U.S. Marine commanders who fought successfully to capture the poppy-growing region now have different objectives, such as starting up schools. But their efforts are hindered by a Taliban presence that is still felt deeply by the residents.

Lt. Col. Brian Christmas led the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment in the fighting that drove many Taliban fighters out of Marjah.

Now he spends his days visiting dusty markets and holding meetings — or shuras — with local leaders. Christmas needs to convince them that the U.S. and NATO occupation is a benign presence that can help bring needed services, such as health and education.

Marine Lt. Col. Brian Christmas listens as an interpreter translates the concerns of Marjah residents about opening a school. Local people fear the Taliban who have remained in the area, hidden among the population. Some residents have received "night letters" — notes from Taliban fighters threatening them with death if they deal with NATO or Afghan government troops.

At one meeting, the sandy-haired, 39-year-old commander sat cross-legged on the ground amid a group of about 20 turbaned farmers and shopkeepers.

One priority that the elders have identified is the need for a school, and Christmas, eager for a symbol of American goodwill, would like to make that happen.

“If you identify a building to hold school, and a schoolteacher, then as soon as that individual is ready to start teaching the children, I will provide school supplies, and I will pay the schoolteacher until the government picks it up,” the commander told them.

Eventually a tall, black-bearded young man came forward. He is a motorcycle mechanic by trade, but he can read and write well, and his neighbors have suggested him as their first potential teacher.

Christmas left the meeting optimistic that he would soon see at least a rudimentary school in session.

Security Obstacles

But two days later, things got more complicated. Christmas arranged a meeting with the would-be teacher and visited him at his mud-brick shop. The American officer sat on a mat outside the shop with the mechanic and several other young men who might also teach at the school.

For more than an hour, the men raised various problems about where the school should be and how to provide security for it. Christmas, acting as part politician and part salesman, tried over and over to nail down the details.

“So, should we talk to the elders about renting a building, or would you like me to build an outdoor classroom?” he asked. But the comments kept drifting from the subject and a resolution was elusive.

Finally, the young mechanic brought up the real issue: If there is good security, he said, he can teach anywhere, but he’s under pressure from the bad guys — the Taliban fighters who came from this area, and remain here, hiding among the population.

Christmas tried to point out that the security is here now, in the form of U.S. Marines, Afghan soldiers and national police. But the men were unconvinced.

Fears Of ‘Night Letters’

The next day, Christmas was back for yet another meeting, still hoping to get some decisions on when and where the school would open.

The same young men came to the meeting, and they recited the same problems as the day before. But this time, the real cause for their hesitation was much more obvious.

One man said the Taliban will want to know why he has been talking with the Americans. They send “night letters” — notes that threaten death for anyone who deals with the foreigners.

Christmas had an answer for that: “If you know who they are, you point them out. Write them on a piece of paper and I’ll go get them right now. You see what I’m saying? I know it’s not that easy, but at some point you have to stand up.”

But these men have experienced NATO-led security for only a couple of weeks. Before that, they lived for years under the control of Taliban fighters, many of whom were — and are — their neighbors.

One man, speaking halting English, insisted: “We know. You don’t know. If you really want to help us, give us time. Give us one month.”

A month is too long, Christmas told them, but if that is what the people want, they should come to him when they are ready. He walked away with his men, head down, pondering.

The Sheet Of Paper

Later that day, another man from the village approached the lieutenant colonel and asked to speak to him. This man, too, talked about how he is afraid of the Taliban and afraid of the night letters — a threat that’s much more immediate for him than the presence of Marines or Afghan soldiers.

But after a few minutes, the man reached into his shirt and pulled out a folded sheet of paper.

“I know what that is,” Christmas said. “I’ll take that. I’ll come see you later.”

The commander wouldn’t say whether the note contained the names of the Taliban operatives who are intimidating the villagers.

                          

This post was submitted by Corey Flintoff NPR.

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The police said the militant, who went by only one name, Dulmatin, was a senior operative for Jemaah Islamiyah, the Southeast Asian terrorist network with links to Al Qaeda. He was killed in a raid near an internet cafe in Jakarta on Tuesday morning, the authorities said.

The authorities had accused Mr. Dulmatin of setting and triggering one of the bombs used in an attack on a Bali nightclub in 2002 that killed 202 people.

Mr. Dulmatin’s death is a major victory for Indonesia’s counterterrorism unit, which has severely weakened the militant branch of Jemaah Islamiyah over the last eight years, killing or capturing most of its senior leadership.

