Study: Weapons, Civilian Deaths

by

The Weapons That Kill Civilians — Deaths of Children and Noncombatants in Iraq, 2003–2008

Researchers from King’s College London and Royal Holloway, University of London in the UK, together with members of the non-profit group Iraq Body Count, have published a new event-based analysis of the impact of different weapon-types on Iraqi civilians in the April 16, 2009 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine: The Weapons That Kill Civilians – Deaths of Children and Noncombatants in Iraq, 2003-2008

Using the extensive and detailed database of Iraq Body Count (IBC), the researchers analyzed 14,196 events in which 60,481 civilians were violently killed during the first five years of the conflict in Iraq, thereby gaining an extraordinary overview of the harm that different weapons — from low to high tech — have brought to Iraq’s civilian population. Dr Madelyn Hicks of King’s College London, lead author of the article, said, “By linking a large number of deaths to the particular weapons used in specific events, the IBC database offers a unique opportunity for detailed analysis of the public health impact of different forms of armed violence on Iraqi civilians.”

For overall combined causes of civilian death from weapons in the data-set — ranging from gunfire, to improvised explosive devices used in roadside bombs, to precision-guided missiles — the average number killed per event was 4. However, the researchers found that when air-launched bombs or combined air and ground attacks caused civilian deaths, the average number killed was 17, similar to the average number in events where civilians were killed by suicide bombers travelling on foot (16 deaths per event).

The authors relate their findings to international humanitarian law and the need for effective policies to protect civilians. Describing suicide bombers on foot as a form of precisely targetable “smart bomb,” they argue that their pattern of killing high numbers of Iraqi civilians can only result from disregard for civilian life when targeting opposition forces, or the direct targeting of civilians, which is a war crime. Regarding their finding of a high rate of civilian death from aerial bombs, they write, “It seems clear from these findings that to protect civilians from indiscriminate harm, as required by international humanitarian law (including the Geneva Conventions), military and civilian policies should prohibit aerial bombing in civilian areas unless it can be demonstrated — by monitoring of civilian casualties, for example — that civilians are being protected.”

The researchers were also able to analyze the demographic characteristics of noncombatants who fell victim to different forms of violence. Execution after abduction or capture was the single most common form of death overall, with by far most of its victims (95%) being male. Nearly a third of execution victims were described as bearing marks of torture, evidence that they had suffered “a particularly appalling form of violent death.”

For Iraqi females, and children, events involving air attacks and mortar fire were the most dangerous. In air attacks causing civilian deaths, 46% of victims of known gender were female, and 39% of victims of known age were children. Mortar attacks claimed similarly high proportions of victims in these two demographic groups (44% and 42%). By comparison, 11% of victims across all weapons types were Iraqi females, and 9% were children. The authors argue that their findings showing that air attacks (whether involving bombs or missiles) and mortars killed relatively high proportions of females and children is further evidence that these weapons should not be directed at civilian areas by parties to conflict because of their indiscriminate nature. As co-author Professor John Sloboda of Royal Holloway, University of London, who is also a co-founder of IBC, notes, “Our weapon-specific findings have implications for a wide range of conflicts, because the patterns found in this study are likely to be replicated for these weapons whenever they are used.”

The authors conclude that “Policymakers, war strategists of all persuasions, and the groups and societies that support them bear moral and legal responsibility for the effects that particular combat tactics have on civilians — including the weapons used near and among them.”

Authors:

Dr. Madelyn Hicks, King’s College London; Hamit Dardagan, Iraq Body Count; Prof. John Sloboda, Royal Holloway, University of London and Iraq Body Count; Prof. Michael Spagat, Royal Holloway, University of London.

11-47

US vs. Taliban in Afghanistan

by

Inter Press Service, News Analysis, Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

2009-11-01T035748Z_200158948_GM1E5B10X8201_RTRMADP_3_AFGHANISTAN PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Oct 30 (IPS) – To the west of Peshawar on the Jamrud Road that leads to the historic Khyber Pass sits the Karkhano Market, a series of shopping plazas whose usual offering of contraband is now supplemented by standard issue U.S. military equipment, including combat fatigues, night vision goggles, body armour and army knives.

Beyond the market is a checkpoint, which separates the city from the semi-autonomous tribal region of Khyber. In the past, if one lingered near the barrier long enough, one was usually approached by someone from the far side selling hashish, alcohol, guns, or even rocket-propelled grenade launchers. These days such salesman could also be selling U.S. semi-automatics, sniper rifles and hand guns. Those who buy do it less for their quality—the AK-47 still remains the weapon of choice here—than as mementos of a dying Empire.

The realisation may be dawning slowly on some U.S. allies, but here everyone is convinced that Western forces have lost the war. However, at a time when in Afghanistan the efficacy of force as a counterinsurgency tool is being increasingly questioned, there is a newfound affinity for it in Pakistan.

A survey conducted by the International Republican Institute (IRI) in July 2009, which excluded the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and parts of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP)—the regions directly affected by war—found 69 percent of respondents supporting the military operation in Swat.

A different survey undertaken by the U.S. polling firm Gallup around the same time, which covered all of Pakistan, found only 41 percent supporting the operation. The Gallup poll also found a higher number—43 percent—favouring political resolution through dialogue.

The two polls also offer a useful perspective on how Pakistanis perceive the terrorist threat. If the country is unanimous on the need to confront militancy, it is equally undivided in its aversion for the U.S. Yet, both threats are not seen as equal: the Gallup survey found 59 percent of Pakistanis considering the U.S. as the bigger threat when compared to 11 percent for the Taliban; and, according to the IRI poll, fewer saw the Taliban (13 percent) as the biggest challenge compared to the spiralling inflation which is wrecking the economy (40 percent).

In 2001, when the United States launched its ‘war on terror’, many among Pakistan’s political elite and intelligentsia supported it, miscalculating the public mood, which was overwhelmingly hostile. This led to the protest vote which brought to power the religious alliance Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) in two of the frontier provinces. The MMA had been alone in openly opposing U.S. intervention.

However, as Afghanistan fell, things went quiet and passions subsided. Pervez Musharraf, the military dictator, was able to present his decision to participate in the “war on terror” as a difficult but unavoidable choice. Internationally, his isolation ended, and as a reward the various sanctions imposed on Pakistan after the nuclear tests of 1998 were lifted.

The economy grew, so did Musharraf’s popularity. When under intense U.S. pressure in 2004 he sent the Pakistani military into the restive FATA region, people barely noticed. He managed to retain his support despite reports of atrocities, which, according to Human Rights Watch, included indiscriminate use of force, home demolitions, extrajudicial killings, torture and disappearances. Indeed, if he was blamed at all, it was for not going far enough.

Things changed when on Musharraf’s orders, soldiers stormed a mosque in Islamabad held by Taliban sympathizers in August 2007, which resulted in the deaths of many seminarians. The Taliban retaliated by taking the war to the mainland and terrorist attacks hit several major cities.

Musharraf was blamed, and with an emerging challenge from the civil society in the form of a lawyers’ movement and an insurgent media, his popularity went into terminal decline. Meanwhile, in the Malakand region, Swat and Dir emerged as new flashpoints. The threat from Taliban militants could no longer be ignored, but opinions differed as to how best to confront it. The majority supported a negotiated settlement.

The turning point came in May, when, after a peace deal between the government and militants had broken down, the military embarked on a major offensive in Malakand. Though the truce had temporarily brought calm to the region, both sides had failed to live up to their commitments.

Yet, in the aftermath the Taliban alone were blamed, and in the media a consensus developed against any further negotiations with the militants. The operation was hailed as a success despite the loss of countless lives and the displacement of up to three million people.

However, in the frontier itself, analysts remained less sanguine. Rahimullah Yusufzai, deemed the most knowledgeable commentator on frontier politics, considered it an “avoidable” war. Another leading analyst, Rustam Shah Mohmand, wondered if it was not a war against the Pakhtuns, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and the NWFP, since no similar actions were considered in other lawless regions.

Roedad Khan, a former federal secretary, described it as an “unnecessary war” which was “easy to prevent … difficult to justify and harder to win”. In the political mainstream all major parties felt obliged to support the war for fear of being labelled unpatriotic. The opposition came mainly from religious parties, and from cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice).

Opinions were reinforced in favour of a military solution when militants launched a wave of terrorist attacks in anticipation of the Pakistani army’s new operation in FATA.

While the effects of the terrorist atrocities were there for all to see, the consequences of months of aerial bombing and artillery shelling that preceded the operation were less known.

A third of the total population of South Waziristan—site of the government’s newly launched anti-Taliban offensive—has been displaced, and it has received little relief. When an Associated Press crew met the refugees, they expressed their anger at the government by chanting “Long live the Taliban”.

Instead of winning hearts and minds, the Pakistani government is delivering them to the enemy.

Despite the best efforts of sections of the elite to take ownership of the war, the view persists that Pakistan is fighting an American war. That the military operation in South Waziristan follows an inducement of 1.5 billion U.S. dollars from the U.S. government, and is supported by U.S. drone surveillance, does little to disabuse skeptics of their notions.

Following the bombing of the International Islamic University in Islamabad last week, an Al Jazeera correspondent—a Scot—was accosted by an angry student who, mistaking him for an American, held him responsible for the attack.

Pakistanis are acutely aware that before 2002 there was no terrorist threat, and they remain equally convinced that the threat will vanish once U.S. forces withdraw from the region. But before that happens, some fear, Pakistan will have compromised its long-term stability.

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad (m.idrees@gmail.com) is the co-founder of Pulsemedia.org.

11-47

Vande Mataram Fatwa: Hardly Controversial

by

By Nilofar Suhrawardy, Muslim Media News Service India Correspondent (MMNS)

NEW DELHI: Notwithstanding all the reservations and bias, they entertain against each other, several groups representing extremist sections of Indian Hindus and Muslims may be blamed equally for needlessly making noise over their stand on the Indian national song- Vande Mataram. The controversy hit the headlines with Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind (JUH), a Muslim organization issuing a fatwa against recitation of Vande Mataram, as according to them several stanzas were against their religious principles. The JUH issued the fatwa at its 30th general session held at Deoband (November 3). It did not take long for extremist Hindu groups, including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Shiv Sena, Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal to immediately protest against the JUH-fatwa. Several leaders associated with saffron brigade also labeled as not singing the Vande Mataram as an act of treason.

