Crime Wave Engulfs Syria as Its Cities Reel From War

By an employee of The New York Times and Damien Cave, August 9, 2012

ALEPPO, Syria—The consequences of the war here have become familiar: neighborhoods shelled, civilians killed and refugees departed. But in the background, many Syrians describe something else that has them cowering with fear: a wave of lawlessness not unlike the crime wave Iraq experienced during the conflict there.

From Dara’a, near the Jordanian border, to Homs, Damascus and here in Syria’s commercial capital—the fighting has essentially collapsed much of the civilian state. Even in neighborhoods where skirmishes are rare, residents say thieves prey on the weak, and police stations no longer function because the officers have fled.

Kidnapping, rare before, is now rampant, as a man named Hur discovered here last month. He simply wanted to drive home. The man shoving a pistol into his back had other plans. “Keep walking,” the gunman told Hur, 40, a successful businessman, as they approached his car. “Get in.”

Hur said he initially thought he was being arrested by government agents. But then, after blindfolding him, his three captors made a phone call that revealed baser motives.

“They asked my family to ransom me with 15 million Syrian pounds,” Hur said of the abductors’ demand for about $200,000. “They were criminals, not a political group. They told me they knew me and they knew my family could pay.”

Rebel leaders have been trying to fill the void. “We are running patrols to protect our areas from thieves and criminals,” said Abu Mohammad, 30, a rebel fighter in eastern Aleppo.

But as bloody ground battles rage throughout the city, rebel control is limited. Syrians in Aleppo and elsewhere now say they bury their jewelry and other valuables inside their furniture. Some people no longer keep money in their pockets when they venture outside; residents and business owners across the country are padlocking their property to protect against armed opportunists mingling with combatants.

“No one wants to leave their houses, because you never know who is going to stop you or attack you,” said Yasmin, 50, a resident of Aleppo who was too afraid to give her last name. “Chaos, lawlessness, fear, it is just so chaotic, and with all the thugs in the streets, you never know who might kidnap you and ask for a ransom.”

Aleppo’s slide toward something resembling anarchy began months ago. Factory owners here in the country’s industrial capital said the roads outside the city went first, as armed bandits seized whatever they wanted from passing vehicles. One of Syria’s main automobile exporters recently told a Lebanese friend that he had to start sending vehicles to Iraq by boat from Lebanon because of the insecurity.

Then more reports of kidnappings started surfacing. By the end of March, as the government claimed to have retaken control of nearby cities, ransom demands were a daily occurrence in Aleppo, said Amal Hanano, a Syrian writer and analyst living in the United States. Usually, she said, the kidnappers asked for around $75,000 and then dropped their price to a fifth of that after tough negotiations.

Hur, using a nickname out of fear that he could be targeted again, said that his brother talked his kidnappers down to about $30,000 in Syrian pounds. It took a week. He said he spent most of the time tied to a water pipe in the back of a small store somewhere outside Aleppo.

His kidnappers made sure he had enough food and water. They took his cellphone, his watch and a gold ring but they left his car near the city, to establish their credibility. “They told my family where to find the car and the keys to prove that I was with them,” said Hur, indicating that they had probably kidnapped before.

In addition to gaining more expertise as the conflict drags on, criminals are also becoming more brazen. Yasmin said that a few days ago her cousin, a 65-year-old man, was robbed in his garden at 1:30 in the afternoon. His family watched helplessly as the thieves stole all he had, about $70. Now her brother, who lives across the street, makes sure his pockets are empty before he leaves home.

“We’ve all become a lot more careful since that incident,” Yasmin said. “Can you imagine? It’s not even safe to carry $70.”

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Brave New War

By John Glaser, Antiwar.com, August 9, 2012

Since the end of World War II, American leaders bent on making war have faced two major obstacles: nuclear weapons and a reluctant public.

Since 1945, “there have been no wars among the major states of the world,” notes Kenneth N. Waltz, a renowned international-relations theorist. “Nuclear weapons are the only peacekeeping weapons that the world has ever known.”

Another constraint on bellicosity has been the public’s aversion to long, intractable conflicts. This so-called Vietnam Syndrome strongly influenced U.S. foreign policy until September 2001, and it has seemingly returned after the quagmires of the last decade. According to the Human Security Brief 2010, high-intensity wars have declined by 78 percent since 1988.

But a new method of waging war—using special operations forces and drones—offers a way around the public-opinion impediment.

“The appeal is obvious,” writes Tom Engelhardt in Terminator Planet, a collection of essays he co-authored with historian Nick Turse. “The cost (in U.S. lives) is low; in the case of the drones, nonexistent. There is no need for large counterinsurgency armies of occupation of the sort that have bogged down on the mainland of the Greater Middle East these last years.” Drones provide “new ways to cross borders and new technology for doing it without permission.”

Terminator Planet uncovers the largely secret history and charts the likely future of the U.S. government’s remote-controlled wars. As the book makes clear, today’s drones may be less spectacular than the Terminator cyborg of James Cameron’s hair-raising 1984 blockbuster, but they are no less dangerous.

Drones are “killing civilians in disputed but significant numbers in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, creating enemies and animosity wherever they strike, and turning us into a nation of 24/7 assassins beyond the law or accountability of any sort,” Engelhardt warns. “Thought of another way, the drones put wings on the original Bush-era Guantanamo principle—that Americans have the inalienable right to act as global judge, jury, and executioner, and when doing so are beyond the reach of any court of law.”

