Archive for April, 2010
To-Buy or to rent a Home
Your New Home
by Dr. Sharon L. Bender
Each year a new wave of first time home buyers hits the trail in search of their humble abode. As a realtor for nine years I was often met with the challenge of helping these eager buyers to understand the true value of home ownership. There are pros and cons to buying a home and there is the matter of timing, which can have a lot to do with the housing market and related financing programs.
What to consider when deciding on buying a home vs. renting.
Consideration #1 on buying a Home vs. renting.
Buying a home means garnering equity, if the owner keeps the house long enough to overcome the initial cost of its purchase, that is. That can be one of the most surprising matters associated with home ownership.
Consideration #2 on buying a Home vs. renting.
Buying a home brings a sense of pride and accomplishment. Buying a home is also an opportunity to express more freely your personal taste, as long as the neighbors don’t have to view your idea of a decent-looking sculpture in your front yard every time they pull out of their driveway. Not only is there more freedom with home ownership, but there is likely more space than one would find in a rented apartment.
Consideration #3 on buying a Home vs. renting.
Buying a home brings a realization that you are part of a more permanent community in which you might be a contributor to the well being of others around you. In a rented home or apartment one might feel less involved and temporary when we humans tend to be territorial, inherently needing to claim a piece of ground as our own with its sense of permanence. We think about raising children and providing them with “roots” that grow in a yard rather than on a crowded balcony.
Financial considerations on buying a Home vs. renting.
Financial consideration #1 on buying a Home vs. renting.
When owning a home, each monthly payment is like putting money into a savings account rather than giving it to the landlord when renting. Each time the mortgage is paid a percentage goes toward your “equity.” This is indeed like having money in the bank as it is something you can draw upon later if needed. Whereas rental rates increase yearly, the principle on your mortgage is going down with each payment. Plus as the housing market grows, so do the valuations of homes.
Financial consideration #2 on buying a Home vs. renting .
Buying a home is also accompanied by some interesting tax benefits. Every interest payment you make becomes a tax deduction later. You can’t do that with a rental payment. You surely can’t do that with an auto loan either. But imagine buying your next car with a home equity loan that is indeed tax deductible. In this sense you are leveraging your equity.
Buying a home sounds great! But it isn’t for everyone. Just getting into home ownership can be a nightmare. Buying a home is a time-consuming and complex, not to mention costly, endeavor.
The responsibilities involved in buying a home vs. renting.
Responsibility #1 in buying a home vs. renting.
As a tenant in a rented home or apartment you have more freedom to move about the country. Owning a home requires an investment of time. You are now out mowing lawns, pruning hedges, managing the leaking pipes, and spending countless hours you had not expected keeping things running smoothly.
Responsibility #2 in buying a home vs. renting .
Many small home improvements can add up to big dollars invested in upkeep expenses. You might also find yourself paying for utilities that are otherwise covered in a rental agreement. If all of the upkeep outside the home is a problem, you might consider buying a condo. You will reap the rewards of home ownership with some minor constraints; and there is typically a monthly fee attached to condo and townhouse living called the “association fee.”
Responsibility #3 in buying a home vs. renting.
If you find you aren’t exactly thrilled with your new neighborhood, you may find yourself “stuck” until the value of your home increases enough to get back your initial investment. Selecting a home that you will occupy for a good long time takes patience, and initial homework. Anything can happen once you become a home owner to unexpectedly deteriorate the value of the home along with its enjoyment. In a rental you can pick up and move on. In a home you have to stay and endure what nature, neighbors, and nearby businesses might throw at you.
Responsibility #4 in buying a home vs. renting
Rivers can flood, parking lots can become extended to your lot line, and teens can become drum players, keeping you up for nights on end with raw talent. All of this can happen a month after you’ve moved into the peaceful neighborhood. Residential neighborhoods usually come with dogs. You might be tempted to own one yourself. Keeping yours quiet can be a challenge when ten others are sounding off.
