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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

This image has been posted with express written permission.

This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

GMA News TV: (H/T Reader VK)

The effects of climate change have driven women in communities in coastal areas in poor countries like the Philippines into dangerous work, and sometimes even the flesh trade, a United Nations official said.

Suneeta Mukherjee, country representative of the United Nations Food Population Fund (UNFPA), said women in the Philippines are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change in the country.

“Climate change could reduce income from farming and fishing, possibly driving some women into sex work and thereby increase HIV infection,” Mukherjee said during the Wednesday launch of the UNFPA annual State of World Population Report in Pasay City.

In the Philippines, small brothels usually pop up near the coastal areas where many women perform sexual services for transient seafarers. Often, these prostitutes are ferried to bigger ships by their pimps.

Based on the UNFPA report, there are 92 million Filipinos in the country as of 2009 and that number is expected to balloon to more than 146 million in the next 40 years.

Of the 92 million Filipinos, about 60 percent are living in coastal areas and depend on the seas for livelihood, said former Environment secretary Dr. Angel Alcala.

Alcala said that “we have already exceeded the carrying capacity of our marine environment.”

But as the sea’s resources are depleted due to overpopulation and overfishing, fishermen start losing their livelihood and women are forced to share the traditional role of the man in providing for the family.

Alacala, who also heads the Angelo King Center for Research and Environmental Management in Siliman University, said some women often pick out shellfish by the coastlines, which exposed to storm surges.

Women who can no longer endure this work often go out to find other jobs, while some are tempted to go into prostitution, Alcala added.

In an interview with the Inter Press News Agency, Marita Rodriguez of the Centre for Empowerment and Resource Development, Inc. said women are taking the brunt of climate change.

“Aside from their household chores and participation in fishing activity, they have to find additional sources of income like working as domestic helpers in affluent families,” she said.

The UNFPA noted that the temperature in the earth’s surface has risen 0.74 degrees Celsius in the past 100 years. The 10 warmest years globally since 1880 have also been recorded in the last 13 years.

“Slower population growth, for example, would help build social resilience to climate change’s impacts and would contribute to a reduction of greenhouse gas-emissions in the future,” the UNFPA report said.

The UNFPA suggested five measures to mitigate climate change and overpopulation:

• Bring a better understanding of population dynamics, gender and reproductive health to climate change and environmental discussions at all levels;
• Fully fund family planning services and contraceptive supplies within the framework of reproductive health and rights, and assure that low income is no barrier to access;
• Prioritize research and date collection to improve the understanding of gender and population dynamics in climate change mitigation and adaptation;
• Improve sex-disaggregation of date related to migration flows that are influenced by environmental factors and prepare now for increases in population movements resulting from climate change; and
• Integrate gender considerations into global efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

This image has been posted with express written permission.

This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

This image has been posted with express written permission.

This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

Jerusalem Post:

A team at Jerusalem’s Hadassah University Medical Center has managed for the first time in the world to separate platelets and adult stem cells from the blood and bone marrow of patients with fractures and inject them – causing the bones to meld in a quarter to third of the time it usually takes to repair bones, and repairing some breaks that without the therapy would fail to heal at all.

Prof. Meir Liebergall, chairman of the orthopedics department on the Ein Kerem campus, gene therapy expert Prof. Eithan Galun and colleagues worked for years on the technique, which he said involves a “breakthrough in concept and overcomes major scientific and logistical problems.”

All seven of those who received the experimental cell-based therapy have seen the broken tibias in their legs heal, even though the fractured bone in at least one control group patient who received only conventional treatment of screws or bone grafts failed to meld. Instead of taking six to nine months to heal, the fractures treated with adult stem cells and platelets healed in two months.

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This image has been posted with express written permission.

This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

This image has been posted with express written permission.

This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

This image has been posted with express written permission.

This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

Chicago Tribune:

In the age of the $787 billion stimulus package, it is, perhaps, a modest question:

Should American taxpayers foot the bill to enshrine the gas station run by the late Billy Carter — the beer-swilling, wisecracking, self-professed redneck brother of the 39th president?

Located in tiny Plains, still the world’s most famous peanut town some 28 years after the Carter presidency, the station was transformed into a museum last year by a civic group that owns the property.

Its claim to historical significance came during Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential run, when reporters mobbed Plains and transformed the station into an unofficial headquarters.