The Obama administration is indeed placing itself above the law with its drone offensive in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere (Turse discovers at least 60 U.S. bases from which drones conduct surveillance or bombing missions). Recent reporting confirms that the administration has an internal process for authorizing “signature strikes,” which target individuals who cannot even be identified. The secret, unregulated nature of this process contradicts the very idea of the rule of law.

Christof Heyns, special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, addresses this lawlessness in a recent report to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

“Current targeting practices weaken the rule of law,” Heyns argues. “Killings may be lawful in an armed conflict [such as Afghanistan], but many targeted killings take place far from areas where it’s recognized as being an armed conflict.”

U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay concurs. “I see the indiscriminate killings and injuries of civilians in any circumstances as human rights violations,” she says, adding, “Because these attacks are indiscriminate, it is very, very difficult to track the numbers of people who have been killed.”

Eyewitness accounts, corroborated by new research, indicate that the drone strikes have indeed killed significant numbers of civilians. The administration has suggested that drones rarely kill innocents, “embrac[ing] a disputed method for counting civilian casualties,” reported The New York Times in May, that “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants … unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”

As Terminator Planet repeatedly reminds us, this is not only immoral, but also counterproductive. “In Pakistan,” writes Engelhardt, “a war of machine assassins is visibly provoking terror (and terrorism), as well as anger and hatred among people who are by no means fundamentalists.” Indeed, as Charles Schmitz, a Yemen expert at Towson University, told the Los Angeles Times, “The more the U.S. applies its current policy, the stronger al-Qaeda seems to get.”

The Pentagon has a history of exaggerating the efficacy of new weapons. In World War II, the U.S. rejected the British practice of nighttime carpet bombings of civilian areas. New technology, American officials said, enabled “precision bombing.” The Norden bombsight, which could calculate a bomb’s trajectory, was said to be capable of hitting a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet.

“In reality,” writes Yuki Tanaka in Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History, “‘precision bombing’ was a euphemism, as the bombs regularly fell at least a quarter mile from the target.” The report of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, issued in September 1945, concluded, “in the over-all, only about 20% of the bombs aimed at precision targets fell within this target area.”

“In the Gulf War,” Engelhardt recalls, “smart bombs” were supposed to “give war the kind of precision that would lower civilian casualties to the vanishing point.” Unfortunately, the smart bombs “turned out to be remarkably dumb.”

But genuinely smarter weapons raise new concerns. Terminator Planet examines the cutting edge of drone capabilities to see what tomorrow (and hefty sums of taxpayer money) will bring. Drones will soon be “small enough to fly through windows or down ventilation shafts,” Turse reveals, “and carry out lethal attacks, undertake computer-disabling cyber-attacks, and swarm, as would a group of angry bees, of their own volition,” that is, without human oversight.

And it won’t end there. The Pentagon “is planning to increase the funding of drone development by 700% over the next decade.”

Polls show that Americans largely approve of the president’s use of drones. “When we possess such weaponry, it turns out there is nothing unnerving or disturbing, apocalyptic or dystopian about it,” Engelhardt observes. But these technologies will not be exclusively American for long. As many as 40 countries are now developing versions of their own pilotless planes. “And when the first Iranian or Russian or Chinese missile-armed drones start knocking off their chosen sets of ‘terrorists,’ we won’t like it one bit,” Terminator Planet hauntingly warns. “Then let’s see what we think about the right of any nation to summarily execute its enemies—and anyone else in the vicinity—by drone.”

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Scott Neeson left Hollywood to save children rooting in Cambodia's garbage dumps

By Tibor Krausz, CS Monitor, August 10, 2012 

Phnom Penh, Cambodia—Scott Neeson’s final epiphany came one day in June 2004. The high-powered Hollywood executive stood, ankle deep in trash, at the sprawling landfill of Stung Meanchey, a poor shantytown in Cambodia’s capital.

In a haze of toxic fumes and burning waste, swarms of Phnom Penh’s most destitute were rooting through refuse, jostling for scraps of recyclables in newly dumped loads of rubbish. They earned 4,000 riel ($1) a day—if they were lucky.

Many of the garbage sorters were young children. Covered in filthy rags, they were scruffy, sickly, and sad.

Clasped to Mr. Neeson’s ear was his cellphone. Calling the movie mogul from a US airport, a Hollywood superstar’s agent was complaining bitterly about inadequate in-flight entertainment on a private jet that Sony Pictures Entertainment, where Neeson was head of overseas theatrical releases, had provided for his client.

Neeson overheard the actor griping in the background. ” ‘My life wasn’t meant to be this difficult.’ Those were his exact words,” Neeson says. “I was standing there in that humid, stinking garbage dump with children sick with typhoid, and this guy was refusing to get on a Gulfstream IV because he couldn’t find a specific item onboard,” he recalls. “If I ever wanted validation I was doing the right thing, this was it.”

Doing the right thing meant turning his back on a successful career in the movie business, with his $1 million salary. Instead, he would dedicate himself full time to a new mission: to save hundreds of the poorest children in one of the world’s poorest countries.

Much to everyone’s surprise, within months the Australian native, who as president of 20th Century Fox International had overseen the global success of block-busters like “Titanic,” “Braveheart,” and “Die Another Day,” quit Hollywood. He sold his mansion in Los Angeles and held a garage sale for “all the useless stuff I owned.” He sold off his Porsche and yacht, too.

