WSJ graphic showing China's growing share of global GDP:

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

 ("The Boom Generation," Michael Milken, Sept. 19, 2006)

Another graph charting the same history (both are based on economic historian Angus Maddison's pioneering research):

("Why liberalism is the right future for a declining Europe," by Martin Wolf, FT, March 13, 2007)

WSJ graphic measuring annual GDP growth since 1990:

Annual growth in GDP from previous year, in percent

*First three quarters
Source: Chinese government data, U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Indian Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation

 

("India's Surging Economy Lifts Hopes and Ambitions," by Paul Beckett, Krishna Pokharel and Eric Bellman, WSJ, November 28, 2007 - behind a pay wall, email me to send)

WSJ graphic showing the IMF's robust growth projections for China going forward:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125375004489335869.html

WSJ graphic on China's still rising foreign reserve holdings:

("China's GDP Rise Prompts a Debate," by Terence Poon and Andrew Batson, WSJ, July 17, 2009)

WP graphic showing who owns America's debt:

Major foreign holders of U.S. Treasury securities.

 

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/02/AR2009010202322_pf.html

FT graphic showing China's rising military spending (from an excellent analysis piece on China's rise):

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/671a76ec-a950-11de-9b7f-00144feabdc0.html

Economist graphic on China's growing foreign aid:

http://www.economist.com/world/international/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13799239

WP graphic showing recent Chinese deals for natural resources:

  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/22/AR2009042203823.html

NYT graphic showing China's explosive growth in CO2 emissions:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/science/earth/07enviro.html

Boston Review graphic showing China's massive consumption of coal in 2008:

 
("Living With Coal," Boston Review, September/October 2009)

WSJ graph on the origins of international students to the US:

Origin of international students in the U.S.

Source: Open Doors 2007, the Institute of International Education

 

("India's Surging Economy Lifts Hopes and Ambitions," by Paul Beckett, Krishna Pokharel and Eric Bellman, WSJ, November 28, 2007 - behind a pay wall, email me to send)

Graphic showing the number of world class universities in China:

("Duke Expands India Offerings As U.S. Schools Seek Foothold," by Geeta Anand and Brittany Hite, WSJ, October 16, 2008 - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122411271740938385.html)

WSJ graphic on explosion of Chinese higher education:

("China Faces a Grad Glut After Boom at Colleges," by Ian Johnson, Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2009)

 

 
 
 
Gideon Rachman joined the Financial Times as chief foreign affairs commentator in 2006, after a 15-year career at The Economist which included stints as a correspondent in Brussels, Bangkok and Washington.

China makes gains in its bid to be top dog

1) Price on Carbon: WSJ op-ed by Harvard economist Greg Mankiw on the virtues of a carbon tax:

Campaign consultants aren't fond of this kind of proposal, but policy wonks keep pushing for it. Here's why: The environment. The burning of gasoline emits several pollutants. These include carbon dioxide, a cause of global warming. Higher gasoline taxes, perhaps as part of a broader carbon tax, would be the most direct and least invasive policy to address environmental concerns.

Road congestion. Every time I am stuck in traffic, I wish my fellow motorists would drive less, perhaps by living closer to where they work or by taking public transport. A higher gas tax would give all of us the incentive to do just that, reducing congestion on streets and highways.

Regulatory relief. Congress has tried to reduce energy dependence with corporate average fuel economy standards. These CAFE rules are heavy-handed government regulations replete with unintended consequences: They are partly responsible for the growth of SUVs, because light trucks have laxer standards than cars. In addition, by making the car fleet more fuel-efficient, the regulations encourage people to drive more, offsetting some of the conservation benefits and exacerbating road congestion. A higher gas tax would accomplish everything CAFE standards do, but without the adverse side effects.

The budget. Everyone who has studied the numbers knows that the federal budget is on an unsustainable path. When baby-boomers retire and become eligible for Social Security and Medicare, either benefits for the elderly will have to be cut or taxes raised. The most likely political compromise will include some of each. A $1 per gallon hike in gas tax would bring in $100 billion a year in government revenue and make a dent in the looming fiscal gap.

Tax incidence. A basic principle of tax analysis -- taught in most freshman economics courses -- is that the burden of a tax is shared by consumer and producer. In this case, as a higher gas tax discouraged oil consumption, the price of oil would fall in world markets. As a result, the price of gas to consumers would rise by less than the increase in the tax. Some of the tax would in effect be paid by Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

Economic growth. Public finance experts have long preached that consumption taxes are better than income taxes for long-run economic growth, because income taxes discourage saving and investment. Gas is a component of consumption. An increased reliance on gas taxes over income taxes would make the tax code more favorable to growth. It would also encourage firms to devote more R&D spending to the search for gasoline substitutes.

National security. Alan Greenspan called for higher gas taxes recently. "It's a national security issue," he said. It is hard to judge how much high oil consumption drives U.S. involvement in Middle Eastern politics. But Mr. Greenspan may well be right that the gas tax is an economic policy with positive spillovers to foreign affairs.
 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116131055641498552.html

2) Nuclear: Scientific American essay arguing for nuclear power as a necessary global warming solution (I'd also recommend this WSJ story from yesterday on next generation nuclear plants and this FT story from today on the huge expansion of nuclear power underway):

In 2003 we co-chaired a major Massachusetts Institute of Technology study, The Future of Nuclear Power, that analyzed what would be required to retain the nuclear option. That study described a scenario whereby worldwide nuclear power generation could triple to one million megawatts by the year 2050, saving the globe from emissions of between 0.8 billion and 1.8 billion tons of carbon a year, depending on whether gas- or coal-powered plants were displaced. At this scale, nuclear power would significantly contribute to the stabilization of greenhouse gas emissions, which requires about seven billion tons of carbon to be averted annually by 2050 [see "A Plan to Keep Carbon in Check," by Robert H. Socolow and Stephen W. Pacala].

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=0000137A-C4BF-14E5-84BF83414B7F0000

3) Carbon Capture and Storage: Washington Post story from a few weeks ago titled "Coal's Future Wagered on Carbon Capture":

Coal companies and environmentalists alike are counting on a breakthrough in carbon capture and storage technology to siphon off harmful emissions from the world's coal plants. Coal plants in the United States account for a third of U.S. greenhouse emissions. In the past five years China has brought online coal-fired electricity equal in size to total U.S. installed capacity, and new plants are coming online in the developing world all the time. Without a breakthrough on coal plants, it may be impossible to meet emission limits climatologists say are needed.

  Yet carbon capture and storage remains the elusive holy grail of the coal industry, an idea that could contain the damage inflicted by coal-burning power plants but a technology that remains expensive, energy intensive and largely untested. Even optimists say it will not be commercially available for another six to 10 years. Pessimists say it might take much longer, and may never be ready for widespread use without attaching a punishingly high price to carbon.

  "There is no credible pathway towards prudent greenhouse gas stabilization targets without CO2 emissions reduction from existing coal power plants," Ernest Moniz, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of President Obama's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, said in a report earlier this year. "We urgently need technology options for these plants and policies that incentivize implementation."

  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/10/AR2009081002709.html

4) Solar: Scientific American piece titled "A Solar Grand Plan"

Solar energy’s potential is off the chart. The energy in sunlight striking the earth for 40 minutes is equivalent to global energy consumption for a year. The U.S. is lucky to be endowed with a vast resource; at least 250,000 square miles of land in the Southwest alone are suitable for constructing solar power plants, and that land receives more than 4,500 quadrillion British thermal units (Btu) of solar radiation a year. Converting only 2.5 percent of that radiation into electricity would match the nation’s total energy consumption in 2006.

  To convert the country to solar power, huge tracts of land would have to be covered with photovoltaic panels and solar heating troughs. A direct-current (DC) transmission backbone would also have to be erected to send that energy efficiently across the nation.

  The technology is ready. On the following pages we present a grand plan that could provide 69 percent of the U.S.’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy (which includes transportation) with solar power by 2050. We project that this energy could be sold to consumers at rates equivalent to today’s rates for conventional power sources, about five cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). If wind, biomass and geothermal sources were also developed, renewable energy could provide 100 percent of the nation’s electricity and 90 percent of its energy by 2100.

  The federal government would have to invest more than $400 billion over the next 40 years to complete the 2050 plan. That investment is substantial, but the payoff is greater.

  http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan

5) Electric Cars: Excellent Economist analysis piece on electric cars (technology, price, viability) titled "The electrification of motoring":

IN 1995 Joseph Bower and Clayton Christensen, two researchers at the Harvard Business School, invented a new term: “disruptive technology”. This is an innovation that fulfils the requirements of some, but not most, consumers better than the incumbent does. That gives it a toehold, which allows room for improvement and, eventually, dominance. The risk for incumbent firms is that of the proverbial boiling frog. They may not know when to switch from old to new until it is too late.

  The example Dr Bower and Dr Christensen used was a nerdy one: computer hard-drives. But unbeknown to them a more familiar one was in the making. The first digital cameras were coming on sale. These were more expensive than film cameras and had lower resolution. But they brought two advantages. A user could look at a picture immediately after he had taken it. And he could download it onto his computer and send it to his friends.

  Fourteen years on, you would struggle to buy a new camera that uses film. Some of the leading camera-makers, such as Panasonic, are firms that had little interest in photography when Dr Bower and Dr Christensen published. And an entire industry, the manufacturing and processing of film, is rapidly disappearing.

  Substitute “car” for “camera” and you have a story that should concern thoughtful bosses in the motor and oil industries. Internal-combustion engines have dominated mechanised road transport for a century, but the past year or so has seen the arrival of a dribble of vehicles driven by electric motors. That these are the products of small, new firms, or of established non-carmaking companies, supports the Bower-Christensen thesis. But next year the big boys, encouraged by legislative pressure to produce low-emission vehicles, will leap out of the boiling water and join in. Their progress towards greenery will be an important theme of the Frankfurt motor show this month.

  Bold claims are being made. Carlos Ghosn, who leads the Renault-Nissan alliance, thinks 10% of new cars bought in 2020 will be pure-battery vehicles. A report by IDTechEx, a research consultancy based in Cambridge, England, reckons a third of the cars made in 2025 will be electrically powered in one way or another. If that trend continues, liquid fuels might become as obsolete as photographic film.

  http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=14362092

6) Regulation: WP A1 story tilted "In Energy Conservation, Calif. Sees Light" (also read this WSJ A1 story titled "How Denmark Paved Way To Energy Independence" and this NYT story titled "Japan Squeezes to Get the Most of Costly Fuel"):

And today the state uses less energy per capita than any other state in the country, defying the international image of American energy gluttony. Since 1974, California has held its per capita energy consumption essentially constant, while energy use per person for the United States overall has jumped 50 percent. California has managed that feat through a mixture of mandates, regulations and high prices. The state has been able to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, keep utility companies happy and maintain economic growth. And in the wake of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on global warming, California serves as a model for other states seeking a similar path to energy reduction. Now California is pushing further in its effort to cut automobile pollution, spur use of solar energy and cap greenhouse gases.
"California really represents what the rest of the country could do if it paid a bit more attention to energy efficiency," says Greg Kats, managing principal at Capital E, an energy and clean-technology advisory firm. "California is the best argument we have about how to very cost-effectively both reduce energy consumption and cut greenhouse gases. And they've made money doing it." Kats estimates that the average Californian family spends about $800 a year less on energy than it would have without efficiency improvements over the past 20 years.
Today, as an energy consumer, California is more like thrifty Denmark than the rest of the energy-guzzling United States. While the average American burns 12,000 kilowatt-hours a year of electricity, the average Californian burns less than 7,000 -- and that's counting renewable energy sources.
California has managed to cut its contributions to global warming, too. Carbon dioxide emissions per capita in California have fallen by 30 percent since 1975, while U.S. per capita carbon dioxide emissions have remained essentially level.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/16/AR2007021602274_pf.html

 

   

Great NYT Magazine piece by Steven Pinker titled "My Genome, My Self":

Last fall I submitted to the latest high-tech way to bare your soul. I had my genome sequenced and am allowing it to be posted on the Internet, along with my medical history. The opportunity arose when the biologist George Church sought 10 volunteers to kick off his audacious Personal Genome Project. The P.G.P. has created a public database that will contain the genomes and traits of 100,000 people. Tapping the magic of crowd sourcing that gave us Wikipedia and Google rankings, the project seeks to engage geneticists in a worldwide effort to sift through the genetic and environmental predictors of medical, physical and behavioral traits.

  The Personal Genome Project is an initiative in basic research, not personal discovery. Yet the technological advance making it possible — the plunging cost of genome sequencing — will soon give people an unprecedented opportunity to contemplate their own biological and even psychological makeups. We have entered the era of consumer genetics. At one end of the price range you can get a complete sequence and analysis of your genome from Knome (often pronounced “know me”) for $99,500. At the other you can get a sample of traits, disease risks and ancestry data from 23andMe for $399. The science journal Nature listed “Personal Genomics Goes Mainstream” as a top news story of 2008.

  Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee. It could usher in an era of personalized medicine, in which drug regimens are customized for a patient’s biochemistry rather than juggled through trial and error, and screening and prevention measures are aimed at those who are most at risk. It opens up a niche for bottom-feeding companies to terrify hypochondriacs by turning dubious probabilities into Genes of Doom. Depending on who has access to the information, personal genomics could bring about national health insurance, leapfrogging decades of debate, because piecemeal insurance is not viable in a world in which insurers can cherry-pick the most risk-free customers, or in which at-risk customers can load up on lavish insurance.

  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11Genome-t.html?pagewanted=print

NYT story titled "Patient’s DNA May Be Signal to Tailor Medication":

For more than two years, Jody Uslan had been taking the drug tamoxifen in hopes of preventing a recurrence of breast cancer. Then a new test suggested that because of her genetic makeup, the drug was not doing her any good.

  “I was devastated,” said Ms. Uslan, 52, who stopped taking tamoxifen and is now evaluating alternative treatments. “You find out you’ve been taking this medication for all of this time, and find out you are not getting benefit.”

  Ms. Uslan’s situation is all too common — and not just among the hundreds of thousands of women in this country taking tamoxifen.

  Experts say that most drugs, whatever the disease, work for only about half the people who take them. Not only is much of the nation’s approximately $300 billion annual drug spending wasted, but countless patients are being exposed unnecessarily to side effects.

  No wonder so much hope is riding on the promise of “personalized medicine,” in which genetic screening and other tests give doctors more evidence for tailoring treatments to patients, potentially improving care and saving money.

  Many policy experts are calling for more studies to compare the effectiveness of different treatments. One drawback is that such studies tend to be “one size fits all,” with the winning treatment recommended for everybody. Personalized medicine would go beyond that by determining which drug is best for which patient, rather than continuing to treat everyone the same in hopes of benefiting the fortunate few.

  The colon cancer drugs Erbitux and Vectibix, for instance, do not work for the 40 percent of patients whose tumors have a particular genetic mutation. The Food and Drug Administration held a meeting this month to discuss whether patients should be tested to narrow use of the drugs, which cost $8,000 to $10,000 a month.