Clarifying his stand on the issue, Minority Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid questioned both the JUH-fatwa and the saffron brigade’s stand on it being compulsory for all Indians, including Muslims, to sing Vande Mataram. “During the independence movement, all national leaders, including leaders of the Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind Hind sat together and resolved that some stanzas of Vande Mataram would be treated as the national song and would be sung voluntarily. Nobody was forced to sing it and this is something which was there in the resolutions of both JUH and the Congress party,” Khurshid said. Just as there was no need for JUH to raise the issue again, as it had been already settled earlier, no individual could be forced to sing the song, he said. “I don’t know why this issue is being raised again,” he commented.

Vande Mataram, song was a part of the novel written by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay called Anand Math, published in 1882. When India achieved independence in 1947, it was expected to become the national anthem. Objections raised by Muslim leaders, led to the song (Jana Gana Mana Adhinayak Jaya), written by Rabindranath Tagore become the national anthem.

Considering the fact that issue was resolved several decades ago, there was no reason for any fatwa against it. It would have been different case altogether, had JUH issued the decree in response against any of their members or associates being forced to sing the song. Similarly, the protest raised by extremist Hindu groups would have carried some relevance were the JUH-fatwa legally or morally binding on the entire Indian Muslim community. Or if the fatwa was suggestive of their showing disrespect to the national song. In this context, Vande Mataram is not the only national issue over which controversies have been raised time and again. Officially, though Hindi is India’s national language, it is not binding for government work across the country. Each state uses its regional language, with Hindi being the official language of less than 10 states. Bengali is West Bengal’s official language, Tamil of Tamil Nadu, Marathi – Maharashtra, Gujarati – Gujarat, Telugu – Andhra Pradesh and so forth.

The key point here is that the decision of various states of not using Hindi as their official language is not regarded as an act of treason and/or their showing disrespect to the national language. So why should questions be raised regarding the JUH-fatwa on Vande Mataram? Just as all Indians cannot be forced to use only Hindi, why should hue and cry be raised if some individuals or even groups decide not to sing Vande Mataram? It would have been a different case altogether, if the same was suggestive of such national symbols being abused.

Besides, it is indeed surprising that a lot of noise has been made over JUH-fatwa. One organization’s fatwa has prompted critics to say that it reflects the backwardness of Indian Muslims, their suffering from leadership crisis and their life being still being confined to dictates of their clerics. These points would have had some credibility if JUH was representative of the entire Indian Muslim community. It is not. The error lies in the critics confining their approach to analyzing issues linked with Indian Muslims only to their stereotyped approach, strongly suggestive of the negative bias they still hold against the country’s largest minority community. Just as neither the BJP, VHP, Shiv Sena or any extremist organization linked with saffron brigade or known to project its Hindutva-agenda, be held as representative of the entire Indian Hindu community, no Islamic group – even if claims to – be regarded as the voice of all Muslims in India. The error lies in assuming a few select groups to represent one whole religious community. How can the regional, religious, casteist and other ethnic factors the Indian people across the country are divided into be ignored? This is strongly reflected by numerous political parties, spread across the country. Difference in political culture from north to south, east to west and from state to state also stands marked by the dress, language, even the variety in food, used by Indians. It is indeed amazing, that while making noise against the JUH-fatwa on Vande Mataram, the critics virtually ignored facts such as that organization does not represent the entire Indian Muslim community and singing it is not binding on all Indians, just as using Hindi as the national language is not. The issue, hardly controversial, has been made to appear as such by noise raised over it!

11-47

Phys Ed: Why Doesn’t Exercise Lead to Weight Loss?

by

By Gretchen Reynolds, New York Times

(image below: Sven Hagolani/Getty Images)

For some time, researchers have been finding that people who exercise don’t necessarily lose weight. A study published online in September in The British Journal of Sports Medicine was the latest to report apparently disappointing slimming results. In the study, 58 obese people completed 12 weeks of supervised aerobic training without changing their diets. The group lost an average of a little more than seven pounds, and many lost barely half that.

How can that be? Exercise, it seems, should make you thin. Activity burns calories. No one doubts that.

“Walking, even at a very easy pace, you’ll probably burn three or four calories a minute,” beyond what you would use quietly sitting in a chair, said Dan Carey, Ph.D., an assistant professor of exercise physiology at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, who studies exercise and metabolism.

But few people, an overwhelming body of research shows, achieve significant weight loss with exercise alone, not without changing their eating habits. A new study from scientists at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver offers some reasons why. For the study, the researchers recruited several groups of people. Some were lean endurance athletes; some sedentary and lean; some sedentary and obese. Each of the subjects agreed to spend, over the course of the experiment, several 24-hour periods in a special laboratory room (a walk-in calorimeter) that measures the number of calories a person burns. Using various calculations, the researchers could also tell whether the calories expended were in the form of fat or carbohydrates, the body’s two main fuel sources. Burning more fat than carbohydrates is obviously desirable for weight loss, since the fat being burned comes primarily from body fat stores, and we all, even the leanest among us, have plenty of those.

The Denver researchers were especially interested in how the athletes’ bodies would apportion and use calories. It has been well documented that regular endurance training increases the ability of the body to use fat as a fuel during exercise. They wondered, though, if the athletes — or any of the other subjects — would burn extra fat calories after exercising, a phenomenon that some exercisers (and even more diet and fitness books) call “afterburn.”

“Many people believe that you rev up” your metabolism after an exercise session “so that you burn additional body fat throughout the day,” said Edward Melanson, Ph.D., an associate professor in the division of endocrinology at the School of Medicine and the lead author of the study. If afterburn were found to exist, it would suggest that even if you replaced the calories you used during an exercise session, you should lose weight, without gaining weight — the proverbial free lunch.

Each of Melanson’s subjects spent 24 quiet hours in the calorimeter, followed later by another 24 hours that included an hourlong bout of stationary bicycling. The cycling was deliberately performed at a relatively easy intensity (about 55 percent of each person’s predetermined aerobic capacity). It is well known physiologically that, while high-intensity exercise demands mostly carbohydrate calories (since carbohydrates can quickly reach the bloodstream and, from there, laboring muscles), low-intensity exercise prompts the body to burn at least some stored fat. All of the subjects ate three meals a day.

To their surprise, the researchers found that none of the groups, including the athletes, experienced “afterburn.” They did not use additional body fat on the day when they exercised. In fact, most of the subjects burned slightly less fat over the 24-hour study period when they exercised than when they did not.

“The message of our work is really simple,” although not agreeable to hear, Melanson said. “It all comes down to energy balance,” or, as you might have guessed, calories in and calories out. People “are only burning 200 or 300 calories” in a typical 30-minute exercise session, Melanson points out. “You replace that with one bottle of Gatorade.”

This does not mean that exercise has no impact on body weight, or that you can’t calibrate your workouts to maximize the amount of body fat that you burn, if that’s your goal.

“If you work out at an easy intensity, you will burn a higher percentage of fat calories” than if you work out a higher intensity, Carey says, so you should draw down some of the padding you’ve accumulated on the hips or elsewhere — if you don’t replace all of the calories afterward. To help those hoping to reduce their body fat, he published formulas in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research last month that detailed the heart rates at which a person could maximize fat burning. “Heart rates of between 105 and 134” beats per minute, Carey said, represent the fat-burning zone. “It’s probably best to work out near the top of that zone,” he says, “so that you burn more calories over all” than at the extremely leisurely lower end.

Perhaps just as important, bear in mind that exercise has benefits beyond weight reduction. In the study of obese people who took up exercise, most became notably healthier, increasing their aerobic capacity, decreasing their blood pressure and resting heart rates, and, the authors write, achieving “an acute exercise-induced increase in positive mood,” leading the authors to conclude that, “significant and meaningful health benefits can be achieved even in the presence of lower than expected exercise-induced weight loss.”

Finally and thankfully, exercise seems to aid, physiologically, in the battle to keep off body fat once it has been, through resolute calorie reduction, chiseled away. In other work by Melanson’s group, published in September, laboratory rats that had been overfed and then slimmed through calorie reduction were able to “defend” their lower weight more effectively if they ran on a treadmill and ate at will than if they had no access to a treadmill. The exercise seemed to reset certain metabolic pathways within the rats, Melanson says, that blunted their body’s drive to replace the lost fat. Similar mechanisms, he adds, probably operate within the bodies of humans, providing scientific justification for signing up for that Thanksgiving Day 5K.

11-47

Mall Rats

by

By Sumayyah Meehan, Muslim Media News Service (MMNS) Middle East Correspondent

wallgarden The Middle East is world-renowned for hosting some of the tallest buildings in the world. However, the region is also home to some of the largest and most luxurious shopping malls in the world. As a result of almost year-round scorching temperatures and excess oil wealth that flows out of banks just as quickly as the bubbling crude can be exhumed from the earth, shopping is the new national pastime for most Middle East nations.

It’s primarily the elite and wealthy denizens of the Gulf region, in countries like Kuwait, Dubai and Oman, that can afford to shop til they drop in the most prestigious designer boutiques and stores from the global arena. And since the wealthy clearly outnumber the less fortunate in the Gulf region, malls go up at a record pace, each bearing a signature style to lure customers and ring up sales.

Built across 12 million square feet, the largest mall in the Middle East can be found in the United Arab Emirates.  With more than 1,200 stores ready and open for business the Dubai Mall attracts approximately 750,000 visitors each week. The mall is part of the Burj Dubai Project, which is the tallest building in the world. Some of the features that make the mall unique include the biggest gold market in the world with more than 220 jewelry stores. It also has more than 70 stores that carry exclusive haute couture designer clothing. And as for entertainment, the mall is home to the first SEGA indoor theme park in the Middle East and a 22-screen movie theater.

However, the undisputed crown of the region’s largest mall is set to topple by next year’s end. Just a hop, skip and a jump away from Dubai, the leading contender for the most lavish and gargantuan mall in the Middle East can be found in Kuwait. ‘The Avenues’ mall lives up to its name. This monster of capitalism and sheer consumerism is as big as it gets with several hundred stores and plans to house a European-styled ‘Grand Mall’. The mall has already opened despite the fact that only two out of the proposed three phases have been complete. Security is also very tight as the mall features its very own police department with a force of 350 ‘mall cops’ that work around the clock to ensure public safety. The command center of the police department receives live feed from over 350 security cameras situated all over the interior and exterior of the mall.