His sole focus would now be his charity, the Cambodian Children’s Fund, which he had set up the previous year after coming face to face, while on vacation in Cambodia, with children living at the garbage dump.

“The perks in Hollywood were good—limos, private jets, gorgeous girlfriends, going to the Academy Awards,” says Neeson, an affable man with careworn features and a toothy smile. “But it’s not about what lifestyle I’d enjoy more when I can make life better for hundreds of children.”

He sits at his desk barefoot, Cambodian-style, in white canvas pants and a T-shirt. At times he even sounds like a Buddhist monk. “You’ve got to take the ego out of it,” he says. “One person’s self-indulgence versus the needs of hundreds of children, that’s the moral equation.”

On the walls of his office, next to movie posters signed by Hollywood stars, are before-and-after pictures of Cambodian children. Each pair tells a Cinderella story: A little ragamuffin, standing or squatting in rubbish, transforms in a later shot into a beaming, healthy child in a crisp school uniform.

Neeson has more than 1,300 sets of such pictures; that’s how many children his charity looks after. Every one of the children, the Australian humanitarian stresses, he knows by sight, and most of them by name. “You go through a certain journey with them,” he says.

Houy and Heang were among the first who started that journey with him in 2004. Abandoned by their parents, the two sisters, now 17 and 18, lived at the dump in a makeshift tent.

“We felt sick and had no shoes. Our feet hurt,” Houy recalls in the fluent English she’s learned. “We’d never seen a foreigner,” Heang adds. “He asked us, ‘Do you want to study?’ “

Today the sisters are about to graduate from high school. They want to go on to college.

Neeson maintains four residential homes around town for more than 500 other deprived children and is building another. He operates after-school programs and vocational training centers. He’s built day cares and nurseries.

His charity provides some 500 children with three meals a day and runs a bakery where disadvantaged youths learn marketable skills while making nutrient-rich pastry for the poorest kids. It pays for well over 1,000 children’s schooling and organizes sightseeing trips and sports days for them.

“I drive the staff crazy,” says Neeson, who employs more than 300 locals, many of them former scavengers. “If I come up with a plan, I want to see it implemented within 48 hours. If I see a need, I want to do something about it. You don’t want to see suffering prolonged.”

He sees plenty of both need and suffering.

After decades of genocide and civil war, millions of Cambodians live in abject poverty. Many children are chronically malnourished, and many never even finish primary school.

On a late afternoon, as garbage pickers begin to return to their squalid dwellings of plastic sheets, tarpaulins, and plywood, Neeson sets out on his daily “Pied Piper routine.”

Navigating a muddy path, pocked with fetid puddles and strewn with trash, which winds among clusters of derelict shacks and mounds of garbage, he picks his way around a squatters’ community. Everywhere he goes, children dash up to him with cries of “Papa! Papa!” They leap into his arms, pull at his shirt, cling to his arms, wrap themselves around his legs.

“Hey, champ!” he greets a boy who clambers up on him. “He needs a dentist so badly,” he notes, referring to the boy’s rotten teeth. His charity offers free health care and dental services to the children and their parents.

In 2007 Neeson won the Harvard School of Public Health’s Q Prize, an award created by music legend Quincy Jones. In June he was named “a hero of philanthropy” by Forbes magazine. (“Well, I finally made it into Forbes,” he quips. “But no ‘World’s Richest’ list for me.”)

When Neeson spots certain kids, he hands them their portraits from a sheaf of newly printed photographs he carries around.

“I want them to have mementoes of themselves when they grow up and leave all this behind,” he explains. They give him their latest drawings in return.

He stops at a windowless cinder-block shanty inhabited by a mother and her three teenage daughters. The bare walls are adorned with Neeson’s portraits of the girls in school beside their framed Best Student awards.

“I’m so proud of my children,” says Um Somalin, a garment factory worker who earns $2 a day. “Mr. Scott has done wonders for them.”

Neeson rescued one girl from being trafficked, another from domestic servitude, and the mother from a rubber plantation, after he had come across the youngest girl living alone at the dump. “We always bring the family back together,” he says. “We help everyone so no one slips through the cracks.”

The need is great: Life here can be unforgiving. “This girl has an abusive father. This one here fell into a fire when she was 6. That guy got shot. That one there lost an arm in an accident,” Neeson says, reeling off details.

Then, flashlight in hand, he doubles back down another path—and steps into what seems like a different world. Behind a high-security fence, children sit in neat rows in brightly painted classrooms, learning English and math in evening classes. Others play on computers in an air-conditioned room.

Until recently, the site where Neeson’s new school now stands was a garbage dump.

“When I started working for him, I was surprised how much he does for the children,” says Chek Sarath, one of his helpers. “He places their well-being above his own.”

Neeson stops by young children who have their eyes glued to a Disney cartoon playing from a DVD.

“I miss a lot about Hollywood,” Neeson muses. “I miss Sundays playing paddle tennis on the beach with friends and taking the boat out to the islands.

“Sundays here, I’m down at the garbage dump. But I’m really happy.”

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The Golden Rule According to Whom?

Georgia Purdom

At the end of the last school year, my daughter’s public school took part in an anti-bullying campaign.The cover of the short workbook they completed in class intrigued me. Here is a picture of it.