  And a genetic test might help doctors determine the optimal dose of warfarin, a blood thinner used by millions of Americans. Tens of thousands of them are hospitalized each year because of internal bleeding from an overdose or a blood clot from an inadequate dose.

  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/business/30gene.html

WP story titled "Genome Database Will Link Genes, Traits in Public View":

George Church wants to put his personal genetic blueprint online for all to see -- the sequence of chemical bases that make him who he is, a lanky scientist of Scottish ancestry who has dyslexia, narcolepsy and motion sickness.
And he wants 99,999 other people to follow suit.

  The Harvard genetics professor's Personal Genome Project is an attempt to build the only public genomic database that connects genes with diseases. With it, he believes, scientists could correlate more easily many millions of genetic variants with medical and other traits, from asthma to acne, eye color to perfect pitch.

  If successful, he says, it would usher in an era of "personalized medicine" -- enabling a consumer to order up his own genetic blueprint and know what diseases might lurk in his future. That could allow him to change his lifestyle to try to avoid them. Or climb K2 now, while he still can.

  A better understanding of genes could lead to more effective drugs, proponents say. Couples could learn what diseases might be in store for their children and decide not to have them. Eventually, they say, scientists might even be able to alter the dangerous genes.

  But other people consider Church's vision the darker side of genetic knowledge. Such a database could be used against the participants. Insurance companies might refuse to sell them life, disability or long-term care coverage. A child could learn she faces a terrible disease. In a more far-fetched but still possible scenario, a criminal could craft synthetic DNA using someone's genetic code in the database and place it at a crime scene to frame that person. In a broader context, people might draw spurious links between genes and criminal behavior.

  The database, a nonprofit venture, is scheduled to go online Monday, when Church and up to nine other volunteers -- the "PGP 10" -- will release their genomic data and traits profiles to the public. Then anyone, from a university researcher to a kid working in a basement lab, will be able to tap into the data and create research applications much the way that Facebook allows vendors to create game applications.

  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/17/AR2008101703345_pf.html

NYT story titled "The Quest for the $1,000 Human Genome":

As part of an intensive effort to develop a new generation of machines that will sequence DNA at a vastly reduced cost, scientists are decoding a new human genome — that of James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and the first director of the National Institutes of Health’s human genome project.

 Decoding a person’s genome is at present far too costly to be a feasible medical procedure. But the goal now being pursued by the N.I.H. and by several manufacturers, including the company decoding Dr. Watson’s DNA, is to drive the costs of decoding a human genome down to as little as $1,000. At that price, it could be worth decoding people’s genomes in certain medical situations and, one day, even routinely at birth.

 Low-cost decoding may bring the genomic age to the doctor’s office, but it will also raise quandaries about how to safeguard and interpret such a wealth of delicate and far-reaching personal information.

 The first human genome decoding, completed by a public consortium of universities in 2003, cost more than $500 million. With the same technology, dependent on DNA sequencing machines made by Applied Biosystems, a human genome could probably now be decoded for $10 million to $15 million, experts say.

 Much greater efficiency is expected from the new generation of DNA sequencing machines, based on different, highly miniaturized technologies. One machine, made by 454 Life Sciences, has been on the market since March 2005. Another, made by Solexa, will start shipping this summer. Applied Biosystems will start marketing its own next-generation machine next year.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/18/science/18dna.html

NYT story titled "$300 to Learn Risk of Prostate Cancer":

A combination of common and minor variations in five regions of DNA can help predict a man’s risk of getting prostate cancer, researchers reported Wednesday.

 A company formed by researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine is expected to make the test available in a few months, said Karen Richardson, a Wake Forest spokeswoman. It should cost less than $300.

 This is, some medical experts say, a first taste of what is expected to be a revolution in medical prognostication. The results, they agree, are clear. But the question is what happens next. And will patients be helped or harmed? Because the new test — which will analyze DNA in blood or saliva samples and is to be offered by Proactive Genomics — cannot predict which men will get aggressive cancers, it could lead to more screening and unnecessary surgery and complications. But, proponents say, it could also help men decide whether they want aggressive screening in the first place.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/health/17cancer.html?pagewanted=print

WP story on the current state for genetic science ("How Science Is Rewriting the Book on Genes"):

Everyone who goes to medical school hears this story at some point.

Graduation day comes and the new doctors assemble to get their diplomas. The dean gazes out and announces sheepishly: "I'm sorry to tell you that half of what we taught you is wrong. The problem is, we don't know which half."

 Nowhere has this been more evident than in genetics.

 The rules of inheritance, and hints of the biological mechanisms behind them, were first elucidated by Gregor Mendel in the 1860s. Over the ensuing 130 years, scientists gained insight at a molecular level into how biological information is recorded, preserved, used and passed on to future generations.

 In recent years, however, many of the certainties gained over that long run are being overturned.

 Ever better tools for cutting and splicing strands of DNA, combined with the explosion of data from sequencing the genomes -- the inherited genetic instruction books -- of humans and more than a dozen other organisms, are the engines driving this revolution.

 Here are some of the recent revisions of what were once canonical rules of genetics.

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2007/11/11/ST2007111101076.html

Very hopeful NYT story titled "New Effort Aims to Unlock Secrets of Cancer Genes":

The government is beginning a project that aims to unlock all the genetic abnormalities that contribute to cancer, an effort that would exceed the Human Genome Project in complexity but could eventually lead to new diagnostic tests and treatments for the disease.

 Government officials said today that they would spend $100 million over three years on a pilot phase of the project, which will be called The Cancer Genome Atlas. "This is a revolutionary project," Anna D. Barker, deputy director of the National Cancer Institute, said at a news briefing in Washington. "It's going to empower all cancer researchers with an entire new set of data to work with."

 Her agency will contribute half the money with the other half provided by the National Human Genome Research Institute. Both are part of the National Institutes of Health.

 Scientists have long known that genetic mutations that accumulate in normal cells over a person's lifetime can turn those cells cancerous. About 300 genes involved in cancer are known already and there are a handful of drugs that work by interfering with specific genetic abnormalities.

 The drug Gleevec, which blocks a particular genetic change that causes a type of leukemia, produces remissions in most patients with that form of the disease. Some studies have shown that the lung cancer drug Iressa is likely to work very well for about 10 percent of patients with a particular mutation but barely at all for others.

 But federal officials and many cancer researchers say that a more systematic search could find many more genes and gene variations that play an important role in determining how aggressive a cancer will be and what drugs might work best. The first fruits, such as new diagnostic tests, might be seen in several years.

 "We are still working with an incomplete compass," said Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. "The time is right to bring the full power of genomics to bear on the problem of cancer."

 The project would involve determining the sequence of letters in the DNA of cancer cells taken from tumor samples taken from biopsies or surgery. The initials of the project's name, T.C.G.A., represent the four letters of the genetic code.

 http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/12/13/news/cancer.php

NYT story titled "Scientists Decode Set of Cancer Genes":

For the first time, researchers have decoded all the genes of a person with cancer and found a set of mutations that may have caused the disease or aided its progression.

  Using cells donated by a woman in her 50s who died of leukemia, the scientists sequenced all the DNA from her cancer cells and compared it to the DNA from her own normal, healthy skin cells. Then, they zeroed in on 10 mutations that occurred only in the cancer cells, apparently spurring abnormal growth, preventing the cells from suppressing that growth and enabling them to fight off chemotherapy.

  Mutations are genetic mistakes, and the ones found in this research were not inborn, but developed later in life, like most mutations that cause cancer. (Only 5 to 10 percent of all cancers are thought to be hereditary.)

  The new research, by looking at the entire genome — all the DNA — and aiming to find all the mutations involved in a particular cancer, differs markedly from earlier studies, which have searched fewer genes for individual mutations. The project, which took months and cost $1 million, was made possible by recent advances in technology that have made it easier and cheaper to analyze 100 million DNA snippets than it used to be to analyze 100.

  The study was done at Washington University in St. Louis and is being published Thursday in the journal Nature. It is the first report of a “cancer genome,” and researchers say many more are to come.

  The findings will not help patients immediately, but researchers say they could lead to new therapies and will almost certainly help doctors make better choices among existing treatments, based on a more detailed genetic picture of each patient’s cancer. Though the research involved leukemia, the same techniques can also be used to study the genomes of other cancers, and the researchers expect to apply them to breast, brain and lung cancers.

  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/health/research/06cancer.html?pagewanted=print

WSJ story on genetics at the cutting edge of cancer science ("In Long-Awaited Maps of Cancer, The Breakthrough Is the Problem"):

After struggling for years to improve the treatment of cancer, scientists now hope to fight the disease with the help of the same techniques that deciphered the human genome eight years ago: mapping it.
Traditionally, researchers have started with a fuzzy premise about which toxic drugs might kill tumors and then tested those drugs in the lab, in animals and, finally, in human subjects. This helps explain why some 35 years after Richard Nixon declared a "war on cancer," there has been only limited progress in the treatment of most of the 200 cancers that afflict humans. In most cases, "we extend life a little at great cost," says geneticist Garth Anderson of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N.Y.
Now, scientists are trying to eliminate the guesswork by using powerful gene-sequencing machines to identify which genetic alterations cause which cancers -- an ambition reflected in three papers published this week. The hope is to offer differentiated treatment to patients based on their different tumor profiles. But the picture is enormously complicated. For example, scientists had expected to identify certain key genes that were frequently mutated. They found the opposite: a large number of mutated genes, but each mutated in a smaller fraction of the tumors.
"We used to think there was one enemy that was well-defined, but now we know there are lots of little enemies," says Victor Velculescu of Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and a co-author of two papers in the journal Science. Stephen Eldridge, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School who wasn't involved with the recent studies but is familiar with the findings, says new knowledge of cancer's complexity suggests that it still won't be easy to find good treatments. But "it's a new era in cancer research," he says.
In the papers that came out this week, researchers provide a detailed blueprint of tiny genetic mutations that appear to be linked to two of the most lethal cancers: pancreatic cancer and a brain cancer known as glioblastoma multiforme. The findings suggest that cancer's molecular machinery appears to be far more intricate than anyone imagined.
Two separate papers in Science on pancreatic and brain cancer are the result of a private cancer-genome project led by researchers at Johns Hopkins. A third study, in Nature, also on glioblastoma, is the product of a far larger project funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
After years of the hit-and-miss approach, targeted anticancer drugs such as Herceptin, for breast cancer, and Gleevec, for a type of leukemia, have arrived on the scene, sparking intense industry interest in agents that narrowly attack specific targets of a tumor's cellular machinery.

 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122058186705402585.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

NYT in house evolutionary biologist, Olivia Judson, on the complexities and ambiguities inherent in genetic science ("Testing Genes, Solving Little"):

It was supposed to be simple. Once it became cheap to scan large numbers of people for large numbers of genetic differences, everyone assumed that it would swiftly become straightforward to convert genetic differences into physical differences — that we’d be able to look at someone’s genome and say, this man is between 5-foot-10 and 6-foot-2, has black hair, green eyes and a high risk of developing diabetes.

 Not so. The age of large-scale screening arrived about five years ago, and a hunt for the genes underlying heritable human differences immediately began. But with a few exceptions — almost all of which predate the large screens — the business of genetic forecasting has turned out to be much more difficult than anyone expected. And despite the hype, the era of personal medicine — where your treatment is tailored for your genes — remains frustratingly far away.

 At the heart of this story there is a paradox. We have accumulated huge databases on human genetic differences — but many of the differences appear to be more or less irrelevant.

 To see what I mean, suppose you set out to analyze a DNA sample from someone you knew nothing about. What could you discover?

 You could discover their sex. That’s easy. You could also discover where they are from, genetically speaking. In the past five years, the genetics of ancestry testing has become excellent. So much so that you can reliably tell the difference between someone descended from Swedes, as against Italians.

 The reason this works is that in the past, humans didn’t move around much. As a result, genetic differences accumulated slightly differently in different groups. On average, then, Swedes’ genomes resemble each other more closely than they resemble those of Italians or American Indians.

 If you discovered someone’s ancestors were Swedish, you’d infer that they themselves are likely to be tall and blond with pale skin. But that’s only because you already know what other Swedes look like. If you didn’t — and this is the odd thing — you wouldn’t be able to infer much from the genes themselves. This is because, by and large, we don’t know how to translate genetic differences into physical differences.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/opinion/17judson.html?pagewanted=print

Great Charlie Rose interview with Steven Pinker and George Church (both mentioned above) and the founders of www.23andme.com, a personal genomics company that will give you a limited sequence of your genome for $399:

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10399

Great Craig Venter interview by Richard Dawkins which goes over (inter alia) some of the amazing advances in the technology of genomics sequencing:

http://richarddawkins.net/article,4012,Craig-Venter---The-Genius-of-Charles-Darwin-The-Uncut-Interviews,Richard-Dawkins-Craig-Venter

Finally, a great Charlie Rose interview with Francis Collins, who was the Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute and is now Obama's Director of the National Institute of Health:

http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2008/07/29/1/a-conversation-with-francis-collins

Cost of Decoding a Genome Is Lowered

Comparative prison stats from a NYT story titled "Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’":

Number of prisoners per 100,000 people

United States                         751

Russia                                627

England                              151

Germany                             88

Japan                                 63

Median among all nations       125

 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/us/23prison.html?_r=1&fta=y&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin 

Similar stat from an essay by Tony Judt in the NYRB titled "Europe vs. America":

Number of prisoners per 100,000 people:

US:                            685

EU:                             87

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17726

WP A1 story titled "New High In U.S. Prison Numbers":

More than one in 100 adults in the United States is in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year and the federal government $5 billion more, according to a report released yesterday.

 With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving far-more-populous China a distant second, according to a study by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.

 The growth in prison population is largely because of tougher state and federal sentencing imposed since the mid-1980s. Minorities have been particularly affected: One in nine black men ages 20 to 34 is behind bars. For black women ages 35 to 39, the figure is one in 100, compared with one in 355 for white women in the same age group.

 ...And the report also documents the tradeoffs state governments have faced as they devote larger shares of their budgets to house them. For instance, over the past two decades, state spending on corrections (adjusted for inflation) increased 127 percent; spending on higher education rose 21 percent.

 Five states -- Vermont, Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut and Delaware -- now spend as much as or more on corrections as on higher education.

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/28/AR2008022801704_pf.html

Nobel economist Joe Stiglitz making a relevant point regarding the massive costs of mass incarceration:

Failures to promote social solidarity can have other costs, not the least of which are the social and private expenditures required to protect property and incarcerate criminals. It is estimated that within a few years, America will have more people working in the security business than in education. A year in prison can cost more than a year at Harvard. The cost of incarcerating two million Americans – one of the highest per capita rates (pdf) in the world – should be viewed as a subtraction from GDP, yet it is added on.

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/06/economicgrowth.useconomicgrowth

Kristof NYT column titled "Priority Test: Health Care or Prisons?":

It’s time for a fundamental re-evaluation of the criminal justice system, as legislation sponsored by Senator Jim Webb has called for, so that we’re no longer squandering money that would be far better spent on education or health. Consider a few facts:

  ¶The United States incarcerates people at nearly five times the world average. Of those sentenced to state prisons, 82 percent were convicted of nonviolent crimes, according to one study.

