This month, you’ll find mixed treats. First, renew your Mensa Membership right away to receive one of the new plastic cards. Go on-line and renew, check the spelling of your name and whatever seems necessary. But do it now. Then check back here, under NOTES & QUERIES, for the facts about swine/bird flu (with thanks to Jeff Pugh). Next, scan FOR YOUR CONTEMPLATION and learn about Neolithic surgery. This was 7,000 years ago, but we knew about bone structure, blood vessels, aseptic conditions, and anaesthetic.

Also in FOR YOUR CONTEMPLATION, review the first of the New York Times’ series on negligence in radiation treatments, the awful effects and concealment of blunders by private institutions and government, failure of medical colleges to police themselves, and the foolishness of placing blind faith in doctors. These political and medical failures, motivated by greed and laziness, promise to be a big scandal. What’s the betting that Canada’s system is worse?

Click here to see the calendar of events for this month. Use it as a reference by rolling your mouse over the links or just as a reminder. Bookmark it today!

Science

Head to the Plaza Theatre February 4th to catch “The Sea Inside”, the latest Science in the Cinema flick. Tonight’s movie – made in Spanish with English subtitles – features a true story about a quadriplegic, who fought to end his own life. Two experts, Patrick Whelan, a senior scholar with Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research, and Dr. Ian Mitchell, a bioethicist with the University of Calgary, will introduce the movie. After the movie, they’ll discuss the latest spinal cord research and the ethical issues broached in the film.

The event begins February 4th at 6:30 at the Plaza Theatre (1133 Kensington Rd. NW)

1) Create a square consisting of four rows and four columns. Each “box” in the square contains a different number from one through 16. Every number appears only once. The sum of every row is identical; likewise the sum of every column, quadrant, the diagonals, and the sum of the central four boxes.

2) Why is a raven like a writing desk? Or, if Lewis Carroll’s famous conundrum doesn’t appeal to you, then answer this gentle query: you’re at a party. Can everyone at the party have a different number of friends present? For greater certainty, a person can’t be his or her own friend, and someone may have no friends.

The answers to January’s puzzles were supplied in the January issue.

Here are the answers to this month’s puzzles:

1) Hint: Albrecht Durer engraved a picture of this square, and the date of his engraving lies in the bottom row, central two boxes.

16 3 2 13
5 10 11 8
9 6 7 12
4 15 14 1

2) As to Lewis Carroll, he didn’t supply an answer, perhaps because there’s a “b” in both and an “n” in neither. As to friends and gatherings, at least two people will have the same number of friends at the party. The reason is that a friend is defined as someone else, not one’s self. In math terms, we can identify each person with a different number from A through (say) J. Assume person A has no friends in the gathering, person B has one friend, and so forth, through J who has J – 1 friends. But there is a contradiction between J, who counts A as a friend, and A, who claims to have none. To avoid the contradiction, J must have the same number of friends as one of the other people (J – 2 friends, or J – 3 friends, for example). Lest the issue of zero seem relevant, eliminate it and the result is the same. A has one friend, B has two, and so forth through J, who has ten. But this ten includes him or herself, which is excluded. J must therefore have the same number of friends as one of the other partygoers.

This is said to be the deepest image of the Universe ever taken in near-infrared light by the Hubble Space Telescope. The faintest and reddest objects (left inset) in the image are galaxies that correspond to times of approximately 12.9 billion years to 13.1 billion years ago. No galaxies have been seen before at such early epochs

The Hubble Space Telescope has peered further back in space and time than ever before to see baby galaxies that may have formed as little as 500 million years after the Big Bang.

Observations with a new camera installed on the orbiting telescope last year have revealed an ancient cosmic “undiscovered country” of primitive galaxies, which date back to the infancy of the Universe.

Astronomers estimate that three newly-identified galaxies, which are small and compact and glow a striking blue, are about 13.2 billion light years away. The starlight that Hubble has captured was thus emitted some 13.2 billion years ago, when the Universe was just 4 per cent of its present age.

If these preliminary calculations of distances and dates are confirmed, the galaxies would be the oldest and farthest away yet observed, offering new insights into the earliest years of the cosmos.

“With the rejuvenated Hubble and its new instruments, we are now entering unchartered territory that is ripe for new discoveries,” said Garth Illingworth, of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), who led the survey team.

He told the American Astronomical Society conference in Washington that the updated Hubble observatory provides an opportunity to “push back the frontiers of the searches for the first galaxies and to explore their nature”.

Further clues to the early Universe have been provided by a another remarkable image, a mosaic which combines pictures from Hubble’s new camera with an older survey taken in 2004, which was also presented at the Washington conference.

It gives a panoramic view of a slice of sky covering about a third of the diameter of the full moon, containing some 7,500 galaxies at many different stages of evolution.