When I read it, I couldn’t help but smile! This is the so-called Golden Rule, which comes from Luke 6:31, “And just as you want men to do to you, you also do to them likewise.” Of course, the workbook doesn’t give credit to the Bible or to God. The workbook states, “Students will learn to follow The Golden Rule by being fair, kind, respectful, responsible, and honest. ‘Treating other people the way you want to be treated’ is an important life skill that needs to be modeled and encouraged by all.”

As I pondered these statements I couldn’t help but think how inconsistent these ideas are with the evolutionary worldview that is taught in public schools. Evolution works by “survival of the fittest,” not “survival of the fairest and kindest.” In fact, many eugenicists (those that promote the birth of the “well-born”) both of the past and present readily acknowledge that helping the sick, poor, and weak impedes the evolution of man to a higher level. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, wrote, “Organized charity itself is a symptom of a malignant social disease . . . our civilization has bred, is breeding, and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the failure of philanthropy, but rather at its success.”[1]

For the public schools to be consistent with an evolutionary worldview, they should actually be encouraging bullying and not campaigning against it. Bullying could be seen as an aspect of natural selection since those that cannot withstand bullying (the weaker) decrease, and those that stand up to the bullying or are bullies are stronger and increase. (Thanks to Todd Friel of Wretched for initiating my thinking on this topic!)

In addition, if humans are nothing more than animals then morality is irrelevant, as it does not apply to animals. When a cat kills a mouse, we don’t charge the cat with first-degree murder because the cat is an animal acting on instinct and not a moral agent. So, if people are just animals acting on instinct, if they are nothing more than the sum of their genes, then we cannot justifiably say bullying is wrong. Evolutionary biologist Dr. William Provine stated, “Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear–and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end of me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either. What an unintelligible idea.”[2]

The real question is by what authority does a teacher or a principal or a school say that bullying is wrong and that students should be fair and kind? They cannot claim a higher authority outside of themselves and promoting anti-bullying is actually inconsistent with the evolutionary worldview that, by and large, public schools teach. This is the same question I asked in Tuesday’s blog related to the issue of the definition of marriage. If we don’t have an ultimate authority outside of ourselves then it is just our arbitrary opinion.

What a joy for me to share with Elizabeth the biblical foundations of the exhortation to treat others as you want to be treated! She has a biblical basis for being fair and kind. Elizabeth has had the opportunity to live out the Golden Rule and show others the love of Christ by being fair and kind even when others were not treating her the same way. I hope as the school year begins that you will join with me in praying for Christians in the public school system, whether students, teachers, or administrators that seek to serve Christ in a very difficult setting. I also encourage parents to check out our resources and make sure you are equipped to equip your children with the authority and truthfulness of God’s Word.

Keep fighting the good fight of the faith![1] Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization (New York: Brentano’s, 1922), p. 108.

[2] William Provine, “Darwinism: Science or Naturalistic Philosophy,” Origins Research (1994) 16.

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US starts landmark Agent Orange cleanup in Vietnam

By Mike Ives, AP, Aug 8, 2012 DANANG, Vietnam (AP)—Vo Duoc fights back tears while sharing the news that broke his heart: A few days ago he received test results confirming he and 11 family members have elevated levels of dioxin lingering in their blood. The family lives in a two-story house near a former U.S. military base in Danang where the defoliant Agent Orange was stored during the Vietnam War, which ended nearly four decades ago. Duoc, 58, sells steel for a living and has diabetes, while his wife battles breast cancer and their daughter has remained childless after suffering repeated miscarriages. For years, Duoc thought the ailments were unrelated, but after seeing the blood tests he now suspects his family unwittingly ingested dioxin from Agent Orange-contaminated fish, vegetables and well water. Dioxin, a persistent chemical linked to cancer, birth defects and other disabilities, has seeped into Vietnam’s soils and watersheds, creating a lasting war legacy that remains a thorny issue between the former foes. Washington has been slow to respond, but on Thursday the U.S. for the first time will begin cleaning up dioxin from Agent Orange that was stored at the former military base, now part of Danang’s airport. “It’s better late than never that the U.S. government is cleaning up the environment for our children,” Duoc said in Danang, surrounded by family members sitting on plastic stools. “They have to do as much as possible and as quickly as possible.” The $43 million project begins as Vietnam and the U.S. forge closer ties to boost trade and counter China’s rising influence in the disputed South China Sea. Although the countries’ economic and military ties are blossoming, progress on addressing the dioxin legacy has been slow. Washington still disputes a claim by Hanoi that between 3 million to 4 million Vietnamese were affected by toxic chemicals sprayed by U.S. planes during the war to eliminate jungle cover for guerrilla fighters, arguing that the actual number is far lower and other environmental factors are to blame for the health issues. That position irks Vietnamese, who say the United States maintains a double standard in acknowledging the consequences of Agent Orange. The U.S. has given billions of dollars in disability payments to American servicemen who developed illnesses associated with dioxin after exposure to the defoliant during the Vietnam War. In 2004, a group of Vietnamese citizens filed suit in a U.S. court against companies that produced the chemical, but the case was dismissed and the Supreme Court declined to take it up. Until a few years ago, Washington took a defensive position whenever Agent Orange was raised because no one had determined how much dioxin remained in Vietnam’s soil and watersheds, and the U.S. worried about potential liabilities, said Susan Hammond, director of the War Legacies Project, a U.S. nonprofit organization that mainly focuses on the Agent Orange legacy from the Vietnam War. “There was a lot of the blame game going on, and it led nowhere,” Hammond said by telephone from Vermont. “But now at least progress is being made.” Over the past five years, Congress has appropriated about $49 million for environmental remediation and about $11 million to help people living with disabilities in Vietnam regardless of cause. Experts have identified three former U.S. air bases—in Danang in central Vietnam and the southern locations of Bien Hoa and Phu Cat—as hotspots where Agent Orange was mixed, stored and loaded onto planes. The U.S. military dumped some 20 million gallons (75 million liters) of Agent Orange and other herbicides on about a quarter of former South Vietnam between 1962 and 1971. The defoliant decimated about 5 million acres (2 million hectares) of forest—roughly the size of Massachusetts—and another 500,000 acres (202,000 hectares) of crops. The Agent Orange issue has continued to blight the U.S.-Vietnam relationship because dioxin can linger in soils and at the bottom of lakes and rivers for generations, entering the food supply through the fat of fish and other animals. Vietnam’s Ministry of Defense and the U.S. now plan to excavate 73,000 cubic meters (2.5 million cubic feet) of soil from the airport and heat it to a high temperature in storage tanks until the dioxin is removed. The project is expected to be completed in four years. The U.S. is rolling out a $9 million project to address disabilities in Vietnam through 2015, but it continues to dispute Vietnam’s claim that dioxin has caused health problems there. Every penny counts for Nguyen Thi Hien, who directs three rehabilitation and vocational training centers for 150 children and young adults with disabilities in Danang on a budget of roughly 100 million dong ($5,000) per month. The children, busy drawing and making plastic flowers that are sold to raise funds, suffer from a range of physical and mental ailments that Hien says are linked to dioxin. Vo Duoc, the steel salesman, will travel to the capital, Hanoi, next month to receive treatment for his diabetes. But he says he’s more concerned about what will happen to his six grandchildren, who haven’t yet been tested for dioxin. “They had nothing to do with the war,” Duoc said. “But I live in fear that they’ll test positive like me.

