Archive for October 2007

Geneticists have traced the arrival of AIDS in America to a single person who came from Haiti in 1969.

In an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, University of Arizona researchers analyzed archived blood samples from the first five U.S. AIDS patients. All were recent Haitian immigrants. The geneticists then looked at genetic sequences from another 117 people with HIV subtype B, the most common strain of the virus.

After assembling the sequences, the researchers modeled the probability of various HIV family trees. Did the virus go from Africa to the United States? The chance of that, they found, was just .003 percent. Did it go from Africa to Haiti and then to the U.S.? The chance of that was 99.8 percent — within the scope of the model, a near certainty.

They found that Haiti, which contains more HIV strains than any other country, likely served as a breeding ground for the disease between 1966 and 1969, at which point a single person carried it to the United States. From there, the rest is tragic history.

The findings won’t directly produce cures or treatments. They might, however, give insight into how the disease evolved and spread — and that, in turn, could guide research. The next step: tracing the disease back from Haiti to central Africa, where researchers believe it was acquired by visiting Haitian workers.

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MOSCOW, Oct 2 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin criticised sports officials on Tuesday for attracting sportsmen from abroad instead of grooming homegrown champions.

“Looking at our teams, one cannot immediately understand whether those are ours, or a team from Africa,” he said.
“The result is well known. There is no one to play in our national teams,” he told a meeting of Russia’s Sports Council.

Putin wants to revive the past glory of Soviet teams, who dominated in many disciplines, and blamed club managers for the decline in sports.

“Instead of preparing young people, breeding our own national cadres they spend millions of dollars hiring foreign players,” Putin told the Council meeting, tasked with planning for the 2014 Winter Olympics in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

Apart from hosting the Olympics, Sochi is Putin’s favourite holiday venue. The winning bid earlier this summer has fuelled a wave of patriotism in Russia and was one of the high points of his eight-year presidency.

The government is spending billions of dollars to make the city a world class sports centre and resort.

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The government had previously claimed the majority of new jobs had been filled by British workers.

This appeared to be supported by figures released on Monday, despite the government admitting it had underestimated the number of migrants.

But it later put out a clarification suggesting 52% - or 1.1 million - of new jobs created had gone to migrants.

BBC economics editor Evan Davies said the figures were “a major admission for a government that has been going on about British jobs for British workers”.

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LOS ANGELES, Oct. 29 /PRNewswire/ — Democrats and Republicans agree on a surprising number of issues related to criminal aliens in the United States according to a recent Zogby International / Associated Television News online poll conducted October 23-25, 2007 of 4,702 likely voters. The poll’s margin of error is +/-1.5 percentage points. Poll results show that America is of one mind when it comes to criminal aliens: If you break the law in your native country or in the U.S. you should not be a U.S. citizen, and those criminal aliens who commit a felony should be locked up here in the U.S.

Democrats and Republicans share similar support for who they felt should be ineligible for U.S. citizenship: aliens convicted of a felony. 48% of Democrats were more likely to deny citizenship to an alien convicted of a felony while 54% of Republicans who felt citizenship should be denied to criminal aliens whether the crime was a felony or a misdemeanor. Overall, 37% percent of voters felt any alien convicted of a felony or a misdemeanor should be ineligible for citizenship. Thirty-four percent of voters felt only those aliens convicted of a felony should be ineligible.

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ATHENS, Ga.—A federal jury has awarded $415,000 to two former poultry plant employees who were fired for complaining about fraud, hiring discrimination and other abuses by supervisors.

The U.S. District Court jury found that ConAgra Poultry Co.—later bought by Pittsburg, Texas-based Pilgrim’s Pride Corp.—fired the women in September 2003 after they blew the whistle on an assistant to the human resources manager who made a fake Social Security card for an illegal immigrant who worked a side job for the plant’s general manager.

The panel also found that the manager’s assistant authorized falsified insurance coverage so another employee could claim his sister and nephew—also illegal immigrants—as dependents on his health plan.

In a decision Tuesday, the jury awarded Scarlet Reyna and Maria Ortega a combined $415,000 for lost wages and benefits, as well as emotional pain and mental anguish. They worked in the human resources department of the poultry plant in northern Clarke County.

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SAN DIEGO—(U.S. ASIAN WIRE)— Ethnic media are on the front lines of the Southern California fires, covering the effects of the devastation on their communities and providing information for evacuees and those who wish to help.

Hispanic residents who needed to evacuate their homes in San Diego had trouble finding information in Spanish about what to do, reports the Spanish-language publication Enlace.

