Worldwide cancer cases expected to soar by 70% over next 20 years

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Category: The World

Created on Monday, 03 March 2014 00:00

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Worldwide cancer cases expected to soar by 70% over next 20 years

New cancer cases expected to grow from 14m a year in 2012 to 25m, with biggest burden in low- and middle-income countries

Sarah Boseley, health editor

Cancer cases worldwide are predicted to increase by 70% over the next two decades, from 14m in 2012 to 25m new cases a year, according to the World Health Organisation.

The latest World Cancer Report says it is implausible to think we can treat our way out of the disease and that the focus must now be on preventing new cases. Even the richest countries will struggle to cope with the spiralling costs of treatment and care for patients, and the lower income countries, where numbers are expected to be highest, are ill-equipped for the burden to come.

The incidence of cancer globally has increased in just four years from 12.7m in 2008 to 14.1m new cases in 2012, when there were 8.2m deaths. Over the next 20 years, it is expected to hit 25m a year – a 70% increase.

The biggest burden will be in low- and middle-income countries. They are hit by two types of cancers – those triggered by infections, such as cervical cancers, which are still very prevalent in poorer countries that don't have screening, let alone the HPV vaccine, and increasingly cancers associated with more affluent lifestyles "with increasing use of tobacco, consumption of alcohol and highly processed foods and lack of physical activity", writes the World Health Organisation director general, Margaret Chan, in an introduction to the report.

Lung cancer is the most commonly diagnosed among men (16.7% of cases) and the biggest killer (23.6% of deaths). Breast cancer is the most common diagnosis in women (25.2%) and caused 14.7% of deaths, which is a drop and only just exceeds lung cancer deaths in women (13.8%). Bowel, prostate and stomach cancer are the other most common diagnoses.

"Despite exciting advances, the report shows that we cannot treat our way out if the cancer problem," said Dr Christopher Wild, director if the International Agency for Research on Cancer and joint author of the report. "More commitment to prevention and early detection is desperately needed in order to complement improved treatments and address the alarming rise in cancer burden globally."

Alcohol, obesity and physical inactivity are all preventable causes of cancer along with tobacco, the report says. Its authors call for discussion on ways forward, which could include taxes of sweet calorific drinks.

Source: The Guardian UK

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Russian parliament passes amnesty law that may help Pussy Riot, Arctic 30

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Category: Law & Justice

Created on Wednesday, 18 December 2013 00:00

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Russian parliament passes amnesty law that may help Pussy Riot, Arctic 30

Russia's State Duma has approved an amnesty that may prompt the freeing of two jailed members of punk band Pussy Riot and 30 detained Greenpeace activists. The vote in favor was unanimous.

The Russian parliament, or Duma, voted 446-0 in favor of the amnesty bill, which includes first-time offenders, minors and women with small children among the beneficiaries.

The move to introduce the law is widely seen as an attempt by the Kremlin to placate criticism of its human rights record ahead of the Winter Olympics in Sochi next year.

The amnesty is likely to lead to the release from jail of two members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot . Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyoknina are serving two-year sentences for performing a political protest song in a Moscow church and are currently due to be released in March.

Both are mothers of small children.

The environmental organization Greenpeace has said the amnesty will mean that charges of hooliganism - carrying sentences of up to seven years - will "almost certainly" be dropped against 30 members of a Greenpeace ship arrested in September for protesting against oil drilling in the Arctic Sea.

It said the 26 non-Russians among them will be free to return home as soon as they get Russian exit visas.

How many people will benefit from the amnesty remains unclear. Russian Human Rights Ombudsman Vladimir Lukin said last week that up to 22,000 prisoners could be freed. However, a senior Duma member, Pavel Krasheninnikov, put the number at about 10,000 on Tuesday.

The amnesty, which was submitted by President Vladimir Putin to mark the 20-year anniversary of the Russian constituion earlier this month, excludes many crimes, including embezzlement. It will thus not affect former oil tycoon and Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky , who is serving an 11-year sentence partly on embezzlement charges, or opposition leader Alexei Navalny , who was given a suspended five-year sentence for embezzlement this summer.

tj/ph (dpa, AP, Reuters, AFP)

Source: Deutsche Welle

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How Tunisia's revolution began

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Category: The World

Created on Friday, 24 January 2014 00:00

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How Tunisia's revolution began

Ben Ali, who tended to focus on developing the northern, tourist-rich regions of the country [Getty]

From day one, the people of Sidi Bouzid broke through the media blackout to spread word of their uprising.