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Brazil Gains Business and Influence as It Offers Aid and Loans in Africa

By Simon Romero, NY Times, August 7, 2012

RIO DE JANEIRO—In Mozambique, Brazil’s government is opening a plant making antiretroviral drugs to fight the AIDS epidemic. Brazil is lending $150 million to Kenya to build roads and ease congestion in the capital, Nairobi. And in Angola, West Africa’s rising oil power, a new security agreement seeks to expand the training of Angolan military personnel in Brazil.

Brazil, which has more people of African descent than any other country outside of Africa itself, is assertively raising its profile again on the continent, building on historical ties from the time of the Portuguese empire.

The array of aid projects and loans recently extended to African countries points both to Brazil’s ambitions of projecting greater influence in the developing world and to the expanding business allure of Africa, where some economies are rapidly growing even as parts of the continent still grapple with wars and famine. The charm offensive is paying off in surging trade flows between Brazil and Africa, growing to $27.6 billion in 2011 from $4.3 billion in 2002.

“There’s the growing sense that Africa is Brazil’s frontier,” said Jerry Dávila, a historian at the University of Illinois who has written extensively about Brazil’s inroads across the South Atlantic Ocean. “Brazil is in the privileged position of finally reaching the institutional capacity to do this.”

Brazil’s forays into Africa are similar to the ambitions of other rising powers, like Turkey, which has established its sway in the Arab world, and India’s promotion of its culture across Asia.

The prominence given to Africa also reflects Brazil’s shift from aid recipient to provider. Big development challenges persist in Brazil, including woeful public schools and a sharp economic slowdown this year. But Brazil is a major agricultural exporter that recently surpassed Britain as the world’s sixth-largest economy, and it now boasts more embassies in Africa than Britain does—a notable change from when Brazil relied on foreign aid in the 1960s, largely from the United States, to alleviate hunger in the country’s impoverished northeast.

Africa now accounts for about 55 percent of the disbursements by the Brazilian Cooperation Agency, which oversees aid projects abroad, according to Marco Farani, the agency’s director. Altogether, including educational exchanges and an expanding loan portfolio, Brazil’s foreign aid exceeds $1 billion, he said. Big portions of Brazilian aid also go to countries in Latin America, and there is a smaller focus on East Timor, the former Portuguese colony in Southeast Asia.

“We still have a smaller foreign aid profile than other some countries, but we’re learning how to do cooperation,” Mr. Farani said.

After a surge of openings of diplomatic missions over the past decade, Brazil now has 36 embassies across Africa, and hopes to open its 37th in Malawi this year. Brazil is already using this presence to bolster its actions on the world stage, sending jets to fly delegations from Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cape Verde to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, which was held here in June.

Other projects are intended to lure Africans to study in Brazil. A new university began offering classes last year for students from Portuguese-speaking countries, including Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Principe.

Since Brazil does not need to import large amounts of oil or food, its plans in Africa differ somewhat from other countries seeking greater influence there. Outreach projects tie largely into efforts to increase opportunities for Brazilian companies, which sometimes work with Brazil’s government in offering aid.

Some of Brazil’s biggest inroads, predictably, are in Portuguese-speaking countries like Angola, where the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht ranks among the largest employers, and Mozambique, where the mining giant Vale has begun a $6 billion coal expansion project.

But Brazilian companies are also scouring other parts of Africa for opportunities, putting down stakes in Guinea and Nigeria. A leading Brazilian investment bank, BTG Pactual, started a $1 billion fund in May focused on investing in Africa. New links are also emerging, including Brazilian farming ventures in Sudan; a flight from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, to São Paulo; and a fiber optic cable connecting northeast Brazil to West Africa.