Weighing the pros and cons of renting and buying a home can be challenging. There is a possible freedom of movement in one instance and financial freedom in the other. Homeowner responsibilities can be far greater than expected.
Tips on what to look for when buying a home
Tip #1 on what to watch out for when buying a home
Drive the neighborhood at different times of the day and week to see how your potential neighbors behave both during the week and on weekends.
Tip #2 on what to watch out for when buying a home
Check into the schools and surrounding businesses. Look for those conditions that contribute to “economic obsolescence.”
If you choose your new home (and the mortgage) wisely, you will find home ownership greatly rewarding. Although most people today don’t remain in their homes long enough to see the mortgage release arrive in the mail, personal satisfaction abounds.
For some additional help, Buying a New Home offers some tips on knowing what you can afford, knowing your rights, and shopping for a home. When it comes to searching for the mortgage, there are few parameters you need to digest in order to make the best selection. The mortgage is a major consideration in deciding whether to rent or buy.
Choosing a mortgage is not only about the lowest interest rate. There are other factors to consider in determining if the mortgage is right for you. The lease on an apartment or house is pretty straightforward. The mortgage process is a great deal more complex. You will need to do an analysis of your financial position much more exactingly. Consider your income, savings, and cash on hand. Determine your debt-to-loan ratio ability. The analysis should include a look at your past spending habits, your present needs, and your potential for success in not only getting the right loan, but in keeping it paid. As to your lifestyle, consider how long you intend to live in the home, whether you are going to need to save for college expenses, and whether you are expecting an increase in pay. These and any other eventualities will need to be considered in your affordability determination.
A short-term loan might be the right choice for a short-term stay, but a traditional 30-year fixed rate loan like your parents likely held when you were in grade school are still and often the best choice. Payments are stretched out over an extended period, with lower payments involved, making these types of loans more affordable. You can still double up on the payments and get the principle paid faster like the short-term loan, but without the threat of foreclosure if you have an unforeseen event. In unfortunate times, you can resort to making the lower payments as originally scheduled.
In your haste to pay off your mortgage, however, you may forget to account for college or other expenses that may crop up. There are also a host of conditions that will affect your determination such as age. If you are close to retirement when buying the home, you may not want the mortgage around in ten years. But again, with a 30-year mortgage you have the option and leeway to pay more each month and pay the loan off sooner. There are even some interest only and 40-year mortgages cropping up to help make home ownership more affordable. The mortgage may outlive you, but with the prices of homes souring and incomes somewhat dropping, these options can become the only means to gain home ownership.
Understanding the financing can be a complicated matter. People who can help you to make your financial decision are the lender, the realtor, the attorney handling the closing, and a tax preparer. For some additional tips on mortgage selection, Choose the right Mortgage and Save provides some advice on how to get the right mortgage plan. Once you have made your mortgage selection, examine the monthly payments and tax benefits as well as any hidden home ownership expenses such as potentially higher utility bills against the monthly rental fees at the apartments around the corner. Those may or may not include paying for utilities. You need to include all costs in both instances in order to make a fair comparison.
Generally, buying a home is more costly than renting. Often people make the same mistakes when they purchase a car. They do not allow for the maintenance such as new tires. With a house this can mean putting money aside for the leaking roof or the failed heating system. A good rule of thumb is to put aside 10% of your income toward home ownership expenses. If the tax savings are indeed saved, this may very well cover it. So let the house pay for itself in essence. Don’t rely on the tax reimbursement for the purchase of a new set of golf clubs. Chances are it will go right back into the home. And it should. If you can put the taxes into paying the mortgage, you have found another way to put the savings to good use.
Even though buying a home is more costly than renting and the threat of foreclosure can be at the discretion of the lender, you have a sense of security knowing that if you can’t maintain the cost, you may be able to sell it or rent it rather than lose it. In an apartment or home rental situation you can be evicted with no recourse other than to try to find another rental. And without good references, that can be very difficult. Likewise it is important to keep your credit in good standing in order to get a better mortgage rate the next time around.
