playing in the mud...

Mud volcano swallows Java
May 26 '07

One year later, mining companies wrangle and thousands await
compensation in Sidoarjo, Indonesia.
THEY come in pairs - the prophets, witches and psychics - to cast
spells, prayers and offerings on a vast mud lake that has subsumed
nearly 700 hectares around the town of Sidoarjo, forcing more than
43,000 Indonesians from their homes.
Dwarfed by an enormous dyke surrounding the centre of a mud volcano in
East Java, they kneel before the bubbling ooze, with reverential
followers held back at security checkpoints.
Donning a black headscarf and a Javanese blend of Islam and mysticism,
Sri Sunarti scatters water gathered from the grave of a 17th-century
Muslim missionary. An ancient spirit, Semar, had told her she could
halt the mud with prayer, she says.
Excavators continually strengthen and heighten the main dam as plumes
of toxic gas mushroom overhead, with hot mud shooting up to 30 metres
into the air!
Authorities have barred more than two citizens from entering the site
at a time, and they may only walk a few metres along an outer wall, a
kilometre from the central dam.
The sacrificial throwing of live cows, goats and chickens into the
mud has been banned.
One year ago this Tuesday, a gas-exploration well part-owned by the
Australian mining giant Santos exploded, sending a geyser of mud and
toxic gas into the air. Nearby villages and factories were flooded,
the highway and railway were covered, and later East Java's main gas
pipeline ruptured.
Despite all attempts to plug the flow - drilling relief wells and even
dropping concrete balls into its centre - more and more mud spurts
from the volcano -- around 1 million barrels daily.
The rising mudtide covered thousands more homes in March.
The displaced await compensation, mitigation efforts are farcical and
arguments continue over who will bear the multibillion-dollar cost.
There is no end in sight.
Optimists hope the mudflow could dissipate in 30 years, but experts
suggest it may continue for centuries. Twenty-three kilometres of
earth dams have been built in an unsuccessful attempt to contain the
mud, 20 metres deep in parts, and channel it into the nearby Porong
River, then into the sea.
When the Herald visited the site last week, just a trickle of ooze
dribbled from one of eight large pipes above the river. The director
of operations of the mud disaster team, admits they are pumping only a
fraction of what emerges from the volcano because the wrong pumps were
installed.
"They are only fit for water, not for mud!"

Owing to the "complexity of the incident and the dynamic nature of the
ongoing work, there is significant uncertainty surrounding these
issues", Santos has warned in a report to shareholders.

Direct mitigation of the mudflow and buying the land and houses it
covers would be Lapindo's responsibility - an estimated $540 million.
Parliamentarians have threatened to overturn the decree, complaining
that all costs should be met by the miners.
Walhi describes it as a political conspiracy to avoid corporate responsibility.
Santos had limited influence urging a greater focus on long-term "mud
mitigation to prevent further social, economic and infrastructure
degradation".
Mr Bakrie has denied that the volcano was caused by the gas bore -
blaming an earthquake two days earlier near Yogyakarta, more than 200
kilometres away
The third partner in the well, Medco, said Lapindo's drillers had
been negligent in not inserting a casing around the gas bore which
would have enabled the flow to be plugged after the drill hit a huge
mud bubble, pressurised by gas underneath.
A Bakrie company bought out Medco's share of the well, and its
liabilities, for a token fee last month.
Last year Indonesia's Finance Minister blocked the Bakrie group's
attempt to sell Lapindo to a shelf company offshore as an attempt to
evade responsibility for the incident.

Lapindo has launched a public relations offensive, funding studies
and a geological seminar. Only geologists who said the volcano was a
natural phenomenon were invited to contribute.
A police investigation has determined that negligence was to blame and
recommended 13 Lapindo officials face criminal charges.
Local prosecutors are reluctant to proceed, sending the brief of evidence

back twice for revision.
The head of the Disaster Research Centre at the Surabaya Institute of
Technology has no doubts it was the failure to install a casing along
the drill shaft that caused the disaster. "Because they didn't use a
casing, the mud went wild," he says.
Sidoarjo's catastrophe is "just beginning", he says, and with no known
way to halt the flow it could last hundreds of years.
Meanwhile, most of the more than 43,000 victims await compensation,
many in ramshackle, open-air refugee camps. Lapindo says it has paid
more than $180 million towards the clean-up, evacuation, and rent and
food relief. But only 185 people so far have been compensated for the
loss of their homes.
The problem, according to Lapindo, is that locals must produce
evidence of land ownership and most lack official certificates.

The village of Balongnongo was the first hit by the mud. Zaenul, a
mechanic, did have a land title and has received an initial payment, but
he says no compensation can replace the daily village life of
community celebrations, traditional music and Koran readings.
His family is scattered in rented homes across the district and his
two children must travel 20 kilometres to primary school.
"It was my pride to have built a house from my own sweat, but now it
is gone," he says, adding: "What we need is a place to rest, a house
of our own."

The world today

Mount Everest is lighter...