  ¶California spends $216,000 annually on each inmate in the juvenile justice system. In contrast, it spends only $8,000 on each child attending the troubled Oakland public school system, according to the Urban Strategies Council.

  ¶For most of American history, we had incarceration rates similar to those in other countries. Then with the “war on drugs” and the focus on law and order in the 1970s, incarceration rates soared.

  ¶One in 10 black men ages 25 to 29 were imprisoned last year, partly because possession of crack cocaine (disproportionately used in black communities) draws sentences equivalent to having 100 times as much powder cocaine. Black men in the United States have a 32 percent chance of serving time in prison at some point in their lives, according to the Sentencing Project.

  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/20/opinion/20kristof.html?pagewanted=print

An earlier WP article titled "U.S. Prison Population Sets Record" providing an explanation for the US incarceration rate:

A record 7 million people -- one in every 32 U.S. adults -- were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, a Justice Department report released yesterday shows.

Of those, 2.2 million were in prison or jail, an increase of 2.7 percent over the previous year, according to the report.

More than 4.1 million people were on probation and 784,208 were on parole at the end of 2005. Prison releases are increasing, but admissions are increasing more.

From 1995 to 2003, inmates incarcerated in federal prisons for drug offenses have accounted for 49 percent of total prison population growth.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/30/AR2006113000912_pf.html

NYT story titled "Racial Disparities Found to Persist as Drug Arrests Rise":

More than two decades after President Ronald Reagan escalated the war on drugs, arrests for drug sales or, more often, drug possession are still rising. And despite public debate and limited efforts to reduce them, large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates.

Two new reports, issued Monday by the Sentencing Project in Washington and by Human Rights Watch in New York, both say the racial disparities reflect, in large part, an overwhelming focus of law enforcement on drug use in low-income urban areas, with arrests and incarceration the main weapon.

But they note that the murderous crack-related urban violence of the 1980s, which spawned the drug war, has largely subsided, reducing the rationale for a strategy that has sowed mistrust in the justice system among many blacks.

In 2006, according to federal data, drug-related arrests climbed to 1.89 million, up from 1.85 million in 2005 and 581,000 in 1980.

More than four in five of the arrests were for possession of banned substances, rather than for their sale or manufacture. Four in 10 of all drug arrests were for marijuana possession, according to the latest F.B.I. data.

Apart from crowding prisons, one result is a devastating impact on the lives of black men: adult black males are nearly 12 times as likely to be imprisoned for drug convictions as adult white men, according to the Human Rights Watch report.

...Two-thirds of those arrested for drug violations in 2006 were white and 33 percent were black, although blacks made up 12.8 percent of the population, F.B.I. data show. National data are not collected on ethnicity, and arrests of Hispanics may be in either category.

...Her report cites federal data from 2003, the most recent available on this aspect, indicating that blacks constituted 53.5 percent of all who entered prison for a drug conviction.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/us/05cnd-disparities.html?partner=rssnyt%26emc=rss%26pagewanted=print

WP op-ed titled "Two Separate Societies: One in Prison, One Not":

Forty years ago, the Kerner Commission concluded in its landmark study of the causes of racial disturbances in the United States in the 1960s: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white -- separate and unequal." Today we are still moving toward two societies: one incarcerated and one not. The Pew Center on the States released a study in February showing that for the first time in this country's history, more than one in every 100 adults is in jail or prison. According to the Justice Department, 7 million people -- or one in every 32 adults -- are either incarcerated, on parole or probation or under some other form of state or local supervision.

 These figures understate the disproportionate impact that this bold and unprecedented social experiment has had on certain groups in U.S. society. Today one in nine young black men is behind bars. African Americans now comprise more than half of all prisoners, up from a third three decades ago.

 Sen. James Webb (D-Va.) held a remarkable set of hearings last October on mass incarceration in the United States. In his opening statement, Webb noted that "the United States has embarked on one of the largest public policy experiments in our history, yet this experiment remains shockingly absent from public debate."

 The leading presidential candidates have not identified mass imprisonment as a central issue, even though it is arguably the country's top civil rights concern. Many of today's crime control policies fundamentally impede the economic, political and social advancement of the most disadvantaged blacks and members of other minority groups. Prison leaves them less likely to find gainful employment, vote, participate in other civic activities and maintain ties with their families and communities.

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/14/AR2008041402451_pf.html

LAT op-ed by travel writer Rick Steves titled "Europe: Curing, not punishing, addicts":

Europe has a drug problem, and knows it. But the Europeans' approach to it is quite different from the American "war on drugs." I spend 120 days a year in Europe as a travel writer, so I decided to see for myself how it's working. I talked with locals, researched European drug policies and even visited a smoky marijuana "coffee shop" in Amsterdam. I got a close look at the alternative to a war on drugs.

Europeans are well aware of the U.S. track record against illegal drug use. Since President Nixon first declared the war on drugs in 1971, our country has locked up millions of its citizens and spent hundreds of billions of dollars (many claim that if incarceration costs are figured in, a trillion dollars) waging this "war." Despite these efforts, U.S. government figures show the overall rate of illicit drug use has remained about the same.

By contrast, according to the 2007 U.N. World Drug Report, the percentage of Europeans who use illicit drugs is about half that of Americans. (Europe also has fewer than half as many deaths from overdoses.) How have they managed that -- in Europe, no less, which shocks some American sensibilities with its underage drinking, marijuana tolerance and heroin-friendly "needle parks"?

Recently, in Zurich, Switzerland, I walked into a public toilet that had only blue lights. Why? So junkies can't find their veins. A short walk away, I saw a heroin maintenance clinic that gives junkies counseling, clean needles and a safe alternative to shooting up in the streets. Need a syringe? Cigarette machines have been retooled to sell clean, government-subsidized syringes.

While each European nation has its own drug laws and policies, they seem to share a pragmatic approach. They treat drug abuse not as a crime but as an illness. And they measure the effectiveness of their drug policy not in arrests but in harm reduction.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-steves12oct12,0,5300443.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail 

LAT op-ed titled "There's nothing funny about prison rape":

We know of the abuses, and we know of the rapes. Research by the University of South Dakota's Cindy Struckman-Johnson found that 20% of prisoners reported being coerced or pressured into sex, and 10% said they were violently raped. In a 2007 survey by the U.S. Department of Justice, more than 60,000 inmates claimed to have been sexually victimized by other inmates during the previous 12 months. Given the stigma around admitting such harms, the true numbers are probably substantially higher.

But by and large, we seem to find more humor than outrage in these crimes. In part, this simply reflects the nature of our criminal justice system, which has become decreasingly rehabilitative and increasingly retributive.

In the 1970s, as economist Glenn Loury has written, "the corrections system was commonly seen as a way to prepare offenders to rejoin society. Since then, the focus has shifted from rehabilitation to punishment and stayed there."

On the campaign trail, Mike Huckabee put it even more pithily. "We lock up a lot of people that we're mad at," he liked to say. "Not the ones we're really afraid of." Criminals aren't sent to prison so they can learn to live outside of prison; they're sent to prison to get what they deserve. And that paves the way for the acceptance of all manners of brutal abuses. It's not that we condone prison rape per se, but it doesn't exactly concern us, and occasionally, as in the comments made by Lockyer, we take a perverse satisfaction in its existence.

Morally, our tacit acceptance of violence within prisons is grotesque. But it's also counterproductive. Research by economists Jesse Shapiro and Keith Chen suggests that violent prisons make prisoners more violent after they leave. When your choice is between the trauma of hardening yourself so no one will touch you or the trauma of prostituting yourself so you're protected from attack, either path leads away from rehabilitation and psychological adjustment.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-klein30mar30,0,980991,print.story

Hitchens essay in Vanity Fair titled "The Scandalous Brutality of U.S. Prisons" (disturbing):

Here's a commercial for 7UP that ran for two months before it was taken off the air. A charming young black salesman opens with: "They say if you're gonna sell something, get yourself a captive audience." Cut to prison bars and slamming cell doors. He walks along the cellblock handing out cans through the bars and then drops one. Mugs to the camera: "Ooo, I'm not picking that up." Then with a grizzled biker-type cellmate: "When you bring the 7UP, everyone is your friend." Cellmate turns meaningly toward him: "That's enough being friends." Cell door closes and cameras begin to pull back: "Hey, where are you goin'?"

 The target "demographic" for this ad is members of the 12-to-24 age group, who are therefore assumed to "get" the joke about rape as a constant and reliable feature of American prison life. (Take the catchy slogan "Make 7UP Yours" and remove the first word and there might be a real thigh-slapper in there somewhere.) Late-night comedians make frequent use of "Don't drop the soap" jokes, and I have seen a bail-bond advertisement built entirely around a sequence of a nerdy young guy being propelled into a prison shower room.

 It might not take a visitor from another planet, or even another country, to detect something warped in a culture that not only takes rape for granted but expects its children to find it amusing. Here is a case history or two where in order to see the funny side you would really have had to be there:

 "X claimed me as his property and I didn't dispute it. I became obedient, telling myself at least I was surviving.… He publicly humiliated and degraded me, making sure all the inmates and gaurds [sic] knew that I was a queen and his property. Within a week he was pimping me out to other inmates at $3.00 a man. This state of existence continued for two months until he sold me for $25.00 to another black male who purchased me to be his wife."

 This is one of the more printable first-hand accounts from the "Slavery" section of a Human Rights Watch report entitled "No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons."

 http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2005/09/hitchens200509?printable=true&currentPage=all

Human Rights Watch's report titled "No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons," mentioned by both Hitchens and Ezra Klein above:

http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/

   
California's overcrowded prisons

Gulags in the sun

The consequences of three decades of being “tough on crime”

AP

Cruel and unusual

It occurred in a prison in Chino, just east of Los Angeles, that houses nearly twice as many inmates as it was built for, about the same degree of overcrowding that plagues California’s 33 prisons as a whole. It is also one of the prisons that are currently trying to implement a 2005 ruling by the Supreme Court that inmates must not be segregated by race.

The overcrowding in California’s prisons, by far the worst in the country with only Georgia and Alabama coming close, has been the subject of lawsuits for years.

  http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14222337

Graph showing strong correlation between CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and global temperatures through 450,000 years of earth history:

("What do we do now the climate wolf is at the door?," Martin Wolf, Financial Times, July 11 2006 - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/1/b28a816e-1103-11db-9a72-0000779e2340,dwp_uuid=fc2aebdc-32a6-11db-87ac-0000779e2340.html)

This graph shows the same relationship over the last 150 years:

("Global warming could ignite sudden calamity," Fiona Harvey, FT, Sept. 14, 2006)

Graph showing rises in global temperature since 1850:

("In spite of sceptics, it is worth reducing climate risk," by Martin Wolf, Financial Times, February 6, 2007 - text here)

Graph showing actual temperature changes vs. change predicted by modelling natural variations in solar and volcanic activity:

("The Heat is On," The Economist Climate Change Survey, Emma Duncan, Sept. 7, 2006)

Graphic showing CO2 in the atmosphere going back 10,000 years:

("In spite of sceptics, it is worth reducing climate risk," by Martin Wolf, Financial Times, February 6, 2007 - text here)

Graph showing steady rise in global CO2 emissions:

("Climate Effort Could Be Stalled by Credit Crisis," by Stephen Power and Leila Abboud, WSJ, October 16, 2008)

Graphic showing projected CO2 emissions by country:

Graphic showing range of projected temperature rises according to the authoritative Stern Report (anything above 2 degrees celsius is thought to be extremely dangerous - see stories in the Washington Post, Financial Times and the Guardian):

("Stern warning," Economist, Nov 2, 2006)

Graphic showing projected temperature rises:

 ("The heat is on," by Fiona Harvey, FT, December 1, 2008)

Graph from an Economist survey on climate change showing the correlation between warm sea temperatures and hurricanes:

("Reaping the whirlwind," The Economist Climate Change Survey, Emma Duncan, Sept. 7, 2006)

Graphic showing how agriculture yields are projected to decrease in much of the developing world because of climate change (while increasing in much of the North):

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/04/16/business/20080417_WARM1_GRAPHIC.gif.html  

Graphic showing declining Arctic ice cover (here's a pretty amazing NASA video showing arctic melting):

 
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123085070980447477.html

Graphic showing anticipated US coastline should sea levels rise by 39 feet:

Gene Thorp and Patterson Clark, The Washington Post - July 16, 2007

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/15/AR2007071500882_pf.html

 

 

 Begley Is Newsweek’s Science Editor. Prior to returning to Newsweek she wrote the "Science Journal" column at the Wall Street Journal for five years.

NYT story titled "Advances Elusive in the Drive to Cure Cancer":

   
In 1971, flush with the nation’s success in putting a man on the Moon, President Richard M. Nixon announced a new goal. Cancer would be cured by 1976, the bicentennial.

  When 1976 came and went, the date for a cure, or at least substantial progress, kept being put off. It was going to happen by 2000, then by 2015.

  Now, President Barack Obama, discussing his plans for health care, has vowed to find “a cure” for cancer in our time and said that, as part of the economic stimulus package, he would increase federal money for cancer research by a third for the next two years.

  Cancer has always been an expensive priority. Since the war on cancer began, the National Cancer Institute, the federal government’s main cancer research entity, with 4,000 employees, has alone spent $105 billion. And other government agencies, universities, drug companies and philanthropies have chipped in uncounted billions more.

  Yet the death rate for cancer, adjusted for the size and age of the population, dropped only 5 percent from 1950 to 2005. In contrast, the death rate for heart disease dropped 64 percent in that time, and for flu and pneumonia, it fell 58 percent.

  Still, the perception, fed by the medical profession and its marketers, and by popular sentiment, is that cancer can almost always be prevented. If that fails, it can usually be treated, even beaten.

  The good news is that many whose cancer has not spread do well, as they have in the past. In some cases, like early breast cancer, drugs introduced in the past decade have made an already good prognosis even better. And a few rare cancers, like chronic myeloid leukemia, can be controlled for years with new drugs. Cancer treatments today tend to be less harsh. Surgery is less disfiguring, chemotherapy less disabling.

  But difficulties arise when cancer spreads, and, often, it has by the time of diagnosis. That is true for the most common cancers as well as rarer ones.

  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/health/policy/24cancer.html

NYT story titled "Playing It Safe in Cancer Research":

Among the recent research grants awarded by the National Cancer Institute is one for a study asking whether people who are especially responsive to good-tasting food have the most difficulty staying on a diet. Another study will assess a Web-based program that encourages families to choose more healthful foods.

  Many other grants involve biological research unlikely to break new ground. For example, one project asks whether a laboratory discovery involving colon cancer also applies to breast cancer. But even if it does apply, there is no treatment yet that exploits it.

  The cancer institute has spent $105 billion since President Richard M. Nixon declared war on the disease in 1971. The American Cancer Society, the largest private financer of cancer research, has spent about $3.4 billion on research grants since 1946.

