• Video of Orla Guerin’s interview with Meena
• BBC coverage of the Taliban conflict
• On The World: Pakistan blast kills American soldiers (Feb 3)

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman.  This is The World.  Two suicide bombings today in the Pakistani city of Kurachi killed at least 25 people.  The blasts were the latest in a series of attacks by Taliban insurgents in Pakistan and they come on the day where we’re hearing a shocking story from Pakistan about life under the Taliban.  It’s a story told by a 13-year-old girl named Meena.  She told the BBC that her own family tried to turn her into a suicide bomber.  Meena said her brother is a Taliban Commander in Pakistan’s tribal areas and that he has trained many bombers, including their 9-year-old sister who was sent out on a suicide mission in Afghanistan.  Meena’s story is disturbing and there’s no independent verification of her account, but authorities in Pakistan say it’s all too credible.  The BBC’s Islamabad correspondent Orla Guerin spoke to her.  Orla, we’ll hear what Meena told you in just a moment but first how did you find her?

ORLA GUERIN: Well we got in contact with her through local authorities.  She had actually, after fleeing her village, had been on a tour around the countryside for several weeks.  She had been taken in in various places by local families and she had eventually found herself in the hands of police.  Now she wasn’t under arrest.  They were simply questioning her.  They wanted to find out what she had to say.  Having carried out initial interviews with her, they decided her information could be very valuable.  They kept on talking to her in some detail, piecing together the story that she had to offer and learning a lot about the Taliban, not just the about the personnel in the area that she came from but also about their methods and the operations that they were carrying out.

WERMAN: Alright.  Let’s hear from Meena and her story as she told it to you, Orla.

INTERPRETER:  Taliban Commanders used to come to our house.  There was an underground bunker beside the house with electricity.  It was concrete and very strong.  They used to train suicide bombers there.  Most were children of my age or younger than me.  They were used for these activities because they were too young to know any better.  I used to see these children getting on a vehicle to go for their missions.  They used loud Islamic CD’s to motivate them and I would think my God, more Muslims are going to be buried.  My father and brother told me to carry out a suicide attack.  They were pressuring me to do this.  They told me if you do it, you’ll go to paradise long before us.  I replied, “Why don’t you tell me I’ll go to hell long before you?”  Every day they used to tell me this, every day.  I was really young when they started telling me this.  I told them, “what about all the people I kill?  They’re all Muslims.”  They started beating me when I refused.  They beat me non-stop.  They made my life hell.  I never had a single moment of happiness.  They did everything other than kill me.  They told me, you have to do it.  There was a kind of medicine they used to give to the bombers that made them go around smiling, in a trance.  They said they would give me that medicine and then I would go running to die with a smile.  I was so scared; I decided to prepare my own tea and my own food.  I was afraid they would add that medicine to my food.  They attached a bomb to my sister.  They tied rectangular pieces to both her arms and a black strip was wrapped around both her legs.  Then they connected the whole thing.  She told my brother the bomb was very heavy and she couldn’t walk.  He said you will be comfortable once you are sitting down in the car.  But she was crying very loud for my mother.  She kept hugging her.  Then my brother and my father started beating my mother and they were shouting, why are you distracting the girl from her mission?  I heard my sister say, “Where is Meena?  I want to see her.”  But I did not have the strength, my heart couldn’t take it.  They put her in the car.  My mother fainted.  People say I have a strong heart.  I had to be strong.  What can I do?  God won’t even let me die.  If my brother gets hold of me, I’ll poison him and myself.  The Taliban slaughter other people’s children.  They turn women into widows.  They should be made to suffer too.  I want these Taliban to be burned alive.

WERMAN: Meena and her story there.  She told it to the BBC’s Orla Guerin.  Orla, she describes in painful detail what happened.  How do we know it’s true?

