FuN LivINg Lifestyle

NAIROBI, Kenya — Interpol says African wildlife authorities have seized nearly 3,800 pounds (1,700 kilograms) of illegal elephant ivory in a six-nation operation.

Interpol’s east Africa chief Awad Dahia says leopard, crocodile and snake skins were also seized in the three-month long operation. Dahia says the operation involved wildlife authorities, police and customs departments of Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.

The Kenya Wildlife Service says it has arrested 65 people during the operation.

The elephant populations of many African countries were being decimated until a global ban on the ivory trade was implemented in 1989. Since then the elephant population of Kenya, for example, has grown to 35,000 this year from 16,000 in 1989.

PITTSBURGH — Making one’s true love happy will cost a whopping $87,403 this year, a minuscule increase from last year, according to the latest cost analysis of the items in the carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

That’s the grand total for the single partridge in a pear tree to the 12 drummers drumming, purchased repeatedly as the song suggests, according to the annual “Christmas Price Index” compiled by PNC Wealth Management. The price is up a mere $794, or less than 1 percent, from $86,609 last year.

The cost of buying each item just once is increasing this year to $21,466, up 1.8 percent from last year’s $21,081.

Jim Dunigan, managing executive of investment for PNC Wealth Management, which has been calculating the cost of Christmas since 1984, attributed the modest increase to lower energy costs and fewer wage increases.

It’s the smallest increase since 2002, when the cost actually decreased, according to PNC.

The main driver behind the higher cost is that the price of gold has increased 43 percent, bringing the five gold rings up $150 to $500.

Although wage increases were modest, nine ladies dancing, at $5,473 per performance, is the costliest item, surpassing the that of any of the material goods.

The most expensive goods are the seven swans a-swimming at $5,250, but their cost decreased 6.3 percent from last year’s $5,600. Dunigan said their cost tends to be the most volatile because of supply and demand; they were up 33 percent last year over 2007.

Costs for the 10 lords a-leaping ($4,414 per performance), 11 pipers piping ($2,285 per performance) and 12 drummers drumming ($2,475 per performance) remained the same as last year. Dunigan says that reflects the labor market in which the unemployment rate rose to near 10 percent after sitting below 5 percent for much of the decade.

And for those who would shop online, a word of caution.

PNC says you’ll pay $31,435, which is down from last year’s online price, but still about $10,000 more than in the traditional index.

“In general, Internet prices are higher than their non-Internet counterparts because of shipping costs for birds and the convenience factor of shopping online,” Dunigan said.

PNC Financial Services Group Inc. checks jewelry stores, dance companies, pet stores and other sources to compile the list. While it is done humorously, PNC said its index mirrors real economic trends.

Besides putting out the list for fun, PNC makes it available to teachers across the country to teach economic trends.

While it’s unlikely anyone would buy the items, Dunigan said one item is likely to please.

“We don’t necessarily suggest picking just one, but it’s hard to believe that gold rings wouldn’t lead the list on a year-to-year basis,” Dunigan said.

___

On The Net:

PNC Christmas Price Index: http://www.pncchristmaspriceindex.com

World AIDS Day looms. Let’s ask a few festering questions about the city where 10% of American women with AIDS live. Why, after a decade of steadily decreasing deaths, has New York City’s progress in reducing women’s AIDS mortality stumbled so badly? Why after years in which women’s and men’s deaths were falling at almost the same rate, are deaths of men with AIDS now falling at almost twice the rate of women’s; and why, when only a few years ago, deaths of women with AIDS in the Bronx were dropping almost the fastest of any group in the city, have women in the Bronx and Brooklyn, the two boroughs with 60% of New York City women’s AIDS cases, especially seen their progress in survival collapse?

Things like this rarely happen by accident—and, as is often the case—following the money gives a dismaying answer. Between 2006 and 2007, the Bloomberg Administration “redistributed” the federal emergency AIDS money (commonly known as Ryan White funds) which pays for the “enhanced” AIDS medical care and support services used by some 40,000 people with AIDS in the city. To deliver these services, it had inherited an amazing network of programs—-painfully built over many years— which reached into stricken communities across the city, making AIDS care notably accessible to the poor, distressed and “outer” borough populations who had become the majority of the city’s AIDS population.