Brazil, closely linked for centuries to Africa through shipping routes and the slave trade, is thought to have imported 10 times as many slaves as the United States did before slavery was abolished here in 1888. For a stretch in the 19th century, Brazil was the seat of the Portuguese empire, making the capital then, Rio de Janeiro, a nerve center for trade with Africa.

Those ties withered until civilian leaders sought to establish relations with newly independent governments in Africa in the early 1960s. That process cooled after Brazil’s military rulers seized power in a 1964 coup supported by the United States.

Then economic necessity and a quest to build autonomy from the United States laid the foundations in the 1970s for today’s diplomatic buildup in Africa. Seeking to offset spending on oil imports, including cargoes from Nigeria, military rulers set about opening new markets in Africa for Brazilian companies. They found some success, notably in newly independent Angola.

Brazil’s former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, built on those inroads in trips to Africa from 2003 to 2010, referring to the “historic debt” Brazil had to Africa in its formation as nation

.

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10 Smart Things I've Learned from People Who Never Went to College

David DiSalvo, Forbes, Aug. 2, 2012

I grew up in an extended family of folks who for the most part didn’t attend college. Many of them were working full time before they left high school, and a few (like my father) went to night school after they’d already been working for a long time. From an early age my perspective was steeped in wisdom from those who never went to college, but managed to live fulfilling lives just the same. Here are ten things they and others I’ve encountered along the way have taught me.

1. You can learn something useful from anyone. Whenever we find ourselves ignoring someone because we’ve already determined that they aren’t “smart” enough to say something meaningful, we’ve made a big mistake. Besides being presumptuous and arrogant, this mindset blocks out every useful thing the other person might pass along. Instead of just listening and mining the conversation for nuggets of wisdom, we allow our pre-existing bias to brand everything as “not smart enough for me.” Incredibly bad idea. I’ve yet to meet someone who couldn’t teach me something.

2. If quality slips, it really doesn’t matter how good your ideas were. This one I learned from a couple of my uncles who worked as quality control specialists on assembly lines. The most ingenious design plans, no matter how many brains contributed to them, can fatally falter in the execution phase if quality slips. This is equally true for intangible plans. Imparting greatness requires a continuum of effort and attention, not just an initial brain-fueled flurry to get exemplary ideas on paper.

3. Don’t ever let a bully intimidate you—not even once. Now, some might say this one is too dogmatic because it’s possible to allow a bully to intimidate you in the short term so you can get the upper hand in the long term. But the best advice I ever received about this came from a retired truck driver who said, paraphrasing, “When you let a bully intimidate you, the bully doesn’t necessarily win, but you definitely lose.” What he meant was, you lose upstairs where the loss takes a progressively worse toll on your psyche. Yes you can recover from that, but it’s going to take a lot more effort to bring your self-esteem up to par again than if you’d stood your ground to begin with. Reasonable people can differ on this, of course, but I think it’s sound advice.

4. Reciprocity is the name of the relationship game and always will be. If you can’t find it in yourself to return a favor, or give back more than you got when someone helped you out of a bind, then you are relationship handicapped. While this may seem like basic intuitive logic, it’s amazing how often it’s ignored. While relationships shouldn’t be tit for tat arrangements, the underlying willingness to reciprocate—even if it’s really hard to do—must be there for the relationship to grow and flourish. None of us are one-way streets.

5. Learning is good; Doing is better. Learning is more than good—it’s essential. Learning is the elixir that makes the human brain the most powerful organic decision-making and problem-solving tool on the planet. The main point here (passed on to me by a former co-worker) is that there’s a certain magic in doing that many people simply miss out on. You can learn a lot about car engines, but until you get under the hood and work on one, you can’t see just how remarkable an invention these machines we take for granted truly are. That’s one example of thousands, but the same principle applies.

6. Kindness isn’t optional. Kurt Vonnegut famously said, “There’s only one rule that I know of… you’ve got to be kind.” Why do some people just “get” this while others find being kind a chore? Personally, I think it has a lot to do with our need to feel right, and an attendant unwillingness to consider that maybe we really aren’t right, and it’s not worth treating another person unkindly to prove whatever point is on the table. Besides that, being unkind is illogical because it only incites unkindness aimed at you, and who wants that?

7. You can survive anything (assuming it doesn’t physically kill you). More than one person has said something like this to me, and I think it’s dead on right. Often it’s rumination about how we won’t survive this or that calamity that really gets us. But usually we can find the inner reserves to overcome just about anything, and will probably surprise ourselves that we pulled it off. I’m not saying it won’t hurt or bring us to our very brink, but we usually give ourselves far too little credit for being able to overcome difficulty.

8. Get a dog. I suppose this one could also be “get a cat” or a fish for that matter, but as someone once told me, there’s something about a dog that brings out the best in its owners. Companionship with a beast brimming with unconditional love does a body good—especially when hard times hit.

9. Money is important, but experience is invaluable. I honestly can’t recall where I first heard this but I’m putting it on this list anyway because I think it’s really important. When you buy something, you’ll enjoy that thing for a while, but our in-built tendency toward habituation will eventually assert itself and the thing will become yet another thing we own. When we invest in experience, however, we are buying memories, and new learning, and new ways of thinking, and a whole lot more. Those are things that become part of who we are, and no physical item can touch that.