GUERIN: Well at this stage there is no independent verification of her account.  But local officers in the area who have been questioning her believe that she is telling the truth.  Interestingly, the kind of detail she provides about the Taliban techniques that were used to persuade young children to carry out bombings, the administration of medicine as she described it and so on.  I’ve hear similar accounts from a young boy from the same area, a 14-year-old who I interviewed some months ago.  He had been taken by the Taliban, brought to a training camp.  Initially they had tried to persuade him to carry out a bombing.  When he wouldn’t agree under persuasion, he was beaten and he also described young boys like himself being given medicine which put them into a trance.  So clearly, it’s a reference to some kind of drug being used.

WERMAN: So youth is obviously not off limits for the Taliban, but what about girls?  You describe these boys who have been tapped as bombers, but what about girls?

GUERIN: Well the use of girls is extremely rare.  I have met boys before this 14-year-old and others who had been taken by the Taliban.  The Pakistani Army says that boys as young as 9 have been taken off to Taliban training camps and not necessarily for use as suicide bombers, but for use also as spotters.  They would be sent out to areas where the military was carrying out operations and they would be providing information for the Taliban.  So the use of boys is not anything new.  The use of girls is something very, very rare.  There was another case recently where two girls came forward and said that they had wanted to carry out suicide bombings, but there is only one other case in Pakistan in which it’s suspected that a woman carried out a suicide bombing.  That’s some years ago and there is even some dispute about whether or not it actually was a woman bomber at that stage.  We have, of course, seen many woman suicide bombers in Iraq.  The most recent, Monday of this week, a bombing which killed 40 people.

WERMAN: And finally, Orla, where is Meena now?  What’s happened to her?  I can’t imagine all these things she told you are very good for her safety.

GUERIN: Well Meena has been taken to an undisclosed secure location.  Police have obvious concerns about her safety.  They know that she is at risk.  She has told her story publicly.  There are Taliban supporters all over this country who, I’m sure, will not be happy about that.  So she has been put in a safe place and she’s been given a new identity.  Now her dearest wish, she told me, was to go to school.  She spoke passionately about that.  She said her brother had insisted that the only place for women was either in the home or in the grave and had threatened her with beheading when she said she wanted to go to school.  But she is very determined to have an education.  She told me, in fact, that she wants to be a doctor.  So what we understand now is that she will be in a position to begin her education, to learn to read and write, and I have no doubt that she will now do very well and manage to build a new future.  But she will have to leave her past and all of her relatives behind.

WERMAN: The BBC’s Orla Guerin speaking to us from Islamabad Pakistan.  To see a video of Orla Guerin’s interview with Meena, go to our website, the world dot org.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Coverage on the BBC’s Newshour:

• BBC coverage
• Global Economy podcast

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston.  On the U.S. economy, first the good news; unemployment has dipped slightly.  The Labor Department says the jobless rate crept down to 9.7% in January from 10%.  Now the bad news; a separate survey found that U.S. employers shed some 20,000 jobs last month.  It’s been a turbulent day for the markets in the wake of that news and the economic news from Europe, as The World’s Matthew Bell reports.

MATTHEW BELL: Conventional wisdom says it’s the beginning of the end of the great global recession.  But not in parts of Europe.  The Euro zone counties of Spain, Portugal and Greece are in tough economic shape.  Former IMF economist Kenneth Rogoff just got back from Greece where he says the mood among financial experts is grim.

KENNETH ROGOFF:  This is a country that has run a government deficit of an average of almost 8% a year since the early 1980′s.  It’s at 13% now.  They’re government debt is more than 120% of their national income.  They owe foreigners even more than that counting private debt.  They are on an unsustainable trajectory and the markets have just lost confidence.

BELL: Rogoff says the writing is on the wall.  Greece is likely to go into default and need to be rescued.

