LOVE ANGELES

Obama from the Oval Office

Source: CNN - "We will fight this spill with everything we've got for as long as it takes. We will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused," Obama said in a televised address aimed at restoring confidence in his handling of the crisis before it further tarnishes his presidency." - President Obama

Awaken (Video)

Sean Penn Speaks About Haiti

Source: CNN - Editor's note: CNN's Moni Basu followed Sean Penn in Haiti on May 4, documenting the celebrity's life as an aid worker, including his efforts to save a boy with diphtheria.

At base camp, Sean Penn sits under a lampshade made with discarded Chef Boyardee packages and pulls closer a Bic lighter dangling from a rope.

It's not quite 7 a.m. and Penn is smoking another Marlboro Light. He brought Nicorettes with him to Haiti, but quickly gave up on the idea of refraining from cigarettes.

He runs his hands through disheveled hair, takes another drag. Wrapped in an embossed white towel and barefoot, he says no hellos, makes no attempt at niceties.

He starts telling a harrowing tale from the day before.

He hunted every corner of Port-au-Prince for an antitoxin for Oriel, a 15-year-old boy who contracted diphtheria, an acutely infectious disease spread through respiratory droplets.

The American Red Cross didn't have it. Nor did any of the major hospitals. Penn even had the U.S. military on the search.

The United States stockpiles the vaccine and antitoxin. But in Haiti, it took Penn -- even with his star power -- 11 hours to get his hands on one dose.

It was at a medical warehouse and Penn wrested the head of the World Health Organization from bed to unlock the door at a late hour.

"This country is not ready for an emergency," he says.

"Three months in and nobody in the major hospitals knew where to find the immunoglobulin. That kinda says it all to me."

Oriel had been brought to a clinic at the encampment of earthquake-displaced people at the Petionville Golf Club, which Penn's newly formed aid agency J/P Haitian Relief Organization has been helping to manage.

The boy had started feeling symptoms six days earlier. Doctors quickly realized that he had diphtheria. No hospital wanted to admit the boy, Penn says. They did not have the capacity to prevent infection. Penn hand- carried him to General Hospital, the city's main medical care facility, where doctors finally agreed to place Oriel on life support.

Penn feels personally responsible -- for the boy, for the entire camp, for the city. Diphtheria could spread lightning fast through the congested tents and shanties.

Haiti grapples with diphtheria and other killer diseases every year, but after the quake doctors feared the worst. Oriel was the first case of "the worst" discovered at the golf course camp.

Early on, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had urged immediate vaccination against diphtheria and recommended having the antitoxin on hand.

Penn cannot comprehend why, with an abundance of aid agencies working in Haiti, prevention like this has to be so difficult. He is not one to shield his anger, or mince words. "If the boy were to die," he says, "this would be murder."

Celebrity in a foreign land

Penn is hardly new to heroic endeavors. He's flown to the eye of a hurricane, to the front lines of war. A few years back, he traveled to Iraq and Iran and wrote about both countries for the San Francisco Chronicle.

He was in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina -- his right arm bears a tattoo that says: "NOLA, Deliver Me."

His presence in all those places and now in Haiti draws skepticism and ire from those who think that celebrities use tragedies to burnish their public images. Penn has been mocked and caricatured by filmmakers, writers and talk-show hosts for taking up causes.

But he brushes it all aside. Someone, he says, has to get it done.

He landed in Haiti a week after the earthquake, he says, with a genuine concern. He insists he will be here for the long haul, that he's more than a celebrity goodwill ambassador who has dropped in to smile with orphaned kids for a day.

No stunts. No gimmicks. His staffers say the actor is simply following his heart.

The Oscar-winning star has shed his life of comfort and glamour for the unassuming role of aid worker. For the past few weeks he has been helping manage 50,000 displaced Haitians living in the camp that sprouted on the nine-hole course at the capital's once-exclusive golf club.

Perched atop a hill that affords a view of Port-au-Prince, the star of movies like "Dead Man Walking," "Mystic River" and "Milk" might have been a guest here in former years, sipping a rum punch on a balmy evening. These days, he's sleeping in a tent along with a small proletarian staff. They wear navy blue shirts with the J/P HRO logo loudly emblazoned -- and answer only to Penn. Void of the bureaucracy common at the United Nations and other major humanitarian agencies, Penn says his J/P HRO, is often able to get things done faster.

The group's work began in the weeks after the quake with the disbursal of critically needed aid. Then Penn noticed the tremendous need at the crowded golf club camp, one of the city's largest and completely vulnerable to rain and treacherous mudslides.

