Month: March 2006

Blank Blu-Ray Discs Available Sometime in April

Sony is apparently going to actually start shipping single-layered Blu-ray discs later this month, which means they’ll hit retail around April. At least in Europe.

At least in Germany, the initial price is going to be about $30 apiece for the write-once version and $36 for the rewritable version of the 25gb optical disc. That’s $1.20/gigabyte of storage, or about 12 times higher than the per-gigabyte cost for DVD-R and DVD+R blanks these days. They’ll have to hit the $2-$2.50/apiece pricepoint to be worthwhile except for those people concerned more about physical storage space for optical media.

Currently I’ve got probably 3,000-4,000 DVD-R/DVD+Rs and would love to be able to cut that number by 75 percent. Or wait for the dual-layered discs supposedly arriving in late 2006.

Is This Salon.Com Spam Legitimate?

As long-time readers probably known, I absolutely detest Salon.Com. Still, when I received a spam purporting to be from Salon Media Group asking me to re-up my subscription recently, even I had to do a double-take. Yes they have lousy judgment, poor ethics and a trash tabloid aesthetic, but even Salon.Com’s publishers wouldn’t try to entice me to renew my subscription by offering up previously unpublished Abu Ghraib photos of torture. Would they?

We’re planning to release hundreds more photos taken inside Abu Ghraib. Using information found in a U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) report and other sources, our news team is cataloging each image so we may provide captions that offer critical context. Our goal is to publish newsworthy pictures that haven’t been widely seen before, providing the best information that the CID investigation materials could offer.

I’m contacting you and other former Salon Premium members to make sure these photos reach a large audience. Your expired Premium membership supported our ongoing mission to speak truth to power, but we need your help again now.

I’d like to urge you to renew your Premium membership now through this link to give us the support we need to continue this important work:

https://sub.salon.com/dyn/RenewMembership/

Well that is a bit tempting. Hey Salon — how about throwing in an autographed photo of Lyndie England?

Overpopulation Doesn’t Kill People, War Kills People

A study in the January 7 edition of The Lancet claims that the ongoing civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo is killing as many as 38,000 people each month, largely by magnifying the levels of malnutrition and preventable disease in that country.

Based on surveys conducted in 19,500 homes in the Democratic Republic of Congo conducted from April-July 2004, the researchers concluded there were an excess of 600,000 deaths during that period that would not have occurred in the absence of the civil war.

An estimated 4 million people have died in the DRC since fighting began in 1998.

By the Lancet’s measure, the civil war in DRC is the single deadliest humanitarian crisis in the world at the moment, and yet receives comparatively little coverage or focus. As the study’s lead author Richard Brennan told the BBC,

Congo is the deadliest crisis anywhere in the world over the past 60 years. Ignorance about its scale and impact is almost universal and international engagement remains completely out of proportion to humanitarian need.

The backdrop of DRC’s civil war goes back to the Hutu/Tutsi conflict that led to genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Fearing that Congo leader Mobutu Sese Seko was not doing enough to stop Hutus in the DRC that Rwanda believe were planning attacks against Tutsis, Rwanda and Uganda backed Laurent Kabila’s successful coup against Mobutu. When Kabila turned on his supporters and attempted to expel Rwanda military forces in 1998, a civil war developed that soon involved 9 African nations in what has been called Africa’s world war.

There have been a series of truces and cease-fires, but violence has proceeded largely unabated.

Sources:

The Lancet Publishes IRC Mortality Study from DR Congo; 3.9 Million Have Died: 38,000 Die per Month. Press Release, International Rescue Committee, January 6, 2006.

‘Thousands’ dying in DR Congo war. The BBC, January 6, 2006.

Systematic Rape in Congo Reportedly Continues Despite Peace Agreements

Although there is a peace agreement in place and elections scheduled later this year to end the Democratic Republic of Congo’s seven year civil war, human rights activists who visit the DRC say that the systematic use of rape continues to be used by various forces involved.

At its heart, the DRC civil war has its root in an ethnic conflict between Hutus and Tutsis that led to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda in which an estimated 800,000 Tutsis were murdered in less than 4 months.

In 1997, fearing Hutus were preparing to launch an attack from the DRC, the Tutsi-led government of Rwanda supported Laurent Kabila’s coup against DRC dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. When Kabila won and attempted to expel Rwandan military forces from the Congo, a civil war erupted that at one point included 9 other African nations.

Systematic rape has been a frequent tactic in the civil war. A 2004 Amnesty International report estimated that as many as 40,000 women had been raped by military and paramilitary forces from 1998-2004. The AI report said that sexual assault had been committed by forces on all sides of the conflict.

Human rights activists such as Eric Schiller returning from the DRC claim that although there is a peace in place, the rapes and violence have not abated. Schiller told the Canadian Press,

It [systematic rape] is very extensive, it is ongoing, it seems to have become a modus operandi.

This is hardly surprising giving AI’s report in late 2004 that the transitional government in place in the DRC was indifferent at best to the plight of the victims of sexual violence. According to AI’s report,

Insufficient resources and the fact that the country is still balanced between war and peace are often used as excuses by the government to justify its inaction on these issues. Questioned by Amnesty International on the government?s weak commitment on care for survivors of sexual violence, the deputy health minister claimed that this was due to the lack of resources and the complex configuration of the government. He clearly indicated that his ministry will limit its work to caring for victims if and when it is able to, and that the government “cannot establish a global policy on rape because rape is an isolated phenomenon and is not an epidemic or disease like cholera”(58).

If Schiller is correct, little appears to have changed in the year and a half since the release of the Amnesty International report.

Source:

Democratic Republic of Congo: Mass rape – time for remedies. Amnesty International, 2004.

Congo rape victims seek solace. Jackie Martens, BBC, January 24, 2004.

Report shows DR Congo rape horror. BBC, October 26, 2004.

Systematic rape in eastern Congo continues despite pleas for intervention. Dennis Bueckert, Canadian Press, March 5, 2006.