ROGOFF:  Greece is going to have to be bailed out.  They don’t’ acknowledge it yet.  The Prime Minister thinks that he can push forward a program that will be credible on its own.  The trouble is that, first of all his program is so lacking credibility. It’s just not tough enough.  Spending has shot up the last couple years, but he still isn’t talking about big spending cuts.  They need credibility.  I don’t think the European Union even can provide it.  They’ve never done this before.  They’re not good at this.  I bet that Greece is going to end up in the arms of the IMF.

BELL: To a lesser extent Portugal, Spain and Ireland are facing similar troubles.  Part of the problem is rooted in the way the Euro zone works. The 16 country zone has one currency, the Euro, and one monetary policy.  But it’s still made up of 16 sovereign nations with their own political systems and political realities.  Arnab Das is with the financial consulting firm Roubini Global Economics.  He says the Euro zone is not likely to splinter apart as a monetary union, but the tension is still there.

ARNAB DAS:  The underlying issue is that Europe, there’s one monetary policy, but it’s really many different sovereign countries and many different levels of income and many different rates of growth.  Right?  So one size really so far, doesn’t fit all.

BELL: As a result, the Euro as a currency is taking a hit because of the poor health of some of the zone’s weaker economies.  What does that mean for the global economy?  Andrew Walker is the BBC’s economics correspondent.

ANDREW WALKER:  I think in the short term, at least, a declining Euro might actually be slightly helpful for countries in the Euro area.  They have been concerned about the currency’s strength against the dollar and against the Chinese currency.  However, I’d put it the other way round, the weakness of the Euro, the declines we’ve seen in the last few days, are a sign of these underlying problems that themselves could be very disruptive, indeed.

BELL: As for the possible impact on the U.S. economy, Kenneth Rogoff says we’re probably not looking at round two of the global financial crisis here.  But he says economic pain in southern Europe could spread to the rest of Europe and even to American shores.

ROGOFF:   If it really, really spreads, it’s going to make it very hard for the rest of Europe to grow fast.  We export to Europe.  We depend a lot on their capital and their integration.  It could easily end up cutting, say a percent, off our growth rate, which may not sound bad, but when you’re crawling out of the recession the way we are, it would count a lot.  It would translate into lost jobs in the United States.  This is definitely an unstable moment.  The world needs to heal still after this huge financial recession.

BELL: Rogoff says the situation in hard hit Greece has some lessons for the U.S.  Deficits and national debts can’t be allowed to climb indefinitely without driving up interest rates.  He adds that Americans can’t keep choosing tax cuts and more government spending without paying a price some time down the road.  For The World, I’m Matthew Bell.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• The Power of Half homepage
• Book info

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: Greed clearly a big factor in that British Parliamentary scandal.  Our next story is about the reverse impulse, altruism.  A few years ago the Salwen family in Atlanta decided they wanted less.  It all started when Kevin Salwen and his then 14-year-old daughter Hannah were in their car stopped at a traffic light.  Hannah looked out the window.

HANNAH SALWEN: And I saw a homeless man sitting there holding up a sign that said homeless, please help.  Pretty typical scene.  Then to my right, I saw a man in a Mercedes.  I looked at my dad and I said, you know, if that man in the Mercedes didn’t have such a nice car, then that man, the homeless man, could have a meal.  My dad thought about it for a second and then he turned back to me and he said yeah, but you know if we didn’t have such a nice car then that man could have a meal.  And that was kind of the beginning of the project.

WERMAN: That project was the Salwen’s attempt to figure out how, as a family, they could give up some of what they had in order to help others.  What they decided to give up was their house.  No, they didn’t become homeless, but the Salwen’s did put their 6,000 square foot home on the market.  Then they moved into a smaller house and committed $800,000.00 to a good cause.  They chose the hunger project, a charity that’s using the money to support community programs in dozens of villages in Ghana.  The family documents their experience in a book called The Power of Half.  Kevin Salwen says the decision to sell their house was a big one, but it made sense to them.

KEVIN SALWEN: We’re not suggesting that anybody cut their complete lives in half, we don’t do that.  We chose one item in which we felt we had more than enough and we felt we could live with less.  And we cut that in half, in part because it’s kind of simple to say some for us, some for the community, and then live to that standard.