Beyond the mortgage complications you will need to consider getting the best deal on the purchase price. You need to keep the emotional aspect out the purchasing process because the more emotional you are about the home, the more you are likely to pay. With a rental, the monthly fee is typically not negotiable. The purchase of a home typically is negotiable. Check the logistics in your state concerning buying and renting so that you are familiar with any parameters that affect the purchase and financing as well as any rights you may have as a tenant. These are additional factors to consider when weighing the pros and cons of renting and buying a home.
Health Benefits of Green Tea
Drink Green Tea
Experts explain green tea’s potential benefits for everything from fighting cancer to helping your heart.
By Julie Edgar
WebMD Feature
Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD
It’s difficult not to gush about green tea.
More than a decade’s worth of research about green tea’s health benefits — particularly its potential to fight cancer and heart disease — has been more than intriguing, as have limited studies about green tea’s role in lowering cholesterol, burning fat, preventing diabetes and stroke, and staving off dementia.
“I believe in green tea based on everything written about it,” says Katherine Tallmadge, RD, LD, a nutritionist and spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association. “Green tea, white tea, black tea — I like all of them.”
Still, real-world evidence is lacking; most of the consistent findings about green tea’s health benefits have come out of the lab.
The few large-scale human studies that have focused on green tea’s impact on heart disease and cancer are promising, but many of those were conducted in the East, where green tea is a dietary mainstay. The outcomes are likely influenced by other lifestyle factors such as high consumption of fish and soy protein, says cardiologist Nieca Goldberg, MD, a spokeswoman for the American Heart Association and medical director of the New York University Women’s Heart Center.
But Goldberg agrees with other health professionals: green tea has important antioxidants and compounds that help in maintaining good health.
The SAFE Banking Act: Break Them Up
By Simon Johnson, co-author of 13 Bankers.
On Wednesday, Senators Sherrod Brown and Ted Kaufman unveiled a “SAFE banking Act” with a clear and powerful purpose: Break up the big banks.
The proposal places hard leverage and size caps on financial institutions. It is well crafted, based on a great deal of hard thinking, and — as reported on the front page of The New York Times this week — the issue has the potential to draw a considerable amount of support.
The idea is simple, in the sense that the largest six banks in the American economy are currently “too big to fail” in the eyes of the credit market (and presumably in the leading minds the Obama administration — which saved all the big banks, without conditions, in March-April 2009). The bill put forward by Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the chairman of the Banking Committee, has some sensible proposals — and is definitely not an approach that supports “bailouts” — but it does not really confront the problem of the half-dozen megabanks.
In the American political system — where the power of major banks is now so manifest — there is no way to significantly reduce the risks posed by these banks unless they are broken up.
These banks are so powerful that they can confront and defy the government, as seen in the twists and turns of the S.E.C. versus Goldman Sachs case. They are also powerful enough to threaten a form of extortion: If reform is tough, according to JPMorgan Chase’s chief, Jamie Dimon, credit will contract, the recovery will slow and unemployment will stay high. Given the size of his bank, that’s a credible threat.
The big banks give a lot of money to politicians on both sides of the aisle and they are now digging in hard to defeat reform. Indeed, there are credible reports of various “front” organizations being used for this purpose.
Under such circumstances, the Brown-Kaufman approach might be thought unlikely to succeed.
But consider how the Republicans are already starting to counterattack the Dodd proposals, the ways in which the broader Dodd-White House approach remains vulnerable, and how exactly the Brown-Kaufman approach can help the Democratic leadership as it becomes increasingly hard pressed.
The Republicans are saying: the Dodd bill does not end “too big to fail.” Most of their reasons are misleading (“it’s all about Fannie and Freddie really,” “there will be a permanent bailout fund,” “the Federal Reserve needs to lose some of its powers,” etc.). But there is no question that this message will seriously confuse people who are only just starting to pay attention.
As the Republicans have astutely spotted, the Dodd-White House proposals will not actually reduce the size or seriously limit the activities of the megabanks — and a broad cross-section of society completely understands that these institutions brought us into the trauma of September 2008, have become even bigger since then, and still have the incentive to take on an excessive amount of risk.