The early galaxies detected by Dr Illingworth’s team were pinpointed from data collected by Hubble in August last year, following the installation of the telescope’s new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) in May.

The instrument was pointed at a section of sky known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which was first surveyed in visible light in 2004 to provide one of the telescopes’ most iconic images — dark sky teeming with more than 10,000 galaxies. The WFC3 instrument has now repeated the exercise for infrared light.
The first analysis of the new 2009 Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF09), released last month, found faint objects that were formed about 600 million years after the Big Bang. Dr Illingworth’s team has now found evidence that three galaxies in the image date back still further, to about 500 million years after the dawn of the Universe.

As the distance travelled by light increases, its wavelength becomes shifted towards the red end of the spectrum because of the expansion of the Universe — a phenomenon known as redshift that scientists can use to calculate the age of galaxies.

Preliminary calculations have suggested that the redshift value for three very faint galaxies in the new Ultra Deep Field is 10, which equates to an age of about 13.2 billion years, or 500 million years after the Big Bang.

The research has not yet been peer-reviewed, though the scientists have posted a paper online and submitted it to the journal Nature. It has also been reported by the magazine Science News.

The primordial galaxies are much smaller than modern ones, and are thought to have coalesced to give birth to the much larger bodies that exist today, scientists said.

Marcella Carollo, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, another member of the research team, said: “They are the very building blocks from which the great galaxies of today, like our own Milky Way, ultimately formed.”
The stars that make up the primitive galaxies must have been formed still earlier than the galaxies themselves, but Hubble is not capable of looking back further into space and time to see them directly. The more powerful James Webb Space Telescope should be able to search for them when it is launched in 2014.

Rychard Bouwens, of UCSC, the lead author of the paper, said: “The faintest galaxies are now showing signs of linkage to their origins from the first stars. They are so blue that they must be extremely deficient in heavy elements, thus representing a population that has nearly primordial characteristics.”

“This is about as far as we can go to do detailed science with the new HUDF09 image,” Dr Illingworth said. “This shows just how much the James Webb Space Telescope is needed to unearth the secrets of the first galaxies.”

(mark henderson, Times Online, 5January2010)

Every day, millions of Americans stand at store checkout counters and make a seemingly random decision: after swiping their debit card, they choose whether to punch in a code, or to sign their name.

It is a pointless distinction to most consumers, since the price is the same either way. But behind the scenes, billions of dollars are at stake.

When you sign a debit card receipt at a large retailer, the store pays your bank an average of 75 cents for every $100 spent, more than twice as much as when you punch in a four-digit code.

The difference is so large that Costco will not allow you to sign for your debit purchase in its checkout lines. Wal-Mart and Home Depot steer customers to use a PIN, the debit card norm outside the United States.

Despite all this, signature debit cards dominate debit use in this country, accounting for 61 percent of all such transactions, even though PIN debit cards are less expensive and less vulnerable to fraud.

How this came to be is largely a result of a successful if controversial strategy hatched decades ago by Visa, the dominant payment network for credit and debit cards. It is an approach that has benefited Visa and the nation’s banks at the expense of merchants and, some argue, consumers.

Competition, of course, usually forces prices lower. But for payment networks like Visa and MasterCard, competition in the card business is more about winning over banks that actually issue the cards than consumers who use them. Visa and MasterCard set the fees that merchants must pay the cardholder’s bank. And higher fees mean higher profits for banks, even if it means that merchants shift the cost to consumers.

Seizing on this odd twist, Visa enticed banks to embrace signature debit — the higher-priced method of handling debit cards — and turned over the fees to banks as an incentive to issue more Visa cards. At least initially, MasterCard and other rivals promoted PIN debit instead.

As debit cards became the preferred plastic in American wallets, Visa has turned its attention to PIN debit too and increased its market share even more. And it has succeeded — not by lowering the fees that merchants pay, but often by pushing them up, making its bank customers happier.

In an effort to catch up, MasterCard and other rivals eventually raised fees on debit cards too, sometimes higher than Visa, to try to woo bank customers back.

“What we witnessed was truly a perverse form of competition,” said Ronald Congemi, the former chief executive of Star Systems, one of the regional PIN-based networks that has struggled to compete with Visa. “They competed on the basis of raising prices. What other industry do you know that gets away with that?”

Visa has managed to dominate the debit landscape despite more than a decade of litigation and antitrust investigations into high fees and anticompetitive behavior, including a settlement in 2003 in which Visa paid $2 billion that some predicted would inject more competition into the debit industry.

Yet today, Visa has a commanding lead in signature debit in the United States, with a 73 percent share. Its share of the domestic PIN debit market is smaller but growing, at 42 percent, making Visa the biggest PIN network, according to The Nilson Report, an industry newsletter.