WERMAN: Hannah how did you get from the idea of wanting to help, to actually selling the house, or convincing your parents to do so?

HANNAH SALWEN: Well, when I got home that night I talked to my brother and my mom about what I had seen and how I had felt and I felt really angry that I wasn’t doing all that I could do and that I knew that there was so much, and so many ways that I could be helping and I wasn’t doing that.  I said to my mom I don’t want to be a family that just talks about doing something.  I really want to get out there and make a difference.  My mom kind of in a fit of frustration said what do you want to do?  You want to sell the house?  And I said yeah.  Yeah I do.  That was kind of how it started.  We finally all got on the same page and moved forward with the project.

WERMAN: So, Kevin, you decided to give half the value of your house to help others and you decided to give that money to the Hunger Project to help villages in Ghana.  Tell me about that decision and what the Hunger Project is.

KEVIN SALWEN: We spent about a year as a family getting together on Sundays because what we were trying to do was actually figure out, how do you invest $800,000.00 smartly?  And so one of the interesting things that my wife insisted on was giving our kids a perfectly equal say in our family decisions.  One person, one vote.  In other words, the hormonal, sometimes irrational teenagers would actually have the same say as the rational parents in this.  The thinking behind that was that we recognized that our kids were giving up their house.  They were giving up their rooms.  And they should have as much power in this process as we did.  And so, we started with the big questions, if we had a bunch of money would we want to help a few people a lot, in other words, say that homeless man that Hannah had seen on the street?  Or did we want to help a lot of people a little?  In other words, maybe provide thousands and thousands of vaccines for people across the world.  And each week we would research, discuss, and vote.  And it moved us down the path of making a decision.

WERMAN: And getting, specifically, to the Hunger Project.

KEVIN SALWEN: Yeah, and once we had whittled it down to several organizations, we recognized that the Hunger Project really was a cut above.

WERMAN: Why is that?

KEVIN SALWEN: Well, what we love about the Hunger Project is the fact that it’s complete empowerment of the people who are building their own futures.  The Hunger Project is a five year program that helps villagers move from poverty to self-reliance.  All the work is done by the people in the villages and it’s a recognition that people are the authors of their own futures.

WERMAN: It’s interesting, your decision making process that got you to the Hunger Project as the vehicle for your money and helping Ghana.  But on the other hand I think of Haiti and it’s shown how Americans getting involved overseas can often have disastrous consequences.  Were you conscious of that as you had these meetings?

KEVIN SALWEN: We were absolutely conscious of that.  As we researched this, we started to recognize that there is really two camps.  One is kind of the, we’re from the west, we’re here to show you what to do, or worse, we’re from the west, we’re here to do it for you.  I think that’s been a disaster for economic aid.  When Americans go into places and say let us do this for you because you need a well, or you need a school, often times those things are just a flop.  And so what we started to search for in our process was which organizations are actually making change that is long-lasting, that is empowering of the people who are the recipients of it, because they’re not really recipients, they’re full partners in it.  We found that the Hunger Project’s methodology was just flat out different.

WERMAN: And Hannah, what do you think is the connection between that man, that homeless man that you saw in the streets of Atlanta, and the people you met in the rural villages you visited in Ghana?

HANNAH SALWEN: Yeah, you know, it’s crazy.  When we were in Ghana, I probably met some of the nicest people I’d ever met in my life and it was just so crazy to see how much they live without.  I mean, thinking about how we live, and it was just so unbelievable to see those differences and see those cultural differences and be able to talk to people personally.  We went to the opening of a corn mill and it was unbelievable to see people so excited about something we take for granted every day and just the symbolism of this corn mill was that these girls, mainly, didn’t have to walk six miles round trip to get their corn milled an instead could do it right here and then could go to school.  So this corn mill actually meant education for their community.