  Yet the fight against cancer is going slower than most had hoped, with only small changes in the death rate in the almost 40 years since it began.

  One major impediment, scientists agree, is the grant system itself. It has become a sort of jobs program, a way to keep research laboratories going year after year with the understanding that the focus will be on small projects unlikely to take significant steps toward curing cancer.

  “These grants are not silly, but they are only likely to produce incremental progress,” said Dr. Robert C. Young, chancellor at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia and chairman of the Board of Scientific Advisors, an independent group that makes recommendations to the cancer institute.

  The institute’s reviewers choose such projects because, with too little money to finance most proposals, they are timid about taking chances on ones that might not succeed. The problem, Dr. Young and others say, is that projects that could make a major difference in cancer prevention and treatment are all too often crowded out because they are too uncertain. In fact, it has become lore among cancer researchers that some game-changing discoveries involved projects deemed too unlikely to succeed and were therefore denied federal grants, forcing researchers to struggle mightily to continue.

  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/health/research/28cancer.html

NYT graphic from the above story:

BG op-ed by MIT president Susan Hockfield titled "Gaining Ground on Cancer" (here's a very engaging Charlie Rose interview with President Hockfield):

IN 1971, President Nixon launched the War on Cancer, with the optimistic goal of defeating the disease in eight years with $100 million. More than 35 years and $79 billion later, the war is far from won. While 2002 marked the first-ever yearly decline in US cancer deaths, more than 40 percent of Americans will still contract cancer in their lifetime. What's more, although effective therapies have emerged for some cancers, other types stubbornly resist therapy, and many patients find treatment itself debilitating.

 Given the scale of the problem, advocates like Lance Armstrong call for increased federal funding for cancer research. But, if we have spent so much without defeating the disease, why should we think that further spending will finally conquer the 200 or more diseases we now know as cancer?

 There are two reasons. First, fundamental research takes time, sometimes decades, and we are only now reaping some of the rewards of the fundamental work triggered by the War on Cancer. The drug Herceptin offers highly effective therapy for women with one type of breast cancer; its development depended on molecular discoveries made at MIT in 1979, amplified and extended by the work of researchers at many institutions since.

 The second reason to be optimistic about progress on cancer is that recent innovations have dramatically accelerated cancer research.

 In the early 1990s, when fundamental research in my own neurobiology lab opened a new approach to primary brain cancer, gains came slowly, one protein or one gene at a time, and depended on experimental systems that only partially mimicked human disease. Today, thanks to new technologies, researchers collect and analyze more data in a year than their mentors could in a whole career. Startling new tools from chemical, biological, and nano-scale engineering have dramatically shortened the road to new discoveries and new therapies - as we have seen already in revolutionary cardiac treatments like drug-eluting stents.

 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/04/28/gaining_ground_on_cancer?mode=PF

NYT story titled "New Effort Aims to Unlock Secrets of Cancer Genes":

The government is beginning a project that aims to unlock all the genetic abnormalities that contribute to cancer, an effort that would exceed the Human Genome Project in complexity but could eventually lead to new diagnostic tests and treatments for the disease.

 Government officials said today that they would spend $100 million over three years on a pilot phase of the project, which will be called The Cancer Genome Atlas. "This is a revolutionary project," Anna D. Barker, deputy director of the National Cancer Institute, said at a news briefing in Washington. "It's going to empower all cancer researchers with an entire new set of data to work with."

 Her agency will contribute half the money with the other half provided by the National Human Genome Research Institute. Both are part of the National Institutes of Health.

 Scientists have long known that genetic mutations that accumulate in normal cells over a person's lifetime can turn those cells cancerous. About 300 genes involved in cancer are known already and there are a handful of drugs that work by interfering with specific genetic abnormalities.

 ..."We are still working with an incomplete compass," said Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. "The time is right to bring the full power of genomics to bear on the problem of cancer."

 The project would involve determining the sequence of letters in the DNA of cancer cells taken from tumor samples taken from biopsies or surgery. The initials of the project's name, T.C.G.A., represent the four letters of the genetic code.

 Scientists will also look for other changes, like duplications or deletions of genes, or differences between cells in which genes are turned on or turned off.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/health/13cnd-genome.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1209478202-IG06eZXqg5kFwRhr5cY4OQ

NYT story titled "Slowly, Cancer Genes Tender Their Secrets":

The turning point came only recently, with the advent of new technology. Using microarrays, or gene chips - small slivers of glass or nylon that can be coated with all known human genes - scientists can now discover every gene that is active in a cancer cell and learn what portions of the genes are amplified or deleted.

 With another method, called RNA interference, investigators can turn off any gene and see what happens to a cell. And new methods of DNA sequencing make it feasible to start asking what changes have taken place in what gene.

 The National Cancer Institute and the National Human Genome Research Institute recently announced a three-year pilot project to map genetic aberrations in cancer cells.

 The project, Dr. Druker said, is "the first step to identifying all the Achilles' heels in cancers."

 Solving the problem of cancer will not be trivial, Dr. Golub said. But, he added, "For the first time, we have the tools needed to attack the problem, and if we as a research community come together to work out the genetic basis of cancer, I think it will forever change how we think about the disease."

 Already, the principles are in place, scientists say. What is left are the specifics: the gene alterations that could be targets for drugs.

 "We're close to being able to put our arms around the whole cancer problem," said Robert Weinberg, a biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Whitehead Institute. "We've completed the list of all cancer cells needed to create a malignancy," Dr. Weinberg said. "And I wouldn't have said that five years ago."

 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/health/27canc.html?pagewanted=print

WSJ story titled "In Long-Awaited Maps of Cancer, The Breakthrough Is the Problem":

After struggling for years to improve the treatment of cancer, scientists now hope to fight the disease with the help of the same techniques that deciphered the human genome eight years ago: mapping it.
Traditionally, researchers have started with a fuzzy premise about which toxic drugs might kill tumors and then tested those drugs in the lab, in animals and, finally, in human subjects. This helps explain why some 35 years after Richard Nixon declared a "war on cancer," there has been only limited progress in the treatment of most of the 200 cancers that afflict humans. In most cases, "we extend life a little at great cost," says geneticist Garth Anderson of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N.Y.
Now, scientists are trying to eliminate the guesswork by using powerful gene-sequencing machines to identify which genetic alterations cause which cancers -- an ambition reflected in three papers published this week. The hope is to offer differentiated treatment to patients based on their different tumor profiles. But the picture is enormously complicated. For example, scientists had expected to identify certain key genes that were frequently mutated. They found the opposite: a large number of mutated genes, but each mutated in a smaller fraction of the tumors.
"We used to think there was one enemy that was well-defined, but now we know there are lots of little enemies," says Victor Velculescu of Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and a co-author of two papers in the journal Science. Stephen Eldridge, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School who wasn't involved with the recent studies but is familiar with the findings, says new knowledge of cancer's complexity suggests that it still won't be easy to find good treatments. But "it's a new era in cancer research," he says.
In the papers that came out this week, researchers provide a detailed blueprint of tiny genetic mutations that appear to be linked to two of the most lethal cancers: pancreatic cancer and a brain cancer known as glioblastoma multiforme. The findings suggest that cancer's molecular machinery appears to be far more intricate than anyone imagined.
Two separate papers in Science on pancreatic and brain cancer are the result of a private cancer-genome project led by researchers at Johns Hopkins. A third study, in Nature, also on glioblastoma, is the product of a far larger project funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
After years of the hit-and-miss approach, targeted anticancer drugs such as Herceptin, for breast cancer, and Gleevec, for a type of leukemia, have arrived on the scene, sparking intense industry interest in agents that narrowly attack specific targets of a tumor's cellular machinery.

  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122058186705402585.html

NYT story titled "Scientists Decode Set of Cancer Genes":

For the first time, researchers have decoded all the genes of a person with cancer and found a set of mutations that may have caused the disease or aided its progression.

  Using cells donated by a woman in her 50s who died of leukemia, the scientists sequenced all the DNA from her cancer cells and compared it to the DNA from her own normal, healthy skin cells. Then, they zeroed in on 10 mutations that occurred only in the cancer cells, apparently spurring abnormal growth, preventing the cells from suppressing that growth and enabling them to fight off chemotherapy.

  Mutations are genetic mistakes, and the ones found in this research were not inborn, but developed later in life, like most mutations that cause cancer. (Only 5 to 10 percent of all cancers are thought to be hereditary.)

  The new research, by looking at the entire genome — all the DNA — and aiming to find all the mutations involved in a particular cancer, differs markedly from earlier studies, which have searched fewer genes for individual mutations. The project, which took months and cost $1 million, was made possible by recent advances in technology that have made it easier and cheaper to analyze 100 million DNA snippets than it used to be to analyze 100.

  The study was done at Washington University in St. Louis and is being published Thursday in the journal Nature. It is the first report of a “cancer genome,” and researchers say many more are to come.

  The findings will not help patients immediately, but researchers say they could lead to new therapies and will almost certainly help doctors make better choices among existing treatments, based on a more detailed genetic picture of each patient’s cancer. Though the research involved leukemia, the same techniques can also be used to study the genomes of other cancers, and the researchers expect to apply them to breast, brain and lung cancers.

  “This is the first of many of these whole cancer genomes to be sequenced,” said Richard K. Wilson, director of Washington University’s Genome Sequencing Center and the senior author of the study. “They’ll give us a whole bunch of clues about what’s going on in the DNA when cancer starts to bloom.”

  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/health/research/06cancer.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

NYT story titled "Screening Could Lead to More Potent Cancer Drugs":

Researchers have discovered a way to identify drugs that can specifically attack and kill cancer stem cells, a finding that could lead to a new generation of anticancer medicines and a new strategy of treatment.

  Many researchers believe that tumor growth is driven by cancerous stem cells that, for reasons not understood, are highly resistant to standard treatments. Chemotherapy agents may kill off 99 percent of cells in a tumor, but the stem cells that remain can make the cancer recur, the theory holds, or spread to other tissues to cause new cancers. Stem cells, unlike mature cells, can constantly renew themselves and are thought to be the source of cancers when, through mutations in their DNA, they throw off their natural restraints.

  A practical test of this theory has been difficult because cancer stem cells are hard to recognize and have proved elusive targets. But a team at the Broad Institute, a Harvard-M.I.T. collaborative for genomics research, has devised a way of screening for drugs that attack cancer stem cells but leave ordinary cells unharmed.

  Cancer stem cells are hard to maintain in sufficient numbers, but the Broad Institute team devised a genetic manipulation to keep breast cancer stem cells trapped in the stem cell state.

  The team, led by Piyush B. Gupta, screened 16,000 chemicals, including all known chemotherapeutic agents approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The team reported in the Thursday issue of Cell that 32 of the chemicals selectively went after cancer stem cells.

  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/health/research/14cancer.html?em=&pagewanted=print

NYT story titled "Stem Cells May Be Key to Cancer":

One day, perhaps in the distant future, stem cells may help repair diseased tissues. But there is a far more pressing reason to study them: stem cells are the source of at least some, and perhaps all, cancers.

 At the heart of every tumor, some researchers believe, lie a handful of aberrant stem cells that maintain the malignant tissue.

 The idea, if right, could explain why tumors often regenerate even after being almost destroyed by anticancer drugs. It also points to a different strategy for developing anticancer drugs, suggesting they should be selected for lethality to cancer stem cells and not, as at present, for their ability to kill just any cells and shrink tumors.

 "I think this is one of the most interesting developments in cancer research in the last five years," says Robert Weinberg, a cancer geneticist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass. "I think more and more people are accepting it and evidence is accumulating that cancer stem cells exist in a variety of tumors."

 The idea that cancer cells possess the same properties as stem cells has been around for many years. Only recently have biologists developed techniques for identifying stem cells and their presence in tumors.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/health/21canc.html?pagewanted=print

NYT story titled "Scientists Begin to Grasp the Stealthy Spread of Cancer":

The moment when a cancer begins to spread throughout the body — metastasis — has always been the most dreaded turning point of the disease.

 Without metastasis, cancer would barely be a blip on the collective consciousness. Fewer than 10 percent of cancer deaths are caused by the primary tumor; the rest stem from metastasis to vital sites like the lungs, the liver, the bones and the brain.

 Though chemotherapy and other treatments have lengthened the lives of people with metastasized cancer, no drugs have been specifically formulated to halt the process. That is because metastasis has remained something of a mystery until the last five years or so.

 “In the last 30 years, we’ve learned all about identifying genes whose mutations initiate tumors,” said Dr. Joan Massagué, chairman of the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. But these advances, he added, did not explain the metastatic process.

 Now, knowledge of metastasis is beginning to accumulate to the point that new therapies are entering the pipeline.
“In terms of milestones or breakthroughs, most of them are about to be made,” said Dr. Massagué.

 Dr. Patricia S. Steeg, chief of the women’s cancers section of the Laboratory of Molecular Pharmacology at the National Cancer Institute, said she was optimistic for the first time. “The trickle is close, the first agents are in early clinical testing or will be soon,” she said. “I’m very enthusiastic, much more than I was five years ago.”

 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/15/health/15meta.html?pagewanted=print

WSJ story titled "Genetic Research May Help Pick Patients' Best Cancer Drugs":

New genetic research emerging from a major cancer meeting here could help doctors better identify the drugs most likely to work in their patients -- but sharply reduce the market for certain blockbuster cancer drugs.
The research, presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, highlights an important shift in cancer treatment and in attitudes of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies toward "personalized medicine," in which treatment is tailored to an individual based on his or her genetic makeup. Companies are beginning to accept a smaller market for some medicines in return for a better chance that those who use them will have a good result.
The interest reflects growing frustration over the limited number of patients who achieve a meaningful improvement in survival, despite the introduction of many cancer drugs in recent years. Although many of the new drugs target specific cancer genes, under current practice doctors administer these expensive targeted drugs without knowing whether the patient has the right type of cancer genes. Patients often undergo a hit-or-miss series of drug treatments to find one that works, an expensive and frequently uncomfortable process.
The focus of attention at the cancer meeting is a gene called K-ras, a regulator of cell growth that researchers say plays a crucial role in several cancers. A study featured Sunday indicated that about 36% of patients with advanced colon cancer have a mutated form of the K-ras gene that all but assures they won't to respond to ImClone Systems Inc.'s drug Erbitux. That suggests doctors using the drug should focus on the 64% who have a normal version of the gene, for whom the study showed chances of a benefit are much higher.
("Genetic Research May Help Pick Patients' Best Cancer Drugs," by Ron Winslow and Marilyn Chase, WSJ, June 2, 2008) 

WSJ op-ed by a Cancer specialist and a professor titled "The New Ways We Fight Cancer":

This week, the National Cancer Institute, in conjunction with other organizations that track cancers, reported that the death rate from cancer declined from 2002-2004 by an average of 2.1% per year. This is an improvement over the 1.1% annual declines from 1993-2002 and is very good news indeed. Each 1% decline represents 5,000 people living rather than dying, and, of course, this figure is compounded each year.
While some part of the declining death rate from cancer is the consequence of screening, much is the result of greatly improved treatments. And we believe that the successes achieved to date are only the modest beginning of a revolution in the research into and treatment of cancer.
During the last half of the 20th century, almost all treatments of cancers involved forms of chemotherapy in which cancerous and normal tissues were bombarded with nonselective cytoxic drugs. These drugs killed all cells, healthy as well as malignant. Worse, they did not kill all cancer cells, so the cancer progressed -- leading to the pessimism dominant in people's minds today, a reflection of years of articles and opinion pieces in the popular press expressing the view that "the war on cancer" has been waged incorrectly, if not lost.
Now, however, new therapeutic modes are in play, based on better understandings of cancers and great advances in technologies. Scientists are at last on the right track and making progress along three fronts. First, many cancers will be turned into chronic illnesses, each treated with far less toxic drugs with far fewer and less severe side effects, so that a patient can live a normal life span with a near normal quality of life. (A loose analogy would be to diabetics.) These treatments are probably closer to being realized than most people would guess.
Second, the prevention of entire types of cancers will occur through vaccinations, an approach already in clinical use. Third, cancers already growing in individuals will be eradicated. Here is just a partial list of the new approaches:

• Vaccines...