The twin bombings of the Marriot and Ritz-Calrton hotels last July, however, demonstrated how resilient Indonesia’s terrorism networks can be. Those bombings killed seven people and injured more than 50.

Mr. Dulmatin had also been sought in the Philippines, where he fled after the Bali bombings and, terrorism experts said, joined the Islamist separatist group Abu Sayyaf.

The Philippine police had several times come close to catching him, most recently in 2008, when they said they had killed him. It was later determined that Mr. Dulmatin had escaped.

The United States government had offered a $10 million reward for Mr. Dulmatin’s capture.

Mr. Dulmatin, who the police say was in his late 30s, was accused of setting off one of the 2002 Bali bombs with a cellphone and of being one of the bomb makers. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia discussed Mr. Dulmatin’s death during a lunch in Canberra, where he is meeting with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Australia.

“I can announce to you that after a successful police raid against the terrorists hiding out in Jakarta yesterday, we can confirm that one of those killed was Mr. Dulmatin,” he said.

Mr. Dulmatin’s death came little more than a week before President Barack Obama was due to arrive in Jakarta for a two-day visit. Mr. Obama spent four years living in Jakarta as a boy with his mother and Indonesian step-father.

The raid in Jakarta began at 11 a.m. Tuesday outside an Internet cafe housed inside a two-story building. Witnesses told local television stations that they had heard several gunshots. Soon after, a body was taken away by ambulance and two other people were taken into custody.

An hour later, Indonesia’s elite counterterrorism force, known as Detachment 88, descended on a small house nearby. Two men tried to escape on a motorbike and were shot and killed, the police said. One of those men was Mr. Dulmatin, the police said.

They said the raids were related to the ongoing search for a group of Islamic militants who had escaped another police raid on a terrorist camp in the dense forests of Aceh, Indonesia’s westernmost province, late last month.

Police officials said information garnered from 16 men arrested during those initial raids and the subsequent manhunt had led them to Mr. Dulmatin.

Three police officers and two bystanders have also been killed in recent weeks during the manhunt. Police officials also said Monday that they had arrested two men on the island of Java suspected of supplying arms to the Aceh group.

                          

This post was submitted by PETER GELLING New York Times.

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The percentage of workers who said they have less than $10,000 in savings grew to 43% in 2010, from 39% in 2009, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute’s annual Retirement Confidence Survey. That excludes the value of primary homes and defined-benefit pension plans.

Workers who said they had less than $1,000 jumped to 27%, from 20% in 2009.

Confidence in ability to save enough for a comfortable retirement hovered at 16% of respondents, the second lowest point in the 20-year history of the survey.

A drop in the bucket

“Americans’ attitudes toward retirement have clearly tracked the economy the last couple of years, and that seems to be the case in 2010,” said Jack VanDerhei, EBRI’s research director and co-author of the survey, in a statement.

The percentage of workers who said they have saved for retirement fell to 69%, from 75% in 2009.

While VanDerhei attributed the decline in current savings rates to job losses, mortgage problems and the suspension of corporate 401(k) matches in 2009, he said the economy isn’t entirely to blame.

“In previous years, there were a whole lot of people who had nothing to begin with,” said VanDerhei.

The gap between what Americans have saved and what they’d need for retirement is forcing workers to prolong their working years.

According to the survey, 24% of workers said they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year, up from 14% in 2008.

But even as fears over health care costs and job prospects mount, the survey found that only 46% of workers have tried to calculate what they need for a comfortable standard of living in their golden years.

“People just don’t want to think about this,” said VanDerhei. “Everybody thinks they’re too young to think about it, until suddenly they’re too old to do anything about it.”

In general, financial planners say that retirement savings, including Social Security benefits and pension, should be large enough to provide about 80% of pre-retirement income.

To reach that target, “most Americans need to be saving within the healthy range of 6% – 10% (of their salary),” said Beth McHugh, vice president of workplace investing for Fidelity Investments.

But the survey found that 54% of the workers with some form of savings said that they have less than $25,000 stowed away.

Delaying retirement, though not ideal, is a good sign that people are finally facing reality.

“People have figured out that they don’t have enough money,” VanDerhei said. “Still, I’d rather they bite the bullet today, rather than take the chance that they’d have a job when they are 65.”

The EBRI surveyed 1,153 U.S. workers and retirees, age 25 and older, in January.

                          

This post was submitted by Chavon Sutton, staff reporter; CNN Money.

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By his own account, Mr. Kim – who describes the dozens of villas and beautiful furnishings included in the lavish lifestyles of Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il – says he realizes the danger.