Size, however, does not always matter. There seems to be a mall on every corner in the biggest cities of the Gulf region with most of the smaller malls mimicking each other and offering little more than a rehashing of the one prior. However, there is one mall that while small is standing out as a veritable gem in the crown of all things commercial. The ‘360 Mall’ of Kuwait was built in a perfect circle and is an architectural feat of sheer minimalism and art. The most attractive features of this mall are not a giant store or an enormous entertainment center. What makes the 360 Mall unique is that it houses two very unique and permanent art installations. The first is the largest vertical garden in the world, which was grown by French botanist Patric Blanc and is the size of four tennis courts in length. The second are two glass sculptures, made to look like the moon and the sun, by renowned American glass artist Dale Chihuly.

11-47

Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin

by

By John Cloud

As I write this, tomorrow is Tuesday, which is a cardio day. I’ll spend five minutes warming up on the VersaClimber, a towering machine that requires you to move your arms and legs simultaneously. Then I’ll do 30 minutes on a stair mill. On Wednesday a personal trainer will work me like a farm animal for an hour, sometimes to the point that I am dizzy — an abuse for which I pay as much as I spend on groceries in a week. Thursday is "body wedge" class, which involves another exercise contraption, this one a large foam wedge from which I will push myself up in various hateful ways for an hour. Friday will bring a 5.5-mile run, the extra half-mile my grueling expiation of any gastronomical indulgences during the week.

I have exercised like this — obsessively, a bit grimly — for years, but recently I began to wonder: Why am I doing this? Except for a two-year period at the end of an unhappy relationship — a period when I self-medicated with lots of Italian desserts — I have never been overweight. One of the most widely accepted, commonly repeated assumptions in our culture is that if you exercise, you will lose weight. But I exercise all the time, and since I ended that relationship and cut most of those desserts, my weight has returned to the same 163 lb. it has been most of my adult life. I still have gut fat that hangs over my belt when I sit. Why isn’t all the exercise wiping it out?

It’s a question many of us could ask. More than 45 million Americans now belong to a health club, up from 23 million in 1993. We spend some $19 billion a year on gym memberships. Of course, some people join and never go. Still, as one major study — the Minnesota Heart Survey — found, more of us at least say we exercise regularly. The survey ran from 1980, when only 47% of respondents said they engaged in regular exercise, to 2000, when the figure had grown to 57%.

And yet obesity figures have risen dramatically in the same period: a third of Americans are obese, and another third count as overweight by the Federal Government’s definition. Yes, it’s entirely possible that those of us who regularly go to the gym would weigh even more if we exercised less. But like many other people, I get hungry after I exercise, so I often eat more on the days I work out than on the days I don’t. Could exercise actually be keeping me from losing weight?

The conventional wisdom that exercise is essential for shedding pounds is actually fairly new. As recently as the 1960s, doctors routinely advised against rigorous exercise, particularly for older adults who could injure themselves. Today doctors encourage even their oldest patients to exercise, which is sound advice for many reasons: People who regularly exercise are at significantly lower risk for all manner of diseases — those of the heart in particular. They less often develop cancer, diabetes and many other illnesses. But the past few years of obesity research show that the role of exercise in weight loss has been wildly overstated.

"In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless," says Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher. Many recent studies have found that exercise isn’t as important in helping people lose weight as you hear so regularly in gym advertisements or on shows like The Biggest Loser — or, for that matter, from magazines like this one.

The basic problem is that while it’s true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn’t necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

The Compensation Problem
Earlier this year, the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE — PLoS is the nonprofit Public Library of Science — published a remarkable study supervised by a colleague of Ravussin’s, Dr. Timothy Church, who holds the rather grand title of chair in health wisdom at LSU. Church’s team randomly assigned into four groups 464 overweight women who didn’t regularly exercise. Women in three of the groups were asked to work out with a personal trainer for 72 min., 136 min., and 194 min. per week, respectively, for six months. Women in the fourth cluster, the control group, were told to maintain their usual physical-activity routines. All the women were asked not to change their dietary habits and to fill out monthly medical-symptom questionnaires.

The findings were surprising. On average, the women in all the groups, even the control group, lost weight, but the women who exercised — sweating it out with a trainer several days a week for six months — did not lose significantly more weight than the control subjects did. (The control-group women may have lost weight because they were filling out those regular health forms, which may have prompted them to consume fewer doughnuts.) Some of the women in each of the four groups actually gained weight, some more than 10 lb. each.

What’s going on here? Church calls it compensation, but you and I might know it as the lip-licking anticipation of perfectly salted, golden-brown French fries after a hard trip to the gym. Whether because exercise made them hungry or because they wanted to reward themselves (or both), most of the women who exercised ate more than they did before they started the experiment. Or they compensated in another way, by moving around a lot less than usual after they got home.

The findings are important because the government and various medical organizations routinely prescribe more and more exercise for those who want to lose weight. In 2007 the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association issued new guidelines stating that "to lose weight … 60 to 90 minutes of physical activity may be necessary." That’s 60 to 90 minutes on most days of the week, a level that not only is unrealistic for those of us trying to keep or find a job but also could easily produce, on the basis of Church’s data, ravenous compensatory eating.

It’s true that after six months of working out, most of the exercisers in Church’s study were able to trim their waistlines slightly — by about an inch. Even so, they lost no more overall body fat than the control group did. Why not?

Church, who is 41 and has lived in Baton Rouge for nearly three years, has a theory. "I see this anecdotally amongst, like, my wife’s friends," he says. "They’re like, ‘Ah, I’m running an hour a day, and I’m not losing any weight.’" He asks them, "What are you doing after you run?" It turns out one group of friends was stopping at Starbucks for muffins afterward. Says Church: "I don’t think most people would appreciate that, wow, you only burned 200 or 300 calories, which you’re going to neutralize with just half that muffin."

You might think half a muffin over an entire day wouldn’t matter much, particularly if you exercise regularly. After all, doesn’t exercise turn fat to muscle, and doesn’t muscle process excess calories more efficiently than fat does?

Yes, although the muscle-fat relationship is often misunderstood. According to calculations published in the journal Obesity Research by a Columbia University team in 2001, a pound of muscle burns approximately six calories a day in a resting body, compared with the two calories that a pound of fat burns. Which means that after you work out hard enough to convert, say, 10 lb. of fat to muscle — a major achievement — you would be able to eat only an extra 40 calories per day, about the amount in a teaspoon of butter, before beginning to gain weight. Good luck with that.

Fundamentally, humans are not a species that evolved to dispose of many extra calories beyond what we need to live. Rats, among other species, have a far greater capacity to cope with excess calories than we do because they have more of a dark-colored tissue called brown fat. Brown fat helps produce a protein that switches off little cellular units called mitochondria, which are the cells’ power plants: they help turn nutrients into energy. When they’re switched off, animals don’t get an energy boost. Instead, the animals literally get warmer. And as their temperature rises, calories burn effortlessly.

Because rodents have a lot of brown fat, it’s very difficult to make them obese, even when you force-feed them in labs. But humans — we’re pathetic. We have so little brown fat that researchers didn’t even report its existence in adults until earlier this year. That’s one reason humans can gain weight with just an extra half-muffin a day: we almost instantly store most of the calories we don’t need in our regular ("white") fat cells.

All this helps explain why our herculean exercise over the past 30 years — all the personal trainers, StairMasters and VersaClimbers; all the Pilates classes and yoga retreats and fat camps — hasn’t made us thinner. After we exercise, we often crave sugary calories like those in muffins or in "sports" drinks like Gatorade. A standard 20-oz. bottle of Gatorade contains 130 calories. If you’re hot and thirsty after a 20-minute run in summer heat, it’s easy to guzzle that bottle in 20 seconds, in which case the caloric expenditure and the caloric intake are probably a wash. From a weight-loss perspective, you would have been better off sitting on the sofa knitting.

Self-Control Is like a Muscle

Many people assume that weight is mostly a matter of willpower — that we can learn both to exercise and to avoid muffins and Gatorade. A few of us can, but evolution did not build us to do this for very long. In 2000 the journal Psychological Bulletin published a paper by psychologists Mark Muraven and Roy Baumeister in which they observed that self-control is like a muscle: it weakens each day after you use it. If you force yourself to jog for an hour, your self-regulatory capacity is proportionately enfeebled. Rather than lunching on a salad, you’ll be more likely to opt for pizza.

Some of us can will ourselves to overcome our basic psychology, but most of us won’t be very successful. "The most powerful determinant of your dietary intake is your energy expenditure," says Steven Gortmaker, who heads Harvard’s Prevention Research Center on Nutrition and Physical Activity. "If you’re more physically active, you’re going to get hungry and eat more." Gortmaker, who has studied childhood obesity, is even suspicious of the playgrounds at fast-food restaurants. "Why would they build those?" he asks. "I know it sounds kind of like conspiracy theory, but you have to think, if a kid plays five minutes and burns 50 calories, he might then go inside and consume 500 calories or even 1,000."

Last year the International Journal of Obesity published a paper by Gortmaker and Kendrin Sonneville of Children’s Hospital Boston noting that "there is a widespread assumption that increasing activity will result in a net reduction in any energy gap" — energy gap being the term scientists use for the difference between the number of calories you use and the number you consume. But Gortmaker and Sonneville found in their 18-month study of 538 students that when kids start to exercise, they end up eating more — not just a little more, but an average of 100 calories more than they had just burned.

If evolution didn’t program us to lose weight through exercise, what did it program us to do? Doesn’t exercise do anything?

Sure. It does plenty. In addition to enhancing heart health and helping prevent disease, exercise improves your mental health and cognitive ability. A study published in June in the journal Neurology found that older people who exercise at least once a week are 30% more likely to maintain cognitive function than those who exercise less. Another study, released by the University of Alberta a few weeks ago, found that people with chronic back pain who exercise four days a week have 36% less disability than those who exercise only two or three days a week.

But there’s some confusion about whether it is exercise — sweaty, exhausting, hunger-producing bursts of activity done exclusively to benefit our health — that leads to all these benefits or something far simpler: regularly moving during our waking hours. We all need to move more — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says our leisure-time physical activity (including things like golfing, gardening and walking) has decreased since the late 1980s, right around the time the gym boom really exploded. But do we need to stress our bodies at the gym?