The icy peak of Mount Everest is lighter by about 1,000 pounds of trash.
More than a dozen mountaineers pitched in for the latest effort to
tidy up the world's highest mountain. Accumulated oxygen canisters and
other debris have earned Mount Everest the reputation as the world's
highest garbage dump.
It's the fifth such effort by Japanese mountaineer Ken Noguchi. He
said he's collected nearly 20,000 pounds of garbage since he began his
campaign in 2000.
This year, Noguchi said he's starting to see a cleaner mountain.
Under new Nepalese law, climbers and their guides are required to
carry out all gear and trash or forfeit a $4,000 deposit.

An Alabama boy
An Alabama boy has used his revolver on an enormous wild boar, killing
the animal and sending the youngster on his way to (15 minutes of) fame.
Jamison Stone, 11, used a .50 caliber revolver to kill the pig at a
commercial hunting preserve in east Alabama about three weeks ago.
Stone, his father and two guides tracked the pig, but bagging the
swine took about three hours of chasing through hilly woods before a
final shot at point blank range brought it down for good.
Stone's father, Mike Stone, said the animal weighed more than 1,000
lbs. and was more than nine feet long. The tusks measured five inches.
It took heavy equipment to transport the animal out of the woods. The
head went to a taxidermist. The rest is headed for the sausage
factory. The Stones could net 500 to 700 lbs. of sausage meat.
If the claims are accurate, the trophy boar eclipses Hogzilla, the
famed wild hog that grew to seemingly mythical proportions before it
was killed in south Georgia in 2004.

A phony veterinarian...
A phony veterinarian has been sentenced to probation and mandatory
psychiatric treatment after pleading guilty in New York to performing
unauthorized medical procedures on at least 14 animals.
Steven Vassall was exposed in an undercover sting involving a kitten
named Fred. An investigator posing as Fred's owner called Vassall to
an apartment rigged with a hidden camera.
The fake vet told the investigator he could neuter Fred for $135.
Vassall was arrested as he left the apartment with the kitten and the
cash.
For his part in the sting, Fred -- a rescued stray -- was given a tiny
badge for his collar and a Law Enforcement Appreciation Award.
Officials had planned to use him in a school program about animal
care, but the 15-month old tabby died in August after wandering into
traffic.

A child destroyed?

A child destroyed a one-of-a-kind piece of artwork at Kansas City's
Union Station, and it was caught on tape.
Tibetan monks had been creating the sand art, which looks like a
colorful tapestry on the floor, for two days.
A surveillance camera recorded a young boy, possibly a toddler, who
walked into the sand and started dancing, while his mother mailed a
package at the post office. After a few minutes, the video showed a
woman pull the child away.
"Never happened before, never happened before like that," monk Jampa
Tenzin said.
The monks said they were not angry at the child or his mother.
Instead, they've been hard at work to finish the piece.
Tibetan monks are creating sand art on the floor of Union Station.
The monks are on a yearlong tour of the United States and Canada to
raise money for their monastery. The original monastery in Tibet was
destroyed. They were about halfway finished when they left for the day
Tuesday, roping off the artwork before they left.
The lead monk said it was "no problem," adding, "we will have to work
harder" to get it finished before Saturday. It will then be swept up
and offered to onlookers for their gardens. The rest will be placed in
the Missouri River.

iatrogenicity

1/4 MILLION deaths YEARLY in USA caused by doctors........
The author, Dr. Barbara Starfield of the Johns Hopkins School of
Hygiene and Public Health, describes how the US health care system may
contribute to poor health.

DEATHS PER YEAR:

* 12,000 — unnecessary surgery
* 7,000 — medication errors in hospitals
* 20,000 — other errors in hospitals
* 80,000 — infections in hospitals
* 106,000 — negative effects of drugs
* total 250,000 deaths per year from iatrogenic causes!!

(Google) marketing techniques

HELSINKI - Computer specialist Didier Stevens put up a
simple text advertisement on the Internet offering downloads of a
computer virus for people who did not have one.
Surprisingly, 409 people clicked on the ad which read "Is your PC
virus-free? Get it infected here!" during a 6-month advertising
campaign on Google's Adword, said the IT security expert.
"Some of them must have clicked on it by mistake. Some must have been
curious or stupid," said Mikko Hypponen, head of research at data
security firm F-Secure.
There was no virus involved, it was an experiment aiming to show
how advertising systems can be used for malicious intent, Stevens
told Reuters.

