From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 3/4/2007 2:05 AM
Kathirasen on Sunday: We want peace, we want peace (more weapons please)
04 Mar 2007
Kathirasen

IS that the ominous sound of war drums I hear? There is so much belligerence in the air, so much posturing.

Will Iran be invaded? I don’t think even President George W. Bush is that thick, but one never knows. Iran itself has adopted an attitude that the UN deems stubborn.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has clearly stated that Iran would continue its uranium enrichment programme. The US doesn’t want another nation with nuclear weapons capability, least of all Iran.
Perhaps they think another war is not going to matter. After all, there are 32 armed conflicts in 27 nations today. So what’s another one.
More than a third of the world’s population — an estimated three billion — is mired in some sort of conflict or suffering its effects. People are dying or being displaced in nations such as Algeria, Sudan, Ethiopia, Burundi, Chad, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Afghanistan, India-Kashmir, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Chechnya and Colombia.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), says there have been 13 million deaths in armed conflicts in the last 10 years. Nine million deaths occurred in sub-Saharan Africa alone. Since 1998, 2.4 million people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
ElBaradei, in case you didn’t know, shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 with the IAEA.
According to Uppsala University of Sweden, which has a Conflict Data Programme, there were 30 active armed conflicts in 2004. In 2003, there were 29.
It has recorded 228 armed conflicts after the World War Two and 118 after the end of the Cold War. Although the majority of these have been or are civil wars, outside nations have contributed troops or support, including financial and logistics.
In his report on the prevention of armed conflict, former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan noted on July 16, 2006 that, although the overall trend showed a decrease in the number and severity of armed conflicts, "an unacceptable gap remains between rhetoric and reality in the area of conflict prevention".
Why do you think the US continues to produce weapons of mass destruction and is sending more troops to Iraq? It wants peace. Why do you think China continues to shore up its military strength and recently conducted a ballistic missile test by shooting down an old satellite? It wants peace.
Why do you think India and Pakistan continue missile testing in a game of one-upmanship? They want peace. Why do you think Japan recently sent up another spy satellite? It wants peace. Why do you think North Korea threatens to use its nuclear weapon? It wants peace. And why do you think Iran is going ahead with its uranium enrichment programme? It wants peace, of course.
Please, please don’t misunderstand the leaders and politicians of these nations and others involved in conflicts. They all want peace. That is why they prepare for war.
After all, doesn’t the ends justify the means? What does it matter if some bloke and his family somewhere perish due to the weapons we are testing? What does it matter if children die so that we can continue to stay in power? What does it matter if a million people suffer if we can have control of the oil or the diamond mines or feed our pride?
There are many organisations today that shout about peace. But each time some of these organisations hold some meeting or seminar, they lash out at some leader or other as being the devil incarnate; they are always bashing some country or other.
Then there are organisations which, in the name of peace, take sides in a conflict and march against some country or other in protest.
That, it appears, is how they foster peace. Me, I’m just a simple person who thinks that if you want to work for peace you must be unbiased and you must help bring the warring parties together. But then, being an ordinary person, what would I know about these things.
Over the past couple of weeks, I read two letters on the Sri Lanka conflict in the letters pages of the New Straits Times.
One of them said a humanitarian disaster was in the making, especially after the closing of the only highway linking Jaffna province to the rest of the country. Civilians were facing a severe shortage of food and medicine, he said.
Both writers asked why hardly any attention was being paid to the war in Sri Lanka. More than 50,000 people have died and millions have been forced to become refugees.
In fact, a number of people have asked me why the Malaysian obsession with the Iraq war and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Civilians, they said, were also dying or suffering in Sri Lanka, Africa and elsewhere.
One friend asked why Malaysian leaders were always talking about Palestine and Iraq and hardly ever said anything about Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo or other conflict spots.
That’s something to reflect, I guess.
I would celebrate if conflicts came to an end, but there is little hope of that happening. So, I’ll pray that at least the war drums beating over Iran’s uranium enrichment programme cease, and sanity prevails.

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. — Albert Einstein


This is one bed advice I’m taking to heart

I AM writing this after a short afternoon nap. It is my day off. I usually don’t sleep in the afternoons but I have decided to do it more frequently from now. After all, I want a healthy heart.
A study of 23,681 Greek men and women with no history of heart disease shows that an afternoon nap might just help prolong my life. Yours, too, if you take the advice of the scientists to heart.
Napping for 30 minutes, three times a week, reduces the risk of dying from a heart attack by at least 37 per cent, joint research by the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of Athens Medical Sch- ool in Greece shows.
The Harvard website quoted the study’s senior author, Dimitrios Trichopoulos, as saying: "If confirmed by other investigations, these results would imply that a siesta could be added to the several means available for the control of coronary heart mortality, like healthy diets or cholesterol-lowering medications. The magnitude of the effect appears to be considerable."
The six-year study showed that even an occasional nap lowered the risk of dying from heart disease by 12 per cent.
It found that working men got the greatest benefit from the siesta — a 64 per cent cut in heart disease death.
The researchers came to the conclusion after factoring in diet, exercise and habits such as smoking that stress the heart.
The team’s lead author Dr Androniki Naska, from the University of Athens Medical School, has been quoted as saying: "We interpret our findings as indicating that among healthy adults, siesta, possibly on account of stress-releasing consequences, may reduce coronary mortality."
The study confirms findings that countries where people embrace the siesta tend to have low heart disease death rates.
No wonder people in the Mediterranean — where a siesta is the norm — are said to be healthy. My friend MM, who recently visited Spain, said he could hardly see any fat people there. He also said the women were pretty and the men good looking. But, I hasten to add, the latter characteristics probably has nothing to do with sleeping.
But I don’t suppose the six Malta Shipyard employees who were found guilty by the company’s disciplinary board of sleeping during working hours on Feb 12 could get a reprieve if they showed this study to the management. They have, by the way, been suspended from work.
Trichopoulos said: "My advice is if you can (nap), do it. If you have a sofa in your office, if you can relax, do it."
I would love to follow his advice but I’m afraid I’ll be labelled as "lazy" if I were to nap at work. I could suggest the health benefits of napping to my boss, of course, but he may want to sleep on it.

http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/nst/Sunday/Columns/20070304085937/Article/index_html