“Maybe I’ll be shot, killed in the next few days,” Kim Jong-ryul, who escaped North Korea in 1994 and now lives at a secret address, told reporters in Vienna after the book came out. At least, “now I can die with a clear conscience,” he said. But “without [publishing] this book, I didn’t want to die.”

The book adds to a growing body of evidence of the selfishness of the North’s Kim Il-sung, who ignored the suffering of his people while focusing on his own comfort and safety. An engineer, Kim Jong-ryul said he was asked to design a special filtration system for the shelter in which Kim Il-sung and his family could hide in order to survive a nuclear attack.

The Great Leader, as Kim Il-sung was routinely called, placed special agents in Europe just to buy the fancy items he wanted. An agent in Romania, for instance, bought a small Cessna plane for him, as well as hunting rifles. Kim himself sometimes spent months at a time looking for all the goods, big and small, on the shopping list.

To go public with such juicy tidbits is enough to invite the death penalty – even for those who manage to flee the country. Activists agree such fear is not the stuff of paranoia. “It’s very dangerous to write about North Korea,” says Peter Chung, who runs an organization in Seoul called Justice for North Korea, which is dedicated to helping defectors.

“In the Dictator’s Service,” written in German by Austrian journalists Ingrid Steiner-Gashi and Dardan Gashi, reveals the dietary cravings and demands, the parties and the lovely surroundings, in which Kim Il-sung existed for much of the 49 years that he ruled North Korea. He died in 1994 after ensuring that his son, Kim Jong-il, would succeed him.

A crime to have known anything

It may be even more dangerous to write about the man who’s known in the North as the Dear Leader.

The nephew of Song Hye-rim, a woman who became either Kim Jong-il’s second wife or longtime consort, and bore his oldest son, was assassinated in Seoul in 1997 after writing memoirs about the dictator. Lee Han-young had been living in Seoul since defecting in 1982 until a pair of gunmen killed him outside the apartment of a friend.

“Kim Jong-il’s private life is not normal,” says Mr. Chung. “It is a crime to speak out about it.”

It is even a crime to have known anything about it, according to a book published here by Kim Young-seung, a schoolgirl friend of Ms. Song.

Ms. Kim, held for nine years in one of North Korea’s infamous prison camps for the worst political offenders, says she never was told the charge against her but came to know during months of torture that her offense was that she had been “a friend of the second wife of Kim Jong-il, and I knew about his private life.”

Her closest relatives were imprisoned as well. During her imprisonment, her parents starved to death, one of her sons drowned, another was shot trying to escape, and her husband “disappeared.â€

“Even the beasts would be ashamed to be there,” Kim says.

Her story provides remarkable fresh clues into the private life of Kim Jong-il, who left Song for his third consort, Ko Young-hee, a dancer and mother of sons No. 2 and 3. The latter is the heir-apparent Kim Jong-un, who is in his 20s.

After being freed from prison around 1989, Kim escaped to China in 2001, a year before Song died in exile in Moscow, and then to South Korea via Vietnam. Ms. Ko, who was diagnosed with breast cancer, died two years later.

Kim Young-seung knows she may be at risk but does not feel afraid. “This is my story,” she says, smiling slightly and pulling a copy of her book from her handbag.

Villas and luxury cars amid poverty Kim Jong-ryul’s story provides still more glimmerings. Kim Il-sung “only ate foreign food” and had his chefs study in Vienna, he said. He had a passion for high-priced foreign cars, ranging from Mercedes-Benz and Citroens to Cadillacs and Lincolns, made in the lairs of his worst enemy, the United States.

The leader’s shopping lists for Europe included luxury goods ranging from carpets to gold-plated guns.

The former colonel’s account, says Peters, the activist, “highlights the perverse contrast between the lives of the Kim family dynasty and the tens of millions of beleaguered North Korean peasantry.”

Kim Il-sung died just as North Korea was entering a famine in which 2 million people are estimated to have died.

                          

This post was submitted by Donald Kirk.

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Keajaiban terjadi di pagi hari ini, Mt McKinley yang megah

Sering kemping di Ontario kami sudah pernah melihat beaver. Yang paling sering melihat beaver dam atau bendungan hasil karyanya maupun beaver lodge, rumah mereka. Baru di hari ini, Kamis 27 Agustus, ketika kami hiking di sekitar Wonder Lake, kami bertemu beaver yang sedang memotongi dahan dan ranting pohon guna merenovasi rumah mereka. Barangkali kedua pasutri pa en ma beaver mau menambahkan satu kamar tidur sebab konon ada mat kodak yang sempat ngeliat pitiknya. Bisa juga mereka mau meng-upgrade dapur mereka sebab sekarang perlu masak buat lebih banyak mulut . Ini mah jelas eror yah dongengan Bang Jeha tapi sungguh suatu kejadian yang langka bisa melihat beaver sibuk bekerja di siang hari bolong. Tak lain tak bukan karena tempatnya memang cagar alam terluas seAmrik, Denali Park, 6 juta acre sahaja.