“I saw a huge cloud of black smoke coming toward my house but I didn’t know what to do,” Noemi Orozco, a 38-year-old resident of Ramona, told Enlace. As the fires began to spread on Sunday, Orozco said, she turned on her television but none of the Spanish channels interrupted their programming to provide information.

“I watched the English channels but it was hopeless because I can hardly understand it,” said another woman. “At 7:00 p.m., the police came and one spoke Spanish, telling me to leave my apartment because of the approaching danger.”

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Over a week after the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) killed 12 Turkish soldiers when they overran a military outpost in Daglaci, close to Turkey’s border with Iraq, (see EDM, October 22), nationalist anger inside Turkey not only shows no sign of abating but appears to be becoming ever more aggressive. Unless some way can be found to defuse the tensions, there is now a real danger of ethnic clashes and racist violence.

Turkey is no stranger to ethnic violence, pogroms, and racist killings. In January 2007, Turkish-Armenian Hrant Dink was shot dead in a racist attack. In April 2007 three Christians in the southeastern city of Malatya had their throats cut. However, violence has traditionally been directed against religious rather than ethnic minorities. But in recent years a combination of granting – mainly as the result of pressure from the EU — greater cultural rights to Turkey’s Kurdish minority and the continuing violence of the PKK has resulted in a discernible increase in racism against Kurds.

Such sentiments have, in turn, been exacerbated by the Kurds’ greater self-confidence. Twenty years ago Turkey’s Kurds did not officially exist and even speaking Kurdish risked arrest. Today, not only can Kurds openly express their ethnic identity but, as a result of mass migration from the impoverished predominantly Kurdish provinces of southeast Turkey to the metropolises in the west of the country, it is now commonplace to hear Kurdish being spoken on the streets of Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, and Antalya. The result for Turkish nationalists has been an increasing siege mentality.

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Hundreds of concerned parents poured into Lester B. Pearson High School last night for a meeting about school security a week after two 14-year-old girls were beaten up by a group from a nearby French high school.

Last Wednesday, the 14-year-old girls were kicked and punched in a park on their way back to the Montreal North school from lunch. The attack occurred after one girl uttered a racial slur at black students from Ecole secondaire Henri Bourassa.

Then on Thursday, about 20 Henri Bourassa students smashed four cafeteria windows at Pearson as Grade 7 and 8 students were inside. Four students were arrested and charged in Youth Court with assault, assault causing bodily harm and uttering threats.

So many parents turned up last night that the auditorium was full and some parents had to listen to the meeting over speakers that were set up in the hallway leading to the auditorium.

Parents posed questions to two Montreal police officers who attended the meeting, along with English Montreal School Board director-general Tony Lacroce, board commissioner Sylvia Lo Bianco and principal Terrence Quinn.

“They told us this is the first incident that has been reported to them,” said one parent, who did not want to give her name.

“I find that hard to believe. My daughter has been here five years and last year was the first quiet year.

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A few dozen genetic changes can help explain why people of European descent have so many different shades of hair, eye and skin colour - but it is still impossible to tell the colour of someone’s eyes or hair based on DNA alone, researchers said.

The team at Decode Genetics said their scans of 7,000 Icelandic and Dutch people found 60 separate genetic mutations linked with hair, eye and skin colour.

As with earlier gene surveys, no single mutation or cluster of mutations can tell whether a person has brown, blue or green eyes; brown, blond or red hair or whether his or her skin is fair or freckled.

But, writing in the journal Nature Genetics, Kari Stefansson of Decode Genetics and colleagues said their new suite of genes help narrow down the possibilities and might be used to study certain diseases that are more common in people with certain colouring.

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Bolivia Troubling fissures have appeared in Bolivia’s politics that make some fear the nation may be headed for a nasty breakup.

In recent months, there have been several showdowns between residents of the eastern lowlands and President Evo Morales, the nation’s first indigenous president since the Spanish conquest. Morales aims to redistribute the nation’s wealth from the east to the western provinces inhabited by the nation’s indigenous majority.

Just this month, thousands of residents of Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s wealthiest eastern city, seized Bolivia’s busiest airport from soldiers sent by Morales. Airport workers, who had demanded the cargo handling fees that are paid monthly to the national airport authority, had threatened to block flights, which precipitated Morales’ sending in troops. Santa Cruz Gov. Ruben Costas called on residents to retake the airport and thousands responded, waving green-and-white Santa Cruz flags.

Also this month, O Globo, one of Brazil’s largest newspapers quoted an anonymous Santa Cruz state official bragging that a 12,000-strong anti-Morales militia was hidden in the jungle, awaiting the right time to strike against the government.

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