Child burnings increase in Afghanistan

[Cocoa]

http://www.nynewsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-woburn0627,0,396966.story?coll=ny-worldnews-headlines

GARDEZ, Afghanistan -- One night last month, when the lamp in Hazrat Khan'svillage home ran low on kerosene, his wife and daughters began to refill it from a jug. The lamp exploded. "It burned the whole room, and they ran out, burning and screaming," Khan recalled.

A week later, his daughters lay scarred and silent in the battered beds of Gardez Civil Hospital. In recent months, kerosene lamps and heaters have exploded in hundreds of Afghan homes. Burned, disfigured children lying in barely functioning hospitals are a new image of how badly this country is broken. Afghanistan lacks electricity, so most families light their homes with oil lamps, typically assigning women and children to tend them.

The country lacks a real school system, or nationwide news media, so there is little way to correct the broad public ignorance of safety rules. And the government department that is supposed to regulate fuel sales has few inspectors and no laboratory to check for dangerous fuels.

A contributing factor is Afghanistan's war and the fact that U.S. forces are using a particularly volatile Russian grade of kerosene to fly their planes and helicopters, Afghan and U.S. specialists said. Afghans say some of this fuel gets sold on the market and winds up exploding in homes.

more...

[mom cat]

1. War: the tragedy that keeps on giving.

[Roland99]

5. Another example of the American empire juggernaut not caring about

the ramifications of its actions.

[MiniMandaRuth]

2. I feel for those of my own age,

though I cannot even begin to imagine the troubles that they experience. I wish I could give them all homes with heat...

:cry: :cry:

(Two for Mom and me.)

[Straight Shooter]

3. Sadly, this happens in any poverty-stricken area.

Families in America who try to save on electricity by burning kerosene, and the house (such as it is) burns down, sometimes taking its occupants with it.

"Afghans say some of this fuel gets sold on the market and winds up exploding in homes."

Market, what market? The black market?

Maybe we could tend to this, maybe this would never have happened, if bush hadn't been so high on his ego trip and diverted attention from Afghanistan to Iraq.

[orwell]

4. Freedom...

is on the match...

Fuggin' ugly

[Lydia Leftcoast]

6. I would bet that $87 billion would have been enough to

provide electricity to every household in Afghanistan, and doing so, would not only have been "the right thing to do" but would have been unbeatable PR.