Look at kids. In May a team of researchers at Peninsula Medical School in the U.K. traveled to Amsterdam to present some surprising findings to the European Congress on Obesity. The Peninsula scientists had studied 206 kids, ages 7 to 11, at three schools in and around Plymouth, a city of 250,000 on the southern coast of England. Kids at the first school, an expensive private academy, got an average of 9.2 hours per week of scheduled, usually rigorous physical education. Kids at the two other schools — one in a village near Plymouth and the other an urban school — got just 2.4 hours and 1.7 hours of PE per week, respectively.

To understand just how much physical activity the kids were getting, the Peninsula team had them wear ActiGraphs, light but sophisticated devices that measure not only the amount of physical movement the body engages in but also its intensity. During four one-week periods over consecutive school terms, the kids wore the ActiGraphs nearly every waking moment.

And no matter how much PE they got during school hours, when you look at the whole day, the kids from the three schools moved the same amount, at about the same intensity. The kids at the fancy private school underwent significantly more physical activity before 3 p.m., but overall they didn’t move more. "Once they get home, if they are very active in school, they are probably staying still a bit more because they’ve already expended so much energy," says Alissa Frémeaux, a biostatistician who helped conduct the study. "The others are more likely to grab a bike and run around after school."

Another British study, this one from the University of Exeter, found that kids who regularly move in short bursts — running to catch a ball, racing up and down stairs to collect toys — are just as healthy as kids who participate in sports that require vigorous, sustained exercise.

Could pushing people to exercise more actually be contributing to our obesity problem? In some respects, yes. Because exercise depletes not just the body’s muscles but the brain’s self-control "muscle" as well, many of us will feel greater entitlement to eat a bag of chips during that lazy time after we get back from the gym. This explains why exercise could make you heavier — or at least why even my wretched four hours of exercise a week aren’t eliminating all my fat. It’s likely that I am more sedentary during my nonexercise hours than I would be if I didn’t exercise with such Puritan fury. If I exercised less, I might feel like walking more instead of hopping into a cab; I might have enough energy to shop for food, cook and then clean instead of ordering a satisfyingly greasy burrito.

Closing the Energy Gap

The problem ultimately is about not exercise itself but the way we’ve come to define it. Many obesity researchers now believe that very frequent, low-level physical activity — the kind humans did for tens of thousands of years before the leaf blower was invented — may actually work better for us than the occasional bouts of exercise you get as a gym rat. "You cannot sit still all day long and then have 30 minutes of exercise without producing stress on the muscles," says Hans-Rudolf Berthoud, a neurobiologist at LSU’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center who has studied nutrition for 20 years. "The muscles will ache, and you may not want to move after. But to burn calories, the muscle movements don’t have to be extreme. It would be better to distribute the movements throughout the day."

For his part, Berthoud rises at 5 a.m. to walk around his neighborhood several times. He also takes the stairs when possible. "Even if people can get out of their offices, out from in front of their computers, they go someplace like the mall and then take the elevator," he says. "This is the real problem, not that we don’t go to the gym enough."

I was skeptical when Berthoud said this. Don’t you need to raise your heart rate and sweat in order to strengthen your cardiovascular system? Don’t you need to push your muscles to the max in order to build them?

Actually, it’s not clear that vigorous exercise like running carries more benefits than a moderately strenuous activity like walking while carrying groceries. You regularly hear about the benefits of exercise in news stories, but if you read the academic papers on which these stories are based, you frequently see that the research subjects who were studied didn’t clobber themselves on the elliptical machine. A routine example: in June the Association for Psychological Science issued a news release saying that "physical exercise … may indeed preserve or enhance various aspects of cognitive functioning." But in fact, those who had better cognitive function merely walked more and climbed more stairs. They didn’t even walk faster; walking speed wasn’t correlated with cognitive ability.

There’s also growing evidence that when it comes to preventing certain diseases, losing weight may be more important than improving cardiovascular health. In June, Northwestern University researchers released the results of the longest observational study ever to investigate the relationship between aerobic fitness and the development of diabetes. The results? Being aerobically fit was far less important than having a normal body mass index in preventing the disease. And as we have seen, exercise often does little to help heavy people reach a normal weight.

So why does the belief persist that exercise leads to weight loss, given all the scientific evidence to the contrary? Interestingly, until the 1970s, few obesity researchers promoted exercise as critical for weight reduction. As recently as 1992, when a stout Bill Clinton became famous for his jogging and McDonald’s habits, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published an article that began, "Recently, the interest in the potential of adding exercise to the treatment of obesity has increased." The article went on to note that incorporating exercise training into obesity treatment had led to "inconsistent" results. "The increased energy expenditure obtained by training may be compensated by a decrease in non-training physical activities," the authors wrote.

Then how did the exercise-to-lose-weight mantra become so ingrained? Public-health officials have been reluctant to downplay exercise because those who are more physically active are, overall, healthier. Plus, it’s hard even for experts to renounce the notion that exercise is essential for weight loss. For years, psychologist Kelly Brownell ran a lab at Yale that treated obese patients with the standard, drilled-into-your-head combination of more exercise and less food. "What we found was that the treatment of obesity was very frustrating," he says. Only about 5% of participants could keep the weight off, and although those 5% were more likely to exercise than those who got fat again, Brownell says if he were running the program today, "I would probably reorient toward food and away from exercise." In 2005, Brownell co-founded Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, which focuses on food marketing and public policy — not on encouraging more exercise.

Some research has found that the obese already "exercise" more than most of the rest of us. In May, Dr. Arn Eliasson of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center reported the results of a small study that found that overweight people actually expend significantly more calories every day than people of normal weight — 3,064 vs. 2,080. He isn’t the first researcher to reach this conclusion. As science writer Gary Taubes noted in his 2007 book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health, "The obese tend to expend more energy than lean people of comparable height, sex, and bone structure, which means their metabolism is typically burning off more calories rather than less."

In short, it’s what you eat, not how hard you try to work it off, that matters more in losing weight. You should exercise to improve your health, but be warned: fiery spurts of vigorous exercise could lead to weight gain. I love how exercise makes me feel, but tomorrow I might skip the VersaClimber — and skip the blueberry bar that is my usual postexercise reward.

11-47

Asperger’s Syndrome Wives Need Understanding

by

By Karin Friedemann, MMNS

Asperger’s Syndrome is a neurological disorder considered as high-functioning autism. Individuals with this syndrome have difficulty with social aspects of intelligence. This manifests itself as a notable lack of “common sense.” The presence of Asperger in children is getting more attention now, but the undiagnosed adult is not yet well recognized. Because these types of brain disorders seem to be more common in men, many times wives have trouble getting the support they need.

The shortcomings of adults with Asperger’s Syndrome have been camouflaged beneath layers of coping strategies and defense mechanisms. Their behavior often gives the impression of someone perhaps a little eccentric or odd – but passable because of their high or gift in an area or career, such as engineering.

Life with an AS spouse is very isolating. Since the AS person in public often appears normal, others do not understand the spouse’s suffering. Spouses of people with Asperger Syndrome play an abnormally large caregiver role. Even when AS people are successful professionals, their families cannot rely on them to participate fully in family life since they typically don’t do their share of chores or provide emotional support to other family members.

Although people with Asperger’s Syndrome do feel affection towards others, relationships are not a priority for them in the same way that it is for people who do not have Asperger’s Syndrome. People with Asperger’s Syndrome generally seem to be more focused on a particular interest, project or task than on the people around them.

Because the person with Asperger’s Syndrome does not have the same relational needs as the non-Asperger partner, he or she is mostly unable to recognize instinctively or to meet the emotional needs of his or her partner. Marriages can thus form seriously dysfunctional relationship patterns. The denial, the complex and multi-layered coping mechanisms and defensive strategies make it difficult to live successfully in a relationship with someone who has Asperger’s Syndrome. Often the afflicted will deny there is a problem, since one of the disorder’s main characteristics is the lack of ability to imagine someone else’s point of view.

People who do not have Asperger’s Syndrome enter a marriage with the normal expectation that the priority of a marriage relationship will be about togetherness, mutual terms and meeting of needs, but in reality the relationship ends up being more one of practicality and convenience for the person with Asperger’s Syndrome than for the loving and meeting of emotional needs of the marital partner.

In many cases, the Asperger partner analyzed the partner prior to marriage and assessed them as being capable of filling a compensatory role for his own deficits. The non-Asperger partner then unwittingly fills the role of personal assistant. In the privacy of their relationship, the spouse who does not have Asperger’s Syndrome will more than likely be physically and emotionally drained, working overtime to keep life on track for both of them. Perhaps the relationship has taken on more of the characteristics of a business partnership or arrangement.

For those who had normal expectations of the mutuality of marriage, there will be a sense of betrayal and a feeling of being used and trapped. Instinctively they know that their partner needs them, but feelings develop that the relationship is about the needs and interests of the person with Asperger’s Syndrome and that there is not even room for their own voice. Many partners feel that they are daily sacrificing their own sense of self to help fulfill the priorities of the partner who has Asperger’s Syndrome. They begin to feel that they are entirely defined by the role they fill for their Asperger partner. There’s a sense that there is no mutuality, no equality, no justice.

People married to someone with Asperger’s Syndrome continue to hope for the mutual meeting of emotional needs within the marriage and resent the reality of living on terms dictated by the needs and priorities of the partner with Asperger’s Syndrome. In effect, their flexibility is exploited by the inflexibility of the person with Asperger’s Syndrome. This prompts an extremely manipulative behavior pattern, with the neurologically typical spouse going overboard to prevent stress. Living with someone who sees only his or her own viewpoint cannot help but damage a spouse’s self-esteem.

The neurotypical spouse must thoroughly evaluate all the issues before deciding if there is enough of value to make continuing the relationship worthwhile. Those who stay in a relationship with an Asperger’s-afflicted mate should do everything possible to be independent socially and financially. In most cases, the afflicted spouse will not be able to make substantial changes, so the neurotypical spouse must be able to accept that. Knowing what to expect will make the marriage more predictable and manageable, if not easier.

Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women.