The Risk of Refusing

Critics complain that Visa does not fight fair, and that it used its market power to force merchants to accept higher costs for debit cards. Merchants say they cannot refuse Visa cards because it would result in lower sales.

“A dollar is no longer a dollar in this country,” said Mallory Duncan, senior vice president of the National Retail Federation, a trade association. “It’s a Visa dollar. It’s only worth 99 cents because they take a piece of every one.”

Visa officials say its critics are griping about debit products that have transformed the nation’s payment system, adding convenience for consumers and higher sales for merchants, while cutting the hassle and expense of dealing with cash and checks. In recent years, New York cabbies and McDonald’s restaurants are among those reporting higher sales as a result of accepting plastic.

“At times we have a perspective problem,” said William M. Sheedy, Visa’s president for the Americas. “Debit has become so mainstream, some of the people who have benefited have lost sight of what their business model was, what their cost structure was.”

Visa officials said the costs of debit for merchants had not gone down because the cards now provided greater value than they did five or 10 years ago. The costs must not be too onerous, they say, because merchant acceptance has doubled in the last decade.

The fees are “not a cost-based calculation, but a value-based calculation,” said Elizabeth Buse, Visa’s global head of product.

As for Visa’s market share, company officials maintain that it is rather small when considered within the larger context of all payments, where, for now at least, cash remains king.

While Visa may be among the best-known brands in the world, how it operates is a mystery to many consumers.

Visa does not distribute credit or debit cards, nor does it provide credit so consumers can buy flat-screen televisions or a Starbucks latte. Those tasks are left to the banks, which owned Visa until it went public in 2008.

Instead, Visa provides an electronic network that acts like a tollbooth, processing the transaction between merchants and banks and collecting a fee that averages 5 or 6 cents every time. For the financial year ended in June, Visa handled 40 billion transactions. Banks that issue Visa cards also pay a separate licensing fee, based on payment volume. MasterCard, which is roughly half the size of Visa, uses a similar model.

“It’s a penny here or there,” said Moshe Katri, an analyst who tracks the payments industry for Cowen and Company. “But when you have a billion transactions or more, it adds up.”

With debit transactions forecast to overtake cash purchases by 2012, the model has investors swooning: Visa’s stock traded at $88.14 on Monday, near a 52-week high, while shares of MasterCard, at $256.84 each, have soared by more than 450 percent since the company went public in 2006.

While there is little controversy about the fees that Visa collects, some merchants are infuriated by a separate, larger fee, called interchange, that Visa makes them pay each time a debit or credit card is swiped. The fees, roughly 1 to 3 percent of each purchase, are forwarded to the cardholder’s bank to cover costs and promote the issuance of more Visa cards.

The banks have used interchange fees as a growing profit center and to pay for cardholder perks like rewards programs. Interchange revenue has increased to $45 billion today, from $20 billion in 2002, driven in part by the surge in debit card use.

Some merchants say there should be no interchange fees on debit purchases, because the money comes directly out of a checking account and does not include the risks and losses associated with credit cards. Regardless, merchants say they inevitably pass on that cost to consumers; the National Retail Federation says the interchange fees cost households an average of $427 in 2008.

While the cost per transaction may seem small, at Best Buy, the biggest stand-alone electronics chain, “these skyrocketing fees add up to hundreds of millions of dollars every year,” said Dee O’Malley, director of financial services. “Every additional dollar we are forced to pay credit card companies is another dollar we can’t use to hire employees, or pass along to our customers in the form of savings.”

Weighing Rules on Merchants

The Justice Department is investigating if rules imposed by payment networks, including Visa, on merchants regarding “various payment forms” are anticompetitive, a spokeswoman said. Several bills have been introduced in Congress seeking to give merchants more ability to negotiate interchange, which is largely unregulated.

While interchange remains legal despite repeated challenges, a group of merchants is pursuing yet another class-action suit, this time in federal court in Brooklyn, against Visa and MasterCard that seeks to upend the system for setting fees.

“Visa and MasterCard have morphed into a giant cookie jar for banks at the expense of consumers,” said Mitch Goldstone, a plaintiff in the case.

Fees were not an issue when debit cards first gained traction in the 1980s. The small networks that operated automated teller machines, like STAR, Pulse, MAC and NYCE, issued debit cards that required a PIN. MasterCard had its own PIN debit network, called Maestro.

Merchants were not charged a fee for accepting PIN debit cards, and sometimes they even got a small payment because it saved banks the cost of processing a paper check.

That changed after Visa entered the debit market. In the 1990s, Visa promoted a debit card that let consumers access their checking account on the same network that processed its credit cards, which required a signature.