Sidi Bouazid, Tunisia - The people of Sidi Bouzid overcame heavy censorship and police repression to ensure that their uprising did not go unnoticed in silence.

Protesters took to the streets with "a rock in one hand, a cell phone in the other," according to Rochdi Horchani - a relative of Mohamed Bouazizi - who helped break through the media blackout.

Since the same day of the self-immolation of the 26-year-old street vendor that triggered riots causing the Tunisian leadership to flee the country, family members and friends used social media to share the news of what was happening in Sidi Bouzid with international media.

Breaking through the media blackout

Mohamed Bouazizi was not the first Tunisian to set himself alight in an act of public protest.

Abdesslem Trimech, to name one of many cases occurred without any significant media attention, set himself ablaze in the town of Monastir on March 3 after facing bureaucratic hindrance in his own work as a street vendor.

Neither was it evident that the protests that begin in Sidi Bouzid would spread to other towns. There had been similar clashes between police and protesters in the town of Ben Guerdane, near the border with Libya, in August.

The key difference in Sidi Bouzid was that locals fought to get news of what was happening out, and succeeded.

"We could protest for two years here, but without videos no one would take any notice of us," Horchani said.

On December 17, he and Ali Bouazizi, a cousin of Mohamed Bouazizi, posted a video of a peaceful protest led by the young man's mother outside the municipality building.

That evening, the video was aired on Al Jazeera's Mubasher channel. Al Jazeera's new media team, which trawls the web looking for video from across the Arab world, had picked up the footage via Facebook.

Tunisian media, in contrast, ignored the growing uprising until Nessma TV broke the silence on December 29.

And aside from a solid core of activists, most Tunisians did not dare repost the videos on Facebook or even to "like" them, until president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's final hours.

Yet even if a muted majority did not actively share news of the protests online until mid-January, Tunisia's 3.6 million internet users - a third of the population, one of the highest penetration rates on the African continent, according to Internet World Stats - were able to follow news of the uprising on social media thanks to a solid core of activists.

Throughout the uprising, Tunisian protesters relied on Facebook to communicate with each other. Facebook, unlike most video sharing sites, was not included in Tunisia's online censorship.

Non-internet users kept abreast of the protests via satellite news channels including Al Jazeera, France 24 and, playing catch-up on its competitors, Al Arabiya.

The hashtags on Twitter tell the tale of how the uprising went from being local to national in scope: #bouazizi became #sidibouzid, then #tunisia.

Media wars get physical

The Tunisian authorities in the region tried every means possible to thwart the flow of videos. There were internet and power outages in Sidi Bouzid and neighbouring towns.

On January 3, a string of web activists were struck by a systematic, government-organised "phishing" operation aimed at wiping out their online dissent.

Bloggers, web activists and a rapper who had published a song criticising the government on YouTube were arrested on January 7.

In spite of the attempts to silence them, people went to extreme lengths to make sure their videos were posted on the web.

Ali Bouazizi still has a black eye where police struck him in retaliation for his videos.

From the courtroom to Facebook

Dhafer Salhi, a local lawyer who witnessed Mohamed Bouazizi's act of self-immolation, said he asked the head of police to meet with the young man's family that day to try to defuse the anger on the street.

"I told [the head of police] that if you don't get [the Bouazizi family] in, the country will be burned," Salhi said. "He refused, by arrogance and ignorance."

Frustrated by the lack of accountability by officials, Salhi became an active participant in the protests.

The lawyer used Facebook to organise protests, sending out invites to his friends.

He was one of the web activists targeted by the Tunisian authorities in the phishing operation. They managed to hijack his Facebook account, but Salhi simply created a new account.

Protesters get organised

The protests that erupted in Sidi Bouzid were indeed spontaneous, yet they were marked by a level of organisation and sophistication that appears grounded in the sheer determination of those who participated in them.

The Sidi Bouzid branch of the UGTT was engaged in the uprising from day one.

While the national leadership of the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT) is generally viewed as lacking political independence from the ruling class, its regional representatives have a reputation for gutsy engagement.

"The major driving force behind these protesters is the Sidi Bouzid union, which is very strong," said Affi Fethi, who teaches physics at a local high school.

For Fethi, it was when police killed protesters in nearby towns including Menzel Bouziane and Regueb that the regional protests became a nationwide uprising.

"The person who helped this revolt the most is Ben Ali himself," he said. "Why didn't he make [the police] use rubber bullets?"