11-47

Soldiers Often ‘Racialize’ to Cope

by

New America Media, Interview, Aaron Glantz

Editor’s Note: The horrific shooting Thursday at Fort Hood that claimed 13 lives and hospitalized another 30 people has set off a great deal of speculation as to why the alleged shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, did what he did.

NAM Editor Aaron Glantz spoke to former Marine Corps Cpl. Dave Hassan, who served in Iraq in 2005 and 2006. Hassan, an Egyptian American, said that while he was in Iraq, racist language was so pervasive that he began to use it himself.

egyptian soldier guy from NAM article

When you heard that the shooter was an Arab-American major what was your reaction?

This is not going to end well. That was essentialy my first reaction. I don’t know if the guy did it or not but assuming that this guy did do it, somebody who shoots a whole bunch of people ought to get punished for it, but in a broader sense, it’s just going to fuel more of the anti-Arab racism that’s grown up in the past decade or so. It’s going to be fun for the rest of us. [laughs]

What about the fact that he was a psychiatrist?

He was probably treating guys with PTSD [post traumatic stress disorder] and there’s a lot more overt racism in that crowd than there is in the rest of the military.

Talk about that.

Well, your average service member is not particularly racist and not necessarily more racist than your average American. But in order to go be involved with killing large [numbers] of other human beings, you have to dehumanize the enemy, and the easiest way to dehumanize them is to racialize them. In my experience, they’re much more prone to talking about ‘f** hajji’s,” if only “these f** hajjis wouldn’t be here, this wouldn’t have happened.’

But after you were deployed to Iraq, you used that language even though your family is Egyptian.

Oh, absolutely. I absolutely used those words. I didn’t think anything of it. It was just a part of how you talked about the people who were in Iraq and it didn’t even register that I was even talking about my own ethnic community until I started thinking about it after I got home. That was a little hard for me.

But it’s just how you talk about Iraqis and Afghans. It’s a word that’s used for specific people in Arabic. It means someone who has completed a pilgrimage so it’s a term of respect in Arab cultures. Now it’s present at every level of the military chain of command, so everybody uses it. In the military, things stop because commanders want them to stop and that wasn’t the case for that kind of language.

They’re hajji’s and you don’t even think about the fact that it’s a pretty racist term to be using it the way that we used it. And he [Hasan] would have heard a lot of it, because he was treating a lot of pretty angry folks.

And how was that day-to-day for you?

For me, it never went beyond the use of language. People would say, ‘Why are hajjis wearing dresses all the time,’ [talking about traditional Iraqi dishdash]. One or two of the officers that I had contact with would call me over and say ‘Hassan, how come these hajjis want to be doing this?’

So thinking of all this were you surprised when Major Hasan opened fire at Fort Hood?

I was surprised that it was a psychiatrist that shot a lot of people. It’s no longer surprising to me that returning veterans would kill a bunch of people. But this guy was a psychiatrist who hadn’t been deployed, and he was also a major, which means he was in for a long time. If he had been at Walter Reed for a long time it was probably the first time that he had to think in detail about actually deploying to a foreign country and what that means. He would have been a lot closer to the ‘action’ there.

11-47

Mich Woman Imprisoned by Israel following settler takeover of Palestinian home

by

alethonews.blogspot.com

Imprisoned American citizen and Michigan resident Ahlam Mohsen to be deported to the US after being arrested in a Palestinian home taken over by Israeli settlers in Occupied East Jerusalem.

Ahlam was a guest of the al-Kurd family when on the morning of 3 November 2009 Israeli settlers burst in and seized part of the building. Contrary to eyewitness accounts, the police claim the 21-year-old attacked them.

>From the Givon prison in Ramle where Ms. Mohsen is currently awaiting deportation she reported that: “The Israeli police were violently pushing an elderly Palestinian woman. So I stepped in front of them. They told me to move and when I refused they started forcefully pushing me. Then they grabbed me and carried me into a police van. While I was waiting at the Israeli Ministry of Interior, the police officers kept telling each other that I was a `dirty Arab’ and introducing me as ‘Osama Bin Laden’s sister’. One of them, threatened to `break my head’. None of the other non-violent demonstrators were targeted; the way they treated me, it’s obvious that I was arrested because I’m of Arab descent.”

The 40 settlers, accompanied by private armed security and Israeli police forces, entered a section of the home, threw out the family’s belongings and locked themselves in.

The take-over came after an appeal submitted by the family’s lawyer was rejected by the District Court. In their appeal, the Palestinian family was challenging an earlier court decision that deemed a section of the house illegal and ordered that the keys be given to settlers. The settlers proceeded to enter the house, while the court did not grant them the right to enter the property.

The al-Kurd home was built in 1956. An addition to the house was built 10 years ago, but the family was not allowed to inhabit the section because the municipality refused to grant them a building permit. Visibly unequal laws are used to make it possible for settlers to move into a home where it was declared illegal for Palestinian residents to inhabit. The Israeli authorities exercise their abilities to demolish and evict Palestinian residents, while ignoring building violations from the Israeli population in East Jerusalem.

The al-Kurds have become the fourth Sheikh Jarrah family whose house has been occupied by settlers in the last year. So far, 60 people have been left homeless. In total, 28 families living in the Karm Al- Ja’ouni neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, located directly north of the Old City, face imminent eviction from their homes.

Ahlam is imprisoned in the Givon prison in Ramle.

She is available for interviews.

Video: edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2009/11/03/hancocks.fight.for.jerusalem.cnn

11-47

Mass Killers and Media

by

By Dr. Aslam Abdullah, TMO Editor-in-chief

Who is in right mind will commit an act attributed to Major Nidal Malik Hasan? Why did he commit such an act when the alleged shooter had sought discharge from the army? Who in his right mind will condone such a criminal act? Regardless of what the motives were, the insane killing of soldiers at Fort Hood is rightly condemned by all Muslim organizations unanimously. Not every act of violence committed by KKK is condemned by people of white skin. Not every act of killing by blacks is condemned by organizations such as NAACP. Not every murder committed in a free society like us is condemned by organizations promoting democracy and freedom. If we as a country with billions of dollars resources spent on law enforcement agencies have failed to prevent groups such as KKK or gun violence or mass murderers, why does any body except 1.6 billion Muslims to be responsible of the behavior of their insane, and crazy people.

But somehow the impression that is being created by the media and propagated by the right wing Christian extremists is that 1.6 billion Muslims are responsible for what was done by Nidal Malik Hasan, as their holy book is the main reason for his behavoior. Well, why donot they also attribute to Islam and the Quran the act of kindness, mercy and forgiveness offered by Muslims to the people regardless of their ethnic or religious background? Look at how Islam and Muslims were demonized by the media.

* Suspected mass murderer Nidal Malik Hasan: Identified as a Muslim American of Jordanian or Palestinian Descend, a sympathizer of suicide bombing, a convert to Islam, a Jihadist, a true believer in the Quran, a practicing Muslim, a promoter of Al-Qaida ideology, a member of a terrorist sleeper cell and so on so forth.

Look at the pattern of news reporting about mass killers in our national and local media listed below and then tell me who is distorting facts? Tell me who is misleading the public? Tell me who is sowing the seeds of hatred. Some of them will say, Aslam Abdullah, because he is a Muslim American, a Middle Eastern by ethnicity and a covert terrorist. Can any sensible American accept their claim? Yes, only those who see Muslims and Islam as their new enemy. These are people who are trapped in the history of the past and refuse to look at Islam and Muslims from an objective, balanced and fair perspective.

Let’s start with another shooting incident that follows on the heels of the Fort Hood incident:

* November 06, 2009, Florida police have arrested a suspect believed to have opened fire Friday in the offices of an engineering firm where he was let go more than two years ago. Authorities have identified the alleged gunman as Jason Rodriguez, 40, a former employee at the office building. Did any news media identify him as an American of Hispanic decent?

* On March 10, 2009, Michael McLendon set fire to the rural south Alabama home he shared with his mother with her body inside. He then set off on a 24-mile shooting spree during which he fired more than 200 rounds and killed 10 more people, including himself. Was he ever described by the media or officials as an American Protestant?

* On April 3, 2009, a Vietnam immigrant killed 13 people and then himself in a shooting spree at the American Civic Association in Binghamton, New York. Did anyone call him a Vietcong terrorist?

* In the year of 1989, in two separate incidents, Westley Allen Dodd sexually assaulted and killed three boys ages 11, 10 and four. His methods were so heinous, forensic psychologists dubbed him one of the most evil killers in history. Did anyone call him Christian killer?

* Jeffrey Dahmer was responsible for a series of gruesome murders of seventeen young men in Ohio and Milwaukee. Who called him a Christian murderer? No one!

* Why Ray and Faye Copeland, both in their 70s, went from being loving grandparents to serial killers who used the clothing of their victims to make a warm winter quilt to snuggle under is a story both morbid and perplexing. Did anyone describe them American terrorists?

* Dean Corll was a 33-year-old electrician living in Houston, Texas, who, with two teen accomplices, was responsible for kidnapping, torturing, raping and murdering at least 27 young boys in Houston in the early 1970s. – No one called him an evangelical terrorist?

* Accompanied by his girlfriend Debra Brown, Alton Coleman went on a six-state raping and killing spree in 1984. – He was not described as a Christian rapist?

* Angelo Buono, Jr. was, along with his cousin Kenneth Bianchi, one of the Hillside Stranglers who went on a two month rape, torture and murder spree in 1977, in California. – Was he identified with his religion and ethnicity?

* Jerry Brudos was a shoe fetishist, serial killer, rapist, torturer and necrophiliac who stalked women around Portland, Oregon in 1968 and 1969. – Should we blame the people of Oregon and call him an Oregonian rapist?

* In 1984, at age 21, Debra Brown became involved in a master/slave relationship with habitual killer and rapist Alton Coleman and the two went on a massive killing, raping and torture spree across the Midwest. – No one ever mentioned his race or religion.

* William Bonin was a habitual sex offender turned serial killer, suspected of sexually assaulting, torturing and killing at least 21 boys and young men in California. He was convicted and executed for 14 of the 21 murders. – No one talked about his affiliation to his local Church.

* Herbert Richard “Herb” Baumeister (April 7, 1947 – July 3, 1996) was the founder of the thrift store chain Sav-a-Lot and an alleged serial killer from suburban Westfield, Indiana. – His conservative background never came into discussion.