Penn called in the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division to help secure the hills with gravel and sandbags.

"Pretty soon, we were managing a camp," he says. "Then you find you are filling a gap and you feel responsibility to keep going."

He negotiates the terrain in a bright red golf cart that says "SEAN PENN" in the front, though few recognized him when he first arrived. Even now, some camp residents barely recognize the name.

"Yes, I know," said one. "He is Madonna's first husband."

Penn, who will turn 50 this year, found it liberating to move without paparazzi or fans asking for autographs.

It was the anonymity he once knew growing up in southern California, before his breakthrough role in the 1983 film "Fast Times at Ridgemont High."

Then came his turbulent marriage to Madonna, a barrage of bad tabloid headlines and jail time for punching an extra who tried to snap his picture.

Learn more about Haiti relief efforts on "Impact Your World"

But he's no bad boy here at the Petionville Golf Club.

"He is helping us. He is a good man," says camp resident Junior Vital.

Penn's group relocated about 5,000 people to safer ground at Corail, a new temporary camp on the outskirts of the city, where flooding and mud will not threaten them in the rainy season.

In the landscape of Haiti's tragedy, Penn's accomplishments are small. But things don't happen quickly here.

In that context, aid workers here gave him kudos for his successes.

"It was a Band-Aid measure," Penn says. "But it meant a lot to us."

Still, he recognizes he's a newbie to the aid business. And a possible diphtheria outbreak is not the kind of emergency the Hollywood actor is used to addressing... Read More at CNN.com

World Cup 2010: One Love (Video)

Enjoy this lovely recap from Germany '06...

Challanges in Africa

Source: AllAfrica.com - Ever since the AIDS problem was discovered nearly 30 years ago, the deadly acquired immune deficiency syndrome remains a challenge to the society.

Now, it is important that we base our initiatives on some understanding of what has gone wrong. Unfortunately and in many ways, the world, countries and communities have struggled to overcome social and economic challenges posed by HIV/AIDS.

Though there is much campaign and struggle to fight HIV/AIDS, the seemingly unstoppable, disaster and catastrophic human tragedy caused by the disease continues in some parts of the world.

It should be noted that some factors contribute to the failure of success against HIV/AIDS. To some extent silence and denial are a primordial and protective human response to situations that are excessively stressful.

It's true that human kind cannot bear too much reality, but trying to cover up the existence of AIDS will never lead to mastery over the disease or its impacts. This habit still commonly occurs in families, communities, and in several parts of the world.

Attitudes, behaviors, insidious associations, and adverse social reactions that discriminate against and stigmatize those with HIV/AIDS drive acknowledgment of the disease into an underground of silence, secrecy, shame and self recrimination.

Lack of correct information on how the disease can be contracted, how it can be prevented, and what those infected can do to ensure that they live a longer life of better quality still remains a challenge.

Today a significant proportion of people do not know how to be protected against HIV infection. Some even do not know that oral and anal sex involve extensive HIV transmission risks. People still think that you can judge by appearances whether or not a person is HIV infected.

The global fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria that was created by the United Nations nearly 10 years ago has helped the international community and national governments to deal with the problem.

This has somehow eased the social and economic challenges as costs for purchase of anti-retro viral drugs and health care of people living with the disease have been minimized.

People should deliver capacity to design good strategies with good response measures. Important to mention is that there is strong focus on short term measures aimed principally at behavior change, but with minimal attention in the context of the disease.

There is strong need to prevent and overcome poverty, malnutrition, the powerlessness in many societies of women and young girls, inadequate health support services, lack of job opportunities, and the absence of recreational outlets as this is one of the channels of the infection exposure.

Inadequate attention to developing comprehensive strategies that focus on the physical, social, economic, recreational and psychological needs of youth. The war against AIDS will be won when it is won among the youth sooner than later.

Overriding attention to dealing with the disease at the level of the individual, but with little recognition that the disease is also undermining the ability of systems, organizations and institutions to cater for the needs of individuals and society remains a problem.

Failure in many approaches to be sensitive to cultural and religious perceptions and values, with the result that suspicions, intransigence and conflict over peripheral issues such as condom use have tended to overshadow what should be a shared world and community vision of how to respond to the disease.

In order to put a halt to the continuous obscene growth of the disease, we need to take forceful action. We must harness the huge potential of the education sector to prevent further HIV infection. By educating people about the spread and infection of the disease, we are bale to overcome its challenges.

We should mobilize the sector to offer support and care for those who are infected with the disease or are in any way affected by it. Here we need to take steps to keep our society in order and protect it from the in roads and ravages of the disease.