- Epigenetics...

• Targeted therapies...

• Cancer "stem cells"...

http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB119267217047662989.html 

WSJ story titled "Lifestyle Changes Could Prevent Almost Half of Cancer Deaths":

As many as half of cancer deaths could be prevented if more people made lifestyle changes such as avoiding smoking and excessive sun exposure, eating nutritiously and getting regular exercise and recommended health screenings, according to a study from the American Cancer Society.
Whether due to socioeconomic or personal challenges, many people have trouble following common health precautions, said Vilma Cokkinides, co-author of the report and program director of risk-factor surveillance for the American Cancer Society in Atlanta.
"What's astonishing is how small the numbers are in terms of the population actually doing these things," Ms. Cokkinides said. "It's a disconnect....The awareness that theoretically half [of cancer deaths] could be prevented hasn't gotten in the mindset."
Smoking is the biggest sticking point because it increases the risk of many kinds of cancer, not just lung, and is expected to kill 170,000 this year. About a third of the 564,830 expected cancer deaths in 2006 will be related to poor diets, physical inactivity and obesity, which itself causes many chronic illnesses, the report said.
Americans have been receiving the antitobacco message for decades, but one in five adults still lights up. Despite calls for better nutrition and more physical activity to maintain a healthy weight, waistlines are growing dangerously wider. And few people do enough to protect their skin from the sun's harmful rays, leading to high rates of skin cancer.
People also fail to follow commonly recommended screenings based on age, family and medical history to catch cancer in its earliest, most treatable phases, the study said.
The ability to keep up with recommended screenings for colorectal, cervical and breast cancer -- where evidence of effective treatment and reduced chance of death is greatest -- is largely dependent on whether people have health insurance, Ms. Cokkinides said. "It's perhaps the single most important determinant."
("Lifestyle Changes Could Prevent Almost Half of Cancer Deaths," by Kristen Gerencher, WSJ, April 6, 2006 - behind a pay wall, email me to send)

WP op-ed titled "Off Target in the War on Cancer'':

We've been fighting the war on cancer for almost four decades now, since President Richard M. Nixon officially launched it in 1971. It's time to admit that our efforts have often targeted the wrong enemies and used the wrong weapons.

 Throughout the industrial world, the war on cancer remains focused on commercially fueled efforts to develop drugs and technologies that can find and treat the disease -- to the tune of more than $100 billion a year in the United States alone. Meanwhile, the struggle basically ignores most of the things known to cause cancer, such as tobacco, radiation, sunlight, benzene, asbestos, solvents, and some drugs and hormones. Even now, modern cancer-causing agents such as gasoline exhaust, pesticides and other air pollutants are simply deemed the inevitable price of progress.

 They're not. Scientists understand that most cancer is not born but made. Although identical twins start life with amazingly similar genetic material, as adults they do not develop the same cancers. As with most of us, where they live and work and the habits that they develop do more to determine their health than their genes do. Americans in their 20s today carry around in their bodies levels of some chemicals that can impair their ability to produce healthy children -- and increase the chances that those children will develop cancer.

 Consider the icon of American cancer, the cyclist Lance Armstrong. He's hardly alone as an inspiring younger survivor. Of the 10 million American cancer survivors who are alive five years after their diagnosis, about one in 10 is younger than 40. Could exposure to radiation and obesity-promoting chemicals help explain why, according to a study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, the rates of the testicular cancer that Armstrong developed nearly doubled in most industrialized countries in the past three decades? Should we wait to find out?

 I'm calling for prudence and prevention, not panic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Working Group have confirmed that American children are being born with dozens of chemicals in their bodies that did not exist just two decades earlier, including toxic flame retardants from fabrics. A new study by Barbara Cohn and other scientists at the Public Health Institute in Berkeley, Calif., finds that girls exposed to elevated levels of the pesticide DDT before age 14 are five times more likely to develop breast cancer when they reach middle age.

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110201648_pf.html

WSJ story titled "Cancer Scientists Lament Funding":

Leading U.S. cancer scientists say that five years of flat federal funding of cancer research is threatening to undo major strides made against the disease.
Nancy Davidson, president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, said researchers had experienced a $500 million decline in real spending during "the longest sustained period of flat funding" in memory. She spoke during a news conference Friday opening ASCO's annual meeting. Billed as the world's largest forum on cancer research, this year's event is expected to draw 30,000 people to hear reports on 4,200 studies.
John Niederhuber, director of the National Cancer Institute, a unit of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., said his organization's $4.8 billion fiscal-2008 budget -- the main engine of federal funding for cancer research -- has remained in an "unbelievably flat trough since 2004."
Dr. Davidson, a professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said the situation has led to a curtailment of research into breast cancer, melanoma, sarcoma and pediatric cancer.
"A hundred Phase I and Phase II clinical trials have been postponed, and the number of people able to participate in clinical trials has been reduced by 3,000," she said.
More than 1.4 million Americans will develop cancer this year, and about 560,000 are expected to die from the disease. There now are between 10 million and 11 million U.S. cancer survivors, up from about 3 million in the 1970s -- a measure of the gains that could be threatened.
http://www.fightplga.org/files/Cancer_Scientists_Lament_Funding.pdf

Charlie Rose had a special show on cancer which is worth watching:

A discussion of the latest advances in cancer, from the genetics to cancer prevention, early detection, diagnosis, treatment and management of care. (Cancer News Release)

Guests:
• Martin Abeloff, Johns Hopkins University
• David G. Nathan, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
• Deborah Schrag, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
• Harold Varmus, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2007/04/18/1/the-latest-on-cancer-research-episode-four-of-the-charlie-rose-science-series

 

To Fight Cancer, Know the Enemy

Martin Wolf FT column on good and bad forms of European capitalism ("Europeans can look to each other"):

The “Nordic model” (Denmark, Finland, Sweden, plus the Netherlands) has the highest public spending on social protection and universal welfare provision. Labour markets are relatively unregulated but there are “active” labour market policies, while strong unions deliver a high degree of wage equality.

 

The “Anglo-Saxon” model (Ireland and the UK) provides quite generous social assistance of last resort, with cash transfers going mainly to people of working age. Unions are weak and the labour market relatively unregulated.

 The “Rhineland model” (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg) relies on social insurance for those out of work, as well as for provision of pensions. Employment protection is stronger than in the Nordic countries. Unions are also powerful or enjoy legal support for extension of the results of collective bargaining.

 Finally, the “Mediterranean” model (Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain) concentrates public spending on old-age pensions. Heavy regulation protects (and lowers) employment, while generous support for early retirement seeks to reduce the number of job-seekers.

 ...How well then do these different approaches work in terms of two fundamental European objectives: high levels of employment and elimination of relative poverty?

 On the former goal, both the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon models perform well and the Rhineland and Mediterranean models relatively poorly. On the latter objective, the Rhineland and Nordic models do well and the Mediterranean and Anglo-Saxon models poorly (see chart). Prof Sapir argues, intriguingly, that the main reason for the underperformance of the Anglo-Saxon model on poverty alleviation is not the lack of fiscal redistribution but poor educational standards at the bottom.

 The Nordic model is good for both employment and poverty alleviation and the Mediterranean model bad. Meanwhile, the Anglo-Saxon model is good on employment and bad on poverty alleviation, while the Rhineland model is the reverse. As Prof Sapir puts it, the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic models are efficient (at least for the labour market), while the Rhineland and Nordic models are equitable. He adds that the inefficient models may also be unsustainable. One indication of this is that the Rhineland and Mediterranean countries have higher ratios of public debt to GDPgross domestic product, at 73 per cent and 81 per cent, respectively, against 36 per cent in the Anglo-Saxon group and 49 per cent among the Nordics.

 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/53b84494-2484-11da-a5d0-00000e2511c8,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F1%2F53b84494-2484-11da-a5d0-00000e2511c8.html&_i_referer=http%3A%2F%2Findustrialrelations.typepad.com%2Funionsfirmsmarkets%2Fglobalization%2Findex.html

Jeff Sachs column in Scientific American in praise of the Scandinavian model ("The Social Welfare State, beyond Ideology"):

One of the great challenges of sustainable development is to combine society's desires for economic prosperity and social security. For decades economists and politicians have debated how to reconcile the undoubted power of markets with the reassuring protections of social insurance.

...Most of the debate in the U.S. is clouded by vested interests and by ideology. Yet there is by now a rich empirical rec-ord to judge these issues scientifically. The evidence may be found by comparing a group of relatively free-market economies that have low to moderate rates of taxation and social outlays with a group of social-welfare states that have high rates of taxation and social outlays.  

Not coincidentally, the low-tax, high-income countries are mostly English-speaking ones that share a direct historical lineage with 19th-century Britain and its theories of economic laissez-faire. These countries include Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the U.K. and the U.S. The high-tax, high-income states are the Nordic social democracies, notably Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, which have been governed by left-of-center social democratic parties for much or all of the post–World War II era. They combine a healthy respect for market forces with a strong commitment to antipoverty programs. Budgetary outlays for social purposes average around 27 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the Nordic countries and just 17 percent of GDP in the English-speaking countries.

 

On average, the Nordic countries outperform the Anglo-Saxon ones on most measures of economic performance. Poverty rates are much lower there, and national income per working-age population is on average higher. Unemployment rates are roughly the same in both groups, just slightly higher in the Nordic countries. The budget situation is stronger in the Nordic group, with larger surpluses as a share of GDP.

 

The Nordic countries maintain their dynamism despite high taxation in several ways. Most important, they spend lavishly on research and development and higher education. All of them, but especially Sweden and Finland, have taken to the sweeping revolution in information and communications technology and leveraged it to gain global competitiveness. Sweden now spends nearly 4 percent of GDP on R&D, the highest ratio in the world today. On average, the Nordic nations spend 3 percent of GDP on R&D, compared with around 2 percent in the English-speaking nations.

 

The Nordic states have also worked to keep social expenditures compatible with an open, competitive, market-based economic system. Tax rates on capital are relatively low. Labor market policies pay low-skilled and otherwise difficult-to-employ individuals to work in the service sector, in key quality-of-life areas such as child care, health, and support for the elderly and disabled.

 

 
 
http://sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=000AF3D5-6DC9-152E-A9F183414B7F0000

List of the "World's Most Competitive Economies":

COUNTRY RANKINGS 2006-2007

1. Switzerland

2. Finland

3. Sweden

4. Denmark

5. Singapore

6. U.S.

7. Japan

8. Germany

9. Netherlands

10. U.K.

11. Hong Kong

12. Norway

13. Taiwan, China

14. Iceland

15. Israel

Source: Global Competitiveness Report, World Economic Forum

("U.S. Loses Top Spot to Switzerland In Global Competitiveness Survey," by Marcus Walker, WSJ, Sept. 26, 2006 - behind a pay wall, email me to send)

Nobel Prize winning economist Joe Stigiltz writing in praise of Scandinavian countries in an article titled "A Progressive Response to Globalization":

Yet Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries have shown that there is an alternative way to cope with globalization. These countries are highly integrated into the global economy; but they are highly successful economies that still provide strong social protections and make high levels of investments in people. They have been successful in part because of these policies, not in spite of them. Full employment and strong safety nets enable individuals to undertake more risk (with the commensurate high rewards) without unduly worrying about the downside of failure. These countries have not abandoned the welfare state but have fine-tuned it to meet globalization's new demands. We should do the same.
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20060417&s=forum

Economist comparing social mobility in Europe and the US:

The obvious explanation for greater mobility in the Nordic countries is their tax and welfare systems, which (especially when compared with America's) deliberately try to help the children of the poor to do better than their parents. One might expect social mobility and economic flexibility to go together—in fact, to be two sides of the same coin. But to the extent that redistribution is an explanation, it implies the opposite: that social mobility is a product of high public spending, a bit like the low incidence of poverty or longer life expectancy (on both of which Europe also does better than America).

("Snakes and Ladders," May 26, 2006 - email me to send)

WP story titled "Innovation Gives Finland A Firm Grasp on Its Future":

A relatively backward agricultural country became a high-tech powerhouse with labor productivity as good or better than that in the United States, but also a welfare state as generous as any in Europe.

  Perhaps the most revealing statistic behind this transformation is Finland's commitment to research and development. The Finns put 3.5 percent of their domestic product into R&D last year, second in the world to Sweden (about 4.3 percent) and far ahead of the United States (about 2.6 percent) or the E.U. as a whole (less than 2 percent).

  R&D expenditures symbolize the Finnish resolve to preserve a comfortable place in a globalized world for an underpopulated nation with thousands of lakes and billions of trees. Typically, the decision to spend so much on scientific research and the adaptation of its results to commercial purposes was the result of a broad political consensus. Finland steadily increased government spending on R&D throughout the 1990s, when all other spending was either cut or frozen.

  Three Finnish institutions channel this money. One is a unique body called Tekes, the national technology agency. It supports both basic and applied research, granting about 40 percent of its funds to universities and other research institutions and 60 percent to businesses.

  This year, according to Veli-Pekka Saarnivaara, the president of Tekes, the organization will give out nearly $540 million, or more than $10,000 for each Finnish citizen. A U.S. agency investing a comparable amount per capita would put $300 billion a year into American R&D.

  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/13/AR2005071302227_pf.html

WP story titled "In Finland's Footsteps":

Finns have one of the world's most generous systems of state-funded educational, medical and welfare services, from pregnancy to the end of life. They pay nothing for education at any level, including medical school or law school. Their medical care, which contributes to an infant mortality rate that is half of ours and a life expectancy greater than ours, costs relatively little. (Finns devote 7 percent of gross domestic product to health care; we spend 15 percent.) Finnish senior citizens are well cared for. Unemployment benefits are good and last, in one form or another, indefinitely.