Sebetulnya kami hiking di pagi hari Kamis itu adalah untuk pergi ngelamun

Reflection Pool di hiking trail ke Kantishna

di tepi kolam yang disebut Reflection Pool sebab bisa memperlihatkan si Denali di pantulan airnya. Cuaca cerah luar biasa namun memang dingin. Ada
bagusnya sebab kaga kebayang hiking pakai dikerubungi nyamuk Alaska yang
di suhu single digit saja masih bisa eksyen mau coba-coba menyedot darah beta. Nah, disuguhi pemandangan langit tak berawan di Pegunungan Alaska, Mt

Seekor beaver sedang berkarya buat renovasi rumahnya

McKinley menjulang megah, kami menemui banyak sekali margasatwa. Dari mulai moose yang asyik melahap lalap pohon pinggir jalan sampai ke keluarga beaver tersebut. Dari mulai gray jay, burung yang beterbangan leloncatan di pucuk pohon cempaka, eh cemara sampai ke trumpeter swan, jenis bangau guede nan indah. Sedemikian banyaknya jenis satwa yang bisa dilihat di Denali Park, sampai kami bertemu beberapa turis asing, wong Jepun dan Belanda yang demen sekali kesitu. Si Jepun, Naruo Ono namanya adalah mat kodak amatiran dan ketika saya tanya, sudah 4 kali ke Denali. Pekerjaannya katanya cuma simple, desk job dan ia yang mengatakan, untuk dapat modal pergi ke Denali. Jelas ia jomblo dan itu sebabnya tak ada yang melarang si abang mau kemane juga . Seriusan, jomblo-jomblo yang ke Denali tersebut keren abis rek. Kameranya sudah engga bisa dilawan oleh Canon P&S dan lensanya mek, segede bazooka alias udah pada pakai teropong 500 mm ke atas. Bener-bener kaga PD dah ke Denali pakai Canon point and shoot A570, beginilah kalau memilih punya isteri, wekekek .

Cape deh jalan mulu, sehabis dari Reflection Pool seusai makan siang, kami

Wonder Lake dengan latar belakang Pegunungan Alaska

nyemplak bis ke tempat terujung di Denali Park bernama Kantishna. Dahulunya, 100-an tahun lalu sebelum cagar dibentuk, disitu daerah tambang emas. Ketiga orang Amrik pertama yang berhasil mendaki Mt McKinley adalah para penambang emas di tahun 1913 dengan perlengkapan jaman purba dan bermodal nekads. Soalnya puncak gunung itu tidak kalah ganasnya dengan Mt Everest sebab sudah berada tak jauh dari Kutub Utara. Dari perspektif geologi, Mt McKinley dasarnya ada di ketinggian 2000 feet dibandingkan dengan Mt Everest setinggi 29000 feet yang dasar gunungnya 19000 feet. Artinya dengan sampai ke McKinley, si pendaki sudah melakukan vertical climb 18000 feet dibandingkan dengan cuma 10000 feet tuk pendaki Himalaya.

Moose saenak udele nyeberang jalan, "lah kampung gue", katanya

“Bang Jeha, berapa duit sih kemping di cagar Amrik yang hebats tersebut,”
tanya prenku anak Emberikan. Di Wonder Lake campground, US$ 16 per campsite per malam dengan maksimum 4 orang doang. Jadi kami memakai 2 campsite dimana ongkos bookingnya US$ 5 per campsite. Terus ada ongkos bis yang membawa kami dari tempat parkiran di dekat pintu masuk, persisnya di Riley Creek campground ke Wonder Lake, US$ 31.45 per orang. Ongkos bis ini unik. Selama kami bepergian di dalam cagar Denali dan tidak keluar, kami bisa nyemplak bis di mana saja dalam cagar tersebut, gratisan. Mau turun naik 10 kali per hari juga oke dan ente-ente Melayu yang ga mau rugi, bisa terus duduk di bis dari mulai jam 5 pagi s/d 7 malam, ihik ihik . Kaga ngeledek prens sebab semua supir bis merangkap jadi guide alias dari waktu ke waktu, kalau ada tontonan satwa yang bisa dilihat oleh siapa saja dan berteriak stop, ia akan stop dan mempersilahkan mat kodak turunin jendela kaca bis tuk jeprat-jepret. Itu sebabnya kami sudah melihat trumpeter swan, golden eagle, ptarmigan, moose, caribou, wolf, beaver sedang renovasi rumah selain beruang grizzly.

