Where is the Red Sea-Dead Sea Water Conveyance Program going?

After meeting with World Bank President, Robert Zoellick, Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister of Regional Development, Silvan Shalom, stated that the World Bank had agreed to fund the Red-Sea-Dead Sea Water Conveyance Program that involves Jordan, Palestine and Israel. However, Bank officials say that they have made no promises and that the project is still in the feasibility study phase.

The studies are slated to be completed in early 2011. According Lintner, the Bank has still not determined how much financial (or other) involvement it will have in the project’s future, but Lintner stated that by 2011, the three governments involved in the project will have decided what the Bank’s role will be if any, but that it is the governments’ decision to make. At this point the Bank’s only involvement is in the feasibility and the environmental impacts studies, which the governments of France, Greece, Italy, South Korea, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden and USA have jointly put in the allocated $16.2 million for.

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The News About the Internet

The News About the Internet – The New York Review of Books

46 Million Uninsured Americans: A Look Behind The Number

“We are not a nation that accepts nearly 46 million uninsured men, women and children,” President Obama told doctors in a speech before the American Medical Association in Chicago in June. “We are not a nation that lets hardworking families go without coverage, or turns its back on those in need. We’re a nation that cares for its citizens. We look out for one another. That’s what makes us the United States of America. We need to get this done.”

And the White House Council of Economic Advisers pressed the number in its number-crunching case for a health overhaul: “Perhaps the most visible sign of the need for health care reform is the 46 million Americans currently without health insurance,” according to the report, also issued in June.

The 46 million number is a handy one — large and round — but who are the people it represents, and what does it mean for the rest of us that they don’t have insurance?

LISTEN TO THIS STORY on NPR

Daily Beast: Can USAID Survive Without a Leader?

Until last week, Farmer was rumored to be Hillary Clinton’s choice to head USAID, an organization that has languished without a leader for almost seven months. Then he bowed out, and Wednesday came news that he’s going to be the U.N. Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti under Bill Clinton. It’s probably a much better position for him—Farmer isn’t a bureaucrat, and Haiti, where he founded the pioneering Zanmi Lasante hospital, is by all accounts where his heart is. But it raises a question that’s being asked with increasing urgency within development circles—why can’t the Obama administration fill the void at the top of USAID?

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A very important topic since Jordan is very dependent on USAID…

Iraqi Refugees Struggle to Adjust to Life in U.S.

By KIRK SEMPLE

Not long after the Iraq War began in 2003, Uday al-Ghanimi was accosted by several men outside the American military base where he managed a convenience store. They accused him of abetting the Americans, and one fired a pistol at his head.

Now, after 24 operations, Mr. Ghanimi has a reconstructed face as well as political asylum in the United States. On July 4, his wife and three youngest children joined him in New York after a three-year separation.

But the euphoria of their reunion quickly dissipated as the family began to reckon with the colder realities of their new life. Mr. Ghanimi, 50, who has not been able to work because of lingering pain, is supporting his family on a monthly disability check of $761, food stamps and handouts from friends. They are crammed into one room they rent in a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in a city whose small Iraqi population is scattered. And Mr. Ghanimi’s wife and children do not speak English, deepening their sense of isolation.

A report released in June by the International Rescue Committee, a refugee resettlement organization in New York, said that many Iraqi immigrants have been unable to find jobs, are exhausting government and other benefits and are spiraling toward poverty and homelessness.

“They say, ‘Let’s go back,’ ” Mr. Ghanimi said glumly. “It’s not what they were thinking. I told them, ‘Just be patient.’ ”

For years after the American invasion of Iraq, thousands of Iraqis clamored for admission to the United States and found the door all but closed — until the government reacted to widespread criticism in 2007 by making it easier for more to enter with special visas or as refugees.

But now that Iraqis are arriving in larger numbers, many are discovering that life in the United States is much harder than they expected.

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Amelia- Official Theatrical Trailer

Click here to watch the official trailor of Amelia, which will be out in theatres in October.

A look at the life of legendary American pilot Amelia Earhart, who disappeared while flying over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 in an attempt to make a flight around the world. |

Mentally Ill Offenders Strain Juvenile System

As cash-starved states slash mental health programs in communities and schools, they are increasingly relying on the juvenile corrections system to handle a generation of young offenders with psychiatric disorders. About two-thirds of the nation’s juvenile inmates — who numbered 92,854 in 2006, down from 107,000 in 1999 — have at least one mental illness, according to surveys of youth prisons, and are more in need of therapy than punishment.

“We’re seeing more and more mentally ill kids who couldn’t find community programs that were intensive enough to treat them,” said Joseph Penn, a child psychiatrist at the Texas Youth Commission. “Jails and juvenile justice facilities are the new asylums.”

At least 32 states cut their community mental health programs by an average of 5 percent this year and plan to double those budget reductions by 2010, according to a recent survey of state mental health offices.