* Ronald Dominique of Houma, Louisiana confessed to murdering 23 men over the past nine years and dumping their bodies in sugarcane fields, ditches and small bayous in six southeast Louisiana parishes. – Yet, his Christian religious identity never came into discussion.

* Kristen Gilbert was a bright, attractive, well-trained nurse who, in 2001 was found guilty of killing her patients at a Veterans Administration medical center. – Did the media release footage of his visit to his place of worship? No

* Eagle Scout turned serial killer, Richard Angelo, killed patients in order to make himself out to be a hero.- Did anyone raise doubts about Scouting? No one!

* Helmuth Schmidt killed innocent women he lured through personal ads. – Did anyone blame the media for being an accomplice of the crime.

* The Lewington brothers were one of Ohio’s most deadly brutal serial killers of all time. – Did anyone bring about their Church affiliation? No one!

* Albert Fish is known for being one of the most vile pedophiles and killers of all time. After his capture he admitted to molesting over 400 children and tortured and killed several others. – Did the media talk about his religious pastor discussing his personal life?

Ads by Google Advertisements not controlled by IslamiCity

* Tedd Bundy was attractive, smart, and had a future in politics. He was also one of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history. Bundy screamed his innocence until his death in the electric chair was imminent. Then he told just enough to show the true evil inside him.- Yet no one in the media talked about his race or religion.

* Richard Ramirez, was named The Night Stalker, after terrorizing Los Angeles during a year long killing and rape spree that resulted in his conviction of 43 counts, including 13 murders and other charges including burglary, sodomy, and rape. – Yet no one talked about Satanism he was preaching and practicing.

* John Wayne Gacy was convicted of the torture, rape and murder of 33 men between 1972 until his arrest in 1978. He was dubbed the “Killer Clown” because he entertained kids at parties as “Pogo The Clown.” – Did anyone blame all the clowns for his behavior.

* Gaskins confessed to several murders during the last days of his life. How much truth was in his confessions was never confirmed. Many believed he did not want to be known in history as a tiny man, but rather as a prolific killer. – He was a devout Christian but we never heard of his religious convictions.

* David Berkowitz, better known as Son of Sam, is an infamous 1970s New York City serial killer who killed six people and wounded several others because a demon dog told him to do it. – Should we assume from his last name that he was of Jewish origin?

* The Plainfield, Wisconsin police department had no idea of the grotesque world they were about to enter when they went to Ed Gein’s farm home to investigate the disappearance of a local woman. Gein’s crimes went down in history as some of the most disgusting ever uncovered that encompassed murder, grave robbing and cannibalism. – Yet, no one ever mentioned that he was a Church goer.

* Juan Corona was a labor contractor who hired migrant workers for produce fields in California. In a murder spree lasting six weeks, he raped and murdered 25 men and buried their machete-hacked bodies in the orchards owned by local farmers. – No one blamed hedonism or homosexuality for his crimes.

* In late October 1979, California authorities were busy hunting down and capturing The Hillside Strangler, Angelo Buono. In the meantime, two more equally barbaric killers had teamed up to fulfill a prison time fantasy – to kidnap, rape, torture and kill a girl for each teenage year. – Yet, we did not hear of their worshipping habits.

* On October 26, 2005, Jeremy Bryan Jones was convicted of the rape, burglary, sexual abuse, kidnapping and capital murder of Lisa Nichols. He now faces prosecution for the murder of Katherine Collins of Georgia and Amanda Greenwell of Douglas County, Ga. Police suspect Jones is a serial killer who may be linked to at least 10 other murders across the country. – No one discussed his faith and ethnicity.

* For month authorities from Utah, Washington, and Colorado worked together to find the serial killer named “Ted” who was brutally killing women everywhere he went, using their kindness to lead them into his trap. – Yet no one blamed Christianity for impacting the mind of the killer.

* Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins was the most prolific serial killer in South Carolina history. Once his brutality was unleashed, he knew no boundaries, torturing, killing, cannibalizing victims, both male and female. – No one talked about those verses in the Old Testament that degrades women, even though several versions of the Bible were found in his custody.

* Pedro Alonzo Lopez, known as the ‘The Monster of the Andes,’ was one of history’s most horrific serial killers. He responsible for the brutal murders of over 350 children. He bragged of his crimes and promised to do it again if ever released from prison. – Yet in the middle of the night he was taken from prison to a van then driven to the Columbia border and set free. We never heard of his Catholic affiliation.

* Turner is the most prolific serial killer in the history of Los Angeles but was finally identified through DNA technology. – But no one identified his religion.

* No one could believe that the child-like face of John Eric Armstrong, nicknamed ‘Opie’ by his navy friends, was really the face of a cold and calculating serial killer. – But no one talked about his religious practices.

* Jack the Ripper, a serial killer murdered and mutilated at least five prostitutes in the East End of London in 1888 and because no one was ever, arrested or tried for the murders, crime buffs are still fascinated with the case more than 115 years later. – His religious background is unknown.

* It is estimated Shipman was responsible for 236 murders over 24 years, finally ending in 1998.- Yet, we never heard of his affiliation to Judaism or any other faith.

“Most of the time I killed them the first time I met them, and I do not have a good memory of their faces.” This is just one of many cold statements made by Gary Ridgway, when he pled guilty to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder in the Green River killing cases. – Yet little is known about his faith and Church.

11-47

Survey: Free Market Flawed

by

By James Robbins

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new BBC poll has found widespread dissatisfaction with free-market capitalism.

In the global poll for the BBC World Service, only 11% of those questioned across 27 countries said that it was working well.

Most thought regulation and reform of the capitalist system were necessary.

There were also sharp divisions around the world on whether the end of the Soviet Union was a good thing.

Economic regulation

In 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell, it was a victory for ordinary people across Eastern and Central Europe.

It also looked at the time like a crushing victory for free-market capitalism.

Twenty years on, this new global poll suggests confidence in free markets has taken heavy blows from the past 12 months of financial and economic crisis.

More than 29,000 people in 27 countries were questioned. In only two countries, the United States and Pakistan, did more than one in five people feel that capitalism works well as it stands.

Almost a quarter – 23% of those who responded – feel it is fatally flawed. That is the view of 43% in France, 38% in Mexico and 35% in Brazil.

And there is very strong support around the world for governments to distribute wealth more evenly. That is backed by majorities in 22 of the 27 countries.

If there is one issue where a global consensus seems to emerge from the survey it is this: there are majorities almost everywhere wanting government to be more active in regulating business.

It is only in Turkey that a majority want less government regulation.

Opinion about the disintegration of the Soviet Union is sharply divided.

Europeans overwhelmingly say it was a good thing: 79% in Germany, 76% in Britain and 74% in France feel that way.

But outside the developed West it is a different picture. Almost seven in 10 Egyptians say the end of the Soviet Union was a bad thing and views are sharply divided in India, Kenya and Indonesia.

11- 47

INTERVIEW-Pakistan seeks US trade, not aid, says minister

by

By Amena Bakr, Reuters

DUBAI, Nov 1-Pakistan plans to send an official delegation to the United States in mid-November to attract investment in a bid to revive its economy following a series of militant attacks, a senior official said on Sunday.

Last month, suicide bomb blasts targeted the United Nations, army headquarters, police and general public, killing more than 150 people.

“The recent attacks did have a negative impact on the perception (of the country), but at the same time Pakistan is a growing country and investors have to be in it for the long term,” Waqar Ahmed Khan, Pakistan’s minister of investment, told Reuters during a visit to Dubai.

A delegation headed by Khan, along with businessmen from Pakistan, will head to Washington on Nov. 18, he said.

“From the United States we are seeking trade, not aid, because that’s what’s going to really help stimulate our economy,” he said, adding that opening up trade between the two countries would support political stability.

“The growth of the economy and fighting terrorism go hand-in-hand and the government is committed to protecting investors’ interests.”

U.S. President Barack Obama has also said increased aid and trade will be tools to fight Islamic extremism both in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan.

Congress has just approved a bill tripling aid to Pakistan to $1.5 billion a year for the next five years, but with conditions attached that have unleashed a storm of protest from Pakistanis who say the country is being humiliated.

Investment Interest

Last month, a delegation headed by the Turkish prime minister was in Islamabad to discuss investment opportunities, said Khan.

“The Turkish investors are now in talks to establish textile factories, lease land for agriculture projects and are also looking at the livestock and dairy industries,” he said.

Pakistan’s GDP growth is expected to be between 2.5 and 3.5 percent in the fiscal year 2009/10, up from 2.0 percent in the previous year, the central bank said in its annual report released on Thursday.

“Despite all the recent attacks I think that the GDP will remain on the positive side this year, and I also expect foreign investment to increase during the forth quarter,” said Khan, without giving further details.

Net foreign investment in Pakistan fell 28.9 percent to $671.1 million in the first three months of the 2009/10 fiscal year, beginning on July 1, compared with $943.4 million in the same period a year earlier.

(Reporting by Amena Bakr; Editing by Nick Macfie)

11-47

Community News (V11-I47)

by

Islamic Ctr of Long Island expansion

LONG ISLAND,NY–This is one case of continuing expansion. The Islamic Center of Long Island was formed in 1982. Ever since then it has evolved from a small brick home to its current  home of 10, 000 square foot of facilities including a mosque, library, classroom, and administrative office. Last month it announced that it is again expanding to meet the needs of its growing congregants.

According to West Bury Times the ICLI is seeking to build a a three story, 19,000 square addition to the existing structure. It has purchases four adjoining homes and construct a parking area. It will add 87 parking spots as compared with the current 35. But it is still short of 221 spots as required by the by-laws. Therefore the center has filed an application with the zoning board to receive a parking variance.

A hearing on the application is expected to be held on Nov.16.

Investigation into imam’s death ends

YERMO,CA– The San Bernardino County Sherriff’s Department has stated that its investigation into the mysterious death of a local Muslim in a house fire hasn’t produced any results and that the case is being now shelved. They have been unable to find any clues or suspects.

Ali Mohammed died on June 27 while visiting a property that his family had moved out of when suddenly the building was enveloped in flames.

Investigators had earlier claimed that the fire was human-caused and not a result of faulty equipment.

The same property was repeatedly the target of vandalism and hate attacks. 

