Fraggin UN aid workers rape children

And the children have no other option, but to die of starvation.

This is disgusting. It's, at least for me, worse than the church's abuses because at least I knew the church is full of shi**y narrow minded men on their higher hierarchy.

I will put here an piece of the full article, link to CNN in English and BBC Spanish here:

¿Peor el remedio que la enfermedad?
Redacción BBC Mundo

Charity: Aid workers raping, abusing children
By Stephanie Busari
For CNN

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Humanitarian aid workers and United Nation peacekeepers are sexually abusing small children in several war-ravaged and food-poor countries, a leading European charity has said.
Children like this 15-year-old girl have suffered abuse at the hands of some UN soldiers and aid workers.
Children as young as 6 have been forced to have sex with aid workers and peacekeepers in return for food and money, Save the Children UK said in a report released Tuesday.

It doesn't stop there:

After interviewing hundreds of children, the charity said it found instances of rape, child prostitution, pornography, indecent sexual assault and trafficking of children for sex.
"It is hard to imagine a more grotesque abuse of authority or flagrant violation of children's rights," Jasmine Whitbread, chief executive of Save the Children UK, said.
In the report, "No One To Turn To" a 15-year-old girl from Haiti told researchers: "My friends and I were walking by the National Palace one evening when we encountered a couple of humanitarian men. The men called us over and showed us their penises.
"They offered us 100 Haitian gourdes ($2.80) and some chocolate if we would suck them. I said, 'No,' but some of the girls did it and got the money."
Save the Children says almost as shocking as the abuse itself, is the "chronic under-reporting" of the abuses. It believes that thousands more children around the world could be suffering in silence.

More on this nasty topic, as published around the globe:

Radio Netherlands (english)

Al Jazeera (english)

Reuters Latin America (spanish)

Os-ama and Uncle-Sam

I just got a little precious book from Rius (Mexican cartoonist) a couple of days ago. It's title, in spanish, is "OSAMA TIOSAM: Por qué ama tanto el mundo a los Estados Unidos", which we could translate more or less like "UNCLESAM LOVESYOU: Why does the world loves so much the United States". It is clearly a word-game the all-caps part of the title: Osama goes for Loves you as well as a reminder for Bin Laden.
What is this book about? Well, it's not for your patriotic-minded U.S. citizen, for sure. It is a full chronicle of all the shit my Country's northern neighbor has been doing on everybody else: State terrorism.

Rius has been quite irreverent for the most part of his life, and has published quite a long list of books. Even if classified as "leftist" by most, he has written books that are not precisely the most kind for the left parties of the world. He goes for the facts, and explains stuff in the most down-to-earth way available: from the bible, to philosophy, to Marx or Israel. Elena Poniatowska, mexican writter, gave prises for him.
And with this little book, published after the "famous" 9/11 (11/S for the spanish world, as we put the dates day-month-year) Rius establishes for the dummies out there who have been truly deluded by the mass media arm of gringo´s (for lack of a better word) goverment into believing that their country is the world's salvation.

Mmm-- let's explain about usuing "gringo" in that phrase.

America IS NOT a country. That's stupid to even think. America goes from Alaska and Greenland, waaaay south 'till Patagonia. It's a continent, spawning dozens of countries with their own goverments.

"United States of America" is not quite a good name for a country that doesn't a) cover the whole extension of the American continent, or b) is the only country in America conformed by several, sovereign states in a confederation or republic.

Mexico, as my most handy example, has the official name of UNITED STATES OF MEXICO. So it covers the whole extension of land known as Mexico and is a federation of sovereign states, fullfiling the above requisites to stand for the name.

Then, based on the facts above, it would be understood that no Latin American citizen would call, on his/her 5 senses, "America" the country that presently has Mr Bush Jr. as president. And for that reason, we simply call that land the land of the Yanquis. Yankees, yes, to the horror of many non-Yankee up there. And to better not hurt any non-Yankee feelings, I prefered the other term: Gringo. Because we have developed that into a country-word, Gringolandia. Like Disneyland, Iceland... then it comes to Gingoland.

So sorry if I hurt some feelings. It was not in bad spirit. It's only because of a lack of a real word to call a country, and my un-willingness to back down a step on the cultural ground towards domination.

I will left you with a small quote for a scholar paper:

“Unknown as it is, and recognizing that this has been standard practice throughout colonialism, that is the record of the Western imperial centers of capital from 1945 to 1990... While mouthing peace, freedom, justice, rights, and majority rule, all over the world state-sponsored terrorists were overthrowing democratic governments, installing and protecting dictators, and preventing peace, freedom, justice, rights, and majority rule. Twelve to fifteen million mostly innocent people were slaughtered in that successful 45 year effort to suppress those breaks for economic freedom which were bursting out all over the world.
“... All [Western] intelligence agencies have been, and are still in, the business of destabilizing undeveloped countries to maintain their dependency and the flow of the world’s natural wealth to powerful nations’ industries at a low price and to provide markets for those industries at a high price, identical to those raiding parties who raided the countryside 800 to 1,000 years ago to destroy their capital, maintain their dependency, and force the countryside to sell their raw material to, and purchase the manufactured products from, the city. The defeated/impoverished former colonial world is the countryside for today’s wealthy imperial centers of capital. The military of today’s powerful nations are for the same purpose as those Middle Age raiding parties. Thus, with per capita natural wealth many times that of Europe, those defeated nations remain impoverished, as that wealth is continually siphoned to powerful imperial centers of capital.”

--Smith, J. W., ‘Simultaneously Suppressing the World’s Break for Freedom’, Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle of the Twenty-First Century, M. E. Sharpe, New York, Armonk, 2000. Excerpts of this study can be found at Institute for Economic Democracy, http://www.slonet.org/~ied

China's Lost Ones

Things seem to be ugly enough right now for them. China is in mourning right now the loss of a yet unclear number of victims from this series of earthquakes that have plagued the Sichuan province.

Acording to this article, there are right now 39.500 confirmed dead and some 32.000 disapeared; according to the official news agency from China, at 6pm (local time) the count was 40,075 dead. The pronostic says some 70 thousand will be found dead at the final count. About 5.36 million buildings have collapsed and more than 21 million were damaged in the earthquake, according to figures available as of Monday evening.

Is your Holy Inquisition uniform ready? Teacher accused of Wizardry

Yes, ladies and gentlemen. Florida's State, and... well, being honest: the Bush family as a whole has a thing for everything that is not square, or is not holy see approved, it seems.

Now a teacher seems has lost his job due to Wizardry:

Substitute teacher Jim Piculas does a 30-second magic trick where a toothpick disappears then reappears.
But after performing it in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land O' Lakes, Piculas said his job did a disappearing act of its own.
"I get a call the middle of the day from the supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, 'Jim, we have a huge issue. You can't take any more assignments. You need to come in right away,'" he said.

When Piculas went in, he learned his little magic trick cast a spell that went much farther than he'd hoped.
"I said, 'Well Pat, can you explain this to me?' 'You've been accused of wizardry,' [he said]. Wizardry?" he asked.

check the full story here and here, or do a Google search.

Hydrogen is not viable right now, so...

...why don't we spend the money elsewhere?

This one is about a note in Wired.com about hydrogen vehicles.

The kind people at one of the best magazines on tech have something good to say about our state-of-the-world.

"Unfortunately, experts say it will be 40 years or more before hydrogen has any meaningful impact on gasoline consumption or global warming, and we can't afford to wait that long. In the meantime, fuel cells are diverting resources from more immediate solutions."

If you want to read the full article, follow the link.