To persuade the banks to issue more of its debit cards, Visa charged merchants for these transactions and passed the money to the issuing banks. By 1999, Visa was setting fees of $1.35 on a $100 purchase, while Maestro and other regional PIN networks charged less than a dime, Federal Reserve data shows. Visa says the fee was justified because signature debit was so much more useful than PIN debit; at the time, roughly 15 percent of merchants had keypads for entering a PIN.

Merchants said they had no choice but to continue taking the debit cards, despite the higher fees, because Visa’s rules required them to honor its debit cards if they chose to accept Visa’s credit cards.

“Smart retailers take advantage and offer a ‘discount’ on debit purchases. Sharing the savings with the customers is a great incentive.”

Wal-Mart, Circuit City, Sears and a number of major merchants eventually sued. After seven years of litigation, Visa and MasterCard agreed to end the “honor all cards” rule between credit and debit and to pay the retailers a settlement of around $3 billion, one of the largest in American corporate history. Visa paid $2 billion, and MasterCard the remainder.

Since then, only a handful of retailers have stopped accepting Visa debit cards, an indication that the crux of the lawsuit was “much ado about nothing,” Mr. Sheedy says.

And while some merchants said they thought the lawsuit would pave the way to a new era of competition, a curious thing happened instead: while Visa temporarily lowered its fees for signature debit, it raised the price on PIN debit transactions and passed the funds on to card-issuing banks, and its competitors soon followed.

The current class-action lawsuit joined by Mr. Goldstone contends that Visa’s PIN debit network, called Interlink, is offering banks higher fees as an incentive to issue debit cards that are exclusively routed over this network. Interlink, which has raised its PIN debit fees for small merchants to 90 cents for each $100 transaction, from 20 cents in 2002, is often the most expensive, especially for small merchants, Fed data shows.

One large retailer, who requested anonymity to preserve its relationship with Visa, provided data that showed Interlink’s share of PIN purchases rose to 47 percent in 2009, from 20 percent in 2002, even as its fees steadily increased ahead of most other networks — to 49 cents per $100 transaction in 2009, from 38 cents in 2006.

Visa officials say its PIN debit network is taking off despite rising costs because it offers merchants, banks and consumers a level of efficiency and security that regional networks cannot match. “We are motivated as a company to try to drive value to each one of those participants so that they accept the card, issue more cards, use the card,” Mr. Sheedy said.

At checkout counters, meanwhile, consumers are quietly tugged in one direction or the other.

Safeway, 7-Eleven and CVS drugstores automatically prompt consumers to do a less costly PIN debit transaction. The banks, however, still steer consumers toward the more expensive form of signature debit. Wells Fargo and Chase are among those that offer bonus points only on debit purchases completed with a signature.

Visa says it does not care how consumers use their debit card, as long as it is a Visa. But for now at least, the company says the only way to ensure that a purchase is routed over the Visa network is to sign.

“When you use your Visa card, you have a chance to win a trip to the Olympic Winter Games,” a new Visa commercial promises.

The commercial does not explain the rules, but the fine print on Visa’s Web site does: nearly all Visa purchases are eligible — as long as the cardholder does not enter a PIN.

(andrew martin, New York Times, 4January2010)

Iceland is right. Britain (and the Netherlands) should give way on the demand that it should pay them back in full for losses in the collapsed Icesave online bank. They will probably have to do so — but before they give way their stubbornness may drive Iceland, now within sight of joining the European Union, to the level of international basket case.

President Grímsson’s decision to block a Bill that would repay Britain and the Netherlands the £3.6 billion their savers lost has triggered a storm of abuse. But the tiny nation of 320,000 people has a good case for saying it won’t pay back all the debt on the dates set out. It has an even better case for saying it can’t.

When Landsbankii, the parent of Icesave, collapsed in 2008, Iceland questioned whether it was obliged to compensate foreign savers. To cool the panic and demonstrate leadership, the British and Dutch governments decided to pay the savers right away, and try to get the money back from Iceland.

Under EU law it’s very debatable whether Iceland is obliged to pay them. It signed up to “passporting” rules that allow banks to operate across national borders if they take part in their home country’s system of guaranteeing deposits. But crucially, these guarantees vary between countries, in their level, and in who runs them. In Britain, the guarantee comes from the Government, and shortly before Landsbankii collapsed, was raised to £50,000. In Iceland, insurance was offered through the Depositors’ and Investors’ Guarantee Fund, set up by private banks, and in value equal to only 1 per cent of deposits. That was within EU rules, which did not foresee the simultaneous collapse of the country’s entire banking system.