Police investigate break-in at mosque

DURHAM, NC–Durham police are investigating a break-in at the Masjid Ibad Ar-Rahman mosque, 3034 Fayetteville St.

Mosque leaders found windows and doors broken early on the morning of Nov. 2. They said two flat-screen monitors, a printer and a computer were stolen.
Anyone with information about the case is asked to call Durham police Investigator K. D. Emanuel at 919-560-4415, ext. 29306, or Crime Stoppers at 919-683-1200.

Lackawanna halal facility opposed

LACKAWANNA, NEW YORK–Angry protestors vent their voices at the Lackawanna City Council last Tuesday night to protest a plan for a halal slaughterhouse in the area. The protestors and those in the council supporting them appeared to be ill informed on the halal method.

“I did research the Halal method and I’m not happy with what I read,” said First Ward Councilmember Andrea Haxton, according to WNED.

It was not readily apparent what kind of research she did.

City Council members told the citizens they had nothing to do with approval of the meat facility and can’t stop it even if they are opposed.

“It has not and will not come in front of city council because we have, unfortunately, no role in this,” said Councilmember Geoffrey Szymanski.

The slaughterhouse is expected to open within a few months.

11-47

Houstonian Corner (V11-I47)

by

ICNA – ISGH – & – Hafiz Tauqer Shah Provided Alternative to the Muslim Families

Picture AB “Human-Beings have been created better than anything else and God has informed us about this in Quran. As such there is no need to turn one-selves into a monster by doing face painting and wearing devilish clothes. Even going out to play game of trick and treat, it is not safe, since one does not know who is giving what inside the candy cover. Muslims need to stay away from such hazardous events. Safe way is to come to Masjid, establish prayers, while Masjid and other community organizations should organize some fun activities within the safe premises. This is what this event is all about, which represents that just barring Youth from certain activities, without giving proper substitutes within the bounds as stipulated by Islam, is no solution.”

These were the approximate sentiments of Hafiz Tauqer Shah, as he talked on “Halloween Night” to a large gathering of Youth, parents and community members at Masjid At-Taqwa located along Synott Road in Sugar Land. Instead of being on the streets, hundreds of Youth and others gathered in the Masjid, were able to establish Mughrib and Isha Prayers together; had fun activities including rides, basketball, etc.; and had dinner together.

This program was part of Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) Houston Chapter effort within the Nationwide “Save Family – Save Society Campaign”. It was a collaborative effort of ICNA Houston and Islamic Society of Greater Houston (ISGH). This Campaign was held between September 21 and October 31, 2009 by ICNA.
Idea is that the family is the most fundamental unit of society – it is the cornerstone and the foundational unit of the social, cultural and religious structure of our world. It is a divinely inspired and ordained institution that came into existence with the creation of man. The family unit is an important component of Islam, and all elements of a family are given due significance – from parents to children to spouses to kith and kin. A sound family can grow and flourish only if man, woman and children are bound in a solid relationship of love, care, compassion and kindness, which has far-reaching results, bringing progress, prosperity and tranquility in the society.

Earlier inspirational speaker Samid AL-Khatib of ICNA Houston Chapter talked about preserving the institution of family, as without that, we cannot build a nice and strong society around us. For more information about ICNA Houston, one can call 713-201-8080 or visit www.ICNA.Org

Jam-Packed Cullen Performance Hall Saw Loose Talk 2: Exploded With Laughter

The much awaited “Loose Talk 2: Loose Mushaira” featuring legendary figures like TV Producer and Script Writer Anwar Maqsood; Comedians Qazi Wajid; Moin Akhtar; Behroz Sabzwari; Shehzad Raza; & Ayaz Khan; came to Houston this past weekend through the immense efforts of young Nabeel Ishaq and Rehan Ahmed of Naya Andaz Radio, which is aired worldwide on www.YouAreOnAir.Com and in Houston at 1460AM Radio Frequency every Saturday 1pm.-5pm. and Sunday 5pm.-10pm. (US Central Time). Program also included some old and golden songs from Pakistan sung, by Sadia Malik and Aziz Warsi.

As promised by the organizers, this program did indeed became one of the biggest Pakistani vents of 2009, as almost every single seat was occupied at the Cullen Performance Hall of University of Houston and Hall Staff had to politely usher some people out of the Hall, since standing along the walls and on the stairs was not allowed.

The poetry presented during the “Loose Talk 2: Loose Mushaira” was absolutely hilarious. Written mainly by Anwar Maqsood, it was presented in a most jovial manner by Qazi Wajid; Moin Akhtar; Behroz Sabzwari; Shehzad Raza; & Ayaz Khan. Several poetries were presented in the rhythm of several well-known poems of prominent poets and also some famous songs of films from the subcontinent.

Topics included change in the White House; social, political and cultural problems facing Pakistan and Pakistanis; security and terrorism issues facing the world and Pakistan (a wish was called out to in a film’s song beat for Osama to come out of his hiding place, as we have waited too long now and this may avoid the killings of so many innocent people); and several other contemporary topics were included. The best part was that program was full of comedy, which was not baseless, but had a strong message behind everything for people to understand.

Audience was very receptive and for a change very cultured (except for a few things said by a few people here and there). Anwar Maqsood said that Houston to him is just like any other city of Pakistan, as people give full respect to the performers by listening attentively and giving complete appreciation. Moin Akhtar said that he always prayed for the Houstonians as they have given him much love each time he has come here. Behroz Sabzwari; Shehzad Raza; & Ayaz Khan said they feel blessed and have gained immense conviction the way people have laughed and given ovation to them.

Birthday of one of the main organizers Rehan Ahmed was celebrated on stage with the legends around him. Our media was one of the prod sponsors of this most well-organized program. Presenters, audiences and international promoter of the program Shaam Chhabria were all most satisfied and happy with the hard work of Nabeel, Rehan and their team of volunteers.

Our media wants to congratulate Naya Andaz Team on job well done and would like them to bring similar shows, which has both the elements of entertainment and learning.

11-47

Digital

by

tufail A digital system is a data technology that uses discrete (discontinuous) values. By contrast, non-digital (or analog) systems use a continuous range of values to represent information. Although digital representations are discrete, the information represented can be either discrete, such as numbers,letters or icons, or continuous, such as sounds, images, and other measurements of continuous systems.

The word digital comes from the same source as the word digit and digitus (the Latin word for finger), as fingers are used for discrete counting.

The word digital is most commonly used in computing and electronics, especially where real-world information is converted to binary numeric form as in digital audio and digital photography.

When data is transmitted, or indeed handled at all, a certain amount of noise enters into the signal. Noise can have several causes: data transmitted wirelessly, such as by radio, may be received inaccurately, suffer interference from other wireless sources, or pick up background noise from the rest of the universe. Microphones pick up both the intended signal as well as background noise without discriminating between signal and noise, so when audio is encoded digitally, it typically already includes noise.

In a digital signal, similar variances will not matter, as any signal close enough to a particular value will be interpreted as that value. Care must be taken to avoid noise and distortion when connecting digital and analog systems, but more when using analog systems.

11-47

Body fat stored in the liver, not the belly, is the best indicator of disease

by

Posted On: August 24, 2009 – 7:30pm

New findings from nutrition researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis suggest that it’s not whether body fat is stored in the belly that affects metabolic risk factors for diabetes, high blood triglycerides, and cardiovascular disease, but whether it collects in the liver.

Having too much liver fat is known as nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. The researchers report in the journal PNAS that when fat collects in the liver, people experience serious metabolic problems such as insulin resistance, which affects the body’s ability to metabolize sugar. They also have increases in production of fat particles in the liver that are secreted into the bloodstream and increase the level of triglycerides.

For years, scientists have noted that where individuals carried body fat influences their metabolic and cardiovascular risk. Increased fat inside the belly, known as visceral fat, is associated with an increased risk of diabetes and heart disease.

"Data from a large number of studies shows that visceral fat is associated with metabolic risk, which has led to the belief that visceral fat might even cause metabolic dysfunction," says senior investigator Samuel Klein, M.D. "However, visceral fat tracks closely with liver fat. We have found that excess fat in the liver, not visceral fat, is a key marker of metabolic dysfunction. Visceral fat might simply be an innocent bystander that is associated with liver fat."

Klein, the Danforth Professor of Medicine and Nutritional Science, directs the Division of Geriatrics and Nutritional Science and the Center for Applied Research Studies, as well as Washington University’s Center for Human Nutrition. He says most of our body fat, called subcutaneous fat, is located under our skin, but about 10 percent is present inside the belly, while much smaller amounts are found inside organs such as the liver and muscle.

This study compared obese people with elevated and normal amounts of liver fat. All subjects were matched by age, sex, body mass index, percent body fat and degree of obesity. Through careful evaluations of obese people with different amounts of visceral fat or liver fat, Klein’s team determined that excess fat inside the liver identifies those individuals who are at risk for metabolic problems.

"We don’t know exactly why some fats, particularly triglycerides, will accumulate inside the liver and muscle in some people but not in others," says first author Elisa Fabbrini, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine. "But our data suggest that a protein called CD36, which controls the transport of fatty acids from the bloodstream into different tissues, is involved."

Fatty acids are the building blocks for making fats, known as triglycerides. Klein, Fabbrini and their colleagues found that CD36 levels were lower in fat tissue and higher in muscle tissue among people with elevated liver fat.

Fabbrini and Klein say changes in CD36 activity could be responsible for diverting circulating fatty acids away from fat tissue and into liver and muscle tissue, where they are converted to triglyceride. Increased tissue uptake of fatty acids could be responsible for metabolic dysfunction.

Klein says those who are obese but don’t have high levels of fat in the liver should be encouraged to lose weight, but those with elevated liver fat are at particularly high risk for heart disease and diabetes. He says they need to be treated aggressively to help them lose weight because dropping pounds can make a big difference.

"Fatty liver disease is completely reversible," he says. "If you lose a small amount of weight, you can markedly reduce the fat content in your liver. In fact, even two days of calorie restriction can cause a large reduction in liver fat and improvement in liver insulin sensitivity."