WERMAN: Why even help people, I know this is going to sound very cruel coming from me, but why help people overseas when you were very conscious of the homeless people right in your backyard in Atlanta?

KEVIN SALWEN: We do a ton of work here in Atlanta.  It sounds boastful, and I don’t mean it to be, but you’ll see us a lot at the Atlanta Community Food Bank or the Central Night Shelter. We do a lot of work in our community.  But we felt that there is no safety net overseas and we felt we could help build one.  And, in addition, it really goes down to the question of how do you find community?  Is it your street?  Is it your neighborhood?  Is it your city, your state, your country, the world?  We happen to feel that we could do work very close to home, right here in our own community, but that also that our community meant going out into the world to build opportunity for others.

WERMAN: Kevin Salwen and his daughter Hannah Salwen’s new book is called The Power of Half, one family’s decision to stop taking and start giving back.  Thank you both very much.

HANNAH SALWEN: Thank you so much.

KEVIN SALWEN: It’s great to be here, thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• Russia’s minimum vodka price to tackle alcoholism
• Trying to break Russia’s vodka dependence

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman, this is The World.  You might say it’s not country for old men; Russia that is.  The average life expectancy of Russian men has been sinking lately.  It’s down to around 60 years old.  One of the main reasons for this decline in the health of Russian men is that nation’s favorite drink, vodka.  The World’s Laura Lynch ventured out to the Russian countryside to find the roots of the country’s troubles with alcohol.

LAURA LYNCH: Life in the village of Klyuchi seems frozen in time.  It certainly is frigid today, as Antonina Bilikova wraps her gloved hands around a water pump.  Here on snowy path, her head wrapped in a babushka, Bilikova could be living in the Russia of 50 years ago.  But there’s something, or someone missing here, the men.  Bilikova points to the homes of her neighbors.

INTERPRETER:  There, she lives alone.  Over there she lives alone.  Almost all the husbands have died.

LYNCH: This is a village full of widows.  It’s like this across Russia.  More than 30,000 villages, once thriving farming communities are very nearly empty.  Those who remain are almost all women.  After much looking, I did find one man living alone at the end of a lane lined with crumbling cabins.  A guard dog stands sentry as Gennady Mikhailovich comes outside.  Unsteady on his feet, he breaks into a smile.

INTERPRETER:   He’s seen you before.

LYNCH: Really?  Okay.  Nice to see you.  In fact, I’ve never met Mikhailovich but that doesn’t stop him from welcoming us into his house.  It smells of urine and rotten food.  He starts to cry.  Life these days, he says, isn’t good.  It’s clear how he’s enduring the hardship.  Mikhailovich tells me he’s been drinking vodka all day and it’s just past one in the afternoon.  This tragic scene is replayed in vast parts of Russia.  The areas where the collective farms of Communist times once provided security are now soaked in vodka as the people struggle to cope.  Andrey Treyvish is a senior lecturer in geography at Moscow State University.

ANDREY TREYVISH:  Enterprises cannot survive, in fact.  They are real bankrupt.  Jobs are almost absent.

LYNCH: So Russians turn to alcohol.  The World Health Organization says alcohol is responsible for at least a quarter of all male deaths.  A Kremlin Advisory Panel estimates 500,000 people a year die from diseases, crimes and accidents related to excessive drinking.  Dr. Alexander Nemstov is one of Russia’s leading authorities on alcoholism.  He doesn’t believe the government or the people are ready to face up to the crisis.

INTERPRETER:  So far, I don’t see any serious action that suggests we can deal with this problem.  Moreover, I find it hard to say what will happen to our country if everyone suddenly chooses a sober life, because it’s a hard life and people find comfort and even happiness in having a drink.

LYNCH: A lot of people who find comfort in drinking wind up in places like this.  It’s a drunk tank, or as officials like to call it, a sobering up center in the Moscow Satellite City of Khimky.  One man is led in and slumps down on a bench, just steps away from a cell where other men have already passed out.  His belly spills over his pants.  His red face is moist with sweat.  He eyes me warily as I ask him why he drinks.