Everyone interviewed for this article agreed that no opposition party - to the extent that independent parties existed under Ben Ali's rule - was involved in co-ordinating the early protests, or even in offering moral support.

Grassroots members of some opposition movements did, however, play an active role as individual activists (Ali Bouazizi, for instance, is a member of the Progressive Democratic Party).

Watching the political theatre from afar

Students, teachers, the unemployed and lawyers joined forces in Sidi Bouzid and neighbouring towns, braving torture and arrest.

Nacer Beyaou, a student, said the uprising was about freedom and employment.

The people of Sidi Bouzid feel their region is neglected, he said, and suffer from "abject destitution".

Yet now that the political momentum has moved to the capital, many locals fear that their region is once again being sidelined.

"They've forgotten about us completely. There's not a single minister from Sidi Bouzid," the student said.

Summing up the combination of poverty and humiliation that many people in Sidi Bouzid say pushed them to rise up in protest, another man put it this way:

"Every day I ask my father to give me one dinar [70 cents], and I'm thirty years old."

A sign of the uncertainty that many are feeling here, the man was forthright in his political views, but said he preferred not to give his name "in case Ben Ali comes back".

Now that the politicians in Tunis have taken over, he said it was like sitting back and watching the theatre.

With the initial euphoria that came when Ben Ali fled the country fast fading, the question here is whether or not there will be any tangible political and economic gains for Sidi Bouzid in the "new" Tunisia.

The conclusion of a two-part series. See also: "The tragic life of a street vendor," the story of Mohamed Bouazizi.

Follow Yasmine Ryan on Twitter @yasmineryan.

Yasmine Ryan Last Modified: 26 Jan 2011

Source: aljazeera.com

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How I Smuggled A Baby Into Nelson Mandela's Jail...

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Category: DateLines

Created on Sunday, 08 December 2013 00:00

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How I Smuggled A Baby Into Nelson Mandela's Jail...

The morning after Nelson Mandela’s death, in the windswept gloom, one man made a solitary journey to the former maximum security prison on Robben Island. There, in what has become a monument to the anti-apartheid struggle, he said a silent prayer.

Christo Brand, a white prison warder who locked up Mandela and his political comrades nightly for four years, enjoyed an unlikely friendship with the man who went on to become South Africa’s President. They remained close until the end.

Their unique friendship was sealed on the stormy day that, 33 years ago, Mandela’s wife Winnie arrived on Robben Island with their baby granddaughter Zoleka.

Now for the first time, Christo reveals the extraordinary story of how he smuggled the baby past his fellow guards in an act of mercy unprecedented in Mandela’s 18 years on Robben Island.

One of the cruellest rules there was that prisoners should never touch or see a child, not even one from the warders’ families – something that was particularly hard for African prisoners from traditional extended families.

It is well-recorded that Mandela felt crippled by the lack of communication with children.

In 1980, during the harshest regime on the island, he received a visit from Winnie. She was a ‘banned’ person under the Apartheid government, forced to live in a township on the outskirts of Pretoria, a day’s drive from Cape Town and its prison island.

On a rainy day, she made her way to the ferry to see her husband for the 30-minute visit that they were allowed just once every three months.

White people went inside the weatherproof cabin. Winnie and the other black visitors were directed to the top deck, exposed to the wind and rain. She took her place uncomplaining, wrapping herself in a blanket.

When she arrived on the island it was discovered she had smuggled a baby with her – the four-month-old granddaughter Nelson Mandela had never seen.

Christo remembers it well. ‘Of course, we could not allow her to take the baby in to see her husband,’ he says. ‘She had to leave the child in someone’s care in the waiting room. She pleaded with me to allow Mandela to see her but I had to refuse.

‘As usual they sat either side of the glass screen, their hands touching on the glass. I stood behind Mandela. He said, “Please Mr Brand, let me at least see the baby as my wife carries her away after the visit”.

‘I spoke to the warrant officer, my superior. We both knew it was impossible. But at the end of 30 minutes I told Mandela to wait. I went into the waiting room and told Winnie I’d like to hold the baby.

‘I told her I had never held a black baby. She let me have her and I walked back to Mandela behind the security screen.

'I called Mandela and put the baby in his arms, unexpectedly. I told him he must keep quiet about it or we could lose our jobs.

'He just said: “Oh” and held the child, and kissed her and there were tears in his eyes. I had to take the baby and give her back to Winnie and not even tell her what had happened.

‘Nobody could know that Mandela had ever seen the child. He kept it a secret from everybody and so I was very pleased he did that.’

