Fire in the Bronx

Horrible news out of New York yesterday. A fire killed eight children and an woman from Mali in the Bronx. An over heated cord on a space heater seems to have caused the fire.
The New York Times has coverage of the complete tragedy.

Eight children and an adult were killed in a fire in the Bronx on Wednesday night that raced up from the basement of a more than 100-year-old wooden building where 22 people from immigrant families lived, the authorities said.

Mothers, shrouded in thick smoke, threw their unconscious children from three stories above to neighbors who tried to catch them, witnesses said. Rescuers fought to revive victims with C.P.R. and oxygen masks on the frigid street in the Highbridge neighborhood near Yankee Stadium, which has a large population of African immigrant families.

the commercialization/consumption of poverty

Amardeep
has an interesting post on slum tourism in India. A Korean doctor came to visit India about five years ago, and was keen to see two things, the poor at New Delhi Railway Station and the Taj Mahal. I do not understand the obsession at looking at poverty, but if it benefits both the viewer and the viewed, let it continue. Growing up in India, and seeing the poor in your face, one tends to try and block them out. Even when there is a mother and a starving child on her breast, or a disabled man slumping towards your car, or a five year old selling magazines, with golden malnourished hair.

Dharavi stretched before us like a vast junkyard, a hodgepodge of brick and concrete tenements roofed with corrugated metal sheets that gleamed dully in the sunshine. Poojari gave us a moment to take it all in. “We’ll show you the positive side of a slum,” he declared.

In the face of such squalor, his words seemed jarring. But Dharavi’s industriousness is well documented. Its businesses manufacture a variety of products—plastics, pottery, bluejeans, leather goods—and generate an estimated $665 million in annual revenue. In other words, Dharavi is not just a slum, it is also a node on the global economy.

Dharavi’s industries are arranged geographically, like medieval guilds, and the first alley we visited belonged to recyclers. In one small “godown” (as warehouses are known on the subcontinent), men were disassembling old computer keyboards. In another, men smeared from head to toe in blue ink stripped the casings from used ballpoint pens so they could be melted down and recycled. A few doors down, workers used heavy chains to knock the residue from steel drums that had once contained polyester resin. Poojari told us that some of Dharavi’s empty plastic bottles come from as far away as the United Kingdom. “People from a rich family, when they drink from a plastic bottle, they don’t know what happens to it afterwards,” he said. “Here, you see.”

a quiet place

Peggy O'Mara contextualizes sleep and babies.

Common sense tells us that night waking is not a pathological abnormality but a temporary disturbance. It decreases as baby teeth come in and the immune system matures. Here are some ideas that can help:

Accept night waking as normal.
Sleep when the baby sleeps.
Don't turn on the light or change diapers when the baby wake at night to nurse.
Don't count how many times you're awake at night.
Don't look at the clock in the middle of the night.
Nap on weekends, or whenever you can get help with the baby.
Carry on.

Vajra Song on Happiness

Free and Easy A spontaneous Vajra Song by Venerable Lama Gendun Rinpoche

Happiness can not be found
through great effort and willpower,
but is already present,
in open relaxation and letting go.

Dont strain yourself,
there is nothing to do or undo.
whatever momentarily arises
in the body-mind
has no real importance at all,
has little reality whatsoever.
Why identify with,
and became attatched to it,
passing judgement upon it and ourselves?

Far better to simply
let the entire game happen on its own,
springing up and falling back like waves
without changing or manipulating
and notice how everything
vanishes and reappears, magically,
again and again, time without end.

Only our searching for happiness
prevents us from seeing it.
It's like a vivid rainbow which you pursue
without ever catching,
or a dog chasing its own tail.

Although peace and happiness
do not exist as an actual thing or place,
it is always available
and accompanies you every instant.

Don't believe in the reality
of good and bad experiences;
they are like today's ephemeral weather,
like rainbows in the sky.

Wanting to grasp the ungraspable,
you exhaust yourself in vain.
As soon as you open and relax
this tight fist of grasping,
infinite space is there -
open, inviting and comfortable.

Make use of this spaciousness, this
freedom and natural ease.
Don't search any further
looking for the great awakened elephant,
who is already resting quietly at home
in front of your own hearth.

Nothing to do or undo,
nothing to force,
nothing to want,
and nothing missing -

Emaho! Marvelous!
Everything happens by itself.

thought for the day

Truth is simple. Truth always expresses itself with the greatest simplicity.

-- Sri Swami Sivananda

Happy Holi

Desi Knitter has a nice post on Holi
and here are wonderful images

War On Terror

The Independent has a story on how the war on terror is the leading cause of terrorism.

Innocent people across the world are now paying the price of the "Iraq effect," with the loss of hundreds of lives directly linked to the invasion and occupation by American and British forces.

An authoritative U.S. study of terrorist attacks after the invasion in 2003 contradicts the repeated denials of George Bush and Tony Blair that the war is not to blame for an upsurge in fundamentalist violence worldwide. The research is said to be the first to attempt to measure the "Iraq effect" on global terrorism.