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The talented cartoonist: Brian Stone

Here are some cartoons by my friend Brian Stone

Jordan attracts major international productions

Two major international film productions and a popular South-American TV series recently wrapped shoots in Jordan.

Scorched, a Canadian production, directed by Denis Villeneuve concluded a five-week shoot in several locations across Jordan including Amman, Jarash, Irbid and Salt. Scorched is a feature film set in the Middle East and is due to be released next year. Villeneuve is well known for this previous film, Polytechnique, which was screened this year at the Cannes Film Festival.

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Councilman Tony Avella

By DAVID W. CHEN

It wasn’t a good moment to be the only member of the City Council who turned down an official parking pass, which allows members to park virtually anywhere.

Councilman Tony Avella was racing to Kopperfields restaurant in Bay Ridge, where one of the few groups supporting his insurgent mayoral campaign was gathering.

He circled the block in his Toyota Corolla looking for parking. Then he circled again. Finally he found a metered spot about six blocks from the bar.

“The moment that you don’t do what the ordinary person does in their daily lives, and you start acting like you’re above it, then you become a politician, and I hate politics,” Mr. Avella explained, as he clamped the steering wheel with the Club. “Hate it.”

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Rise in suicide among American Soldiers

By ERICA GOODE

Sgt. Jacob Blaylock flipped on the video camera he had set up in a trailer at the Tallil military base, southeast of Baghdad.

He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, blew the smoke upward.

“Hey, it’s Jackie,” he said. “It’s the 20th of April. We go home in six days. I lost two good friends on the 14th. I’m having a hard time dealing with it.”

For almost a year, the soldiers of the 1451st Transportation Company had been escorting trucks full of gasoline, building materials and other supplies along Iraq’s dark, dangerous highways. There had been injuries, but no one had died.

Their luck evaporated less than two weeks before they were to return home, in the spring of 2007. A scout truck driving at the front of a convoy late at night hit a homemade bomb buried in the asphalt. Two soldiers, Sgt. Brandon Wallace and Sgt. Joshua Schmit, were killed.

The deaths stunned the unit, part of the North Carolina National Guard. The two men were popular and respected — “big personalities,” as one soldier put it. Sergeant Blaylock, who was close to both men, seemed especially shaken. Sometime earlier, feeling the strain of riding the gunner position in the exposed front truck, he had switched places with Sergeant Wallace, moving to a Humvee at the rear.

“It was supposed to be me,” he would tell people later.

The losses followed the men and women of the 1451st home as they dispersed to North Carolina and Tennessee, New York and Oklahoma, reuniting with their families and returning to their jobs.

Sergeant Blaylock went back to Houston, where he tried to pick up the pieces of his life and shape them into a whole. But grief and guilt trailed him, combining with other stresses: financial troubles, disputes with his estranged wife over their young daughter, the absence of the tight group of friends who had helped him make it through 12 months of war.

On Dec. 9, 2007, Sergeant Blaylock, heavily intoxicated, lifted a 9-millimeter handgun to his head during an argument with his girlfriend and pulled the trigger. He was 26.

“I have failed myself,” he wrote in a note found later in his car. “I have let those around me down.”

Over the next year, three more soldiers from the 1451st — Sgt. Jeffrey Wilson, Sgt. Roger Parker and Specialist Skip Brinkley — would take their own lives. The four suicides, in a unit of roughly 175 soldiers, make the company an extreme example of what experts see as an alarming trend in the years since the invasion of Iraq.

The number of suicides reported by the Army has risen to the highest level since record-keeping began three decades ago. Last year, there were 192 among active-duty soldiers and soldiers on inactive reserve status, twice as many as in 2003, when the war began. (Five more suspected suicides are still being investigated.) This year’s figure is likely to be even higher: from January to mid-July, 129 suicides were confirmed or suspected, more than the number of American soldiers who died in combat during the same period.

Those statistics, of course, do not offer a full picture. Suicide counts tend to be undercounts, and the trend is less marked in other branches of the military. Nor are there reliable figures for veterans who have left the service; the Department of Veterans Affairs can only systematically track suicides among its hospitalized patients, and it does not issue regular suicide reports.

Even so, stung by criticism from veterans groups and mental health advocates, the Pentagon and the veterans agency have increased efforts to understand and address the problem. They have bolstered suicide-prevention programs, hiring hundreds more mental health providers. At Fort Campbell, in Kentucky, where at least 14 soldiers have killed themselves this year alone, normal activities were suspended for three days in May and replaced with suicide-prevention training. Late last year, the Army commissioned a five-year, $50 million study of the causes of suicide among soldiers, turning to four outside experts to lead the research.

“The ‘business as usual’ attitudes of the past are no longer appropriate,” said George Wright, an Army spokesman. “It’s clear we have not found full solutions yet, but we are trying every remedy.”

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Read Ending It All