The S.E.C. case against Goldman has created a great opportunity for the Democrats because it exposes details regarding exactly how big banks are mismanaged and why they treat many of their customers in an unreasonable manner. The electorate now completely understands — even more clearly than a week ago — that the attitudes and compensation structure of the largest banks lie at the heart of our current macroeconomic difficulties.
The Brown-Kaufman bill therefore addresses not just the substantive financial issues of our day but also the tough political situation now facing Democrats. If their SAFE banking bill can come to the floor of the Senate (for example, as an amendment to the Dodd bill) and be voted on — up or down — then we will really get to see which of our elected representatives support overly big banks and which want to bring them down.
The bill might fail, of course, on that basis — but then anyone who opposes it can be branded as a “too big to fail” fan in November and beyond. This would be a clear identifier that would cut through the noise and the disinformation. Did this candidate vote for or against the too-big-to-fail banks? It’s a simple yes or no.
As political logic inserts itself more and more into the economic debate on banking, there is a real possibility that Senators Brown and Kaufman have exactly what the Democrats (and the country) needs.
This post appeared this morning on the NYT.com’s Economix; it is used here with permission. If you would like to reproduce the entire post, please contact the New York Times.
Source: The Baseline Scenario
Make The Call Or Get Out Of The Booth: After The President’s “Wall Street” Speech
By Simon Johnson, co-author of 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover And The Next Financial Meltdown
The president’s rhetoric today at Cooper Union was impressive and his body language indicates a major shift in administration attitudes towards the big banks over the past year. This is commendable.
But there is still the awkward question of legislation that would actually reduce the political power of big banks – and make our financial system significantly safer. The latest indications from the Senate are that there will be some sort of “Dodd minus” compromise bill brought to the floor early next week. The Republicans have substantially backed down from Senator McConnell’s “hell, no” position of last week because the polling is crystal clear: Anyone perceived as opposed financial reform will lose badly in November.
But the Democratic leadership is not seizing on this advantage and on the opportunity presented by the SEC case against Goldman Sachs – key figures in the Democratic establishments are too worried about upsetting financial sector donors. As a result, come November, independents will view the Democrats with scorn, while the Democratic base will be far from energized; you do the math.
What can you do? What makes sense in both economic and political terms?Call your Senator, call Senator Harry Reid (Senate majority leader), and call the White House. Tell them that you support the Brown-Kaufman SAFE banking act (unveiled yesterday) – as an amendment that would greatly strengthen the Dodd bill by capping the size and leverage of our biggest banks. Politely ask the people who answer the phone to make certain that this amendment gets an “up or down vote” in the Senate.
The Brown-Kaufman act is our best near-term chance to reduce the size of Wall Street megabanks that are too big to fail and that threaten our economy. (If you don’t understand why this is important, read 13 Bankers; quickly – this could all be over by this time next week.)
Tell everyone you know why this makes sense and ask them to make the call also. These calls will determine the outcome. If the Democratic leadership understands the groundswell of support for breaking up big banks, the Brown-Kaufman proposal has a chance to come to the floor – and who exactly on the Republican side would like to be on the record as opposing it?
If no one who reads this post speaks out (and makes the call), the Brown-Kaufman amendment will not come to the floor. If some of you speak out, there is a sliver of a chance. And if all of you – and everyone you know and everyone they know – make three simple, short, and friendly phone calls, there will be a vote.
Source : The Baseline Scenario
Sodium: Are you getting too Much?
You’ve been trying to eat less sodium — just a pinch of table salt on your baked potato and a dash to your scrambled eggs.
But a pinch and a dash can quickly add up to unhealthy levels of sodium, especially when many foods already contain more than enough sodium. About 11 percent of the sodium in the average U.S. diet comes from adding salt or other sodium-containing condiments to foods while cooking or eating. But the majority of the sodium — 77 percent — comes from eating prepared or processed foods that contain the mineral. So even though you may limit the amount of salt you add to food, the food itself may already be high in sodium.
