go see the Glossary. --------

Approved: Kiwifruit Subject: HARD NEWS 14/9/01 - Making Sense of It HARD NEWS is first broadcast in Auckland on 95bFM around 9.30am on Fridays and replayed around 5.15pm Friday and 10am Sunday on The Culture Bunker. You can listen to 95bFM live on the Internet. Point your web browser to http://www.95bfm.co.nz. You will need an MP3 player. Currently New Zealand is 12 hours ahead of GMT. HARD NEWS is also available in MP3 form from http://www.mp3.net.nz and in text form at http://www.scoop.co.nz. You can subscribe to the 95bFM Hard News mailing list at http://www.95bfm.com/hardnews.php GOOD DAY MEDIAPHILES ... It was as strange as if we had dreamed it. And, in a very modern sense, we have. We have seen Armageddon, Deep Impact and Independence Day. We have seen New York laid waste in the movies. As that great cloud of smoke, paper, masonry dust and human remains teemed down the from Trade Centre towers, then stormed towards the cameras, it followed a visual syntax familiar to us all. But this time it was real and that was what was so hard to grasp. This time, it wasn't Godzilla. Yet even as we feel for America, we are fretting about America's response. The President's speeches reassure his people - and unnerve the rest of us. What exactly is going on here? As it happens, two of America's finest essayists, Lewis Lapham writing in last month's Harper's, and Gore Vidal, in this month's Vanity Fair, have given us instructive and insightful works with which to untangle the horror. The Lapham essay might have been written as a study guide to the utterances of George W. Bush on the day of the attack. Bush's first words to his nation were: "Freedom itself was attacked this morning." America not only loves freedom - it *owns* freedom. His big speech on the evening of the attack was littered with words like "justice", "peace" and "freedom" - not once but repeatedly. It served to support the dangerous fantasy that America has worn a white hat for the past five decades. The Americans now calling for their country to get dirty have missed the fact that their country has played dirty for a very long time. Television pictures of a few hundred celebrating Palestinians have already enraged Americans. But if I had spent 20 or 30 years rotting in a refugee camp in Lebanon, I think I, too, would celebrate a strike against the country that had, year after year, used its veto to thwart the will of the United Nations over Palestine. In 1988, a US missile cruiser shot down an Iranian airliner en route to Dubai, under the impression that it was a warplane. 290 civilians died, their relatives later told to get lost by the US Supreme Court. America paid $2.9 million in compensation - but only to the families of non-Iranian passengers. When it happened, the father of the current American president was then campaigning for office. His statement was this: "I will never apologise for the United States. I don't care what the facts are." Today's terrorists might be equally callous, but surely not more so. America has also, when it has suited, ignored acts of terrorism by foreign governments on its own soil. Take, say, the 1976 murder by car bomb of a Chilean opposition leader and his American assistant. It happened in downtown Washington DC and the American government knew precisely who was responsible: the Pinochet regime it had helped install in Chile. America didn't punish Pinochet: instead, it offered him FBI help in tracking down other dissidents, presumably so they too could be assassinated in the Land of the Free. Pinochet has been allowed to survive into the refuge of his dotage. Henry Kissinger, directly complicit in the deaths of thousands of innocent people, will die comfortably in old age, no doubt accorded a state funeral. It is rarely heads of state who pay the ultimate price for their actions, but ordinary people. And this week, thousands of ordinary American people have been horribly snatched away. The awfulness here is almost impossible to grasp. Children with no one to pick them up from school. Three hundred and fifty firefighters taken as they tried themselves to save lives. About 5000 lives lost in all. And people in planes and buildings making cellphone calls to say goodbye, forever. Even this far away, most of us have been shaken. I had to talk to my kids about it, especially my 10-year-old, who just could not understand why someone would do this - he is a very moral boy. I eventually realised that the non-stop TV coverage was really upsetting him. I turned the TV off,and he asked if he could be alone for a while. A 10 year old. But this doesn't make it any better that thousands more people may soon die in a probably fruitless, low-risk attack on the trappings of Osama Bin Laden - who was once himself helped and cultivated by the CIA, when it suited. Or that Ariel Sharon, who oversaw the massacre of more than a thousand Palestinian civilians in a few days in 1982, is now the Prime Minister of Israel, which receives billions of dollars from US taxpayers every year. Or that, by the estimate of the United Nations, 600,000 Iraqi children have either starved to death or been poisoned in the years since the Gulf War. It is not a just world, and blind American anger will not make it so. Bin Laden himself is a murderous, Islamist pig; a rich racist with an endless supply of cannon fodder. But he does not inflict mindless, motiveless violence. He acts in a deeply political context. Which is where Gore Vidal can help us. He writes about the last great slaughter of American innocents; the Oklahoma bombing. Timothy McVeigh acted with a cold reason that he was able