, in a statement.

"In reality there will be little change until the United States faces up to the need for a fundamental re-think of its policies".

The report showed that the United States is now faced with a dilemma: if it withdraws from Iraq, insurgent groups will be able to operate freely in the biggest oil reserve in the world.

"If it stays, though, then US soldiers become an increasing magnet for radical factions, with Iraq becoming a training ground for new generations of paramilitaries, just as Afghanistan was in the 1980s against the Soviet occupying forces," the report said. (AGENCIES)

Dave Barry's new book spins Christmas for laughs

NEW YORK, Nov 21: Carolers have long called Christmas ''the season to be jolly,'' and US humorist Dave Barry has tried to deck the pages of his first Christmas book with more belly laughs than April Fool's Day.

A ''manger war'' between neighbourhood churches; a wise man with a rubber cigar; red ants stinging children in a station wagon; a ''Betsy Wetsy Jesus'' and a near-fatal pile of frozen bat dung are a few of the ornaments Barry has strung through his latest book, ''The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog.''

Barry's fictional pseudo-memoir skewers his own childhood memories of going to school and performing as a shepherd or a wise man in the church Christmas pageant. There are also liberal dollops of early 1960s nostalgia such as the Sputnik, the twist and Oldsmobile station wagons. There is even a mention of Fabian, the pre-Beatles teen idol.

''I wanted the book to have a Christmas feel to it, but I also wanted it to have a real-world '60s feel,'' Barry said in an interview.

The book, released on November 7, also recycles some stories from the author's newspaper career, after changing them almost beyond recognition. One story involved a man who disposed of his dead pet goat by standing it up, frozen by the winter cold, in the middle a manger scene.

''I didn't want to use that story exactly because it was too cold-hearted,'' he said. ''I tried to make it part of the story in a positive, uplifting, or at least not creepy way.''

Barry, 59, said his publisher had ''bugged me for years to write a Christmas book. ... The columns I had written about my childhood Christmas experiences always got a good response,'' so he decided to build on those with a pseudo-memoir.

One incident in the book is related exactly as Barry remembers it happening to him in real life. After sitting through a boring science lesson during which the teacher demonstrated how to melt ice to obtain water, the youngster in the book waits until the class is perfectly quiet, then says:

''So what you're saying, Mrs. Forrester, is that ice is actually ... Frozen water!''

''That happened, pretty much verbatim,'' Barry recalled with a smile. ''I was a 'wiseguy' in school and I would do things like that because I couldn't stop myself. If I thought of a line, I just had to say it, and that is a true line that I said in Mrs. West's science class in eighth grade.''

In the book, the classroom erupts in laughter and the teacher sends the boy to the office, where the assistant principal cracks him on the head with a ring and lectures him ''on how I should stop wasting my brain being a clown.''

Barry, who went on to become one of the best-read humorists in America, is glad he did not take that advice.

''Even when I was in school, I always thought I was funny,'' he said. ''I always wanted to do humor, but the idea that I could make a living at it never occurred to me.''

(AGENCIES)_

Prince Charles embraces Internet age with online video diary

LONDON, Nov 21: The heir to the British throne took a leap into the Internet age, posting a day-in-the life video on his revamped personal Web site.

The short film follows Prince Charles through a typical day, showing him working at his London office, carrying out public engagements with his wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall and flying by helicopter to his country home for a reception.

The site also allows royal-watchers to sign up for e-mail updates on topics ranging from Charles' sons, Princes William and Harry, to his Duchy Originals brand of organic food products. There is also a section for children, with puzzles and games.

Future plans for the site include clips of the prince's speeches and interviews, his Clarence House office said yesterday. (AGENCIES)

All you need is Love: new Beatles album woos fans

LONDON, Nov 21: Fans rushed to buy the first "new" Beatles album for a generation -- a radical remixing of some of the group's most famous songs -- more than 35 years after the breakup of the iconic band.

"Love", which has the backing of surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, comprises 26 of the Fab Four's hit songs, many of them mixed together using previously unheard material from the studio.

"I hope this will help people to hear Beatles music again," said Giles Martin, son of the Beatles' original producer Sir George Martin, often referred to as the fifth Beatle.

Martin and his son both worked for three years on the project, which forms the soundtrack to a Beatles stage show of the same name, put on since June in Las Vegas by Canadian entertainment company Cirque du Soleil.

Using archives and master tapes at the Abbey Road studios in London, they put together songs by a complex mixture of overlaying, dubbing and synchronizing to produce sometimes startlingly new compositions.

For example elements of "Penny Lane" are mixed with "Strawberry Fields Forever", while "Blackbird" is combined with "Yesterday" in a process called a "mash-up" by sound engineers.

"I think they would have liked it," said the elder Martin at the launch of the album yesterday, which also has the backing of John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono and George Harrison's widow Olivia.

"To be honest, I believe they were there with us as we worked on it," he added. (AGENCIES)

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Egypt's ruling NDP attacks minister for veil remark.

