Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
from Environment Forum:
The power of a soccer ball
Anyone who watched the women's World Cup final might have wondered if it's possible to harness that pure human energy. Turns out, it is. There's enough power in a soccer ball to light the night -- or at least a part of it.
It's done via sOccket, a soccer ball that kids kick around all day, where its movement generates energy. When the sun sets, plug an LED lamp into the ball and it turns into a light for reading or other purposes. Play with the sOccket for 15 minutes and use the light for up to three hours. Sustainable, non-polluting, safe.
SOccket was created to solve a pervasive problem -- the lack of reliable electricity -- with a pervasive game. More than one-fifth of the world's population, about 1.4 billion people, lack electric power, but kids almost everywhere play soccer.
Conceived as a group project at Harvard University by Jessica Matthews and Julia Silverman when they were undergraduates, sOccket has been tested in South Africa, Nigeria, Spain and Haiti. Now, Matthews said in a telephone interview, it's on track for mass production and distribution later this year.
Testing has led to significant improvements, Matthews said from London. "We've pretty much changed everything from the prototype ... One thing that people can expect is definitely a redesign of the soccer ball, to think of our end-user, which is the resource-poor child." That includes making the internal mechanism a lot sturdier. Early versions lasted a few months; the new ones to be unveiled in August or September should last at least a year, she said.
The latest version will also be able to power more than an LED lamp, but Matthews wouldn't say exactly what appliances it might energize.
SOccket is a "movement" of an enterprise called Uncharted Play Incorporated, co-founded by Matthews and Silverman.
from Pakistan: Now or Never?:
Solving Afghanistan and Pakistan over a cup of tea
I have never read "Three Cups of Tea", Greg Mortenson's book about building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I tried to read the sequel, "Stones into Schools" and gave up not too long after the point where he said that, "the solution to every problem ... begins with drinking tea." Having drunk tea in many parts of South Asia - sweet tea, salt tea, butter tea, tea that comes with the impossible-to-remove-with-dignity thick skin of milk tea - I can confidently say that statement does not reflect reality.
So I have always been a bit puzzled that the Americans took Mortenson's books so much to heart. Yes, I knew he boasted that his books had become required reading for American officers posted to Afghanistan; and yes, there is the glowing praise from Admiral Mike Mullen on the cover of "Stones into Schools", where he wrote that "he's shaping the very future of a region". But I had always believed, or wanted to believe, that at the back of everyone's minds they realised that saccharine sentimentality was no substitute for serious analysis. Just as hope is not a strategy, drinking tea is not a policy. (To be fair to the Americans, I have also overheard a British officer extolling the virtues of drinking tea in Afghanistan.)
As a result of my scepticism on the miracle powers of tea-drinking, I find I am learning an awful lot more about the thinking of the U.S. administration than I ever did from Mortenson from the fall-out from the allegations of inaccuracies in his books. (Mortenson rejects these allegations in a statement on the website of his Central Asia Institute charity.)
Take for example the detailed account by Jon Krakauer (pdf) charting not only inaccuracies but also alleged irregularities in the finances of the Central Asia Institute. In his opening paragraph, Krakauer notes that President Barack Obama donated $100,000 of the award money from his own Nobel Peace Prize, which he received in 2009, to the Central Asia Institute. I had not known about the Obama connection until I read advance stories on Krakauer's piece.
During his presidential election campaign, Obama made Afghanistan and Pakistan his foreign policy priority. So you might expect that he would have had foreign policy advisers who would have questioned the wisdom of associating publicly with one man. After all, it was quite clear -- whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of Montenson's philanthropy -- that the narrative used to describe his schools in Baltistan as a bulwark against the Taliban and Islamist militants was a bit awry.