INTERPRETER:  Every man deserves a drink after work to relax after a tense and difficult day.  It’s normal.  Everyone doe sit.

LYNCH: Major Yelena Grakova looms above him.  She’s a sturdy, stern faced woman who knows it’s going to be a busy Friday night.

INTERPRETER:   When people finish work, when they get paid, that’s when it starts to get busy in here.  Actually, most of the people who end up here are unemployed.  But it’s difficult to check because when we ask they deny being jobless.

LYNCH: The big bellied man is now attempting a sobriety test.  His running shoes squeak as he teeters while trying to do knee bends.  He fails, then he’s stripped of both his clothes and his dignity.  Four officers are needed to remove his shirt, pants and shoes.  They then lead him cold and nearly naked into the cell, clearly not quite ready to sleep it off.  Later tonight when he sobers up and leaves, he’ll pay a fine of about $4.00.  It’s not the best way to battle alcoholism in Russia.  The government has tried to find other solutions.  Twenty-five years ago Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev ordered stores to empty their shelves of vodka, but there was a backlash and he was forced to back down.  Now President Dmitry Medvedev is trying something else.  He’s doubled the price of vodka to about $3.00 a pint.  Tatiana Nefedova of Russia’s Academy of Sciences says the lessons of the past prove price hikes don’t work.

INTERPRETER:  When the priced increased, it actually made the problem worse because it led to an increase in the production of bootleg vodka.

LYNCH: Instead, she says, what’s really needed is a broader strategy to deal with the reasons men drink; unemployment, poverty and little hope for the future.  So this is where all the strands of Russia’s multilayered crises come together, with its younger generations.  Natalie Kivenko is having a drink with a few friends at a bar in downtown Moscow.  She’s 25, beautiful and well educated.  In Russia, women outnumber men by more than 10% and that gap only increases with age.  So Kivenko is keenly aware of how difficult it is to find a suitable husband.

NATALIE KIVENKO: Yes, even if you get below average, it’s considered to be okay because at least you have a man.

LYNCH: And if she does find a husband, she’s not counting on him living to a ripe old age.  She’s just hoping when she’s a widow her children will take care of her.  For The World, I’m Laura Lynch, Moscow.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

©2009 National Geographic

Just how much life can you find in an ecosystem of one cubic foot? That is the question photographer David Liittschwager set out to answer when photographed a range of different environments on land and in water, in tropical climes and temperate regions and began to chart the living organisms.

Monteverde 100 feet up in a tree ©2010 David Liittschwager/National Geographic

Monteverde Jeweled Scarab ©2010 David Liittschwager/National Geographic

Moorea Reef Crest ©2010 David Liittschwager/National Geographic

Moorea post larval Octopus ©2010 David Liittschwager/National Geographic

Table Mountain Drosera flower ©2010 David Liittschwager/National Geographic

For our Geo Quiz today, we’re looking for a volcanic island in French Polynesia that’s graced with beautiful coral reefs and is visited by quite a few honeymooners each year. The answer is Moorea. The island is also part of a National Geographic project aimed at documenting the planet’s biodiversity. Anchor Marco Werman speaks with photographer David Liittschwager, who worked on the project with a team of biologists.

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Table Mountain, South Africa, location ©2010 David Liittschwager/National Geographic

• Monica Ortiz Uribe’s photos from Ciudad Juarez

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: The Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez has been in shock all week.  The city just across the border from El Paso is used to rampant drug related violence, but a mass killing last Sunday was out of the ordinary, even for Juarez.  That’s because most of the victims were teenagers who were attending a birthday party in their own neighborhood.  In the midst of funerals and wakes, residents and officials are struggling to make sense of what happened.  Monica Ortiz Uribe has more from Juarez?