  ...Teaching had always been a high-status profession in Finland, but now it would become even more prestigious. (Today there are 10 applicants for every place in the universities that train teachers.) Teachers would be required to complete master's degrees, six years of preparation that combined education courses with substantive work in subject areas. "Of course I faced much criticism," Aho recalled. "Upper secondary school teachers were very skeptical. Many parents were critical. The cultural elite said this would mean catastrophe for Finnish schools. The right thought the comprehensive schools smacked of socialism."

  But by the end of the 1980s, the new system was broadly popular. It was strengthened by a reform of higher education that gave Finland numerous new, high-quality universities. A grave economic recession in the early '90s was a key test, Aho said. "It was wonderful to see how strong the consensus was" that even in dire economic straits, Finland had to save this new school system, which had become "so important to the society," he said.

  Indeed it had. Finland in the '90s became a high-tech powerhouse, led by Nokia, now the world's largest maker of cell phones. Finnish students have become the best in the world, as measured by an internationally administered exam that assesses the educational progress of 15-year-olds in all the industrial countries.

  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/05/AR2005080502015_pf.html

Guardian story titled "Sweden plans to be world's first oil-free economy":

Sweden is to take the biggest energy step of any advanced western economy by trying to wean itself off oil completely within 15 years - without building a new generation of nuclear power stations.

The attempt by the country of 9 million people to become the world's first practically oil-free economy is being planned by a committee of industrialists, academics, farmers, car makers, civil servants and others, who will report to parliament in several months.

The intention, the Swedish government said yesterday, is to replace all fossil fuels with renewables before climate change destroys economies and growing oil scarcity leads to huge new price rises.

"Our dependency on oil should be broken by 2020," said Mona Sahlin, minister of sustainable development.

Sweden has a head start over most countries. In 2003, 26% of all the energy consumed came from renewable sources..

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,5394081-110373,00.html

Some stats from an excellent essay in the NYRB by Tony Judt comparing Europe to America:

Average number of hours worked per year:

US:                             1777

Germany:                     1362

France:                        1346

Sweden:                      1316

Netherlands:                 1309

(Source: OECD (2004), OECD in Figures, OECD, Paris)

Number of prisoners per 100,000 people:

US:                            685

EU:                            87

("Europe vs. America," Tony Judt, Feb. 10, 2005, New York Review of Books)

Ratio of CEO pay to average manufacturing employee:

US:                            475:1

Britain:                        24:1

France:                       15:1

Sweden:                     13:1

("Europe vs. America," Tony Judt, Feb. 10, 2005, New York Review of Books)

Productivity per hour worked (United States=100)

Norway:                      119.7

Belgium:                      109.0

Netherlands:                105.2

France:                       104.9

Germany*:                   103.9

US:                             100

Finland:                        89.5

Sweden:                      88.0

Britain:                         85.3

Canada:                       84.0

(International Productivity Monitor: www.csls.ca/ipm/9/sharpe-tables.pdf)

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17726

WSJ titled "For the Danish, A Job Loss Can Be Learning Experience":

Most of Western Europe is fighting to hold on to its traditionally strong job protections while in some cases cutting jobless benefits, as the region struggles to compete in a globalized economy. Denmark has gone the other way.

The government allows liberal hiring and firing as in the U.S. And it has imposed limits on the duration of its high unemployment benefits. But it also invests more than any other country, as a percentage of its gross domestic product, in retraining the jobless -- a combination it calls "flexicurity." Its unusual mix of the free market and big government has helped Denmark cut its unemployment rate in half, from about 10% in the early 1990s to U.S.-style levels of under 5% now. The economy has been relatively robust, growing 3.4% last year. Meanwhile, France and Germany are at or above the Danish jobless rate of a decade ago.

Even though Danes are among the most easily laid-off workers in Europe, polls show the country's workers are the most secure about their future. The European Commission now holds up Denmark as a model for other countries to try to follow. Politicians from other EU countries have made numerous study trips to Copenhagen. France has cited Denmark as a model for its own more modest labor-law reforms, which in recent days have touched off mass public protests.

Meanwhile, Danes change jobs more frequently than any workers in the developed world except Americans and Australians, says the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. But fewer than 10% say they're concerned about job security, compared with nearly 40% in Germany and more than 60% in Spain. Most Danes believe they can always find work in their fluid labor market. In the interim, they get security from a dole that replaces up to nine-tenths of their last wage, the highest level in Europe.

("For the Danish, A Job Loss Can Be Learning Experience," by Marcus Walker, WSJ, March 21, 2006 - behind a pay wall, email me to send)

Graph from a NYT story showing the size of the safety net in various industrialized countries:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/business/yourmoney/01view.html?ex=1333080000&en=d3f9d7e4bfc2fa2c&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Foreign aid giving as a percentage of GNP:

Norway:                     0.93

Sweden:                    0.92

Netherlands:               0.82

Denmark:                   0.84

Britain:                       0.48

France:                      0.47

Ireland:                      0.41

Germany:                   0.35

Canada:                     0.34

Italy:                         0.29

Australia:                    0.25

US:                           0.22

http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/involved/action07.htm

Yale University's 2008 Environmental Performance Index:

1)      Switzerland                        95.5

2)      Norway                                93.1

3)      Sweden                                               93.1

4)      Finland                                 91.4

5)      Costa Rica                            90.5

6)      Austria                                  89.4

7)      New Zealand                     88.9

8)      Latvia                                    88.8

9)      Colombia                             88.3

10)   France                                  87.8

11)   Iceland                                 87.6

12)   Canada                                 86.6

13)   Germany                             86.3

14)   UK                                          86.3

15)   Slovenia                               86.3

16)   Lithuania                              86.2

17)   Slovakia                                86.0

21) Japan                                     84.5

28) Russia                                    83.9

34) Brazil                                      82.7

39) United States                     81.0

104) China                                   65.1

http://epi.yale.edu/CountryScores

United Nations 2007/2008 Human Development Index rankings (rankings for all countries at link):

1. Iceland
2. Norway
3. Australia
4. Canada
5. Ireland
6. Sweden
7. Switzerland
8. Japan
9. Netherlands
10. France
11. Finland
12. United States
13. Spain
14. Denmark
15. Austria
16. United Kingdom
17. Belgium
18. Luxembourg
19. New Zealand
20. Italy

http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/

Human Poverty Index (a subsection of the Human Development Report)

1)      Sweden

2)      Norway

3)      Netherlands

4)      Finland

5)      Denmark

6)      Germany

7)      Switzerland

8)      Canada

9)      Luxembourg

10)   Austria

11)   France

12)   Japan

13)   Australia

14)   Belgium

15)   Spain

16)   United Kingdom

17)   United States

18)   Ireland

19)   Italy

20)   Iceland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Poverty_Index

NYT graphic showing comparative infant mortality stats:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/16/health/16infant.html

 

   

NYT story titled "New Glimpses of Life’s Puzzling Origins":

Some 3.9 billion years ago, a shift in the orbit of the Sun’s outer planets sent a surge of large comets and asteroids careening into the inner solar system. Their violent impacts gouged out the large craters still visible on the Moon’s face, heated Earth’s surface into molten rock and boiled off its oceans into an incandescent mist.

Yet rocks that formed on Earth 3.8 billion years ago, almost as soon as the bombardment had stopped, contain possible evidence of biological processes. If life can arise from inorganic matter so quickly and easily, why is it not abundant in the solar system and beyond? If biology is an inherent property of matter, why have chemists so far been unable to reconstruct life, or anything close to it, in the laboratory?

The origins of life on Earth bristle with puzzle and paradox. Which came first, the proteins of living cells or the genetic information that makes them? How could the metabolism of living things get started without an enclosing membrane to keep all the necessary chemicals together? But if life started inside a cell membrane, how did the necessary nutrients get in?

The questions may seem moot, since life did start somehow. But for the small group of researchers who insist on learning exactly how it started, frustration has abounded. Many once-promising leads have led only to years of wasted effort. Scientists as eminent as Francis Crick, the chief theorist of molecular biology, have quietly suggested that life may have formed elsewhere before seeding the planet, so hard does it seem to find a plausible explanation for its emergence on Earth.

In the last few years, however, four surprising advances have renewed confidence that a terrestrial explanation for life’s origins will eventually emerge.

  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/science/16orig.html

Nature review by Lewis Wolpert of a new book titled "Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution" (in a related vein, this week's Science has a paper titled "On the Origin of Eukaryotes"):

The variety of living things is astonishing — as is their evolution. Nick Lane describes in Life Ascending "the greatest inventions of evolution, how each one transformed the living world, and how we humans have learned to read this past with an ingenuity that rivals nature herself". The ten inventions he has chosen are the origin of life, DNA, photosynthesis, the complex cell, sex, movement, sight, hot blood, consciousness and death. Not everyone will agree with his choice. But his writing and explanations are excellent and imaginative and, similar to life itself, the book is full of surprises.

  The origin of life — the evolution of the single cell from which all life is derived — is not yet solved. Particularly difficult to explain is the evolution of cell division. The first cells were simple bacteria, but they were complex in that their constituent molecules interacted in a reliable way. Eukaryotic cells with a nucleus and with mitochondria came later. The book mentions the origin of mitochondria — thought to have occurred when a primitive eukaryotic cell swallowed a bacterium — but explaining the origin of the nucleus is harder.

  Surprisingly, Lane pays little attention to proteins. He discusses genes in detail, but in the cell they are passive, coding for the true workers: the proteins. Proteins provide the cell with the ability to synthesize and break down molecules, and they turn genes on and off and replicate DNA. They give the cell its basic structure. But how did proteins evolve?

  A major omission from Lane's list of inventions is the embryo and the development of complex forms from a single cell. The origin of multicellularity is not discussed, yet it is fundamental to the evolution of all animals. My view is that it may have evolved when a group of cells stuck together after dividing and then, when food was in short supply, some cells survived by eating each other. This could have given rise to the egg, which is a cell fed by other cells.

  ("Great inventions of life," by Lewis Wolpert, Nature, Published online 22 July 2009 - behind a pay wall, email me to send)

Richard Dawkins had a very interesting interview with Craig Venter:

http://richarddawkins.net/article,4012,Craig-Venter---The-Genius-of-Charles-Darwin-The-Uncut-Interviews,Richard-Dawkins-Craig-Venter

Finally, an apposite Freeman Dyson NYRB piece titled "Our Biotech Future":

It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology. Two facts about the coming century are agreed on by almost everyone. Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century. Biology is also more important than physics, as measured by its economic consequences, by its ethical implications, or by its effects on human welfare.

  These facts raise an interesting question. Will the domestication of high technology, which we have seen marching from triumph to triumph with the advent of personal computers and GPS receivers and digital cameras, soon be extended from physical technology to biotechnology? I believe that the answer to this question is yes. Here I am bold enough to make a definite prediction. I predict that the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our lives during the next fifty years at least as much as the domestication of computers has dominated our lives during the previous fifty years.

  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20370

 

   

 

 

A new twist on life

NYT story titled "Symbol of Unhealed Congo: Male Rape Victims":

For years, the thickly forested hills and clear, deep lakes of eastern Congo have been a reservoir of atrocities. Now, it seems, there is another growing problem: men raping men.

 According to Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, United Nations officials and several Congolese aid organizations, the number of men who have been raped has risen sharply in recent months, a consequence of joint Congo-Rwanda military operations against rebels that have uncapped an appalling level of violence against civilians.

 Aid workers struggle to explain the sudden spike in male rape cases. The best answer, they say, is that the sexual violence against men is yet another way for armed groups to humiliate and demoralize Congolese communities into submission.

 The United Nations already considers eastern Congo the rape capital of the world, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to hear from survivors on her visit to the country next week. Hundreds of thousands of women have been sexually assaulted by the various warring militias haunting these hills, and right now this area is going through one of its bloodiest periods in years.

 The joint military operations that began in January between Rwanda and Congo, David and Goliath neighbors who were recently bitter enemies, were supposed to end the murderous rebel problem along the border and usher in a new epoch of cooperation and peace. Hopes soared after the quick capture of a renegade general who had routed government troops and threatened to march across the country.

 But aid organizations say that the military maneuvers have provoked horrific revenge attacks, with more than 500,000 people driven from their homes, dozens of villages burned and hundreds of villagers massacred, including toddlers thrown into open fires.

 And it is not just the rebels being blamed. According to human rights groups, soldiers from the Congolese Army are executing civilians, raping women and conscripting villagers to lug their food, ammunition and gear into the jungle.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/world/africa/05congo.html

NYRB essay by Berkeley historian Adam Hochschild titled "Rape of the Congo":

Unimaginably horrifying as ordeals like Kamate's are, they are all too similar to what Congolese endured a century ago. Rape was then also considered the right of armies, and then, as now, was how brutalized and exploited soldiers took out their fury on people of even lower status: women. From 1885 to 1908, this territory was the personally owned colony of King Leopold II of Belgium, who pioneered a forced-labor system that was quickly copied in French, German, and Portuguese colonies nearby. His private army of black conscript soldiers under white officers would march into a village and hold the women hostage, to force the men to go into the rain forest for weeks at a time to harvest lucrative wild rubber. "The women taken during the last raid...are causing me no end of trouble," a Belgian officer named Georges Bricusse wrote in his diary on November 22, 1895. "All the soldiers want one. The sentries who are supposed to watch them unchain the prettiest ones and rape them."

 

Forced labor also continues today. The various armed groups routinely conscript villagers to carry their ammunition, collect water and firewood, and, on occasion, dig for gold. A 2007 survey of more than 2,600 people in eastern Congo found over 50 percent saying that they had been forced to carry loads or do other work against their will in the previous decade and a half.

  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22956

LAT op-ed by John Holmes, the U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, titled "Congo's Rape War":

DESPITE MANY WARNINGS, nothing quite prepared me for what I heard last month from survivors of a sexual violence so brutal it staggers the imagination and mocked my notions of human decency. I cannot find the words to describe what I heard from the girls and women in Panzi Hospital, located in South Kivu province in the Democratic Republic of Congo, near the epicenter of one of the world's major humanitarian crises. What I do know is that I am not the same person now as when I walked into that hospital.

As a United Nations official with a special brief for humanitarian affairs, I have seen many people around the globe suffering under truly tragic circumstances. But Congo is different. Its long-running conflict has always been a brutal one, having claimed nearly 4 million lives between 1998 and 2004 -- the equivalent of five Rwandan genocides. And although the war formally ended years ago, fighting has continued in the eastern part of the country, where the national army is battling local and foreign militias in a struggle involving unresolved ethnic conflicts, regional power dynamics and the powerful tug of greed, with all sides vying for a slice of Congo's rich mineral resources.

One of these militias is the FDLR, the Hutu ex-genocidaire group that fled from Rwanda to Congo in 1994 and that continues to harbor wider political ambitions. Civilians are deliberately targeted and harassed by these groups in a climate of almost total impunity.