Are you getting too much? Here’s where sodium sneaks into your diet and ways you can shake the habit.
Sodium: Essential in small amounts
Your body needs some sodium to function properly. Sodium:
- Helps maintain the right balance of fluids in your body
- Helps transmit nerve impulses
- Influences the contraction and relaxation of muscles
Your kidneys regulate the amount of sodium kept in your body. When sodium levels are low, your kidneys conserve sodium. When levels are high, they excrete the excess amount in urine.
If your kidneys can’t eliminate enough sodium, the sodium starts to accumulate in your blood. Because sodium attracts and holds water, your blood volume increases. Increased blood volume, in turn, makes your heart work harder to move more blood through your blood vessels, increasing pressure in your arteries. Certain diseases such as congestive heart failure, cirrhosis and chronic kidney disease can lead to an inability to regulate sodium.
Some people are more sensitive to the effects of sodium than are others. People who are sodium sensitive retain sodium more easily, leading to excess fluid retention and increased blood pressure. If you’re in that group, extra sodium in your diet increases your chance of developing high blood pressure, a condition that can lead to cardiovascular and kidney diseases.
How much sodium do you need?
Various organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine, have published recommendations on daily sodium limits. Most recommend not exceeding the range of 1,500 and 2,400 milligrams (mg) a day for healthy adults. Keep in mind that the lower your sodium, the more beneficial effect on blood pressure.
If you are older than 50, are black or have a health condition such as high blood pressure, chronic kidney disease or diabetes, you may be more sensitive to the blood pressure raising effects of sodium. As a result, aim for a sodium limit at the low end of the range recommended for healthy adults. Talk to your doctor about the sodium limit that’s best for you.
Three main sources of sodium
The average U.S. diet has three main sources of sodium:
- Processed and prepared foods. Most sodium in a person’s diet comes from eating processed and prepared foods, such as canned vegetables, soups, luncheon meats and frozen foods. Food manufacturers use salt or other sodium-containing compounds to preserve food and to improve the taste and texture of food.
- Sodium-containing condiments. One teaspoon (5 milliliters) of table salt has 2,325 mg of sodium, and 1 tablespoon (15 milliliters) of soy sauce has about 900 to 1,000 mg of sodium. Adding these or other sodium-laden condiments to your meals — either while cooking or at the table — raises the sodium count of food.
- Natural sources of sodium. Sodium naturally occurs in some foods, such as meat, poultry, dairy products and vegetables. For example, 1 cup (237 milliliters) of low-fat milk has about 107 mg of sodium.
Be a savvy shopper: Find the sodium
Taste alone may not tell you which foods are high in sodium. For example, you may not think a bagel tastes salty, but a 4-inch (10-centimeter) oat-bran bagel has 451 mg of sodium.
So how do you identify foods high in sodium? The best way to determine sodium content is to read food labels. The Nutrition Facts label tells you how much sodium is in each serving. It also lists whether salt or sodium-containing compounds are ingredients. Examples of these compounds include:
- Monosodium glutamate (MSG)
- Baking soda
- Baking powder
- Disodium phosphate
- Sodium alginate
- Sodium nitrate or nitrite
How to cut sodium
You may or may not be particularly sensitive to the effects of sodium. And because there’s no way to know who might develop high blood pressure as a result of a high-sodium diet, choose and prepare foods with less sodium.
You can cut sodium several ways:
- Eat more fresh foods and fewer processed foods. Most fresh fruits and vegetables are naturally low in sodium. Also, fresh meat is lower in sodium than luncheon meat, bacon, hot dogs, sausage and ham are. Buy fresh and frozen poultry or meat that hasn’t been injected with a sodium-containing solution. Look on the label or ask your butcher.
- Opt for low-sodium products. If you do buy processed foods, select those that have reduced sodium.
- Remove salt from recipes whenever possible. You can leave out the salt in many recipes, including casseroles, stews and other main dishes. Baked goods are an exception. Leaving out the salt could affect the quality as well as the taste of the food.