In asserting that Iceland must repay in full, Britain is making two contestable assertions. The first is that if Iceland’s private fund can’t pay, the responsibility passes to the Government and taxpayers. EU rules do not say this, if only because they fail to provide for such dramatic circumstances. The second is that Iceland must pay not the amount set by its own guarantee rules nor even the British £50,000, but the full amount of British savers’ losses, even though the Government chose to pay out more than UK rules obliged.

It is hypocritical of Britain, with the Netherlands, to insist on the full £3.6 billion. Britain describes this as a loan to Iceland, but the “deal” in June that purported to set out the terms has never been agreed by Iceland’s parliament and President — hence this week’s drama.

Britain claims that responsibility for foreign activities of a bank falls on the taxpayers of a country in which its headquarters happen to sit. But while Britain has courted foreign banks assiduously, it is unthinkable that if it faced paying £720 billion to foreign savers (as, scaled up for the UK population, a comparable bill would be) it would pay without murmur. UK regulators also approved Icesave, and bear responsibility too.

What’s more, the UK, which now claims to advise the world on regulation after the financial crisis, is ignoring two key questions that the Iceland debacle has raised but the EU has not begun to resolve. The first is whether bank activities which benefit from a government guarantee should be walled off from those that do not. It’s certainly a live debate, but hard to say there is much real impetus to resurrect the barriers. The second is whether EU members want to agree a common level and model for deposit guarantees, backed, in the end and in every case, by government funds. The answer so far has been no.

Iceland is hardly blameless. Its bankers and politicians are entirely at fault for the greed, ignorance, vanity and cronyism which led to the implosion. National fury at Gordon Brown’s misappropriation of anti-terror laws to freeze Landsbankii’s UK activities was understandable, but has become a self-indulgent evasion. It is very hard to get Icelanders to look beyond this insult to acknowledge the real injury to British savers. Yet the best answer to these inevitable weaknesses of a very small country is to bring it within a club such as the EU, and under its scrutiny and regulation. But the row may put EU membership beyond reach. Yesterday, the escalating dispute was also jeopardising help from Nordic countries and the International Monetary Fund.

After all the legal rows, Iceland’s best card is that it can’t pay. A fall in the currency would make debt insupportable; a fall in population (and many graduates are now leaving) would make full payment impossible. EU finance ministers concluded in November 2008 that talks should respect Iceland’s need to rebuild itself.

The total bill amounts to hardly more than a third of Britain’s annual aid budget. The UK could afford to help out a tiny neighbour that has been an ally for 60 years. At the very least, it should not pursue its debatable claim in a way that prevents others pulling Iceland back from the brink.

(bronwen maddox, The Times, 9January2010)

The US army is training a crack unit to seal off and snatch back Pakistani nuclear weapons in the event that militants, possibly from inside the country’s security apparatus, get their hands on a nuclear device or materials that could make one.

The specialised unit would be charged with recovering the nuclear materials and securing them.

The move follows growing anti-Americanism in Pakistan’s military, a series of attacks on sensitive installations over the past two years, several of which housed nuclear facilities, and rising tension that has seen a series of official complaints by US authorities to Islamabad in the past fortnight.

“What you have in Pakistan is nuclear weapons mixed with the highest density of extremists in the world, so we have a right to be concerned,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA officer who used to run the US energy department’s intelligence unit. “There have been attacks on army bases which stored nuclear weapons and there have been breaches and infiltrations by terrorists into military facilities.”

Professor Shaun Gregory, director of the Pakistan security research unit at Bradford University, has tracked a number of attempted security breaches since 2007. “The terrorists are at the gates,” he warned.

In a counterterrorism journal, published by America’s West Point military academy, he documented three incidents. The first was an attack in November 2007 at Sargodha in Punjab, where nuclearcapable F-16 jet aircraft are thought to be stationed. The following month a suicide bomber struck at Pakistan’s nuclear airbase at Kamra in Attock district. In August 2008 a group of suicide bombers blew up the gates to a weapons complex at the Wah cantonment in Punjab, believed to be one of Pakistan’s nuclear warhead assembly plants. The attack left 63 people dead.

A further attack followed at Kamra last October. Pakistan denies that the base still has a nuclear role, but Gregory believes it does. A six-man suicide team was arrested in Sargodha last August.

Fears that militants could penetrate a nuclear facility intensified after a brazen attack on army headquarters in Rawalpindi in October when 10 gunmen wearing army uniforms got inside and laid siege for 22 hours. Last month there was an attack on the naval command centre in Islamabad.

Pakistani police said five Americans from Washington who were arrested in Pakistan last month after trying to join the Taliban were carrying a map of Chashma Barrage, a complex in Punjab that includes a nuclear power facility.

The Al-Qaeda leadership has made no secret of its desire to get its hands on weapons for a “nuclear 9/11”.