It became the setting for story after story about Billy Carter and his down-home manners and epigrammatic wit (for example: “Beer is not a good cocktail-party drink — especially in a home where you don’t know where the bathroom is”).

Last month, the House approved a measure that would incorporate the station into the Jimmy Carter National Historic Site, a National Park Service operation that already runs a number of Carter-related buildings in Plains.

A similar bill is under consideration in the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

The legislation calls for the park service to take over the gas station, plus an old farmhouse where Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, lived from 1956 to 1961.

The park service would also take over a state-run welcome center threatened with closing because of state budget problems.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates it would cost $17 million to upgrade and maintain the sites over the next five years. That was enough to elicit an objection from Steve Ellis, vice president of the Washington-based Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Ellis said his concern has nothing to do with Billy Carter’s place in history. It’s a question of priorities, he said. The park service already faces a $9 billion maintenance backlog for property it manages, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The gas station is “not in imminent danger of being turned into condos or something like that,” Ellis said. “So you’ve got to question whether it’s the best move for the park service.”

But “the Billy Carter piece is just one little tiny component” of the historic site, said Gary Ingram, superintendent of the Carter site. “It’s a spur, but it’s a spur that still has relevance because it’s connected to the larger story.”

Der Spiegel:

Just one day before Afghan President Hamid Karzai is sworn in for his second term, the country’s attorney general has announced that he has prepared indictments against five top politicians on charges of corruption. It’s now up to Karzai to take action. NATO has also said it is willing to help in the fight against graft.

When Hamid Karzai takes his oath of office in the presidential office in Kabul at 11 a.m. on Thursday, the amount of attention focused on him will likely not be to his liking. Every word of his speech will be analyzed by the international community, led by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is currently in Afghanistan. Even normally reserved diplomats are doing little to conceal their high expectations. “If he doesn’t say anything concrete, or even names names, he will feel the wrath,” said one European diplomat. “And he knows that.”

The pressure on Karzai is immense. In recent days, a veritable parade of ambassadors has descended on his office. Diplomats are speaking of a “shopping list” that they have presented to Karzai, who has found himself weakened since the manipulated elections that recently returned him to office. They have made it clear to Karzai that he is expected to discard some of his aides and take concrete steps against rampant corruption in his country. Visits from Clinton and other leading Western politicians are aimed at upping the pressure.

Kabul’s justice department appears to have gotten the message. One day before Karzai is sworn in for his second term in office, Attorney General Mohammed Ishaq Aloko told SPIEGEL ONLINE in Kabul that his office has prepared indictments against five high-ranking politicians. “We have indictments with sufficient proof against five ministers,” Aloko said. “Two of them are in the current cabinet and three are former ministers.” The indictments have been submitted to President Karzai. “The president only has to grant his approval, then the trials can proceed,” Aloko said…

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This image has been posted with express written permission.

This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

This image has been posted with express written permission.

This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

This image has been posted with express written permission.

This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

This image has been posted with express written permission.

This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

This image has been posted with express written permission.

This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

Via TribLive

M&C

Two people were wounded Tuesday when armed clashes broke out between two families in eastern Lebanon in a dispute over a car parking space, police said.

The Jaafar and Wehbe clans exchanged machine-gun and rocket- propelled-grenade fire in the Sharawneh neighbourhood, east of the ancient city of Baalbeck over the dispute, triggering panic among the other residents of the neighbourhood.

The fighting came to an end only after the intervention of the Lebanese army.

Science Daily:

Despite advances in treatment regimens and the best efforts of nurses and doctors, about 70% of all people with severe burns die from related infections. But a revolutionary new wound dressing developed at Tel Aviv University could cut that number dramatically.

Prof. Meital Zilberman of TAU’s Department of Biomedical Engineering has developed a new wound dressing based on fibers she engineered — fibers that can be loaded with drugs like antibiotics to speed up the healing process, and then dissolve when they’ve done their job. A study published in the Journal of Biomedical Materials Research — Applied Biomaterials demonstrates that, after only two days, this dressing can eradicate infection-causing bacteria.

The new dressing protects the wound until it is no longer needed, after which it melts away. “We’ve developed the first wound dressing that both releases antibiotic drugs and biodegrades in a controlled manner,” says Prof. Zilberman. “It solves current mechanical and physical limitations in wound-dressing techniques and gives physicians a new and more effective platform for treating burns and bedsores.”

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