to explain in detail to anyone who asked; after Waco he felt himself to be at war with a hostile government - his own. Yet, in public, writes Vidal: "There was to be only one story: one man of incredible, innate evil wanted to destroy innocent lives for no reason other than a spontaneous joy in evildoing." The story was the same this week. In his evening address to the nation, Bush punctuated his words so that the phrase "America was attacked by evil," stood on its own. Good was attacked by evil. It was that simple. Yet, as Lapham relates, he visited France this year, shortly after an opinion poll in which people were asked about images that came to mind when they thought of America. From a short list of words, two-thirds chose "violence" and "power". Half chose "inequality" and "racism". Only 20 per cent chose "freedom", the image in which Bush chose to dress America. And this in a Nato member country. "Gradually it occurred to me," writes Lapham. "That the French didn't fully appreciate the doctrine of America innocence." This tragedy has also drawn out the best in the American people. The deeply symbolic rush to give blood; the way little people went to help, or turned over their websites to personal coverage of what was going on. These are positive and poignant responses to trauma. But the American people's profound ignorance of their own government's foreign policy bodes ill. A massive military response is being assembled even now. The cold fact that American military might isn't much use against the kind of opponent America is fighting will be ignored. Bush will use this week as an excuse to spend billions of dollars on missile defence - even though missile defence is now more absurd than ever. The US intelligence agencies - outsmarted yet again - are already demanding that civil rights be rolled back in the hope of catching the next group of criminals. There will be pressure as never before on privacy. John Perry Barlow has depicted the attack as the burning of the Reichstag - the calamity that unleashed the Nazis. We can only hope he's wrong. And already, it seems, American anger has been turned inwards on Arab Americans - or even anyone who looks like they might be Arab. The economic consequences here are yet unknowable. Only hours before the attack, there was very bad news on the global economy, with concerns focused on Japan. It's not yet clear what the additional impact of destruction, interruption of business, an insurance nightmare and a general loss of confidence will be. On the other hand, money spend setting right disaster will boost American GDP; and it may be fear of economic consequences that stays the hand of America's military might. For us, Air New Zealand has fallen in a hole at precisely the wrong time; things may be tough for the air travel industry for a while now. Still, there are worse places to be right now than a food basket in the South Pacific ocean. The world has changed and it already seems a long, long time since last Friday night and the B-Net New Zealand Music Awards and the late, late party after at the Bowler. Special big-ups to MonkeyBoy for storming the decks with his his two new Subware remixes and to SirVere for his good grace and general niceness after that unfortunate incident with the fire extinguisher. Anyway, when I finally did leave the party, about 4.30, I walked up the hill and along K Road, as you do, before catching a cab. It was a grotty, battered little taxi, driven by a little man in Muslim garb. We got talking. Turned out, he was an electrical engineer. He was finishing off his PhD part-time, feeding his family by ferrying out-of-it twentysomething in an out of K Road. And he couldn't understand why there wasn't a real job for him - or for most of his friends. They were from Pakistan; not refugees, but skilled migrants whose skills New Zealand now didn't seemed to want. He asked me about my work, said he felt bad about being a drag on the country - surely the government didn't want this? I told him I was ashamed that he didn't have a job worthy of his skills. And then stood on the footpath watching him drive away, kicking myself for not just tipping him the last twenty in my wallet. Now, with local mosques having to increase security, with Winston Peters standing up in Parliament to suggest that the Afghan refugees still headed here might be terrorists, with, even here, bigotry in the air, I fear the little guy has more problems than ever. I hope I'm wrong, I really do. ENDS ripped off --------

Seven faces of Eve 01.09.2001 The man who narrowed our European ancestors to seven separate women talks to GILBERT WONG about mitochondrial DNA and the emotion of origin. Ursula, Xenia, Helena, Velda, Tara, Katrine and Jasmine. If you or your kin can say you came from Europe then these are the names of your clan mothers. These are the prolific women, the maternal archetypes, or earth mothers who gave birth to those who would become today's 650 million modern Europeans. The claim that every individual European can claim a direct line of descent to at least one of these seven women who lived between 45,000 and 20,000 years ago is fantastic and logical. Logical because if we pause to think, any genealogical tree will narrow down to one founder. Fantastic because science lets us see back through millennia in prehistory to these women and say that each of their descendants in modern Europe carries a little piece of biological material that has endured for up to 45,000 years. These women were lost to time but no longer. The man making the claim is Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University. His book The