“I have no doubt they are hell-bent on acquiring this,” said Mowatt-Larssen. “These guys are thinking of nuclear at the highest level and are approaching it in increasingly professional ways.”

Nuclear experts and US officials say the biggest fear is of an inside job amid growing anti-American feeling in Pakistan. Last year 3,021 Pakistanis were killed in terrorist attacks, more than in Afghanistan, yet polls suggest Pakistanis consider the United States to be a greater threat than the Taliban.

“You have 8,000-12,000 [people] in Pakistan with some type of role in nuclear missiles — whether as part of an assembly team or security,” said Gregory. “It’s a very large number and there is a real possibility that among those people are sympathisers of terrorist or jihadist groups who may facilitate some kind of attack.”

Pakistan is thought to possess about 80 nuclear warheads. Although the weapons are well guarded, the fear is that materials or processes to enrich uranium could fall into the wrong hands.

“All it needs is someone in Pakistan within the nuclear establishment and in a position of key access to become radicalised,” said MowattLarssen. “This is not just theoretical. It did happen — Pakistan has had inside problems before.”

Bashir Mahmood, the former head of Pakistan’s plutonium reactor, formed the Islamic charity Ummah Tameer-e-Nau in March 2000 after resigning from the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. He was arrested in Islamabad on October 23, 2001, with his associate Abdul Majeed for alleged links to Osama Bin Laden.

Pakistan’s military leadership, which controls the nuclear programme, has always bristled at the suggestion that its nuclear facilities are at risk. The generals insist that storing components in different sites keeps them secure.

US officials refused to speak on the record about American safety plans, well aware of how this would be seen in Islamabad. However, one official admitted that the United States does not know where all of Pakistan’s storage sites are located. “Don’t assume the US knows everything,” he said.

Although Washington has provided $100m worth of technical assistance to Islamabad under its nuclear protection programme, US personnel have been denied access to most Pakistani nuclear sites.

In the past fortnight the US has made unprecedented formal protests to Pakistan’s national security apparatus, warning it about fanning virulent anti-American sentiment in the media.

Concerns about hostility towards America within elements of the Pakistani armed forces first surfaced in 2007. At a meeting of military commanders staged at Kurram, on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, a Pakistani major drew his pistol and shot an American. The incident was hushed up as a gunfight.

(christina lamb, The Sunday Times, 17January2010)

The Bavarian ski resort Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which played a major role in whitewashing Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, is applying to co-host the 2018 Winter Olympics.

A German government delegation will head to Vancouver next month to set out the joint bid with Munich and a formal submission will be made to the International Olympic Committee in March.

But if the Germans are to stand a chance, they will have to conduct a serious re-branding of Garmisch, which is still wallowing in its past glories – and the time that Adolf Hitler came to stay.

On the surface, Garmisch resembles a typical picture postcard Alpine community, with wooden chalets, flower tubs and the ice-clad Zugspitze mountain looming over the valley, and it is still proud of the last time that it was the site of a Winter Olympics -1936.

In the 1930s, though, the town was rabidly anti-Semitic, so much so that worried sports managers ordered a cover-up lest bad publicity jeopardise the success of the Summer Olympics in Berlin which Hitler wanted to be a showpiece of Aryan superiority.

The organiser of the summer Olympics, Carl Diem, visited Garmisch in 1935 and did not like what he saw. Nazi party rallies were stirring up hatred against Jews, he said, and the anti-Semitic newspaper “Der Stuermer” was on sale everywhere.

“As a result there is concern that action taken against domestic and German Jews could not only cast a shadow over the Winter Games but also threaten the holding of the Summer Olympics,” said Mr Diem, in a letter to Karl Ritter von Halt who had been given the task of staging the Garmisch events.

What ensued was a comprehensive clean-up to present the sunny face of Nazi Germany. All anti-Semitic banners were removed from sports centres, Jews and foreigners were served again in pubs – apres-ski drinking was again allowed to be “cosmopolitan”- and Der Stuermer disappeared. Signs like “Jews forbidden” or “Business must not be conducted in the Jewish language” were unscrewed and stored for later use.

The Games were to be photographed by Nazi-Party approved German photographers. The Nazi censorship bureau the ruled on which pictures could be released to the foreign press. Any hint of repression against Jews was to be removed from the papers for the duration of the games in case foreign visitors get wind of a less-than-tolerant Germany. “It is strictly forbidden, in the light of the Winter Olympics, to report about any clashes with foreigners or with Jews, “ said a memo sent from the Propaganda Ministry to German editors on January 27, 1936.