I have only been to Baltistan once, on a brief trip organised by the Pakistan Army to visit the Siachen region, the world's highest battlefield, where Indian and Pakistani troops have faced off against each other since 1984. Yet even under the watchful gaze of my army minder, a group of Balti intellectuals who I met in the regional capital Skardu were able to tell me (over several cups of tea) that they felt neglected by Islamabad and excluded from power in Pakistan. Baltistan is part of the former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir, divided between India and Pakistan, and because of its disputed status, the people there have never been integrated into Pakistan and nor have they been given voting rights.
The political and security issues in Baltistan are related to the rivalry between India and Pakistan, to the dispute over Kashmir, and to the electoral dispossession of a people who have been frozen in time since the partition of the subcontinent since 1947. They are nothing to do with the Taliban, militant Islam, or the war in Afghanistan. That should have been easy enough to find out - have U.S. diplomats never been to Baltistan? Indeed even without going there, the information was available for free on the Internet. Why did nobody ask any questions?
If I recall, it was said that Mr. Obama falsified his own autobiography. That said, he is perhaps appreciative of the value of lies in promoting a cause.
In war, truth is the first casualty.
from Afghan Journal:
The view from Pakistan: India is a bigger threat than the Taliban, al Qaeda
India may have a bigger problem in Pakistan than previously thought. More than half of Pakistanis surveyed in a Pew poll say India is a bigger threat than al Qaeda or the Taliban.
It's not just the Pakistani military that believes a bigger, richer India is an existential threat. A majority of ordinary people share that perception as well. That ought to worry Indian policy planners. Of the Pakistanis polled, 23 percent think the Taliban is the greatest threat to their country, and 3 percent think al Qaeda is, despite the rising tide of militant violence in Pakistan's turbulent northwest region on the Afghan border, and also in the heartland cities.
One must approach all surveys with caution, especially so in countries such as India and Pakistan with very large populations. Pew conducted face-to-face interviews with 2,000 adults in Pakistan between April 13 and 28 of 2010. It says the sample was disproportionately urban, and parts of the troubled areas of the northwest and Baluchistan were not covered. For a country with a population of over 170 million, drawing hard conclusions based on a sample size that small must come with a mandatory health warning.
Still, there were some positive take-aways. Despite the deep-seated tensions between these two countries, most Pakistanis want better relations with India. Roughly 72% say it is important for relations with India to improve and about three-quarters support increased trade with India and further talks between the two rivals.
But India won't talk unless Pakistan acts against the militant groups and their patrons. For a large number of Indians, memories of the 11/26 attacks in Mumbai are still too fresh. India has made almost all dialogue with Pakistan conditional, based on the steps it takes to roll up groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based organization that New Delhi has blamed for a series of attacks in India including the Mumbai assault of 2008. But Pakistan won't act because it doesn't consider them to be a threat. So how do you square such a circle?
The Indians can take some comfort in the fact that Pakistanis also gave the United States an equally poor approval rating. Roughly 59 percent of Pakistanis describe the U.S. as an enemy. And President Barack Obama is very unpopular -- only 8% of Pakistanis express confidence that he will do the right thing in world affairs, his lowest rating among 22 nations that were polled about their confidence in the U.S. president.
For all the money that has been lavished on Pakistan, the United States seems to be getting nowhere in winning public support. Indeed, support for the U.S. involvement in the fight against extremists fell last year. "The lesson unlearned in fifty years is that feeding Pakistan cash will not alter a national psychosis of war and hatred for the U.S.," Dr. Aseem Shukla wrote in the Washington Post.
Self-righteousness! more self-righteousness!! Hasn’t self-righteousness plagued India and Indians since time immemorial. Nuclear India! Richer India! Powerful India! Modern India! Industrialized India! Secular India! Democratic India! That’s all the self-righteousness in the world. But STOP there. Add to this 42% poorest of the world, a constitutionally enforced inequality to schedule castes, close to 200 parliamentary seats held by fascist Hindu extremist parties, gruesome killings of over 100,000 men, women and children in Kashmir and it doesn’t really present a pretty picture. Be honest about it. Blaming everything on Pakistan would get you nowhere.