Yet, when the “redistribution” presided over by then Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden was complete, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene had contracted 60% of Ryan White funds to Manhattan-based hospitals and agencies. Manhattan only had 30% of the city’s actual HIV/AIDS cases (and an even lower percentage of the high need AIDS patients for whom these funds are intended), but it enjoyed other attributes. Manhattan is power central for the city’s medical and social service industries, as well as its major AIDS organizations and the only borough with a substantial white and middle-class AIDS population—mainly gay men. Organizations in the Bronx and Brooklyn, the two boroughs with the poorest, most minority AIDS populations, and with the majority of women’s cases, were left with only 30% of the money combined; literal dozens of AIDS programs in these boroughs were closed.

Almost immediately deaths of people with AIDS in New York City shifted. In the two years before this redistribution, deaths for people with AIDS in all boroughs decreased at virtually the same rate—between 15% and 16%; but in the two years after the city launched its redistribution, Manhattan forged ahead to see deaths decrease by 20%—for the best record in the city— leaving the Bronx and Brooklyn to stumble and fall behind to 9% decreases.

The fact that a Department of Health would preside over a redistribution of federal AIDS funds that created differential death rates—and did so by wrecking major progress in overcoming deaths in the city’s poorest areas—was appalling enough; even more appalling is the fact that the federal government, itself, allocates Ryan White funds to AIDS-impacted cities and states largely based on their caseload. The national formula that sees money follow cases means New York City automatically gets the most funding in the nation—some $110 million, year after year; illness in the Bronx and Brooklyn, in sum, “produced” most of these millions, but the benefits were shifted to Manhattan, with its powerful medical and social service industries and large AIDS organizations.

And, making the “redistribution” unspeakable was how it injured women with AIDS. These women are 94% Black and Hispanic—and perhaps the most defenseless population within the care of the New York City Department of Health.

Most women with AIDS, as a major report of Women’s HIV Collaborative of New York underscores, have “histories of intimate partner and family violence…rates of homelessness and mental health problems run high.” Nonetheless, when the city’s AIDS funding and programs had reflected “the unique geographic distribution of women and girls living with HIV/AIDS”, these women made notable progress in survival.

For example, in the two years before the “redistribution” started, deaths of women with AIDS in the Bronx dropped by an impressive 20%—an achievement many would have said was not possible for women in the poorest urban Congressional district of the United States. As I know, because my organization, Health People, then ran the Bronx’s Ryan White-funded Family AIDS program—and other key women’s support services— a major reason for this drop was that local organizations developed large numbers of well-trained volunteers. Many of these volunteers were, themselves, women with AIDS—and they had a real mission to see that other women got proper care and survived. Moving the money to Manhattan meant not only an end to Bronx and Brooklyn “programs”; it also meant severing all that extra community help and outreach—as the health powers who did the severing knew only too well.

Indeed, the injury to women was so unspeakable that the New York City Department of Health, by withholding documents that are mandated to be public under both federal regulations and its own internal rules and contracts, tried to assure no one could speak about it at all. The Department of Health’s contract with an organization called Public Health Solutions ( formerly known as Medical Health and Research Associates) which “administers” federal Ryan White funds and programs for the city, requires it to annually produce “a report for public distribution, summarizing services …clients served (and) the types of services provided.”

Although Public Health Solutions receives $4.5 million a year to administer these funds, it stopped releasing the required public reports in 2005—the year before the “redistribution” started! It could hardly have evaded this contractual obligation—the report is supposed to provide key data for the ongoing planning of effective AIDS services—without the approval of the Health Department.

Only in October, 2009, finally forced by one a half years of Freedom of Information Law requests and appeals, did the city direct Public Health Solutions to release the 2006 AIDS services report. While 2007 and 2008 data are still missing, and 2006 only provides information about the impact of the first stage of the Bloomberg Administration’s “redistribution” even this scratchy information suggests an ominous future for women.

In just that first stage, new AIDS clients from the Bronx and Brooklyn and new women clients overall being enrolled in any Ryan White funded services fell significantly—by at least 10%— even as their portion of the city caseload steadily increased. The drop in new enrollments unquestionably means that every year, more people with AIDS in the Bronx and Brooklyn—and especially more women—are being doomed to die early; as is well known, when people with HIV/AIDS don’t have early, sustained treatment, they lose their best chance for prolonged life.