Even after the end of the Games – with Germany coming second to Norway in the medals table – the propaganda ministry of Joseph Goebbels kept a tight watch on “anything that could be construed abroad as hypocrisy on our part.” German papers had within days of the end of the Garmisch games attacked the half-Jewish ice hockey player Rudi Ball. The British ice hockey team had infuriated German commentators by taking the gold medal, ahead of the Canadians.

By 1937, the mask had slipped. The “Jews not welcome here” signs were put up again, tourist brochures made plain that guest houses would not be opening their doors to Jews and on the Night of Broken Glass, in November 1938, with Nazi pogroms raging across the country, the last fifty Jews were driven out of town

The Garmisch games were hailed as a success and, indeed, the Germans were later approached with the offer of staging the 1940 Winter Olympics – the Games never took place because of the outbreak of war. This international accolade, rather than the elaborate propaganda spin operation mounted by the Nazis, is what Garmisch city elders still hold to be the most important outcome of 1936, and the reason why it would be a strong candidate for 2018. New hotels are to be built, the rail link with Munich improved.

“People here do not feel the need to look into that part of the town’s history, “ says Alois Schwarzmueller, a former Social Democrat councillor and a local amateur historian.

The 2018 bid is being led by the son of Willy Bogner who delivered the Olympic oath in the presence of Adolf Hitler. And a commemorative book about the Garmisch games, which is still being promoted by the town council, turns out to have been published by a historian who was under investigation by the German equivalent of Special Branch for allegedly printing a book by a Holocaust denier.

(roger boyes, Times Online, 22January2010)

Ringed with razor wire and high fences, Afghanistan’s counter narcotics court is supposed to be a beacon of incorruptible justice in a country, and a court system, awash with corruption.

The high-security compound on the outskirts of Kabul was designed with British and American help to convict Afghanistan’s most wanted drug lords — the untouchables at the top of the heroin cartels — and the results have been extraordinary. So good that more than 9,000 defence attorneys have gone on strike, claiming justice there is a sham.

“The judges just ignore the evidence, they don’t care,” said Rohullah Qarizada, the president of the Afghan Independent Bar Association. “They just convict. The role of the defence lawyers is merely symbolic.”

Conviction rates are more than 90 per cent. In the nine months to December, the Criminal Justice Task Force (CJTF) primary court convicted 310 out of 343 people. The appeal court convicted 394 of 427. The bar association says it is proof that defence lawyers have been sidelined. Court insiders say it is because the burden of proof is set high before the cases come to trial.

Built with $8 million (£5 million) of US money, the task force has 12 dedicated judges, 30 prosecutors and 35 investigators who all get generous salary top-ups from the UK and beefed-up personal security worth £1.2 million a year. The former chief judge was assassinated. “The judges and prosecutors get their salaries from the UK embassies so they just convict people to keep them happy,” Mr Qarizada said.

Defence attorneys have refused CJTF cases since January 9. Their strike is likely to fuel accusations that the West is guilty of its own corruption at a time when the international community is heaping pressure on President Karzai to root out graft and tackle the heroin cartels that permeate his own family.

Mr Qarizada said he defended a man at the CJTF who was sentenced to 16 years in prison in a case of mistaken identity. “I brought 50 people from his village, the mullah, the district governor and five members of parliament who all said he was Mahmood, not Ahmad,” Mr Qarizada said. “One policeman who arrested him said he’d heard his mother call him Ahmad, so the judge gave him 16 years in prison.”

At a trial in November, the primary court sat for less than two hours to convict five people to a total of 55 years in prison. After more than six months collecting telephone intercepts and forensic reports, there was no cross-examination of witnesses and attorneys simply read out opening statements to a panel of three judges. The verdict was recorded the next day, without calling court into session.

The defence lawyers are also angry at the way they are treated by the state authorities. Nasar Mohammed Helmandwal, who defended one of the most notorious smugglers to be convicted at the CJTF, said his offices were illegally raided by the police. “We just want respect,” he said. “The court accepts whatever the foreigners tell them. They don’t listen to us.”

A spokesman for the British embassy said they were aware of the dispute. “The role of defence lawyers is … extremely important. In any transparent and effective justice system a fair acquittal should have equal weight with a fair conviction.”

(jerome starkey, The Times, 28January2010)

Science Café, Jan. 26th, 2010

Pandemics – Risks and Reactions to an Issue of Public Health

The topic of pandemic is especially pertinent at this time, as we are currently involved in the H1N1 flu pandemic. One of the important points made this evening was that we are not through with H1N1, even though it is no longer newsworthy, and there may be a third wave of the virus, as has been evidenced in the past with other pandemics.