10. Just be ready. We’ll end with a nice bit of simple logic. Just be ready…for anything. Quoting that inestimable philosopher, Mike Tyson, “Everyone has a plan—until they get punched in the face.” Exactly. So be ready to get punched in the face, and then refer back to #7 on this list.

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U.S. gold medalist Gabby Douglas: 'glory goes' to God

By Tim Ellsworth & Diana Chandler, Baptist Press, Aug 7, 2012

LONDON (BP)—Gabby Douglas will soon have more money than she ever dreamed.

With a vibrant smile and two gold medals to her credit at the Olympics, the 16-year-old gymnast undoubtedly will cash in with endorsement and marketing deals worth millions of dollars. At the top of her wish list? An Acura NSX.

“I want the one like Iron Man’s off ‘The Avengers,’” Douglas said. “That was a nice car.”

The fame and fortune that Douglas instantly captured may make some things easier, but they won’t remove the difficulties from her life. When she faces such struggles, she turns to Scripture.

“God has given me this awesome talent to represent Him. Glory goes up to Him, and the blessings fall down on us,” Douglas said Aug. 5 in a press conference at the North Greenwich Arena.

When she’s learning something new that may seem intimidating, she tells herself, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but a spirit of peace, love and a sound mind,” she said. When she’s having trouble perfecting a skill, she quotes, “All things are possible through Him.”

“You just mentally quote that, and it builds your faith up so much,” Douglas said. “God will never fail you. He’s always on your side.”

Her first Tweet after winning the individual all-around read simply, “Let all that I am praise the LORD; may I never forget the good things he does for me.”

Before Douglas left for London, Quintin Stieff, pastor of the Valley Church where she attends in West Des Moines, Iowa, likened her to a light that should shine to draw attention to God. Douglas shared her testimony with the congregation.

“The glory goes all to Him. He’s waking me up every morning and He’s keeping me in the gym every day. That’s very important,” she said, asking her church family to pray for her to “bring home the gold.”

Douglas made history, winning two golds in the first week of the Olympics—one in the women’s individual all-around and one in the women’s team competition. She’s the first African American woman to win gold in the Olympic individual all-around, and the first American woman to win gold in both the individual all-around and team competitions at the same Olympic Games.

While she couldn’t replicate that success in the second week, finishing eighth in the uneven bars and seventh in the beam, her performances will be remembered as one of the London Olympics’ biggest stories. Her face is already on a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box.

At age 14, Douglas left her family home in Virginia Beach, Va., to stay with a host family, Travis and Missy Parton, in West Des Moines, Iowa, allowing her to train with coach Liang Chow. Douglas’ mother Natalie Hawkins sends Douglas Scripture passages twice daily to keep her on track to victory, Douglas said.

“When it was time for me to go to bed I would just put my earphones in and just fall asleep listening to the Bible,” she told the congregation. “It’s been a daily thing. I love reading about the Word. We have to put on the full armor of God, so when Satan tries to come against us, we are ready and prepared.”

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Heavy shelling expels Syria rebels from Aleppo district

By Phil Moore | AFP – 15 hrs ago


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Rebels retreated from the key Aleppo district of Salaheddin under a deadly rain of shellfire on Thursday, with the showdown battle for Syria's commercial capital raging into a second day.

"We have staged a tactical withdrawal from Salaheddin. The district is completely empty of rebel fighters. Regime forces are now advancing into Salaheddin," said Hossam Abu Mohammed, a Free Syrian Army (FSA) commander.

"The fighters are withdrawing to (nearby) Sukari district, where they are preparing a counter-attack," he told AFP by telephone.

Abu Mohammed cited heavy shelling and the army's use of thermobaric bombs, which throw out a wall of fire to incinerate targets in enclosed spaces.

"A large number of civilians were killed, as were some 40 rebels," he said. "Forty buildings have been flattened."

State television said: "Our special forces have cleansed Salaheddin district of terrorists."

But Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said "there are still some fighters inside Salaheddin; it seems they are there to fight to the death."

Abu Mohammed said the shelling was "so heavy that we have a cloud of dust above Salaheddin."

Wassel Ayub, who commands the Nur al-Haq Brigade, said the FSA had withdrawn "to open a new front in Saif al-Dawla and Mashhad."

FSA spokesman Kassem Saadeddine told AFP by Skype that the withdrawal "does not mean we are leaving Aleppo. We have military plans to fight in the city, but we cannot reveal them."

In Damascus, a security source told AFP regime forces were "advancing quickly" in Salaheddin towards Saif al-Dawla.

"But the next big battle, which will be very fierce, will be in the (southeastern) Sukari district."

At least 17 people were killed in Aleppo, scene of fierce battles since July 20, the Observatory said, adding that two children and a citizen journalist were among them.

Nationwide, the toll reached 96 -- 37 civilians, 31 soldiers and 28 rebels -- the Observatory said. That compared with 167 on Wednesday, including 33 in Aleppo.

Elsewhere, fierce fighting also broke out on Thursday in Damascus province, where at least 15 people were killed, most of them civilians, while regime forces shelled Zabadani, the monitoring group said.

On Wednesday, loyalist troops launched their offensive against the rebels, who had claimed to control half the city, after President Bashar al-Assad vowed a day earlier to crush the rebellion that erupted in March 2011.

Meanwhile, activists on the Syria Revolution 2011 Facebook page called for the traditional demonstration following weekly Muslim prayers on Friday, with this week's slogan being "Arm us with anti-aircraft weapons."