MONICA ORTIZ URIBE: Seconds before his 15-year-old nephew was carried out of a funeral wake, Raul Segovia’s eyes were filled with rage.  We are sick and tired of so much violence, he said.  We leave our homes with fear.  We go out and don’t know if we’re coming back.  As family members carried out his nephew’s gray casket, Segovia’s rage succumbed to sorrow.  Segovia called out to his nephew as the boy’s mother sobbed uncontrollably.  Don’t take him, she said, please don’t take him, he’s mine, he’s my son.  It has been a week of heavy mourning for this south Juarez neighborhood.  Sunday some 15 gunmen blocked off a street here with four SUV’s.  They entered three side-by-side homes where a birthday party was under way and opened fire; 16 people died, 12 seriously injured.  Funeral vigils were held during the week in private homes on the same street where the killings occurred.  Jose Luis Aguilar Rangel is the father of another slain teenager.  I think 90% of Juarezans would flee this city if we had the opportunity he said.  The Mexican government has made a grand effort to respond to the murders.  President Felipe Calderon condemned the attack in a press conference from Japan.  Less than 48 hours after the crime, police arrested an alleged member of the deadly Azteca gang, saying he had confessed to being one of the gunmen.  Some authorities have said the killings have links to drug trafficking and gang activity, while others says most of the dead were innocent victims.  David Shirk studies Mexico as a fellow for the Woodrow Wilson Center.  He was visiting Juarez when the massacre occurred and met with both victims’ families and authorities.

DAVID SHIRK:  When you see the violence playing out on the streets of places like Ciudad Juarez, we’re talking about ordinary people who are getting caught up in the crossfire.

URIBE: In the past two years, more than 4,000 people have been killed in Juarez, the result of warring drug cartels and the government’s attempt to eliminate them.  The presence of thousands of federal police and military has failed to remedy the situation.  Howard Campbell, and Anthropology Professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, thinks the Mexican government still has a long way to go.

HOWARD CAMPBELL:  The situation in Juarez is completely out of control and chaotic.  The government does not control the situation, neither do the drug traffickers.  Anything goes at this point.

URIBE: As the last of the caskets were loaded onto the hearses, rain poured over weeping relatives, some with red carnations in their trembling fingers.  Raul Segovia said a bitter goodbye to his nephew.  We scream for help, he said, but no one will answer.  For The World, I’m Monica Ortiz Uribe in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

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MARCO WERMAN:  The ravages of alcoholism are a serious problem and not just in Russia so we urge everyone who drinks to do so responsibly.  Now there is one more alcohol related story we want to tell you about. It’s an update, actually, on a new story we told you about last November.  It involved the search for some very old bottles of whiskey in Antarctica.  They had been stored in a hut used by polar explorer Ernest Shackleton.  That was over a century ago.  They had since sunk into thick ice.  Well, now five crates of Shackleton’s whiskey plus another two crates of brandy have been recovered.  In November we spoke with Richard Patterson, the Master Blender at Whyte and Mackay.  That’s the Scottish company that supplied the booze for Shackleton’s polar expedition.  Patterson was cautiously optimistic then.  Now he’s very excited about the recovery and his chances of actually sniffing and tasting the old scotch.

RICHARD PATTERSON:  Oh definitely.  I’m just gasping to taste it.  But remember, when you nose a whiskey it will tell you at least 96% of what you need to know about that whiskey.  Only when you’re wanting to be sure do you then taste it.

WERMAN:  Today’s whiskey is not what it was a century ago, so Patterson hopes to study the old stuff in a lab as well as his palate.  Eventually he would like to recreate the exact blend of Shackleton’s whiskey.  Then, maybe whiskey connoisseurs everywhere could have a taste as well; responsibly, of course.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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MARCO WERMAN: In Britain it’s not the national debt that’s making headlines today, it’s a case about politicians profiting from illegal expense claims.  The scandal involves claims by hundreds of law makers who allegedly abuse the government’s expense reimbursement system.  Claims involve everything from digging a moat, to buying flat screen TV’s.  For months the story involved disclosures and a lot of embarrassment for lawmakers.  Today prosecutors filed the first criminal charges.  The BBC’s Rob Watson is covering the story in London.  Rob, digging a moat?  Is that the worst of the claims?  The most bold or are they still worse?