The disparities—and disruption— in services to women are truly staggering. For one example, although the Bronx has the highest percentage of women with HIV/AIDS (40% of all cases) of any borough, no Bronx organization received Ryan White funding to provide a Family Support Program. These programs are largely directed toward stabilizing the care of women with AIDS who are raising children—-nearly all single, minority women. But, Manhattan, with only 6,000 women living with HIV/AIDS compared to the Bronx’s 9,000, received funding for four Family Support Programs. The city claimed the Manhattan programs would somehow fill this black hole for sick Bronx mothers but, as anyone could have predicted, it turned out that sick mothers wouldn’t—or couldn’t–travel to Manhattan for help; the numbers of Bronx mothers with AIDS receiving this critical support to manage their families, along with their illness, plunged by 71% in one year; similarly, with almost 75% of Treatment Adherence Support services now placed in Manhattan–these programs teach people to understand and follow the often complex regimens that AIDS treatment involves — the number of Bronx and Brooklyn clients dropped by half, and the numbers of women plunged to the point that women were barely 25% of clients receiving this vital education.

The results are written in women’s death rates. In the Bronx, where, as noted, in the two years before “redistribution”, deaths of women with AIDS had decreased by 20%, progress stalled to the point that they only decreased by only 6.5% in the two years after. In Brooklyn, by 2007 (the last full year for which city AIDS death data is available) deaths of women with AIDS were actually increasing—the first time any major borough had recorded an increase in women’s AIDS deaths in years.

The city continues to withhold—or, more precisely, hide—Ryan White services information for 2007 and 2008; however, since we do know that the “final” funding redistribution in 2007 saw several million more dollars in Ryan White services shifted to Manhattan and these “shifts” remain in place— we can project that women’s prospects have steadily worsened.

Taking away the money and services that belonged to women with AIDS was all the easier because they are powerless. The “social service” industry centered in Manhattan, although it promotes itself as a “protector” of the poor, hardly protested shifts that benefited its coffers any more than influential Manhattan AIDS organizations protested. Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s Chelsea district also benefited. The misallocation of millions of federal dollars meant to help poor, sick women might ordinarily be seen as a prime subject for City Council hearings, but all efforts to hold hearings in the City Council, protector of “the people,” were quashed.

On World AIDS Day, we’re supposed to remember. In the city where 10% of women with AIDS in America live, let’s remember this —equal life is deliberately denied to them.

This is the first of a series on AIDS in New York City which will examine funding, death patterns, political influences, the city’s extensive cover-up of its action, as documented in FOIL materials, and the reliability of city AIDS data and statistics. A detailed report, Follow the Money: AIDS Funding and AIDS deaths in the Bloomberg Years,” is available on www.healthpeople.org

Consumer Reports’ latest test of fresh, whole broilers bought in 22 states reveals that two-thirds of birds tested harbored salmonella and/or campylobacter, the leading bacterial causes of food-borne disease. The report reveals that organic “air-chilled” broilers were among the cleanest and that Perdue was found to be the cleanest of the brand-name chicken. Tyson and Foster Farms chickens were found to be the most contaminated. The report is available, free online (note, you have to click through the side bars to the left of the story) and in the January 2010 issue of the magazine.

Consumer Reports has been measuring contamination in store-bought chickens since 1998. The recent test shows a modest improvement since January 2007, when the magazine found these pathogens in 8 of 10 broilers, but the numbers are still far too high. The findings suggest that most companies’ safeguards are inadequate. The tests also found that most disease-causing bacteria sampled from the contaminated chicken were resistant to at least one antibiotic, potentially making any resulting illness more difficult to treat.

Each year, salmonella and campylobacter from chicken and other food sources infect at least 3.4 million Americans, send 25,500 to hospitals, and kill about 500, according to estimates by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While both salmonella and campylobacter are known to cause intestinal distress, campylobacter can lead to meningitis, arthritis, and Guillain-Barré syndrome, a severe neurological condition.

“Our tests show that campylobacter is widespread in chicken, even in brands that control for salmonella,” said Dr. Urvashi Rangan, Director of Technical Policy at Consumers Union, nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports. “While one name brand, Perdue, and most air-chilled chickens were less contaminated than others, this is still a very dirty industry that needs better practices and tighter government oversight.”

