"Soaring lead levels kill in Nigeria; 160 dead after gold miners unearth toxin" by Jon Gambrell, Associated Press | June 13, 2010
Looks like MSM Monitor got himself a yellow card, huh?
Better than what the kid and mom are getting:
A child suffering from lead poisoning awaited treatment in Gusau, Nigeria, where mostly children have fallen ill. (Sunday Alamba/Associated Press)
YARGALMA, Nigeria — Mound after tiny mound of red clay earth dots the cemetery on the outskirts of this impoverished Nigerian village where grieving parents come to pray.
Children began falling ill months ago here and in a half-dozen other villages in this remote northern region on the cusp of the Sahara. Some could not stand, some went blind or deaf.
Then they began dying.
Doctors suspected malaria. But they were wrong — after 160 died and hundreds more were ailing, blood tests revealed the real killer: lead unearthed by villagers digging for gold.
That's GOLD, not GOAL!!
In a tragedy described by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as “unprecedented’’ in its work with lead poisoning worldwide, most victims are children.
Many had played in homes or village common areas contaminated by lead. The level of exposure was so high that most blood samples were off the scale on lead-screening machines.
The existence of gold deposits in this had been long known. But it wasn’t until gold prices soared in recent years that villagers began heading into the bush to search for it.
Not exactly a Midas touch, 'eh?
Soon the poor herdsmen in rural Zamfara state could sell gold for more than $23 a gram, a huge sum in a country where most live on less than $1 a day.
“There is no other business one can do to make that much money,’’ said Haruna Musa, a 70-year-old elder in Yargalma.
The process of extracting gold from the ore is simple and dates back over a millennium. Villagers bash the rocks with hammers, then grind the smaller pieces into a powder, these days with the help of a generator-powered machine. The powder is added to a slurry mixture of water and mercury — itself a dangerous substance — to draw the gold particles together.
However, this time the ore brought back to the villages in Zamfara contained extremely high levels of lead. Fathers carried the precious rocks home to store inside their mud-walled compounds, sometimes leaving them on sleeping mats.
The work of breaking the rocks often fell to their wives. The women of the Muslim villages would chisel the rocks into smaller pieces as their young children played nearby. Dust and flakes accumulated in the villages’ communal areas, which children run through.
An international team of doctors and hazardous waste specialists arrived in Zamfara in mid-May and is racing to treat victims and remove the poison from villages, pastureland, and creek beds....
Which means animals could be affected, too?
On Thursday, local farmers wearing white coveralls, surgical masks, and latex gloves used picks and shovels to dig up the floors of a contaminated mud-walled compound in the village of Dareta. Ore processing sites lay abandoned, the equipment sitting idle as rainwater washed contaminated soil into a pond.
Cleanup efforts have not even begun in Yargalma.
At the village cemetery on Wednesday, Rabiu Mohammed knelt among the dozens of fresh child-sized graves, grief etched on his face. A son and a daughter are buried here.
That should never happen.
Children, particularly those under 5, are most susceptible to lead poisoning because their brains are developing. High levels of exposure can damage the brain and nervous system. In severe cases, it can lead to seizures, coma, and death....
Related: Greece-bound flight diverted to Logan
Yup, missed that one just like the Greeks.
Not hard when it's an invisible ink (not in my printed paper).
Then we look at today's matches:
"2 convicted for role in Srebrenica; Ends 4-year trial over ’95 massacre" by Marlise Simons, New York Times | June 11, 2010
PARIS — Judges at The Hague handed down two rare genocide convictions yesterday, sentencing two security officers for the Bosnian Serb Army to life in prison for their roles in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, the worst single episode in a decade of war that left 100,000 dead and tore the Balkans apart.
The verdicts, along with five other war crimes convictions, concluded an almost four-year trial in which many witnesses spoke, at times in horrifying detail, of the Serbian capture of the United Nations-protected enclaves of Srebrenica and Zepa that held tens of thousand of Bosnian Muslim refugees.
Didn't do a very good job, did they?
The military operation ended with the deportation of thousands of women and children and the execution of close to 8,000 captive men and boys.
Although the UN war crimes tribunal has convicted more than a dozen people of crimes committed in Srebrenica, it has only once before issued a conviction of genocide.....When I see ISRAEL'S LEADERS, George Bush, and Tony Bliar before the bar then I will take notice.
Hammering patsies the West has turned on just doesn't cut it for me.
--more--"
Also see: Serbian police catch convicted assassin
Musical Mass Graves in the Balkans
The Serb monsters will be facing Ghana today.
Nothing about Algeria, Slovenia, Germany, or Australia from what I saw.
For further coverage see my Sports section!!!
(I will provide updates from the matches as I post again today; however, I turned the volume down because of that incessant buzzing noise)