ROB WATSON: Well, in some ways the story started off as almost something of a giggle laughing about people trying to claim for digging moats around their country houses, or claiming for over $300.00 worth for two grapefruit bowls.  Claiming for flagpoles, gardening expenses, you name it.  But now it’s taken a quite different turn and a really dramatic, and I would say, a very problematic turn for the reputation of the British Parliament.  That is, criminal prosecutions against for Parliamentarians.  Overall, on Thursday, when the grand audit was done, if I could put it that way, it was something like a total of like 1.3 or 1.4 million dollars to be paid back.  Essentially, the audit had found that over 50% of MPs had in some way, shape, form or another overcharged the tax payer.

WERMAN: That’s how many people?

WATSON: Well you’re talking over 50% of a Parliament of 646 MPs.

WERMAN: The question that I have is these three MPs and the one peer were supposedly shielded against prosecution.  So how can this happen now?

WATSON: Well, this will no doubt be part of the defense arguments, but it’s certainly true that in Parliament you’re shielded from some things.  You’re shielded, for example, from libeling someone, but I think it’s not entirely clear as in other systems, like in France or wherever, that if you did something like, I don’t know, murder someone, that that wouldn’t offer you immunity.  What the MPs, or their defense lawyers are likely to argue something like the MPs expenses, the running of their offices that should be something that would be handled by Parliament.

WERMAN: The three MPs are in the Labor Party, Gordon Brown’s Labor Party.  How is this going to affect him?

WATSON: Well, two points.  The first point says that the whole expense as scandal, and it is a doozy of a scandal, has not been discriminating in terms of partism.  Everybody is in the soup on this one, no doubt about it.  But the second point says how does it affect the governing Labor Party?  Well, of course they’re going to be worse hit because they just got more MPs.  The other explanation, of course, is that when anything goes wrong, even if it involves all parties and all MPs, it’s always the government that tends to get the boot stuck in.

WERMAN: How are people in the U.K. Rob swallowing this scandal given just how tough the recession remains?

WATSON: Well, as you can imagine, people were absolutely furious when this first happened.  I think a lot of MPs didn’t get it because they’re earning about 64,000 pounds, which is about $80,000.00 plus all of their expenses.  They were sort of saying, well you know, it’s not very much to run something as complicated as an MPs office.  Now what they didn’t understand was there was this huge disconnect with the British public who are saying what, you’re earning over $80,000.00 and you’re on the fiddle?  I mean, people were furious and I suspect that the whole audit on Thursday, now this latest business of MPs getting prosecuted, will fire up the votes as righteous anger again.

WERMAN: The BBC’s Rob Watson in London on the expenses scandal rocking Parliament right now.  Thank you very much Rob.

WATSON: Good to be with you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Oyo comes out next week. It’s a collection of songs by artists that Kidjo herself grew up on in her native Benin like James Brown, Santana and Aretha Franklin. And on this cover of Curtis Mayfield’s “Move on Up,” Kidjo duets with R&B singer John Legend.

Angelique Kidjo didn’t spend her youth in Benin listening only to American pop classics. There’s a Miriam Makeba song here, as well as a number from a Bollywood movie that Kidjo and her father had seen a dozen times when she was a girl.

The real standout track though is an American song that never had words.

“Samba Pa Ti” was one of Carlos Santana’s great romantic showpieces for his guitar. And where his guitar once wailed, Kidjo sings words she wrote in Yoruba. When she’s not singing, Roy Hargrove takes over on trumpet.

We’ll leave you today with a good taste of Angelique Kidjo’s cover of Samba Pa Ti, from her latest CD “Oyo.”