From the start, sexual violence has been a particularly awful -- and shockingly common -- feature of the conflict in Congo. Women and girls are particularly vulnerable in this predatory environment, with rape and other forms of sexual abuse committed by all sides on an astonishing scale. Since 2005, more than 32,000 cases of rape and sexual violence have been registered in South Kivu alone. But that's only a fraction of the total; many -- perhaps most -- attacks go unreported. Victims of rape are held in shame by Congolese society and frequently are ostracized by their families and communities. The ripple effect of these attacks goes far beyond the individual victim, destroying family and community bonds and leaving children orphaned and/or HIV positive.

http://www.latimes.com/news/ printedition/asection/la-oe- holmes11oct11,1,3326677,print. story?ctrack=1&cset=true

Very disturbing NYT story titled "Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War" (I've included parts of a photo essay that accompanied the article):

Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show up at his hospital. Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair.

 “We don’t know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear,” said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo’s rape epidemic. “They are done to destroy women.”

 Eastern Congo is going through another one of its convulsions of violence, and this time it seems that women are being systematically attacked on a scale never before seen here. According to the United Nations, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country.

 “The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world,” said John Holmes, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs. “The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity — it’s appalling.” 

Dr. Denis Mukwege, left, performs as many as six rape-related surgeries a day. In one town, Shabunda, 70 percent of the women reported being sexually brutalized.

Honorata Barinjibanwa, 18, said she was kidnapped from a village during a raid in April and kept as a sex slave until August. Most of that time she was tied to a tree, and she still has rope marks ringing her neck. Her kidnappers would untie her for a few hours each day to gang-rape her, she said.

No one — doctors, aid workers, Congolese and Western researchers — can explain exactly why this is happening. “We don’t know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear,” said Dr. Mukwege. “They are done to destroy women.”

  
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/ 10/07/world/africa/07congo. html?ref=multimedia& pagewanted=print

Economist story titled "Atrocities beyond words - A barbarous campaign of rape":

EVERYTHING in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country almost the size of western Europe, is on a scarcely imaginable scale—including the violence. Among the beautiful mountain vistas, terraced hillsides and lush tropical greens of eastern Congo, a bitter, decade-long civil war that officially ended in the rest of the country in 2003, and that has claimed several million lives as a result of fighting and disease, burns on in the eastern border provinces of Ituri, North Kivu and South Kivu. A ceasefire signed in the town of Goma in January between the government and more than a score of militias has so far done little to ease the plight of civilians in the east. All sides—government troops, says the United Nations, as well as the militias—continue to use rape as a weapon of war on a barbarous scale.

Most victims, as ever, are women and girls, some no more than toddlers, though men and boys have sometimes been targeted too. Local aid workers and UN reports tell of gang rapes, leaving victims with appalling physical and psychological injuries; rapes committed in front of families or whole communities; male relatives forced at gunpoint to rape their own daughters, mothers or sisters; women used as sex slaves forced to eat excrement or the flesh of murdered relatives. Some women victims have themselves been murdered by bullets fired from a gun barrel shoved into their vagina. Some men, says a worker for the UN's Children's Fund (Unicef), have been forced to simulate having sex in holes dug in the ground, with razor blades stuck inside.

Sometimes the motive is revenge for attacks by rival militias, sometimes it is ethnic cleansing and on other occasions an effort to undermine the morale of the enemy by spreading shame, injury and disease. The trauma and appalling injury suffered by women and men who survive such assaults cripple families and whole villages. In eastern Congo up to 80% of reported fistula cases in women are thought to result from rape attacks. The epidemic of violence also spreads HIV/AIDS.

According to a report published in October by the UN secretary-general in an effort to get governments to do more to protect civilians caught up in this and other conflicts, in the first six months of 2007 there were 4,500 cases of sexual violence reported in South Kivu alone. As a rule of thumb in such situations, says the UN, for every rape that is reported, as many as ten or 20 cases may go unreported.

http://www.economist.com/ world/mideast-africa/ displaystory.cfm?story_id= 11294767

LAT op-ed by aid worker Ann Jones titled "A war on women" and subtitled "West Africa's conflicts are officially over, but rape, brutality and terror continue.":

Of all those who suffered in the West African wars, it was civilians who suffered the most. Specifically targeted and terrorized as a tactic of war, they were displaced, exiled, abducted, assaulted, tortured, wounded, maimed and killed. And of all the civilians who suffered, none suffered as disproportionately as women. Today, millions of women in these three West African countries are still struggling to recover; for them, the wars aren't really over at all.

To understand why, consider this description from Amnesty International last March of the least of the West African wars, the relatively short civil war in Ivory Coast:

"The scale of rape and sexual violence in [Ivory Coast] in the course of the armed conflict has been largely underestimated. Many women have been gang-raped or have been abducted and reduced to sexual slavery by fighters. Rape has often been accompanied by the beating or torture (including torture of a sexual nature) of the victim. ... All armed factions have perpetrated and continue to perpetrate sexual violence with impunity."

The Amnesty International report documents case after case of girls and women, ages "under 12" to 63, assaulted by armed men. A more recent and thoroughgoing report by Human Rights Watch records the rape of children as young as 3. During the civil war, women and girls were seized in their village homes or at military roadblocks, or were discovered hiding in the bush.

 http://www.latimes.com/news/ opinion/la-op-jones17feb17,0, 7418229.story

WP story subtitled "War in E. Congo Has Driven More Than 1 Million People to a Life of Continual Wandering":

From his pocket, he took out a day-old medical certificate scrawled in the round, childlike handwriting of his 13-year-old daughter, Justine, in which she testified to being raped a day earlier by a man who claimed to own the field where she had ventured with a friend to forage for roots.
Justine was already back in the fields, Agamie said.

 "She has no choice; she needed to risk it," he said, pausing a moment and swallowing hard. "Because we are starving. We have to get food."

  http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-dyn/content/article/2008/ 11/08/AR2008110802511_pf.html

NYT story titled "Rape Victims’ Words Help Jolt Congo Into Change":

Honorata Kizende looked out at the audience and began with a simple, declarative sentence.

“There was no dinner,” she said.

“It was me who was dinner. Me, because they kicked me roughly to the ground, and they ripped off all my clothes, and between the two of them, they held my feet. One took my left foot, one took my right, and the same with my arms, and between the two of them they proceeded to rape me. Then all five of them raped me.”

The audience, which had been called together by local and international aid groups and included everyone from high-ranking politicians to street kids with no shoes, stared at her in disbelief.

Congo, it seems, is finally facing its horrific rape problem, which United Nations officials have called the worst sexual violence in the world. Tens of thousands of women, possibly hundreds of thousands, have been raped in the past few years in this hilly, incongruously beautiful land and many of these rapes have been marked by a level of brutality that is shocking even by the twisted standards of a place haunted by warlords and drug-crazed child soldiers.

After years of denial and shame, the silence is being broken. Because of stepped-up efforts in the past nine months by international organizations and the Congolese government, rapists are no longer able to count on a culture of impunity. Of course, countless men still get away with assaulting women. But more and more are getting caught, prosecuted and put behind bars.

European aid agencies are spending tens of millions of dollars building new courthouses and prisons across eastern Congo, in part to punish rapists. Mobile courts are holding rape trials in villages deep in the forest that have not seen a black-robed magistrate since the Belgians ruled the country decades ago.

The American Bar Association opened a legal clinic in January specifically to help rape victims bring their cases to court. So far the work has resulted in eight convictions. Here in Bukavu, one of the biggest cities in the country, a special unit of Congolese police officers has filed 103 rape cases since the beginning of this year, more than any year in recent memory.

In Bunia, a town farther north, rape prosecutions are up 600 percent compared to five years ago. Congolese investigators have even been flown to Europe to learn “CSI”-style forensic techniques. The police have arrested some of the most violent offenders, often young militia men, most likely psychologically traumatized themselves, who have thrust sticks, rocks, knives and assault rifles inside women.

“We’re starting to see results,” said Pernille Ironside, a United Nations official in eastern Congo.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/18/world/africa/18congo.html

NYT story titled "Clinton Presents Plan to Fight Sexual Violence in Congo":

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton came face to face with the consequences of the brutality in eastern Congo on Tuesday afternoon when she met a Congolese woman who had been gang-raped while she was eight months pregnant.

 The fetus died, Mrs. Clinton said, the woman was gravely injured and since there was no hospital nearby, villagers stuffed the woman’s wound with grass to keep her from bleeding to death.

 “I’ve been in a lot of very difficult and terrible settings,” Mrs. Clinton said later. “And I was just overwhelmed by what I saw.”

 “It is almost impossible to describe the level of suffering,” she said. Eastern Congo’s rape epidemic, she added, “is just horrific.”

 Mrs. Clinton used her unprecedented visit — she is the first secretary of state to venture into the war zone here — to unveil a $17 million plan to fight Congo’s stunning levels of sexual violence, a problem she called “evil in its basest form.”

 She announced that the American government would train doctors, supply rape victims with video cameras to document violence, send American military engineers to help build facilities and train Congolese police officers, especially female police officers, to crack down on rapists.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/world/africa/12diplo.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

WP story titled "A Conflict's Deadly Ripple Effects":

By some estimates, at least 5 million Congolese have died in more than a decade of conflict touched off by the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda, which sent a flood of militiamen across the border into mineral-rich eastern Congo. Although the conflict has surged, receded and changed over time -- at some points involving eight countries and at others breaking into smaller conflicts among a mess of armed groups -- the cumulative death toll in eastern Congo is the largest since World War II.

  For the most part, though, people in eastern Congo have not died in a blaze of bullets or in large-scale massacres. More often, the conflict has set off a chain reaction of less spectacular consequences that begins with fleeing through an unforgiving jungle and ends with a death such as Mihigo's. In eastern Congo, people die from malaria and diarrhea, from untreated infections and measles, from falling off rickety bridges and slipping down slopes, from hunger and from drinking dirty water in the hope of surviving one more day.

  Arguably, people die because of the wider social impact of the conflict. Entire villages have been scattered across hundreds of miles, atomizing extended family networks that people depend upon in difficult times. The conflict has overwhelmed already-dysfunctional government hospitals and left roads rutted and overgrown, isolating people in villages like Walikale from help.

  At the moment, the conflict in eastern Congo is surging once again. Since January, at least half a million people have fled a U.N.-backed Congolese army operation targeting Rwandan rebels, which Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to discuss in a visit to Congo this month. The rebels are retaliating against villagers with whom they have lived for years.

  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/01/AR2009080101140.html

 

  

 Congo's Women Treated as Spoils of War
Rape Epidemic Worsens After Troops Arrive to Counter Rebels

By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 11, 2009

LUGUNGU, Congo -- For the women of eastern Congo, a U.S.-backed Congolese military operation meant to save them from abusive rebels has turned into a nightmare of its own.

An already staggering epidemic of rape has become markedly worse since the January deployment of tens of thousands of poorly trained, poorly paid Congolese soldiers, with people in frontline villages such as this one saying the soldiers are not so much hunting rebels as hunting women.

And so, as the sun dropped behind the soaring jungle here one recent afternoon, little girls, mothers and grandmothers began heading home, some closing curtains and padlocking wooden doors. It was time, they explained, to lock themselves indoors.

"To avoid getting raped, after 6 p.m. women are not allowed to go out of the house," said Maria Bitondo, who said she was among three women attacked by a soldier last month. "With the soldiers here, no woman is safe to go out and walk. We do not even go to the bathroom at night."

On Monday, a coalition of 88 aid groups called the military operation, which is supported by the United Nations, "a human tragedy" and urged Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is to visit eastern Congo on Tuesday, to push for better civilian protection. Clinton has vowed to make the prevention of sexual violence a priority in Congo, where the United States pays about a quarter of the cost of U.N. peacekeeping efforts.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/10/AR2009081003120.html

WP op-ed by UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon titled "A Climate Culprit In Darfur":

Almost invariably, we discuss Darfur in a convenient military and political shorthand -- an ethnic conflict pitting Arab militias against black rebels and farmers. Look to its roots, though, and you discover a more complex dynamic. Amid the diverse social and political causes, the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change.

 Two decades ago, the rains in southern Sudan began to fail. According to U.N. statistics, average precipitation has declined some 40 percent since the early 1980s. Scientists at first considered this to be an unfortunate quirk of nature. But subsequent investigation found that it coincided with a rise in temperatures of the Indian Ocean, disrupting seasonal monsoons. This suggests that the drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, to some degree, from man-made global warming.

 It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought. Until then, Arab nomadic herders had lived amicably with settled farmers. A recent Atlantic Monthly article by Stephan Faris describes how black farmers would welcome herders as they crisscrossed the land, grazing their camels and sharing wells. But once the rains stopped, farmers fenced their land for fear it would be ruined by the passing herds. For the first time in memory, there was no longer enough food and water for all. Fighting broke out. By 2003, it evolved into the full-fledged tragedy we witness today.

 A U.N. peacekeeping force will help moderate the violence and keep humanitarian aid flowing, saving many lives. Yet that is only a first step, as I emphasized to my colleagues at the summit in Germany. Any peace in Darfur must be built on solutions that go to the root causes of the conflict. We can hope for the return of more than 2 million refugees. We can safeguard villages and help rebuild homes. But what to do about the essential dilemma -- the fact that there's no longer enough good land to go around?

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/15/AR2007061501857_pf.html

Atlantic essay by Stephan Faris mentioned above titled "The Real Roots of Darfur" (now expanded into a book):

The fighting in Darfur is usually described as racially motivated, pitting mounted Arabs against black rebels and civilians. But the fault lines have their origins in another distinction, between settled farmers and nomadic herders fighting over failing lands. The aggression of the warlord Musa Hilal can be traced to the fears of his father, and to how climate change shattered a way of life.
Until the rains began to fail, the sheikh’s people lived amicably with the settled farmers. The nomads were welcome passers-through, grazing their camels on the rocky hillsides that separated the fertile plots. The farmers would share their wells, and the herders would feed their stock on the leavings from the harvest. But with the drought, the farmers began to fence off their land—even fallow land—for fear it would be ruined by passing herds. A few tribes drifted elsewhere or took up farming, but the Arab herders stuck to their fraying livelihoods—nomadic herding was central to their cultural identity. (The distinction between “Arab” and “African” in Darfur is defined more by lifestyle than any physical difference: Arabs are generally herders, Africans typically farmers. The two groups are not racially distinct.)

 ...Why did Darfur’s lands fail?...But by the time of the Darfur conflict four years ago, scientists had identified another cause. Climate scientists fed historical sea-surface temperatures into a variety of computer models of atmospheric change. Given the particular pattern of ocean-temperature changes worldwide, the models strongly predicted a disruption in African monsoons. “This was not caused by people cutting trees or overgrazing,” says Columbia University’s Alessandra Giannini, who led one of the analyses. The roots of the drying of Darfur, she and her colleagues had found, lay in changes to the global climate.

 http://oldsite.globalsolutions.org/programs/peace_security/news/Atlantic_Real_Roots_Darfur.html

Jeff Sachs Newsweek piece titled "Land, Water And Conflict":

The world will experience a growing risk of conflicts over food, energy and water in coming years. The population rises each year by about 80 million people, with most of the increase in impoverished regions already facing environmental stress. Climate change, water scarcity and tighter oil supplies will add to the stresses. As violence increases, in new crises resembling those now underway in Darfur, Somalia and Afghanistan, the tendency might be to look to the military for solutions. We'll need to keep in mind that engineers and doctors will be the only ones who can truly keep us safe.