Seven Daughters of Eve, outlining his theory, is a rollicking read of scientific inquiry, adventure and adversity. From his home Sykes, 53 and feisty, hardly sounds like an Oxford don. "Bollocks," he responds to a question during our interview. Sykes can be controversial. His fondness for bold statements and the commercialisation of gene technology has started scientific stoushes which he seems to be winning. The very act of naming these clan mothers could be called an act of gall by some scientists. Sykes disagrees: "What I wanted to do was bring them to life as individuals." Sykes' field is the study of the genetics of human populations. But whereas traditionally, whole populations were compared with others to determine how humans came to people the world, Sykes has firmly turned the focus to the individual. "There was no consideration of individuals, everything was done on the basis of groups. So everyone was given average characteristics," he says. "There's no better way to bring people to life than to give them names. Of course, we don't know their names. "But there is not any disagreement that they existed. On the question of whether I should have given them names, I would say there has been a resounding silence of mild disapproval." Sykes gives a metaphorical shrug of his shoulders. "I do feel that professional academics do tend to want to keep things to themselves. Giving them names brought it to people's attention and that's good. Why should academics have a monopoly on this history of the world?" Sykes' work springs directly from New Zealand-born scientist Allan Wilson who had an illustrious career at Stanford University in California. Recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, Wilson, who died in 1991, was a controversial figure because he first suggested that a certain type of DNA called mitochondrial DNA or mDNA could be used to explore human origins. Mitochondrial DNA sits in the periphery of all human cells. Sperm cells jettison mDNA once they've fertilised an egg. So mDNA is only passed down the maternal line. What Wilson realised is that when mDNA is replicated in a son or daughter it remains a carbon copy of the mother's mDNA. Natural mutation is the only reason for the structure of mDNA to change. Wilson created a molecular genetic "clock", its chiming based on the rate of natural mutation. Using his "clock" Wilson transformed the study of human origins with his theory of the African Eve. Some 150,000 years ago, argued Wilson, there was a woman who lived on the savanna of Africa who was the maternal ancestor of all of the six billion people now alive. Sykes has refined the molecular clock by locating a "control region" within mDNA which allowed his team to categorise genetic clusters and estimate change over shorter periods of time. Through a mixture of persistence and argument Sykes was given permission to take dentine from a tooth in the fossil jaw of Cheddar Man, an early European who lived some 10,000 years ago. After amplifying the sample, Sykes compared it to samples from modern Europeans. It was identical. Theories about our origins would never be the same again. Irrefutably, Sykes can say that race does not exist as a concept. We are all mongrels, he says and have been so for at least the past 10,000 years. In Britain his research has been misused by the British National Party to support its platform that Britons have always been white. Raise the subject of its misuse and Sykes responds with a hearty "What a load of bollocks." There is no biological justification for ethnicity, he says. "Even the idea of a population as an integral biological breeding group has been shown to be completely wrong. People have just done what they always do, they move, perhaps for a better life, they intermarry." Serendipity could be his middle name. Rather than view history or even prehistory as determined by mass movements, Sykes believes that individuals and luck make history. In his book he recounts that if not for a moped accident which left him stuck in Rarotonga, he would not have begun his earlier work that helped to solve the origin of the Maori. Work he began in Rarotonga eventually provided evidence of the path the Polynesians sailed to colonise the Pacific in a grand sweep of epic ocean voyages that had their origins somewhere in Indonesia, possibly the Moluccas, out to the Pacific, to Hawaii in the north, to Easter Island (Rapanui) in the east and New Zealand in the south. The DNA evidence Sykes produced refutes the ideas put forward by Thor Heyerdahl of Kon-Tiki fame that the Polynesians came from South America and matches archeological evidence in pottery and Maori oral tradition exactly. His point about the nonsense of race is made by a side discovery that up to 30 per cent of present-day Pacific Islanders share European DNA, a legacy of whalers, seafarers and missionaries who began to arrive in numbers only 200 years ago. There are more New Zealand links to Sykes' work. He's an Oxford College friend of former National cabinet minister Simon Upton whom Sykes visited on his trek to gather Maori DNA in late 1990. At the time he bought a Jaguar in Blenheim and freighted it back to England. Dunedin is also home to the woman who has become his nemesis, biochemist Erika Hagelberg of the University of Otago. Sykes' work stands or falls on the view that mDNA is perfectly replicated from generation to generation. Research by Hagelberg on the island of Nguna in Vanuatu indicated that mDNA was not a "pure" copy. Hagelberg published research on mDNA that pointed to it being "recombinant" or mixed. If she was right then the edifice upon which Sykes