Salah satu sebabnya bawaan kami ke Denali berjumlah 8 potong tas gede-gede adalah tak lain tak bukan, makanan bawaan kedua chef kami. Sedemikian wangi harumnya bau masakan mereka sehingga bule-bule di food shelter pada ngerubung mau melihat ini dua anak Asia pada masak apaan . Kaga tahunya pasta, kidding. Masakan kami tetap bervariasi bergizi, 4 sehat 5 sempurna alias pakai ada susunya . Dapat kami laporkan bahwa persediaan atau planning bahan bakar kami mencukupi sampai akhir kemping 3 hari di Denali, berhubung bukan saja WCnya flush toilet, juga airnya bisa diminum atau di-treat. Gitu dong Tante Sarah, ente boleh kalah di pemilu tapi jangan bikin malu nama Denali National Park. Satu kekecualian, kertas tissue buat bokernya yang tertipis dari seluruh campground yang selama ini kami singgahi. Dimaklumi dah guna kesejahteraan lingkungan sebab kata si noni petugas di kantor cagar, Denali Park adalah situs World Biosphere yang berarti ramah bagi planet kita…. (bersambung) …

                          

This post was submitted by Bang Jeha.

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Tanya : Yth. Pak Hariadi, bagaimana menghitung shio dengan cara mudah sehingga keluarga saya tidak kesulitan dan mengerti mengenai perhitungan dari leluhur mengenai urut-urutan shio ? (Vincent, Philadelphia).

Jawab :

Perhitungan shio biasanya dimulai dari penggantian tahun Imlek. Pada Imlek tahun ini dimulai tanggal 14 Februari 2010. Dimulai dari bulan macan, kelinci, naga, ular, kuda, kambing, monyet, ayam, anjing, babi, tikus, kerbau. Bila Anda memiliki anak, maka Anda harus memperhatikan kelahirannya, seperti jam, tanggal, bulan dan tahun kelahirannya, sehingga Anda dapat mengetahui shio anak Anda.

MENGHAPAL NAMA-NAMA BULAN IMLEK

• Pindahkan kotak-kotak istana yang menggambarkan bulan-bulan dalam kalender Imlek ke telapak kiri tangan.
• Gerakkan jempol mengitari buku-buku jari, dimulai dari bagian bawah ruas pertama telunjuk yang merupakan bulan pertama Imlek atau bulan Macan.
• Lanjutkan ke ruas pertama, kedua, ketiga telunjuk yang masing-masing merupakan bulan Kelinci, Naga dan Ular.
• Ruas di ujung jari tengah merupakan bulan Kuda sedang ujung jari manis menunjukkan bulan Kambing.
• Lompat ke kelingking, buku di ujung atas merupakan bulan Monyet. Turun ke bawah adalah bulan Ayam, Anjing dan Babi.
• Setelah itu, bagian bawah ruas jari manis dan tengah adalah bulan Tikus dan Sapi.
• Tips untuk mengingatnya, hapalkan nama bulan sesuai kelompok musimnya. Macan, Kelinci dan Naga untuk kelompok musim semi. Ular, Kuda dan Kambing untuk kelompok musim panas. Monyet, Ayam dan Anjing untuk kelompok musim gugur. Babi, Tikus dan Sapi untuk kelompok musim dingin.

MENGETAHUI SHIO KELAHIRAN

• Setelah hapal nama-nama bulan dan letaknya pada telapak tangan, buatkanlah patokan di kotak Tikus sebagai tahun 1960.
• Gerakkan ibu jari searah jarum jam. Setiap melangkah ke kotak di sampingnya, angka tahun bertambah 1.
• Contoh : Shio untuk seorang yang lahir tahun 1965. Jalankan ibu jari dari kotak Tikus yang bertanda tahun 1960, sebanyak lima langkah. Pasti akan berhenti di kotak Ular. Itulah shio orang kelahiran 1965.
• Bila ibu jari berputar terus, ia akan sampai di kotak Tikus kembali pada hitungan ke 12 atau tahun 1972. Begitu seterusnya. Sehingga kotak Tikus bisa pula bertanda tahun 1984, 1996 atau mundur sampai 1900.
• Gerakan ibu jari berlawanan dengan arah jarum jam. Setiap berjalan dua kotak, angka tahun bertambah 10. Maka bila kotak Tikus bertanda tahun 1960, kotak Anjing merupakan tahun 1970. Sedang kotak Monyet, Kuda dan Naga merupakan tahun 1980, 1990 dan 2000. Begitu seterusnya.
• Jika anak anda lahir pada 1994, gerakkan saja ibu jari dari tempat Tikus (1960), berlawanan arah dengan jarum jam sampai ke rumah Kuda (1990). Dari situ, gerakkan ibu jari 4 langkah searah jarum jam. Pasti akan berhenti di tempat Anjing. Itulah Shionya.