The introductions were made by Dr. Paul Koobs, head of a new institute in Calgary, the Alberta Sepsis Network: Viral, Fungal, and Microbial. It’s housed in the new building on the grounds of the Foothills Hospital. He discussed how the major problem with the H1N1 virus was not the virus itself, but the body’s overreaction to the invasive phage. The hyperactive immune system condition, called sepsis, actually causes more damage than the virus does. This is how the great pandemic of the 20th century, the so-called Spanish Flu, killed its victims by proxy, when the white cells’ caustic chemicals used to kill phages turn against body tissues. Five hundred million people died, most of them young, fit, and healthy. Sepsis is so dangerous that the death rate today is 50%, while the death rate from a stroke is 20% by comparison. Twenty years ago, the sepsis death rate was closer to 100%. Some fascinating videos were shown on the PowerPoint presentation of white blood cells ‘searching and destroying’ invasive phages.

From Dr. Koob’s introduction on the microissue of what is happening in the body, Alberta’s Deputy Medical Officer of Health, Judy MacDonald, who made the case for Alberta’s preparedness, spoke about the macroissues of public health. Public health is a very big job, with timely and effective vaccine production and distribution one of the many responsibilities. The H5N1 virus was first detected in Hong Kong in 1997, later named the Bird or Avian Flu, as this was its animal vector, and resulted in an undetermined number of deaths before the Chinese government took the radical step of slaughtering 1.5 million fowl in the poultry markets. This was the first indication that an influenza phage, present in all migratory birds and most domestic ones, could be passed directly to people without the intermediary host of the pig, which serves as a ‘mixing vessel’ to incubate and transform the virus into one that can attack humans, due to the remarkable physiological similarities between humans and swine. Alerted to the possibility of a new, more dangerous flu, nations began cooperating on an unprecedented scale for pandemic contingency planning. In the midst of this, another shock as delivered in the form of SARS in 2002, which forced the issue of faster and better pandemic planning through the World Health Organization. Canada now has a dedicated manufacturer for antivirals as a result of this planning. The next virus arrived in mid-April of 2009, from Mexico, another version of swine flu, now called H1N1. Dr. MacDonald said that preparedness is expecting the unexpected from viruses because of their rapid mutation and today’s rapid travel, which can move a virus planet wide within days. By June 11, a pandemic was announced, with 28,774 confirmed cases in 74 countries, and 144 confirmed deaths. Canada’s antiviral manufacturing committed to producing a dose for all 36 million Canadians, with priority given to the ill and health care workers directly involved. A huge public messaging program for hand hygiene was developed, but the vaccine dosed didn’t arrive until October 26th, well after the initial surge of reported cases. So far, only 33% of Canadians have taken the dose, as the media have ignored the fact the pandemic is still on, and may produce a ‘third wave’ of renewed infections. One of the indicators are schoolchildren – the ‘canaries in the coal mine’. Once school absenteeism reaches 10%, school health officials are required to report that to Alberta’s Public Health as an outbreak. Winter is the high season for outbreaks of flu, but H1N1 chose summer of 2009, coming in at double the normal seasonal illness rate.

Dr. Chip Doig, AMA president for Canada and U of C intensive care specialist, discussed that H1N1 was more treatable with Alberta’s available 300 intensive care beds as it occurred through October, the ‘shoulder season’ when demand for intensive care was not as great. During the summer, ICU capacity hovers around 90% because of summer recreational injuries, and it was fortunate that October had the available space for those H1N1 victims. The white blood cells ‘overreact’ to the phage, and victims effectively drown in their own lung fluids. The process is not yet clearly understood, but the treatment is extremely intensive, long and very expensive. Heart attack victims use a cardio pulmonary bypass machine for perhaps 2 hours of surgery, while H1N1 victims need 14 days on the machine, in addition to a dialysis machine and ongoing, real time blood chemistry testing. The cost can exceed $10,000 a day for treatment, lasting over 2 weeks just for the victim to overcome the white cell overreaction and complications. Another 6 – 8 months of recuperative time is required before the victim is even close to the same fitness as before the attack. It’s a serious business. Dr. Doig assured the audience that Alberta’s health care is among the best in the world, despite media sensationalist reports to the contrary. In 20 years, we have moved from a non-survivable prognosis to survivable in most cases.

All in all, this Science Café was excellent, in both the content and presentation. If you’d like to learn more, Science Café is on the web as a co-production of the U of C and the Telus World of Science, and is presented the last Tuesday of each month, nine times a year, December and June and July excepted. Sign up for notifications via e-mail or Facebook. See you in February!

Jeff Pugh

IQ Tests (tip of the hat to Vicki Herd)
IQ Test

Pigeon Humour (tip of the hat to Jeff Pugh):
Pigeon

Afghanistan, Lessons Unlearned from the Soviet War
Lessons Unlearned

Stone Age Amputation
Stone Age

Radiation Treatment
Radiation