For its latest analysis, Consumer Reports had an outside lab test 382 chickens bought last spring from more than 100 supermarkets, gourmet- and natural-food stores, and mass merchandisers in 22 states. Among the findings:

• Campylobacter was in 62 percent of the chickens, salmonella was in 14 percent, and both bacteria were in 9 percent. Only 34 percent of the birds were clear of both pathogens. That’s double the percentage of clean birds Consumer Reports found in its 2007 report but far less than the 51 percent in the 2003 report.
• Among the cleanest overall were organic “air-chilled” broilers (a process in which carcasses are refrigerated and may be misted, rather than dunked in cold chlorinated water). About 60 percent were free of the two pathogens.
• Perdue was found to be the cleanest of the brand-name chicken: 56 percent were free of both pathogens. This is the first time since Consumer Reports began testing chicken that one major brand has fared significantly better than others across the board.
• Tyson and Foster Farms chickens were found to be the most contaminated; less than 20 percent were free of either pathogens.
• Store-brand organic chickens had no salmonella at all, but only 43 percent of those birds were also free of campylobacter.
• Among all brands and types of broilers tested, 68 percent of the salmonella and 60 percent of the campylobacter organisms analyzed showed resistance to one or more antibiotics. All of the antibiotics were effective against 32 percent of salmonella samples and 40 percent of the campylobacter samples, as compared to just 16 and 33 percent in 2007.

USDA recently released a survey testing these same pathogens in chicken, and reported finding much lower numbers. The method CR used for campylobacter presence is one of two methods cited in the USDA study and the method used for salmonella presence in the USDA study is the same used by CR. The difference is that CR obtained its samples at retail stores while the USDA samples were obtained at two points in the processing plant.

According to CR, there is more likelihood that chicken can be further contaminated once it leaves the processing plant and travels to the store. Testing chicken bought from a retailer is in all likelihood a better indicator of what consumers will be exposed to and more reflective of what the consumer will encounter with these pathogens.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) requires Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) a consumer’s primary protection against chicken contamination. HACCP requires companies to identify potential points of contamination and take measures to eliminate them. The USDA has a standard that requires chicken producers to test for salmonella but it has yet to set a standard for campylobacter.

The USDA has said that a risk assessment for campylobacter and draft performance standards would be ready by the year’s end. It could take months to a year or more, however, for a proposed standard to become a final regulation and take effect.

“USDA has been pondering new standards to cut the prevalence of bacteria in chicken for more than five years but has yet to act,” said Jean Halloran, Director of Food Policy Initiatives at Consumers Union. “Consumers shouldn’t have to play roulette with poultry; the USDA must make chicken less risky to eat.”

Until chicken becomes cleaner, the magazine offers tips for consumers to protect themselves, including thawing frozen chicken in a refrigerator; cooking chicken to at least 165° F; and refrigerating or freezing leftovers within two hours of cooking.

ORLANDO (The Borowitz Report) – In a development that rocked the worlds of sports and politics, golf superstar Tiger Woods announced today that he was hanging up his clubs to become a politician.

“After two days of refusing to speak to the media about suspicious aspects of my personal life, I have proved to myself that I am qualified for a career in politics,” Mr. Woods told reporters in Orlando.

His stunning decision immediately drew praise from such disparate politicians as Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina and Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, who called a press conference to welcome Mr. Woods to the Republican Party.

“Tiger Woods has not yet revealed what his party affiliation will be, but based on what I’ve seen, he has what it takes to be a Republican,” Sen. Ensign said. More here.

“Haven’t you,” said a man who had just taken my heart and snapped it in two, “ever heard of forgiveness?” I was so shocked, I couldn’t speak. What I wanted to say, what I would have said, had I been capable of emitting something other than weird mewling noises, which I wasn’t, was that that isn’t quite how it works.

Forgiveness, I wanted to say, isn’t something you order, like a double macchiato and a chocolate muffin. You don’t bark your request and get your instant get-out-of-jail free card, your “no worries, mate” or, if you’re English, and not 15, or not pretending to be 15, your “please don’t worry about it, it’s all absolutely fine”. Fine for you, maybe, with your slate-wiped-free clear conscience and your great-I-can-do-it-again spring in your step. But for me? I don’t think so. And doesn’t it, by the way, involve something called remorse?

I thought, with a little flash of pain and humiliation, of that conversation this week. I thought of it in relation to the Irish Catholic church which has, for decades (for centuries, actually) been committing crimes a bit more serious than being carelessly romantic. From 1975 to 2004, according to a report from the Irish justice minister, senior figures in the Catholic church, and in the police force, colluded in the sexual abuse of hundreds of children.

The current Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, has conceded that the sexual abuse of a child is a crime in both civil and canon law. You might, perhaps, think that someone who’s read the New Testament might conclude it wasn’t a great idea on other grounds, too, but we’re clearly not talking about a nation of religious Einsteins. What we are talking about is a state-sanctioned squad of (presumably psychopathic) paedophiles who systematically set about destroying people’s lives. But now, luckily, the Catholic Church is sorry.