CAIRO, Nov 21: Egypt's ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) joined the opposition Muslim Brotherhood in attacking Culture Minister Farouk Hosni for saying that wearing the Muslim headscarf was a ''step backwards''.

Two pillars of the ruling party, Parliamentary Speaker Fathi Surour and presidential chief of staff Zakaria Azmi, criticised the minister in parliament, adding to the pressure on Hosni to resign after 19 years in office.

After NDP members asked for Hosni's dismissal, Surour said: ''If an official wants to express personal opinions, he should free himself of the public responsibility he has assumed.''

Hosni, an abstract painter known for his liberal views, said in remarks published last Thursday Egypt would not progress as long as its people depend on religious edicts ''worth 5 cents''.

''Our mothers ... Used to go to universities and work without wearing a headscarf, so why are we going backwards now?'' the independent Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper quoted him as saying.

Egypt, the seat of al-Azhar -- one of Islam's most prestigious centres of religious learning -- has seen a rise in religious conservatism since the 1990s and most Muslim women now wear headscarves in public.

Most Muslim clerics say wearing headscarves is obligatory for women but some Muslim dispute that view. The government has not normally taken a position.

The minister later said the remarks, which sparked outrage in the Egyptian media, represented his personal views and were not meant for publication.

The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's biggest opposition group, said it has filed an urgent appeal to Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif demanding Hosni's resignation.

In yesterday's parliamentary debate at least two lawmakers suggested that the minister was homosexual, an allegation that would further undermine his standing among conservatives.

The minister was not available for comment.

Azmi, President Hosni Mubarak's chief of staff, said: ''We cannot allow anyone to insult Islam... The culture minister should not have talked about religious matters.''

Another minister, Mufid Shehab, said Hosni would attend a debate with two parliamentary committees. ''After that parliament will be free to take whatever measures it likes towards the minister,'' he added, indicating that the government was not insisting that he stay in office.

Analysts say Hosni has traditionally had an ally in First Lady Suzanne Mubarak, with whom he attends many cultural events.

Some sociologists attribute the rise in religious conservatism to the influence of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, where millions of Egyptians have worked and lived since the 1970s.

The minister offered his resignation last year after 46 people died in a fire at a culture centre in southern Egypt, but Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif asked him to stay on. (AGENCIES)

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Moni Varma, Rami Nanger win Asians of the year awards

LONDON, Nov 21: NRI entrepreneurs Moni Varma, founder of the Veetee brand basmati rice and Rami Ranger, founder-chairman of Sun Oil Ltd have won the Asian of the year and Asian Leadership in Europe Awards for 2006 respectively.

Cherie Blair, British Prime Minister Tony Blair's wife, received the Asian Charity of the Year Award on behalf of the Loomba Trust, of which she is the President at a glittering ceremony held at the Grosvenor House Hotel at Park Lane here last night.

Tarique Ghaffur, CEE, Assistant Commissioner, the highest-ranking NRI police officer in the Metropolitan Police Service bagged the Asian Leadership in Diversity Award.

The 19th Edition of Asian Who's Who International brought out by its Managing Editor J S Sachar was also released at the function attended by Deputy Prime Minister of Mauritius, Rama Sithanen, President of the Hinduja Group, G P Hinduja, MP, Keith Vaz and Lord Navnit Dholakia, Deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords.

Previous recipients of the Asians of the Year Award include Lord Swraj Paul, Keith Vas, Lord Bhikhu Parekh, Cricketer-turned-politician of Pakistan Imran Khan, Sir Gulam K Noon, founder of the Noon Products, Raj Loomba, Lord Navnit Dholakia, G S Gujral, Lord Karan Bilimoria, Kartar Lalvani, Ramola Bachchan and Surina Narula.

Sachar, who brought out the first Edition of Asian Who's Who, a veritable bible for the Asian community in the UK 31 years ago recounted the trials and tribulations the community had gone through during the last three decades and said "today the community has made a mark in all walks of life through its contribution to the economic prosperity of the country."

Receiving the award, 57-year-old Moni Varma, who had his early education in Ludhiana before moving to Malawi and the UK said he was "humbled" because it was a recognition of his hard work by the community.

Having run a successful steel business in Malawi, Moni moved to the UK and in 1985 set up a rice milling and packing business in the UK.

Since then he has established milling facilities in India and Pakistan and his group currently exports rice to about 50 countries from his five factories around the world.

In the case of Rami Ranger, MBE, it was literally a case of rags of riches.

An emotionally moved Ranger told the packed gathering that he would like to dedicate the award to his late mother, "who instilled the right values in me despite hardships she had to face."

He also thanked India for its democratic values which he said makes Indians to integrate anywhere easily and quickly.

He was born two months after his father Shaheed Nanak Singh, a prominent leader of West Punjab (now in Pakistan) was assassinated by religious fanatics when trying to save 600 students of DAV College, Multan, who were taking part in a procession against the partition of India.

The students were saved though Rami lost his father. His mother arrived in India, penniless, having lost her country, her ancestral home and the bread-winner of the family. (PTI)

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