- Limit your use of sodium-laden condiments. Salad dressings, sauces, dips, ketchup, mustard and relish all contain sodium.
- Use herbs, spices and other flavorings to enhance foods. Learn how to use fresh or dried herbs, spices, zest from citrus fruit, and fruit juices to jazz up your meals.
- Use salt substitutes wisely. Some salt substitutes or light salts contain a mixture of table salt (sodium chloride) and other compounds. To achieve that familiar salty taste, you may use too much of the substitute and actually not use less sodium. In addition, many salt substitutes contain potassium chloride. Though dietary potassium can lessen some of the harm of excess sodium, too much supplemental potassium can be harmful if you have kidney problems or if you’re taking medications for congestive heart failure or high blood pressure that cause potassium retention.
Your taste for salt is acquired, so it’s reversible. To unlearn this salty savoring, decrease your use of salt gradually and your taste buds will adjust. Most people find that after a few weeks of cutting salt, they no longer miss it. Start by using no more than 1/4 teaspoon (1 milliliter) of added salt daily, and then gradually reduce to no salt add-ons. As you use less salt, your preference for it lessens, allowing you to enjoy the taste of food itself.
Source Mayoclinic.com
With AIDS, Time to Get Beyond Blame
By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. 
You don’t hear much about AIDS in America anymore. The few new headlines are reserved for dispatches from the developing world, where the dying young still make good old-fashioned heart-wrenching copy.
But AIDS endures right here in the U.S.A.: our outpatient clinics are bursting at the seams, and new cases show up daily. A million domestic stories are languishing untold, but they are not the operatic tragedies we have grown used to.
Instead, as illustrated by last week’s report about a Florida athlete indicted on charges of willfully transmitting H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, these are nuanced and complicated fables, with morals that extend beyond the disease itself.
The athlete, Darren Chiacchia, a bronze-medal Olympic equestrian, was charged a few months ago with what is a first-degree felony in Florida: repeatedly exposing a sexual partner to H.I.V. Mr. Chiacchia first tested positive for the virus in 2008, and his partner reportedly tested negative when their relationship began in early 2009.
The relationship ended in rancor six months later, and the partner filed a complaint with the sheriff, claiming that Mr. Chiacchia never disclosed his infection — that the partner found out only by discovering medical papers confirming it. It is not known whether the partner did in fact contract H.I.V. during that time. Mr. Chiacchia’s trial begins in June.
Most states enacted punitive legislation back in the hysterical old days of AIDS, a period lasting roughly from 1981, when the first reports of the syndrome were published, to 1996, when combination drug “cocktails” proved remarkably effective against H.I.V. Back then, transmitting the disease to an unknowing sexual partner was considered tantamount to murder.
These statutes are still on the books, but the science behind them has changed radically. People do still die of AIDS in the United States — the death rate, after plummeting in the late 1990s, has remained constant at about 16,000 per year. But for a person infected in 2009 to die of AIDS in the future would probably require a substantial amount of bad judgment or bad luck: the medications, if properly prescribed and properly taken, appear almost infallible.
Were it a matter of science alone, all those AIDS statutes could be rescinded tomorrow. But the science was only a small part of the panic that created them. And effective treatment has not altered the rest of that potent emotional brew: the virus still sows terror, uncertainty, shame and endless complications, whether the infection is concealed or revealed.
All of us, no matter how learned, carry an eternally primitive creature in our brains. It is a small homunculus who will always react to illness — any illness — with anger, disbelief and a search for blame. Centuries ago we burned witches and torched infidels for poisoning our wells; diseases were the fault of our enemies (in the 15th century, syphilis was simultaneously the Italian disease in France and the French disease in Italy).
Now we think we know better, but do we really? We blame that coughing woman in the subway for our cold, the giant meat company for our food poisoning, all manner of chemicals and electromagnetic radiation for our cancers, and fast-food outlets for our diabetes and heart disease. We cannot experience illness without casting around for blame.