effects of internet on youth

Excited and emboldened by the wealth of information they find on the
Internet, Chinese teens are breaking centuries of tradition to
challenge their teachers and express their own opinions in class.
Wearing jerseys emblazoned with the names of European soccer stars,
downloading weekly episodes of "Prison Break," listening to 50 Cent,
and reading Japanese comic books, China's current high school
generation is plugging itself directly into international culture.
And it's giving the kids ideas. Ideas that could one day transform the
way this country is governed.
"The Internet has given Chinese children wings," says Sun Yun Xiao,
vice president of the China Youth and Children Research Center.
Many are using those wings to fly in the face of received wisdom about
how and what they should learn, and about how much respect they owe to
authority.
"Today students ask you, 'Why?' And if you don't have a good answer,
they won't necessarily accept what you say," says Zhao Hongxia, a
young teacher at a private school in Beijing. "In my day, if the
teacher said something he was always right."
The "post-90" generation of Chinese youngsters, named for the year the
eldest of them was born, is "very different" from its predecessors,
says Tony Hu, a Beijing high school student who has just turned 18.
"We have far more ways to get information," he explains. "The
generation before us knew nothing about anything except studying."
That judgment may be a little harsh, but Sun, whose
research institute is linked to China's Communist Youth League, agrees
with its essence.
"The post-90 kids are more confident and have more experience, and
they are definitely braver and readier to challenge" their elders, he
says. "The reason is that they have the Internet as a way to learn
things, and because a lot more of them travel. They have more ways of
acquiring knowledge."
137 Million Online in China
Internet use in China has exploded in recent years, and at the
forefront of that revolution have been young people, hungry for a
taste of life outside their country's borders. In 1999, there were
just four million Internet connections in China; by the end of last
year there were 137 million.
More than 70 percent of Chinese children between ages 7 and 15 had
used the Internet at least once, according to a survey Sun's center
carried out last year. That was nearly half as many again as the 2005
figure, and the total rose to 87 percent when only urban youngsters
were polled. More than half of town-dwelling children today live in
homes with an Internet connection.
That gives them opportunities to broaden their minds that teachers
often cannot match.
"I learned from books," says Jenny Li, who now trains teachers at a
Beijing college. "These kids learn from the whole world."
That makes them more difficult to teach, says Zhao.
"It's harder for me to keep their attention in class," she complains,
"because they already know a lot. Teachers have to keep broadening
their own horizons."
If Zhao, who has been teaching for six years, finds it hard to keep up
with her students, older teachers are often baffled.
"A lot of teachers over 40 feel uneasy and uncomfortable with the new
knowledge their students have, and their lack of control," says Yan
Ming, a young teacher at the elite No. 1 Middle School in the port
city of Tianjin.
Teachers are also having to cope with an evolving curriculum. A series
of reforms since 1997 have edged the Chinese education system away
from rote learning and towards a more Western emphasis on independent
thought.
"We are moving from a teacher-centered to a student-centered
approach," says Wang Wu Xing, a professor at the Beijing Institute of
Education. "If we want to produce top talent we need millions of
inquisitive and critical-minded innovative talents. The new generation
will develop the ability to explore things."
At the cutting edge of this drive is Tianjin's No. 1 Middle School,
which teaches students up to the university entrance level. The school
is experimenting this year with a history curriculum that breaks the
old rules. For the first time, says Yan, students are allowed to write
history essays that disagree with the textbook's conclusion about the
political significance, for example, of the Boxer Rebellion against
colonial powers.
"If they argue well, they get good marks," explains Yan.
So far, however, this history test has only been administered at the
middle school level in three school districts.
"Whether they will allow this [latitude in answering the question] in
the national exam [to get into university] we will have to see," Yan
adds.
That exam is so critical for ambitious students desperate to get into
China's top universities, says Wang Zhangmin, a veteran history
teacher at the school, few of them dare to step out of line for fear
of risking their chances of success.
That fear acts as a brake on change. Teachers at the Tianjin school,
which prides itself on the high proportion of its graduates who get
into the best colleges, say the pressure is so intense on elite
students that they are still scared to challenge their teachers or to
spend much time exploring topics outside the prescribed curriculum.
At more ordinary schools, too, teachers do not always encourage
student-initiated digressions.
"We don't get many debates in my class," says Xi Haixin, a 17-year-old
Beijing high school junior. "Sometimes we want to discuss something,
but the teacher has too much material to get through and he drops the
issue."
It is also difficult, Xi acknowledges, to hold a coherent debate when
there are 50 or so students in the class, as is normally the case in
China.
'Spider-Man 3': Already Seen It
Even if his teachers do not satisfy his Web-fueled curiosity, Xi says,
the Internet has still changed him and his generation.
"I'm part of international society now," he reckons, listing the Miami
Heat as his favorite basketball team, rhythm and blues as his favorite
music, and "Spider-Man 3" as the best film he has seen recently. "Kids
my age all listen to the same stuff and watch the same films."
"As students learn from foreign cultures they will definitely feel
more global and more international," says teacher Wang Zhangmin.
How far this globalized generation will change the face of China is a
matter of debate among those following young peoples' attitudes.
Tony Hu is dubious.
"I'm not sure that our individualism can change the environment much,"
he says. "The Chinese mold has been established for many years. And if
we can't change the environment, the environment will change us. We
have to survive."
Sun Yun Xiao, the researcher, has greater hopes.
"The sense of participation among post-90 kids is very strong," he
points out. "Their sense of democracy is stronger, and this is a
definite trend."
At Tianjin No. 1 Middle School, Yan Ming is waiting and seeing.
"If these kids really have the chance to think differently, the impact
will be the same as in the West," he predicts. "They will be more
creative, they'll be better at solving problems by themselves, and
they won't simply do what they are told to do."