  Hundreds of millions of people live on the margin of survival, and their numbers will increase if we continue on our current trajectory. The poorest of the poor tend to be found in remote, environmentally stressed regions, such as the drylands of Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, which is evident in Yale and Columbia's Environmental Performance Index. In these places, droughts are becoming more frequent and land more scarce. Rural populations head for the slums in cities unequipped to provide jobs, safe water, sewerage and other basic services.

  With a business-as-usual approach, more regions are likely to experience intensifying stresses. Human-induced climate change is predicted to make drylands drier and increase the risk of floods and powerful cyclones in more-humid regions. Increasingly crowded coastal areas will face greater risks of devastating storms. In places that currently rely on groundwater, such as in India, China and the American Southwest, wells will run dry, or become too expensive to drill. And in places in the Andes and in South Asia that depend on the seasonal melting of glaciers for irrigation, these water flows may stop as the glaciers disappear.

  The results are unlikely to be pretty. Poor and hungry people are vastly more likely to fall into violent conflict than rich and well-fed populations. And when the climate gets tough, people migrate. Nomads from the drylands of northern Darfur went into the more-humid farm regions of southern Darfur in the 1980s in search of water for their livestock. Similarly, migrants from other parts of the African Sahel, such as Burkina Faso, moved south toward the coastal regions, into the Ivory Coast and other coastal countries. In both cases, the migrations triggered conflicts. Such conflicts are not inevitable. Violence is often stoked by ruthless and demagogic politicians. Still, the environmental crises and ensuing desperation provide the fodder.

 http://www.newsweek.com/id/143700/output/print

Jeff Sachs piece in Scientific American titled "Climate Change Refugees":

Human-induced climate and hydrological change is likely to make many parts of the world uninhabitable, or at least uneconomic. Over the course of a few decades, if not sooner, hundreds of millions of people may be compelled to relocate because of environmental pressures.

 To a significant extent, water will be the most important determinant of these population movements. Dramatic alterations in the relation between water and society will be widespread, as emphasized in the new report from Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These shifts may include rising sea levels, stronger tropical cyclones, the loss of soil moisture under higher temperatures, more intense precipitation and flooding, more frequent droughts, the melting of glaciers and the changing seasonality of snowmelt.

 Impacts will vary widely across the world. It will be important to keep our eye on at least four zones: low-lying coastal settlements, farm regions dependent on rivers fed by snowmelt and glacier melt, subhumid and arid regions, and humid areas in Southeast Asia vulnerable to changes in monsoon patterns.

 A significant rise in sea levels, even by a fraction of a meter, could wreak havoc on tens or even hundreds of millions of people. One study found that although coastal areas less than 10 meters above sea level constitute only 2 percent of the world's land, they contain 10 percent of its population. These coastal zones are vulnerable to storm surges and increased intensity of tropical cyclones--call it the New Orleans Effect.

 Regions much farther inland will wither. Hundreds of millions of people, including many of the poorest farm households, live in river valleys where irrigation is fed by melting glaciers and snow. The annual snowmelt is coming earlier every year, synchronizing it less and less well with the summer growing season, and the glaciers are disappearing altogether.

 http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=climate-change-refugees&print=true

Paper by three economists titled "Economic Shocks and Civil Conflict: An Instrumental Variables Approach," published in the Journal of Political Economy, in which the authors argue that "drought is a reliable predictor of civil war in sub-Saharan Africa":

Civil wars have gained increasing attention from academics and policy makers alike in recent years (see, e.g., World Bank 2003). This concern

is understandable since civil conflict is the source of immense human suffering: it is estimated that civil wars have resulted in three times as many deaths as wars between states since World War II (Fearon and Laitin 2003). A major locus for civil wars in recent years has been sub-Saharan Africa, where 29 of 43 countries suffered from civil conflict during the 1980s and 1990s. In the median sub-Saharan African country, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced from their homes as a consequence of civil war during this period (Sambanis 2001). The long-term burden of disease and disability caused by war likely far outweighs the number of deaths during fighting (Ghobarah, Huth, and Russett 2003).

...In this paper we use exogenous variation in rainfall as an instrumental variable for income growth in order to estimate the impact of economic growth on civil conflict.

1 Weather shocks are plausible instruments for growth in gross domestic product in economies that largely rely on rainfed agriculture, that is, neither have extensive irrigation systems nor are heavily industrialized. The instrumental variable method makes it credible to assert that the association between economic conditions and civil war is a causal relationship rather than simply a correlation. As such, this paper relates to the empirical approaches recently taken by Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001) and especially Brunner (2002), who also employ an instrumental variable approach familiar from applied microeconomics in the context of cross-country empirical growth research. Note that the nature of our econometric identification strategy allows us to focus on short-term economic fluctuations that “trigger” conflicts, but it is not as well suited for understanding conflict duration.

 

http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~emiguel/miguel_conflict.pdf

FT op-ed by David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party in Britain, titled "A warmer world is ripe for conflict and danger":

"Picture Japan, suffering from flooding along its coastal cities and contamination of its fresh water supply, eyeing Russia's Sakhalin Island oil and gas reserves as an energy source . . . Envision Pakistan, India and China - all armed with nuclear weapons - skirmishing at their borders over refugees, access to shared river and arable land."

 This might look like the minutes from a meeting of Hollywood executives. In fact, it is from a Pentagon memo on the possible consequences of global warming. Climate change is not just an environmental question, it could have a massive impact on international security.

 People in the developing world will likely suffer most, as climate change will make the resources they depend on more scarce: fresh water, cropland, forests and fisheries. This will have grave humanitarian consequences. Oxfam predicts 30m more people could be at risk of famine as a result of global warming. With more famine we should expect more disease.

 http://www.ft.com/cms/s /49bca770-ab4f-11db-b5db -0000779e2340.html

NYT story titled "Global Warming Called Security Threat":

For the second time in a month, private consultants to the government are warning that human-driven warming of the climate poses risks to the national security of the United States.

 A report, scheduled to be published on Monday but distributed to some reporters yesterday, said issues usually associated with the environment — like rising ocean levels, droughts and violent weather caused by global warming — were also national security concerns.

 “Unlike the problems that we are used to dealing with, these will come upon us extremely slowly, but come they will, and they will be grinding and inexorable,” Richard J. Truly, a retired United States Navy vice admiral and former NASA administrator, said in the report.

 The effects of global warming, the study said, could lead to large-scale migrations, increased border tensions, the spread of disease and conflicts over food and water. All could lead to direct involvement by the United States military.
The report recommends that climate change be integrated into the nation’s security strategies and says the United States “should commit to a stronger national and international role to help stabilize climate changes at levels that will avoid significant disruption to global security and stability.”

 The report, called “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change,” was commissioned by the Center for Naval Analyses, a government-financed research group, and written by a group of retired generals and admirals called the Military Advisory Board.
In March, a report from the Global Business Network, which advises intelligence agencies and the Pentagon on occasion, concluded, among other things, that rising seas and more powerful storms could eventually generate unrest as crowded regions like Bangladesh’s sinking delta become less habitable.

 One of the authors of the report, Peter Schwartz, a consultant who studies climate risks and other trends for the Defense Department and other clients, said the climate system, jogged by a century-long buildup of heat-trapping gases, was likely to rock between extremes that could wreak havoc in poor countries with fragile societies.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/us/15warm.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

WP story titled "Warming Will Exacerbate Global Water Conflicts":

As global warming heats the planet, there will be more desperate measures. The climate will be wetter in some places, drier in others. Changing weather patterns will leave millions of people without dependable supplies of water for drinking, irrigation and power, a growing stack of studies conclude.

 At Stanford University, 170 miles away, Stephen Schneider, editor of the journal Climatic Change and a lead author for the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), pours himself a cup of tea and says the future is clear.

 "As the air gets warmer, there will be more water in the atmosphere. That's settled science," he said. But where, and when, it comes down is the big uncertainty.

 "You are going to intensify the hydrologic cycle. Where the atmosphere is configured to have high pressure and droughts, global warming will mean long, dry periods. Where the atmosphere is configured to be wet, you will get more rain, more gully washers.

 "Global warming will intensify drought," he says. "And it will intensify floods."

 According to the IPCC, that means a drying out of areas such as southern Europe, the Mideast, North Africa, South Australia, Patagonia and the U.S. Southwest.

 These will not be small droughts. Richard Seager, a senior researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, looked at 19 computer models of the future under current global warming trends. He found remarkable consistency: Sometime before 2050, the models predicted, the Southwest will be gripped in a dry spell akin to the Great Dust Bowl drought that lasted through most of the 1930s.

 ...Global warming threatens water supplies in other ways. Much of the world's fresh water is in glaciers atop mountains. They act as mammoth storehouses. In wet or cold seasons, the glaciers grow with snow. In dry and hot seasons, the edges slowly melt, gently feeding streams and rivers. Farms below are dependent on that meltwater; huge cities have grown up on the belief the mountains will always give them drinking water; hydroelectric dams rely on the flow to generate power.

 But the atmosphere's temperature is rising fastest at high altitudes. The glaciers are melting, initially increasing the runoff, but gradually getting smaller and smaller. Soon, many will disappear.

 ..."What do you think is going to happen when this stops?" Thompson mused of the water. "Do you think all the people below will just sit there? No. It's crazy to think they won't go anywhere. And what do you think will happen when they go to places where people already live?"

 The potential for conflict is more than theoretical. Turkey, Syria and Iraq bristle over the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt trade threats over the Nile. The United Nations has said water scarcity is behind the bloody wars in Sudan's Darfur region. In Somalia, drought has spawned warlords and armies.

 Already, the World Health Organization says, 1 billion people lack access to potable water. In northern China, retreating glaciers and shrinking wetlands that feed the Yangtze River prompted researchers to warn that water supplies for hundreds of millions of people may be at risk.

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/19/AR2007081900967_pf.html

IHT op-ed titled "Averting water wars in Asia":

Tibet's vast glaciers and high altitude have endowed it with the world's greatest river systems. Its rivers are a lifeline to the world's two most-populous states - China and India - as well as to Bangladesh, Burma, Bhutan, Nepal, Cambodia, Pakistan, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. These countries make up 47 percent of the global population.

 Yet Asia is a water-deficient continent. Although home to more than half of the human population, Asia has less fresh water - 3,920 cubic meters per person - than any continent other than the Antarctica.

 ...The looming struggle over water resources in Asia has been underscored by the spread of irrigated farming, water-intensive industries and a growing middle class that wants high water-consuming comforts like washing machines and dishwashers. Household water consumption in Asia is rising rapidly, although several major economies there are acutely water-stressed.

 The specter of water wars in Asia is also being highlighted by climate change and environmental degradation in the form of shrinking forests and swamps that foster a cycle of chronic flooding and droughts. The Himalayan snow melt that feeds Asia's great rivers could be accelerated by global warming.

 While intrastate water-sharing disputes have become rife in several Asian countries - from India and Pakistan to Southeast Asia and China - it is the potential interstate conflict over river-water resources that should be of greater concern.

 http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/26/opinion/edchellany.php

IHT op-ed by Kevin Watkins, director of the UN Human Development Report Office, titled "A global problem: How to avoid war over water":

'Whisky is for drinking, water is for fighting over," Mark Twain once said. At the start of the 21st century, his gloomy view on the water side of the equation has been getting endorsements from an impressive - if unlikely - cast of characters.

The Central Intelligence Agency, the accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers and, most recently, Britain's Ministry of Defense have all raised the specter of future "water wars." With water availability shrinking across the Middle East, Asia and sub- Saharan Africa, so the argument runs, violent conflict between states is increasingly likely.

The specter is also on the agenda for the experts from 140 countries gathered this week at the annual World Water Week forum in Stockholm. Meetings of water experts are not obvious forums for debating issues of global peace and security. But the ghost of Mark Twain is in Stockholm this week as we reflect on the links between water scarcity and violent conflict between states.

http://www.iht.com/articles /2006/08/23/opinion/edwatkins .php 

LAT A1 story titled "Climate change laps at Bangladesh's shores"

Bangladesh, a densely crowded and painfully poor nation, contributes only a minuscule amount to the greenhouse gases slowly smothering the planet. But a combination of geography and demography puts it among the countries experts predict will be hit hardest as Earth heats up.

Nearly 150 million people, the equivalent of about half the U.S. population, live packed in an area the size of Iowa and about as flat. Home to where the mighty Brahmaputra, Ganges and Meghna rivers meet, most of Bangladesh is a vast delta of alluvial plains that are barely above sea level, making it prone to flooding from waterways swollen by rain, snowmelt from the Himalayas and increased infiltration of the ocean.

Global warming trends have already exacerbated that, and the situation will probably get worse, scientists say.

...If the sea here rises by a foot, which some researchers say could happen by 2040, the resulting damage would set back Bangladesh's progress by 30 years, Rahman said. As much as 12% of the population would be made homeless.

A 3-foot rise by century's end — a possible scenario if the polar ice caps melt at a more rapid pace — would wreak havoc in Bangladesh on an apocalyptic, Atlantis-like scale, according to scientific projections.

A quarter of the country would be submerged. Dhaka, now in the center of the nation, would sit within 60 miles of the coast, where boats would float above the underwater remnants of countless town squares, markets, houses and schools. As many as 30 million people would become refugees in their own land, many of them subsistence farmers with nothing left to subsist on.

("Climate change laps at Bangladesh's shores," by Henry Chu, LAT, February 21, 2007 - http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/sgw_read.asp?id=128082212007) 

FT story titled "Jakarta’s ecological crisis fails to sink in":

Few places in Jakarta are sinking as fast as Kamal Muara but that could change because most residents are contributing to the main cause of the subsidence: extracting groundwater. Only 10 per cent of the city is connected to the piped water supply and just 2 per cent is on a sewerage system.

Slow as it may appear to the untrained eye, Hongjoo Hahm, an infrastructure specialist at the World Bank in Jakarta, says it is hard to overstate the emergency.

  “I don’t know of another city [in the world] that has a sinking problem because of groundwater extraction to the extent that Jakarta does,” he says.

  Subsidence is just one of several water-related crises Jakarta is facing that are combining to make severe flooding increasingly frequent. Unregulated population growth and associated construction are devouring crucial green spaces. Jakarta has less than half the undeveloped land called for in the city’s master plan.

  Half a million squatters live along the city’s riverbanks and around its reservoirs, clogging them with 4,000 cubic metres of rubbish and human waste a day.

  Then there are the tidal surges that inundate northern neighbourhoods a couple of times a month, and climate change, which is causing sea levels to rise and more frequent extreme weather events.

  “Jakarta is under attack from the sea, the land and the air,” says Budi Widiantoro, the head of the city’s public works office.

  http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f9f8c3b6-6fd9-11de-b835-00144feabdc0.html

Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security