Yet at the same time we believe deeply in prevention. Surely if we watch our diets and get our mammograms and colonoscopies, wash our hands, take whatever vitamin is foremost in the news and eat our burgers well done, we can avert bad things. Whole generations have now grown up knowing that sensible people “play safe,” with the overriding implication that if you catch a sexually transmitted disease, you have no one to blame but yourself.
And so whose fault is a new H.I.V. infection, really? Is it mine, for giving it to you, or is it yours, for being stupid and cavalier enough to get it?
The court will eventually sort out the Florida case, where despite the particulars the matter is probably less about infection than the old lover’s plaint “I trusted you; you betrayed me.”
But the larger questions endure, and I suspect those obsolete H.I.V. statutes will endure as well. AIDS is only one of hundreds of infections that can move from one person to another. Some travel through the air, like tuberculosis; some move by touch, like staph. The air we breathe and the hands we shake will never be safe, anymore than safe sex is entirely safe, and as long as we are fallible, litigious humans, some of us will head to court and cite hoary public-health law to satisfy that primitive little blame monster in our brains.
As for AIDS, though, the fact is that for most new infections, the language of culpability and blame simply no longer applies. As Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, the MacArthur “genius”-award-winning AIDS expert at Columbia University, wrote with colleagues in The New England Journal of Medicine last month, new H.I.V. infections are now increasingly concentrated in specific pockets in the United States. They move among the poorest of the poor, the disenfranchised and socially marginalized, where substandard education means no escape. In these places the prevalence of disease is so high (Washington, D.C., has rates as high as some African countries) that simply living brings risk of infection.
In other words, if you are a woman in some ZIP codes, falling in love and getting married, with no sexual partner but your husband, puts you at risk for H.I.V. We see these women in our clinics, more and more of them, but you won’t find them in court. Whom would they sue?
Dr. Abigail Zuger, an infectious-disease physician in Manhattan, writes the monthly Books column for the health pages.
Source: The New York Times
A version of this news analysis appeared in print on April 20, 2010, on page D6 of the New York edition
Is Marriage Good for Your Health?
By TARA PARKER-POPE 
In 1858, a British epidemiologist named William Farr set out to study what he called the “conjugal condition” of the people of France. He divided the adult population into three distinct categories: the “married,” consisting of husbands and wives; the “celibate,” defined as the bachelors and spinsters who had never married; and finally the “widowed,” those who had experienced the death of a spouse. Using birth, death and marriage records, Farr analyzed the relative mortality rates of the three groups at various ages. The work, a groundbreaking study that helped establish the field of medical statistics, showed that the unmarried died from disease “in undue proportion” to their married counterparts. And the widowed, Farr found, fared worst of all.
Farr’s was among the first scholarly works to suggest that there is a health advantage to marriage and to identify marital loss as a significant risk factor for poor health. Married people, the data seemed to show, lived longer, healthier lives. “Marriage is a healthy estate,” Farr concluded. “The single individual is more likely to be wrecked on his voyage than the lives joined together in matrimony.”
While Farr’s own study is no longer relevant to the social realities of today’s world — his three categories exclude couples living together, gay couples and the divorced, for instance — his overarching finding about the health benefits of marriage seems to have stood the test of time. Critics, of course, have rightly cautioned about the risk of conflating correlation with causation. (Better health among the married sometimes simply reflects the fact that healthy people are more likely to get married in the first place.) But in the 150 years since Farr’s work, scientists have continued to document the “marriage advantage”: the fact that married people, on average, appear to be healthier and live longer than unmarried people.
Contemporary studies, for instance, have shown that married people are less likely to get pneumonia, have surgery, develop cancer or have heart attacks. A group of Swedish researchers has found that being married or cohabiting at midlife is associated with a lower risk for dementia. A study of two dozen causes of death in the Netherlands found that in virtually every category, ranging from violent deaths like homicide and car accidents to certain forms of cancer, the unmarried were at far higher risk than the married. For many years, studies like these have influenced both politics and policy, fueling national marriage-promotion efforts, like the Healthy Marriage Initiative of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. From 2006 to 2010, the program received $150 million annually to spend on projects like “divorce reduction” efforts and often cited the health benefits of marrying and staying married.