It seems Mandela never forgot that kindness. Many years later after his release, in the midst of the worldwide fanfare of publicity, he called Christo and invited him to Parliament.

He offered him a job in the Constitutional Assembly, entertained Christo and his wife to tea at his presidential residence, and invited the former warder to his birthday celebrations for the rest of his life.

Christo was just 19, a raw prison service recruit, when he was sent to the island to join the security team guarding South Africa’s most demonised freedom fighters.

He was warned that they were a band of dangerously ruthless men dedicated to overthrowing the government. Their leader was a powerful, thoughtful Xhosa tribesman who immediately astounded Christo with his politeness and humility.

‘He was 60 years old, I was just a boy from the farm,’ says Christo. ‘I saw the sometimes brutal way other guards treated the maximum security prisoners. I saw the way that Mandela responded.

‘He would kneel down, uncomplaining, to sweep up the dust and dirt outside his cell when there was going to be an inspection.

‘He had a quietness and a mental discipline I’d never seen before. I was a teenager and he called me “Mr Brand” with what seemed like real respect.

‘I was prepared to hate this man trying to bring us all down and ruin our country. Instead I was won over by him very quickly.

‘I saw his suffering and near-desperation when we censored every word going to him or coming from him, and recorded every conversation he held.

‘I used to stand behind him during the few visits he was allowed and I could see the anguish in him when his beloved wife Winnie was there, on the other side of a glass screen. I read all his letters to her and her replies to him.

‘He was the clear leader of all the political prisoners and he never stopped trying to get their messages out to the rest of the world. But he also missed his wife and children, and their family life.’

Christo began to realise that Mandela’s humanity was psychologically reversing their roles. Impressed with the unwavering regime that Mandela imposed on himself – the morning exercise; the tending of a vegetable patch he nurtured outside his cell; the reading and studying when he was allowed an electric light; the interminable passing of notes to his comrades through ever-more ingenious means – Christo found himself continually on the receiving end of overwhelming sympathy from the older man.

‘You had to respect him, the dignified way he accepted the rules and regulations, the way he never asked for any favours or showed anything but respect for me and my job,’ Christo says. ‘Soon he was giving me advice and telling me I should study and achieve a better education and career. He seemed to want the best for me.

‘Once, when he had been moved to Pollsmoor Prison on the mainland, I came into his cell and saw a small container had been lowered into it through the slated windows. Other prisoners were communicating with him in this way.

‘He looked at me and said, “You need to report this.” He knew that I couldn’t bend the rules without losing my job. New secure windows were fixed and they had to find another way to communicate.

‘I was often wired for sound when I entered his cell. When he offered to make me coffee or started to chat, which was not allowed, I would make a gesture to show we were being recorded.

‘We had a bond that way. I wanted to help him, I liked him and believed in him, and for his part he wanted to help me.’

Christo was relieved for Mandela that he had died peacefully at home. ‘His home and family meant everything to him,’ he says. ‘We talked a lot about those values, but I’ve watched him fading over the years. Now I’ll never hear his voice again or see that bright smile. Last time we met he teased me about my weight and said I should do more exercise.’

They also shared bleaker moments. Like Mandela, Christo suffered the loss of a son who died in a car accident. ‘He was the first to call me and try to comfort me,’ he says. ‘Mandela always had time to show he cared, he was always concerned about family matters even when he had the great weight of State affairs to deal with.’

He says that Mandela would have enjoyed the scenes of dancing and singing in the streets that followed his death on Thursday evening.

‘I wish I could have seen all the love coming to him from all over the world.’ Christo has written his own life story around his relationship with Mandela, with the old man’s blessing and encouragement. Mandela – My Prisoner, My Friend, will be published next March.

For the two of them it was the natural continuation of a solid friendship, built in the grim surroundings of a maximum security prison and lasting well into the final years of Mandela’s long life.

The black freedom fighter prepared to die to liberate his people from a cruel regime, and the Afrikaans farm boy born into that same regime.

‘Through him I saw many human moments,’ Christo says. ‘That was our relationship, a series of small human moments that I now treasure more than ever.’

Today he still takes the ferry daily to Robben Island where he supervises supplies to the tourist shops and runs the busy cafeteria.

Last Friday he described how the island felt empty now Mandela had gone. ‘I’ve always felt he was still here in spirit,’ he says.

‘I could still hear his voice sometimes and remembered all those painful times we shared when he was fighting for freedom and we were there to deprive him of it.

‘Now we’ll never see him here ever again.’

Source: Dailymail UK

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