had built his reputation on would crumble. Hagelberg worked in Sykes' laboratory in the 1980s but left under a cloud which neither will expand upon in public. Sykes: "It was a blow. Loads of people who didn't think much of mDNA seized upon it. Erika Hagelberg is not a classical geneticist, but nonetheless she did publish a paper that said she had evidence of recombination in mDNA. "Only by chance I found that I had samples from the very same island and I couldn't see anything at all. I knew almost at once that there was something wrong. I did get in touch with her. Scientific etiquette should mean that if you have a serious doubt then you would be supplied with material so it could be retested, that's the whole basis of science. It was difficult to get samples from Erika. Ultimately, 18 months after I raised the matter, she retracted the paper." And why did she retract? Sykes: "Because of the pressure. The reputation of mDNA was spiralling downwards. She did find that she had made an error.That only takes a week to check, not 18 months, and I make it plain that I disapproved of that episode." This week Hagelberg was on a research trip to a remote part of Vanuatu and could only be contacted by e-mail. Her response: "My general comment is that Sykes overstates his case." And certainly research published since Sykes' book was published points to a far less pat and satisfying conclusion. Instead of 95 per cent of modern Europeans carrying DNA that can be traced back to seven archetypal mothers, it says that only 76 per cent of Europeans can trace their origins to 11 such women. Sykes agrees that his Seven Daughters theory may not be the last word on the matter. "It really depends on what you call a clan and that depends on where you draw the boundaries. It's like looking at an oak and seeing large branches coming off and if you look at it, is this a big branch coming off or is it one or two? "This is a field that isn't 100 years old. Things will change, there are plenty of places in Europe that we've never been to. There could be a clan there." Another source of controversy is Sykes' privatisation of genetic technology. His company Oxford Ancestors offers mDNA tests at a price to a public hungry to trace their prehistoric origins. The company processes 100 requests a day from all over Europe and Sykes has employed six people. "Some of my colleagues said what are you doing making money out of research, but I do really believe that with something as important as this, people should have access to the latest genetic technology." The company is not part of his laboratory and while it makes a profit, Sykes says that is not the motivation. "It's a revelation that people are so interested in their origins. Why do we care? We have seven women who did exist and nonetheless there are uncertain elements. [His descriptions of the seven in the book] are a literary device. It is fiction but does strike home. "Before I started, ancestors were a hazy collection of dead people. I never thought of them as individuals. I do want to know what their lives were like and how they compare to our lives. Because we've shown that genetically they were very much the same as we are today and all the DNA in our body came from these individuals. I thought this a powerful and emotional feeling, irrational but powerful." In his book Sykes recounts the experience of one of his colleagues, Jendayi Serwah, whose parents had arrived in Britain from Jamaica as teenagers. Their ancestor had been slaves, taken from Africa and sold to plantation owners. As slaves they lost their identity, received European names and any record of their birth, parentage and heritage obliterated. While she assumed her ancestry was African, Sykes was able to take her DNA and match it to Kenyan Kikuyu. Sykes writes, "She was literally lost for words. Here at last was the individual proof she had wanted for so long. It was as if the DNA was itself a written document from her ancestors, which in a sense it was; a document that had been handed down one generation at a time, from the woman who had endured and survived the terrible voyage from Africa. A document that could not be obliterated by the plantation owners as it passed unseen and unread for generations. And now in Jendayi, here it was, a perfect copy of the African original preserved in her own body." What became of Tsar Nicholas, the ruler of imperial Russia, and his family? In 1991 nine bodies were recovered from shallow graves in birch woods outside Ekaterinburg, in the Russian Urals. Nearby was the site of the house where the Russian royals were reputedly executed in the cellar by their Bolshevik guards. Forensic evidence suggested that the skeletons belonged to the Tsar, the Tsarina, three of their children - Maria, Tatiana and Olga, their doctor Eugeny Botkin and three servants. Sykes and his colleagues were able to prove via mDNA that there was a family of two adults and three children. The next step was to prove who they were. After discreet negotiations they were able to collect a blood sample from Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh who has a direct maternal link to the Russian royal family. Prince Philip's DNA matched that taken from the skeletons. But what of the other two children, Alexei and Anastasia, whose bodies were never found? Sykes has only been able to disprove the claims of Anastasia pretender Anna Anderson. The theory based on the accounts of some of the guards is that the final two children were put on a pyre and their charred remains lie near the grave of their parents, beyond the ability of even mDNA to prove who they were. --------