                          

This post was submitted by Drs Hariadi - Indonesia Media.

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Take China, for example. A few years ago, China overtook the United States as the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, but Steve Davis of the Carnegie Institution for Science says, “Nearly a quarter of the emissions that are produced in China are ultimately exported to consumers elsewhere.”

The United States consumes a lot of those carbon-intensive exported goods. So we are in some ways responsible for those emissions. It’s still the case that most of the U.S. carbon emissions come from burning coal and oil and natural gas.

This map shows global emissions of carbon dioxide resulting from the import and export of goods. The arrows indicate direction and magnitude of flow, and the numbers are the millions of tons of carbon.

But if you add our imports and subtract our exports, the study shows our carbon footprint is about 11 percent bigger than our official emissions numbers suggest. Imports make up an even bigger fraction of Europe’s emissions.

“It was pretty surprising to see that between a third and a half of all the emissions related to goods consumed in European countries actually occur outside of their borders,” Davis says.

The People Who Reap The Benefits

Some of that is trade within Europe — like French drivers buying BMWs from Germany. But Europe, too, buys a lot of goods from China’s heavily polluting industries.

This new analysis, based on 2004 data, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Davis’ colleague Ken Caldeira co-authored the study.

“Ethicists have made the case for a long time that if some process pollutes, then the people who are reaping the benefit of that process have some obligation to clean up the mess,” says Davis. “So if you believe that argument, our results are showing that developed countries that are benefiting from these goods that are made elsewhere have an obligation to lead the global effort to reduce CO2 emissions.”

In fact, China and India made that argument vociferously at the climate talks in Copenhagen. Besides, Davis says, the results highlight a huge loophole in the global response to carbon emissions.

“If the U.S. or Europe restricts carbon emissions but consumers can just import goods from countries where there are no restrictions, then emissions are likely to grow in those other countries, which will undermine any benefit to the climate.”

A Consumer Solution?

The take-home message for former climate negotiator Nigel Purvis is that as nations like the United States come to grips with climate change, we need to think beyond the emissions within our borders.

“We also need to look at what consumers can do,” says Purvis. “They’re part of the problem, and they can be part of the solution. In order to engage consumers, we need to make sure they, too, face a price signal, and that they, too, are educated about the effects of their behavior on the climate.”

Purvis runs a small policy shop called Climate Advisers. He says that if the world puts a price on carbon, that should be reflected in the cost of all goods that are produced with energy that emits carbon. That ultimately means expanding trade rules — and possibly instituting taxes or tariffs — to include climate costs.

“The trade and climate agendas definitely need to be integrated and mutually supportive,” Purvis says. “We need to make sure that what we’re doing to protect the climate is contributing to economic growth, but we also need to make sure that international trade is compatible with our climate protection goals.”

And he says that’s not really happening right now.

                          

This post was submitted by Richard Harris NPR.

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President Felipe Calderon initially dismissed the incident, saying the dead teenagers were probably gang members cut down by their rivals.

But they weren’t young thugs. Most were students, and the youngest was 13.

Calderon has since apologized to the families. He has traveled to Juarez twice since the massacre and pledged to pump millions of dollars into civic programs in what has become one of the world’s deadliest cities.

Calderon rarely comes to Juarez, so when he did in mid-February, security was tight. Soldiers in Humvees with machine guns mounted on their roofs guarded the airport. Federal police lined the streets and surrounded the hotel where he was speaking.

A demonstrator protests the arrival of Mexican President Felipe Calderon in Ciudad Juarez on Feb. 17. He holds a sign reading, "More green areas, less greens in the area" (referring to soldiers). Calderon arrived in the city for the second time in less than a week to meet with local and state authorities to address a security crisis after a group of gunmen attacked a party Jan. 31, killing 15 teens and injuring many others.

In 2009, more than 2,600 people were killed in Juarez as Calderon’s forces and two of Mexico’s most powerful drug cartels fought for control of the border city.

Outside his hotel, a few hundred protesters, many masked behind bandannas, clashed with the police.