Source: Washington University School of Medicine

How Does Fat Leave Your Body When You Lose Weight?

by

By Allen Smith

The Basics of Weight Management

  1. As the old saying goes, "calories in, calories out." And so it is with managing your weight. For the majority of the 191 million American adults who are obese, struggling with their weight is a daily occurrence. In 2008, overweight men and women spent more than $109 million on the grapefruit, Atkins, South Beach, cabbage soup and hundreds of other fad diets in an effort to lose extra fat. Some work, some don’t. But what happens to all that fat when you lose it?
    Scientists and exercise physiologists will tell you that the most basic unit of energy is the calorie or, more accurately, the "kilo-calorie," abbreviated as Kcal. Kilo-calories are units of heat and can either store or produce energy. One pound of fat is equal to 3,500 Kcal. So, in order to lose 1 pound of fat, you must either eat fewer calories or find a way to burn 3,500 Kcal with physical activity. The best approach is to do both.

    How Fat Is Stored

  2. When you eat food, it is broken down in the stomach and intestinal tract into fat, carbohydrate and protein. If you live an active lifestyle, most of the calories from the food you eat will be burned before it has a chance to be stored. If you lead a sedentary lifestyle, any calories that aren’t burned will be stored, mostly in the form of fat.

    What Happens to the Fat

  3. Some of the fuel you use for maintaining normal body functions and for exercise comes from two ready sources: glucose and triglycerides. Both circulate in the blood, so they are easily available as fuel sources, even though they are in relatively short supply. More abundant supplies are found in the liver and stored fat cells.
    If the demands of your activity are greater than what circulating fat and glucose can supply, your body will need to dip into the stored energy in the liver and fat cells. Hormones in the body activate an enzyme called lipase that tells the fat cells to release triglycerides. The triglycerides are broken down into glycerol and free fatty acids and enter the bloodstream. The liver recycles the glycerol, and the muscles use the free fatty acids for energy. When the free fatty acids are consumed by working muscles and other tissues, they are converted to heat, water, carbon dioxide and adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. Your body releases heat through your skin, water as you sweat and carbon dioxide as you breathe; it converts the energy in the bonds of ATP into energy your body can use.

MJ Khan in Houston Controller Run-Off

by

By Ilyas Hasan Choudry, MMNS

Houston—November 4–“It is a distinct honor for the Muslim, Pakistani and South Asian Communities that a competent person with right credentials, has qualified through Houstonians Votes, to the run-off elections of December 12th, 209 for the Controller Position of the fourth largest metropolis of USA.”

These were the sentiments of those gathered at the Campaign Headquarter of the termed-out City Councilman M. J. Khan located along Richmond Avenue just east of Hillcroft, as they celebrated the strong showing by M. J. on the actual voting day to come from behind into the second position behind the termed-out City Councilperson Ron Green and qualifying for the run-off on Saturday, December 12th, 2009. Early voting for Run-Offs is tentatively expected to be between November 30th and December 08th, 2009. M. J. Khan’s wife and son were also present on the occasion.

Khalid Khan, who was vying to replace M. J. Khan on the City Council Position “F”, came in a strong third place in a race of seven candidates. On the voting day of Tuesday, November 03, 2009, Khalid Khan was number two in the number of votes received, but Al Hoang got majority of his votes in the Early Voting.

When the early vote count came in around 7:00pm., M. J. Khan was third in the pack of three candidates for the Controller position, trailing the second place Pam Holm by about 1,300 votes. By the end of the evening, M. J. Khan had about 2,000 votes more than Pam Holm, who called into M. J. Khan Campaign Office to congratulate him for qualifying for the run-off.

In fact on the voting day of Tuesday, November 03, 2009, M. J. Khan received the most number of votes, as compared to Ron Green and Pam Holm, which according to analysts show that voters learned about M. J. Khan’s credentials late in the race through his TV advertisements and once the voters knew about his strong financial background, he got many votes. The same thing of educating voters through electronic media can help him win on December 12th, 2009 and for that M. J. will need good sum of donations from well-wishers and Houstonians.

This Controller race became most heated, when in the last few weeks to the elections, Ron Green admitted certain issues with liens on his properties by IRS and that these problems were much highlighted by his opponent Palm Holm, while M. J. Campaign stayed out from any negative comments.

M. J. Khan has created history by becoming the first ever Muslim, Pakistani and South Asian Candidate to be running in the run-off elections for the second biggest position of Controller of the 4th largest city of USA .

“I feel most humble that with the support of my community and right choice of the voters to elect a person with right credentials, I will be contesting in December 12th run-off. City of Houston is the best place to live and after having served the City for the past six years, I feel my qualifications are the most appropriate for the Controller position, so that I can contribute more towards the well-being of all Houstonians. I am grateful to each and everyone, who has voted for me and expect more voters to come out in the run-off and elect him to be the next City of Houston Controller because I have the right background and expertise to run the finances of this great city in the most amicable manner,” said M. J. Khan, as final results came in late around 11:45pm.

In other races, it will be mayoral election run-off as well. Here again all political pundits were proven wrong, when City Councilperson Peter Brown, even after spending more than $2-Million of his own and wife’s money, came in third. Since none of the candidates got 50%+, there will be run-off between top position Annise Parker and Gene Locke.

Here is how the final outcome of various campaigns was:

Houston Mayor – Annise Parker 54,193 (30.5%); Gene Locke 45,954 (25.90%); Peter Brown 39,904 (22.4%); Roy Morales 35925 (20.20%) (Run-Off);
Houston Controller – Number Of Votes Are For Harris County Only – Ronald C. Green 53,993 (36.3%); M. J. Khan 49,424 (32.5%); Pam Holm 47,701 (31.2%) (Run-Off);
City Council At-Large Pos. 1 – Stephen Costello 24.1%; Karen Derr 19.6% (Run-Off)
City Council At-Large Pos. 2 – Sue Lovell 48.8%; Andrew C. Burks Jr. 21.4% (Run-Off);
City Council At-Large Pos. 4 – C. O. Bradford Won 52.3%; Noel Freeman 21.1%;
City Council At-Large Pos. 5 – Jolanda “Jo” Jones (I) 42.1%; Jack Christie 36.4% (Run-Off);
City Council Dist. A – Brenda Stardig 31.9%; Lane Lewis 21.8% (Run-Off);
City Council Dist. B – Jarvis Johnson (I) Won 82.0%; Roger Bowden 18.0%;
City Council Dist. C – Anne Clutterbuck (I) Won 81.8%; Randolph Locke 17.5%;
City Council Dist. D – Wanda Adams Won 76.2%; Larry McKinzie 11.0%;
City Council Dist. E – Mike Sullivan (I) Won 74.1%; Wayne Garrison 25.9%;
City Council Dist. F – Mike Laster 2,436 (25.5%); Al Hoang 2,351 (24.6%); Khalid Khan 1,859 (19.5%) (Run-Off);
City Council Dist. G – Oliver Pennington Won 59.1%; Mills Worsham 17.8%.

11-46

Iraqi Widows Marry to Feed Kids

by

By Afif Sarhan, Uruknet

iraq-widow BAGHDAD – Haifa Ahmed Mua’alim, 32, is going to tie the knot in a couple of weeks.

She is marrying a man recommended by her sister-in-law to help feed her two orphan children of a previous marriage.

The young woman lost her husband, the love of her life, two years ago to the violence that has been plaguing her country since the 2003 US invasion.

“When he died I decided never to marry again. We had a stable and lovely relation,” she recalled tearfully.

For the past two years Haifa has been struggling to feed her kids, spending every penny they once had.

But without work or help from any one, she is accepting to remarry at the advice of her deceased husband’s sister.

“I’m being forced to change my mind in exchange for a better life for my sons.”

Haifa only saw the future husband once and never spoke with him, insisting it’s a marriage of convenience for both of them.

“My sister-in-law told me that he also lost his wife and he is a good man who carries four children in his baggage,” she said.

“Maybe it is too precipitated and latter on, I might regret, however, it is better to take care of six children than see your two sons hungry and unable to go to school,” Haifa reasoned.

“I’m glad to find someone willing to take care of them but being happy is another issue that I prefer to keep for my own.”

The Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs estimates there are nearly two million widows and five times kids living without fathers in the country.

“Widows are a serious case in Iraq. Our ministry is trying to help but the lack of proper budget is seriously affecting our work,” said a senior officer, requesting anonymity for not being allowed to speak to the press.

“More widows will be added to this group and to help them the parliament should focus on their problem, create enough conditions for them to work and feed their children.”

Debate

Haifa represents a new trend in Iraq which is encouraged by religious leaders who have been advising single and widower men to marry widows as a way to help them.

“Those women are victims of the violence in our country,” Sheikh Abdul-Kareem Rafel, a religious leader at Sadr City, told IOL.

“The government isn’t offering them enough help to raise their kids alone and advising Iraqis to marry them is a nice way to prevent millions of kids from being raised without a father and prevent women from becoming prostitutes to support them.”

Rana Lattif, a local woman activist, opposes such second marriage arrangements.

“Instead of encouraging women to remarry, we have to force the government to help them, offer stable living conditions and open job places as the majority became widows because of the unfair war in the country,” she told IOL.

“Of course there are women who prefer to be in such unacceptable situation but they are few and the majority is marrying again because it was the only choice found,” she contends.

“If the government takes responsibility towards them, I’m sure this number would decrease impressively.”

Sara al-Azza, a member of a charity that has nearly 1,200 widows registered with more than half willing to remarry, disagrees.

“We cannot keep waiting for the government to take an action,” she told IOL.

“The women come to us after deciding to remarry and what we do is just look for men who have a good background, true good intentions and are able to support her family,” she explains.

“No one is forced to marry but we have made many arrangements with the both sides happy to start a new life together.

“Since we started working on this issue, we never had a complaint from any of the parties. It is a serious matter and we are happy to help.”

Rhim Abdel-Rassoul Rabia’a, a 41-yrea-old mother of three who lost her husband three years in a Baghdad bomb attack, is waiting for a second husband.

“After years of looking for a job, I got desperate and that’s why I started looking for a second marriage even though that was the last thing I would like to do,” she told IOL.

“I was told that women over 40 take more time to find a husband but this is my only hope. I just want a man to look after me and my kids, even if I marry without love.”

Rhim says when she was a young girl she dreamed of a life of happiness, studying and working to become someone important in life.

“I know that none of my dreams can come true but at least I can help my kids become able to support themselves without the need to remarry for that.”

11-46