On the political front, Assad appointed Health Minister Wael al-Halqi as his new premier following the defection this week of Riad Hijab, a leading Sunni Muslim in the minority Alawite-dominated regime.

Halqi served as ruling Baath party secretary from 2000 to 2004 in his home province of Daraa, the birthplace in southern Syria of the anti-Assad revolt.

Day two of the battle for Aleppo came as Syria's key regional ally Iran hosted a 29-nation meeting aimed at finding ways to end the raging conflict.

State media said the foreign ministers of Iraq, Pakistan and Zimbabwe were present. Lower-ranking diplomats, most of them ambassadors, represented the other nations.

Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi opened the meeting by calling for "national dialogue between the (Syrian) opposition, which has popular support, and the Syrian government to establish calm and security," according to state television.

He added that Iran was prepared to host any such dialogue.

Earlier, Salehi said Tehran was attempting to revive parts of former international envoy Kofi Annan's plan, notably: implementing a ceasefire, sending humanitarian aid and laying groundwork for national dialogue.

Excluded from the Tehran meeting were Western and Gulf Arab nations that Iran has accused of giving military backing to the insurgency.

There was no immediate word from the predominantly Sunni Muslim Syrian opposition and rebels on how they viewed the conference in majority Shiite Iran, a stalwart ally of Assad's regime.

On the humanitarian front, a plane carrying a French military medical team to help refugees on the Jordan-Syria border left Paris for Amman on Thursday with around 25 medical and 25 logistics staff.

The UN refugee agency estimates that 276,000 Syrians have fled, mainly to Jordan, Turkey andLebanon, from a conflict activists say has claimed more than 21,000 lives.

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Ele É Cristão

De Tommy Jacek

“Você tocou nela?”, os dois jogadores de futebol gritaram na minha direção.

A esta altura do jogo, quer eu tivesse tocado a bola quer não, era muito importante. Decidiria se seria um tiro de meta para nós, ou um corner para os nossos oponentes. O jogo estava quase terminando, mas o placar permanecia teimosamente num empate. Por isso os jogadores me olhavam com tanta ansiedade e antecipação. Minha resposta, como goleiro, poderia determinar a próxima jogada.

“Toquei,” admiti, meneando a cabeça.

“Por que você tinha que dizer?” um jogador novo no nosso time gritou para mim. Sua reação era típica de um jogador sob pressão e não me surpreendeu nem um pouco. O que aconteceu a seguir é que me surpreendeu.

“Ele é cristão,” veio a resposta simultaneamente de dois ou três outros jogadores em minha defesa.

“Não gosto disso,” murmurou o cara novo, mas era óbvio que ele havia ficado impressionado pela resposta dos outros.

Eu também fiquei impactado. Mal havia testemunhado para aqueles caras. Uns dois deles sabiam que eu era pastor, e alguns de vez em quando recebiam uma revista Contato,mas eu só havia testemunhado para valer para apenas um homem, e ele não estava mais comparecendo aos nossos jogos noturnos nas terças-feiras. O resto do pessoal aparecia bem na hora do jogo e ia embora assim que terminava. Eu mal tinha oportunidade de entrar em uma conversa profunda com eles.

Por isso suas fortes convicções sobre as minhas crenças me surpreenderam.

Outra situação semelhante me aconteceu antes. Faz um tempo, o único homem no nosso time de futebol para quem eu havia testemunhado profundamente gritou para mim desde longe, depois de eu ter admitido que havia tocado a bola antes dela sair do campo. “Tommy, isso não é uma igreja; é uma partida de futebol!” Não preciso nem dizer que todos deram uma boa gargalhada.

Por que estou escrevendo sobre isso e por que é importante para mim? Porque me encoraja imensamente.

Sabe, eu testemunho pessoalmente muito menos do que costumava fazer. Sinto falta disso e me sinto mal por isso. É quase como se parte de meu coração tivesse sido cortado de mim. Afinal de contas, falar para as pessoas de Jesus era a principal razão da minha existência, assim pensava eu. Às vezes tinha que lutar contra condenação de que talvez não estava fazendo o meu trabalho devidamente.

Contudo, bem ali, sem ninguém pedir e vindo da boca de outros, ouvi: “Ele é cristão.” -- Quando eu menos esperava e das pessoas de quem eu menos esperava ouvir isso.

Acabou que eu estava sendo uma testemunha, simplesmente por tentar seguir o Senhor. O Senhor queria que eu fosse honesto (como deveria sempre ser) com relação a ter tocado a bola. Simples assim. Eu só tinha que dizer a verdade, e Jesus cuidou do resto. Eu nem mesmo precisava ser um milagre ostentoso para atrair a atenção, como no caso dos cinco pães e dois peixes. Uma palavrinha apenas era suficiente.

Tinha algo mais sobre a situação também que era tanto contraditória como sóbria.

A maioria dos jogadores com quem eu jogo se diziam cristãos, contudo tinham um padrão diferente para mim por eu ser missionário. O mais engraçado é que eles não viam nenhuma contradição nisto.

Para eles, não tinha problema eles contarem uma “mentirinha boba” em um jogo de futebol. Por outro lado, se eu fizesse isso, seria errado. Visto que eu professava ser um missionário, era esperado que eu permanecesse no caminho estreito e apertado, não importa o que.

Dou graças a Deus por me dar a graça para fazer justo isto.

Tradução Denise Oliveira. Revisão Hebe Rondon Flandoli.

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