Cipriana Jurado was one of the demonstrators. She says Calderon and his administration abandoned Juarez.

“They started a war without consulting the community, and the victims are the community,” she says. “We don’t want this war. There are executions and assassinations in broad daylight, but neither the army nor the federal police intervene.”

In March 2009, Calderon put the Mexican army in charge of the Juarez police department after one of the local drug cartels ordered the police chief to quit.

Calderon now concedes that military muscle alone isn’t going to end the violence. “We need to tackle this social plan, because the problems in Juarez have deep roots in the structure of this city,” Calderon told a group of local business and community leaders.

Young people lack opportunities, he said. Juarez doesn’t have enough schools, hospitals or soccer fields. Only half the roads are paved. Murder, extortion and kidnapping go unpunished.

Calderon said the social fabric and rule of law need to be re-established in Juarez. He received one of his biggest rounds of applause when he declared that motorists should be accountable and people should no longer be allowed to drive around without license plates.

Calderon pledged tens of millions of additional dollars for social programs in Juarez, but he also said he will not pull the Mexican army out of the streets.

The double punch of the global economic downturn and the gruesome drug war has battered the border city across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. The maquiladoras, or assembly plants, in Juarez have cut more than 100,000 jobs since 2008. The owners of thousands of restaurants, bars, corner stores and other small businesses have shut their doors rather than pay “protection money” to local gangs. Many professionals have moved to El Paso.

Alvador Gonzalez Ayala, a civil engineer who works in Texas, has chosen to keep his home in Juarez. “And I want to remain here,” he says. “I want my children to remain here.”

He says one of the biggest problems facing the industrial city is the huge disparity in wealth.

Gonzalez says much of the blame rests with the local elite, which he says is “a privileged and influential minority that’s totally indifferent to the great mass of poor people [who] live in the area.”

He adds that the city has been neglected for decades. Young people who see the opulence in Juarez and just across the border fence in Texas are attracted to the quick money of the drug trade, he says. Workers in the maquiladoras earn $60 to $70 a week. Drug runners can earn that or much more in a day.

Gonzalez is involved in several civic groups, and he recalls going recently to talk to a group of preteens in one of Juarez’s poorer neighborhoods.

“We were promoting education and science and math. And we were asking them, what do you want to do when you grow up? Many of them told us, ‘I want to be a sicario.’ That’s striking. A sicario is a paid assassin,” he says.

Gonzalez and many others say they welcome Calderon’s new social plan for combating crime. But they remain skeptical and say any investment in rebuilding the social fabric of Juarez is going to need the attention of the president, not just for a few weeks, but for years to come.

                          

This post was submitted by Jason Beaubien NPR.

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The result: With the help of a junkyard magnet, a garden–variety refrigerator magnet and a professor with a vast knowledge of magnetics, we were proved right –– eventually.

A highly charged debate ensued after our “How to destroy a credit card” was published in September of 2009. Folks started weighing in on whether magnets –– especially those of the refrigerator persuasion –– actually had the power to strip a stripe. “Running a magnet across the strip will do nothing,” said one commenter on our video at YouTube.com. Others chimed in with their own experiences with credit cards and magnets.

So we put our cards to the test against a barrage of different magnets, even heading to the junkyard to swipe stripes with some serious electromagnetic forces.

But before we get to the results, let’s take a step back.

The Mystery of the Stripe

Credit card magnetic stripes carry more than just your precious financial data; they carry some mystery, too.
The stripe you see on the back of your card is a collection of magnetic particles –– each a very small magnet about 20 millionths of an inch long. It’s a commonly held belief that exposure of these particles to an external magnet can scramble the information and make the card unreadable.

That’s the theory. But does it really happen? We sought to find out.

Magnets on a Mission

Our experiment began with three different magnets of various strengths:

• A generic refrigerator magnet, similar to the one that’s probably holding up your kid’s artwork in your kitchen.

• A slightly more powerful magnet, which is capable of holding up to 72 pounds.

• A junkyard magnet, which can hold about 7,000 pounds and is also just plain fun to watch in action.

You never know when you’ll just happen to be waving your credit card around in a junkyard.

We swiped three separate cards –– all were tested and functioning properly before the experiment, by the way –– with one of these types of magnets; then took them to a local retailer who ran each card through a credit card machine to test which ones were still readable and which ones weren’t.

Once all preparations were in place, it was time for the big reveal.

Moment of Truth

Up first was the card exposed to the fridge magnet. It turned out that it was still readable by a credit card machine. The second, larger magnet was not, despite multiple swipes. Could we have been on the way to the major scientific breakthrough we’d been hoping for?