Six thousand miles away, another prominent Christian is sorry. He’s called Kaing Guek Eav, but he’s better known as Comrade Duch. As head of Tuol Sleng prison from 1975 to 1979, he was the Khmer Rouge’s executioner-in-chief. The prisoners in his care were beaten, mutilated and subjected to electric shocks, and then bludgeoned to death and buried in mass graves. “I am,” he calmly told a packed courtroom this week, “solely and individually responsible for the loss of at least 12,380 lives.” And then he made an astonishing request. “As for the families,” he said, “I am asking you to kindly leave your door open for me to make my apologies. May I meet with you to allow me to share your intense and enduring sorrow?”

There has, apparently, been no great rush. Which, perhaps, isn’t surprising. There’s hardly a single person in Cambodia who was not affected by the mass manipulation, and mass murder, by the Khmer Rouge. Everyone lost relatives. Many lived in (cramped, filthy, degrading) refugee camps for years and years. When you ask Cambodians about that period in their (very recent) history, they mostly go quiet. On a trip to the country earlier this year, our guide took us to Tuol Sleng, pointed to the torture chambers, and refused to go inside. And why would you want to? Why would you want to see the blood on the floor, or walls, or ceiling, that might be your father’s, or your uncle’s, or your aunt’s? What can you say? That that was then and it’s all fine now? But it isn’t fine now, and I’m not sure it ever will be.

In a league table of corruption around the world, Cambodia holds the 136th place out of 147. I have never visited a country that feels so sad, and so defeated. It’s a country that has swung from mass, murderous, enforced equality to a winner-takes-it-all attempt at mass consumerism where there are very few winners indeed. It’s also a country in which no one has taken responsibility for any of the killings, ever. Comrade Duch is the first. Perhaps he’s sincere in his remorse, and perhaps it is better late than never. But most Cambodians, I imagine (in as far as anyone can begin to imagine what it’s like to live with that legacy) will look at him and think “so what”? Is there anything he can say or do that will ever make anything better?

Truly, it’s hard to say. In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has had some success, but it’s been slow, painful, and flawed. In Rwanda, the results of the Gacaca courts, established to assuage ethnic tensions after the terrible genocide of 1994, have been more mixed. The country, as my colleague Ian Birrell pointed out in this paper yesterday, is undergoing something of an economic boom, but relations between Hutus and Tutsis remain potentially explosive.

Forgiveness is not an act; it’s a process. It can take years. It can take a life-time. Sometimes, a lifetime isn’t enough. Sometimes, it’s central to healing, and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes, it’s beside the point.

Sometimes, as John Lydon (who I interviewed this week) sang, in his post Sex Pistols band, Public Image Limited, “anger is an energy”. Sometimes, it’s what gets you through. And sometimes it’s the thing that drives you to swap the distraction of forgiveness-on-demand for revenge. The revenge, as that profoundly Christian poet, George Herbert, put it, of “living well”.

The Carolina Panthers got off to a poor start in yesterday’s game against the New York Jets. Midway through the first quarter, Jake Delhomme fired a pass towards receiver Steve Smith, but the throw took an unexpected — and unlucky — bounce off Smith’s foot and into the hands of Jets cornerback Darrelle Revis, who ran it back for a touchdown. It was far from Delhomme’s only interception of the day — he threw four in total — but it put the Jets up for good. The Panthers lost, 17-6.

WATCH:

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Though technically not the biggest online shopping day of the year, the Monday after Thanksgiving has come to be known as “Cyber Monday,” a day when online retailers release a bevy of deals leading up to Christmas.

So, you could spend your down time at work today scouring the web for online deals, or you could follow our steps to giving online this season. Some retailers are offering some special ways to contribute along with purchases. Away we go:

•Your top bet for buying and giving is Good Shop, a site by GoodSearch.com which links to online coupons and gives up to 30% of each purchase you make to the organization or school of your choice. The donation money comes from commission paid by retailers to GoodSearch.com

•Animal-lovers can contribute to good through BringPetsHome.org, a site that’s partnered with Amazon.com, Walmart, Macy’s and others to donate a portion of online purchases to animal shelters.

•UncleVic.com is offering to donate $1 for every purchase made on the site through tonight as part of its Penny Pincher Promotion. Online shoppers can visit Uncle Vic’s Facebook page to vote on which of six select nonprofit organizations should receive the donations.

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