It found that the number killed in jihadist attacks around the world has risen dramatically since the Iraq war began in March 2003. The study compared the period between 11 September 2001 and the invasion of Iraq with the period since the invasion. The count -- excluding the Arab-Israel conflict -- shows the number of deaths due to terrorism rose from 729 to 5,420. As well as strikes in Europe, attacks have also increased in Chechnya and Kashmir since the invasion. The research was carried out by the Centre on Law and Security at the NYU Foundation for Mother Jones magazine.

Iraq was the catalyst for a ferocious fundamentalist backlash, according to the study, which says that the number of those killed by Islamists within Iraq rose from seven to 3,122. Afghanistan, invaded by US and British forces in direct response to the September 11 attacks, saw a rise from very few before 2003 to 802 since then. In the Chechen conflict, the toll rose from 234 to 497. In the Kashmir region, as well as India and Pakistan, the total rose from 182 to 489, and in Europe from none to 297.

Two years after declaring "mission accomplished" in Iraq President Bush insisted: "If we were not fighting and destroying the enemy in Iraq, they would not be idle. They would be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our borders. By fighting these terrorists in Iraq, Americans in uniform are defeating a direct threat to the American people."

Mr Blair has also maintained that the Iraq war has not been responsible for Muslim fundamentalist attacks such as the 7/7 London bombings which killed 52 people. "Iraq, the region and the wider world is a safer place without Saddam [Hussein]," Mr Blair declared in July 2004.

Announcing the deployment of 1,400 extra troops to Afghanistan earlier this week -- raising the British force level in the country above that in Iraq -- the Prime Minister steadfastly denied accusations by MPs that there was any link between the Iraq war an unravelling of security elsewhere.

Last month John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence in Washington, said he was "not certain" that the Iraq war had been a recruiting factor for al-Qa'ida and insisted: "I wouldn't say that there has been a widespread growth in Islamic extremism beyond Iraq, I really wouldn't."

Yet the report points out that the US administration's own National Intelligence Estimate on "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States" -- partially declassified last October -- stated that " the Iraq war has become the 'cause célèbre' for jihadists ... and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives."

The new study, by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, argues that, on the contrary, "the Iraq conflict has greatly increased the spread of al-Qa'ida ideological virus, as shown by a rising number of terrorist attacks in the past three years from London to Kabul, and from Madrid to the Red Sea.

"Our study shows that the Iraq war has generated a stunning increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks, amounting to literally hundreds of additional terrorist attacks and civilian lives lost. Even when terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is excluded, fatal attacks in the rest of the world have increased by more than one third."

In trying to gauge the "Iraq effect," the authors had focused on the rate of terrorist attacks in two periods -- from September 2001 to 30 March 2003 (the day of the Iraq invasion) and 21 March 2003 to 30 September 2006. The research has been based on the MIPT-RAND Terrorism database.

The report's assertion that the Iraq invasion has had a far greater impact in radicalising Muslims is widely backed security personnel in the UK. Senior anti-terrorist officials told The Independent that the attack on Iraq, and the now-discredited claims by the U.S. and British governments about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, had led to far more young Muslims engaging in extremist activity than the invasion of Afghanistan two years previously.

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of the Secret Service (MI5) said recently: "In Iraq attacks are regularly videoed and the footage is downloaded into the internet.

"Chillingly, we see the results here. Young teenagers are being groomed to be suicide bombers. The threat is serious, is growing and will, I believe, be with us for a generation."

In Afghanistan the most active of the Taliban commanders, Mullah Dadullah, acknowledged how the Iraq war has influenced the struggle in Afghanistan.

"We give and take with the mujahedin in Afghanistan," he said. The most striking example of this has been the dramatic rise in suicide bombings in Afghanistan, a phenomenon not seen through the 10 years of war with the Russians in the 1980s.

The effect of Iraq on various jihadist conflicts has been influenced according to a number of factors, said the report. Countries with troops in Iraq, geographical proximity to the country, the empathy felt for the Iraqis and the exchange of information between Islamist groups. "This may explain why jihadist groups in Europe, Arab countries, and Afghanistan were more affected by the Iraq war than other regions," it said.

Russia, like the US, has used the language of the "war on terror" in its actions in Chechnya, and al-Qa'ida and their associates have entrenched themselves in the border areas of Pakistan from where they have mounted attacks in Kashmir, Pakistan and India.

Statistics for the Arab-Israel conflict also show an increase, but the methodology is disputed in the case of Palestinian attacks in the occupied territories and settler attacks on Palestinians.

* The U.S. is joining the Iraqi government in a diplomatic initiative inviting Iran and Syria to a "neighbours meeting" on stabilising Iraq, the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday. The move reflects a change of approach by the Bush administration, which previously had resisted calls to include Iran and Syria in such talks.