Not so fast. It was time to put the third card, the one exposed to the junkyard magnet, to the test –– and surprisingly, the card was still readable. It had survived the most powerful magnet in our arsenal.

This caused considerable confusion. Our initial assumption was that the strength of the magnet would play a role in the demagnetization process. Thus, a wimpy refrigerator magnet wouldn’t have the data–destruction powers of a gigantic junkyard magnet.

We were wrong.

Puzzled, we turned to an expert for answers.

Calling In the Expert

Totally stumped by the fact that just one out of three magnets (the one of medium strength) had rendered a card unreadable, we sought out the guidance of A. Dean Sherry, a chemistry professor at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Sherry is also associate director of the Rogers Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Center and a radiology professor at the university’s Southwestern Medical Center. In other words, he’s got plenty of magnetic experience for our purposes.

He heard us out and politely corrected our assumption about the relationship between the strength of the magnet and its power over the data on the stripe. “The field strength isn’t all that important,” he said. “Even the refrigerator magnet should work eventually.”

So what was the deciding factor? Exposure time.

“It is well known that magnets will wipe out information on credit card stripes,” Sherry said. “However, it doesn’t always happen after one exposure. It may take several exposures for the card to be deactivated, but it will happen eventually.”

Huh. So armed with that information, we decided to replicate the experiment with the refrigerator magnet. We left the magnet exposed to the credit card stripe for several minutes and took a few more swipes for good measure.
Then we took it back to the store and … success. The card’s stripe had been demagnetized.

Not the Only Way to Destroy a Card

The safest, most practical way to destroy your credit card, however, is to cut it into tiny pieces using a shredder or a pair of scissors.

For an extra level of protection (or if you just want to replicate our very cool experiment), you can use a magnet on the stripe. Just be sure to expose it for a significant amount of time –– that goes for heavy–duty junkyard magnets, too.

                          

This post was submitted by Cynthia Drake Yahoo! Finance; creditcard.com.

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National Police chief Gen. Bambang Hendarso Danuri declined to say when the men were arrested, but officials at Jakarta police headquarters said both were taken into custody on Saturday. They spoke to

The Associated Press (AP) on condition of anonymity.

Aceh Deputy Governor Muhammad Nazar said on Monday that none of the terrorist suspects were originally from Aceh, and that both the Acehnese administration and communities questioned their “sudden” presence in the province.

“Never in the history of conflict in Aceh, has there been a terrorist or violent movement acting on behalf of religious or racist ideology,” Nazar said to The Jakarta Post.

Nazar said the Acehnese, the vast majority of who are Muslims, adopted “peaceful” religious teachings and therefore would not support terrorism or extremism.

“We are unhappy with the presence of these terrorist suspects. We will not support them or let them make Aceh their training ground.

“All ulemas and people I meet do not agree with terrorism. They say that it taints religion, peace and development,” he said.

Separately, secretary of the Acehnese Islamic Boarding School Ulemas Association (HUDA), Faisal Ali, said so far no Islamic boarding schools under HUDA had been found to have links with the group.

There are some Islamic schools near the locations of the firefights between the terrorist group and the police, but none of them recognized nor had a link with the unknown group, he went on.

“It’s confusing, where does this group come from and who are they?” Faisal said.

He said the fact that the group had settled in the middle of the jungle, away from the villages, explained that they knew they were not openly welcome in the area.

Muksalmina, spokesman of Aceh Transition Commission, an organization accommodating former members of former separatist group Free Aceh Movement (GAM), denied involvements of former GAM militants in the terrorist group.

“We’ve never heard of the activities of the armed group now being hunted by the police,” he said.
Muksalmina said members of the group might be Javanese transmigrants, with one of the training grounds of the group located in Jalin, Aceh Besar, an area inhabited mainly by Javanese.

Bambang said as of Monday the police had arrested 21 people suspected of being involved in terrorist training in Aceh.

Police said they found a military assault rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition thought to belong to the militants.

The M-16 rifle had a similar Arabic serial number as another rifle seized from the militants, a detective involved in interrogating suspects told the AP.

The detective, who declined to be named, said one of those arrested was a former member of Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia (MMI). The Java-based group was founded by Abu Bakar Baasyir, the alleged spiritual leader of Jamaah Islamiyah.

Bambang said the police were investigating where the weapons came from, but denied any foreign involvement in the recent armed conflict that led to the death of five police officers and three terrorist suspects. Two civilians also died in the crossfire.

                          

This post was submitted by Alfian and Hotli Simanjuntak , The Jakarta Post.

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