But while it’s clear that marriage is profoundly connected to health and well-being, new research is increasingly presenting a more nuanced view of the so-called marriage advantage. Several new studies, for instance, show that the marriage advantage doesn’t extend to those in troubled relationships, which can leave a person far less healthy than if he or she had never married at all. One recent study suggests that a stressful marriage can be as bad for the heart as a regular smoking habit. And despite years of research suggesting that single people have poorer health than those who marry, a major study released last year concluded that single people who have never married have better health than those who married and then divorced.
All of which suggests that while Farr’s exploration into the conjugal condition pointed us in the right direction, it exaggerated the importance of the institution of marriage and underestimated the quality and character of the marriage itself. The mere fact of being married, it seems, isn’t enough to protect your health. Even the Healthy Marriage Initiative makes the distinction between “healthy” and “unhealthy” relationships when discussing the benefits of marriage. “When we divide good marriages from bad ones,” says the marriage historian Stephanie Coontz, who is also the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, “we learn that it is the relationship, not the institution, that is key.”
Some of today’s most interesting research on the relationship between marriage and health is being led by a pair of researchers at Ohio State University College of Medicine. The duo, Ronald Glaser and Jan Kiecolt-Glaser, are also, fittingly, married to each other.
Glaser and Kiecolt-Glaser’s scholarly collaboration has its roots in a chance encounter during a faculty picnic in October 1978 on the Ohio State campus. Glaser, who is a viral immunologist, spotted an attractive woman standing with members of the psychiatry faculty. Although their eyes met only briefly, he caught a glimpse of her name tag. Intrigued, he tried to track her down, calling the psychiatry department chairman to ask if he knew a petite blonde on staff with a name like “Pam Kiscoli.” The department chairman figured out that Glaser was talking about a new assistant professor named Jan Kiecolt. Glaser and Kiecolt eventually met for lunch at the university’s hospital cafeteria. They married a year later, in January 1980.
The coupling resulted in more than romance. The two scientists were fascinated by each other’s work, which they often discussed over meals or while jogging together. Glaser suggested that they collaborate professionally, but finding common ground was a challenge: he studied virology and immunology; she was a clinical psychologist who focused on assertiveness and other behavior. In the early 1980s, however, Kiecolt-Glaser came across a book on the emerging field of psychoneuroimmunology, which concerns the interplay between behavior, the immune and endocrine systems and the brain and nervous system. The couple were intrigued by a science that lay at the intersection of their disciplines. Today, the two disagree on exactly how their professional collaboration began. “He says I started it,” Kiecolt-Glaser told me. “But I say he started it.”
In their first research collaboration, they sought to measure the effect of psychological stress on the immune system. Although earlier studies had established that trauma and other major stress — like the death of a loved one or prolonged sleep deprivation — weakened the immune system, the Glasers wanted to know if lesser forms of stress, like those associated with the workplace or graduate school, had a similar effect.
The Glasers, who worked at Ohio’s State’s medical school, had ready access to an ample supply of stressed-out students, and so they decided to study the toll exacted by school pressure. They took blood samples from a set of students early in the semester and then did so again in the middle of final exams. The Glasers discovered that the stress of examination time seemed to cause a significant weakening of the students’ immune response: by examination time, the medical students showed a significant drop in so-called natural killer cells, a type of white blood cell that battles viruses and helps prevent cancer.
For their second collaboration, the Glasers turned their attention to domestic strife. They wondered about the role that relationships play in health and about the effects of marital stress, which, like school pressure, can be a source of nontraumatic but chronic strain. In what was to be the first of their many studies on marriage and health, the Glasers recruited 76 women, half of whom were married; the other half were separated or had divorced. The Glasers wanted to identify which married women were in troubled relationships as well as which of the women who were separated or divorced from their husbands were emotionally struggling the most. They did this by using marital-quality scales, types of questionnaires that ask couples to indicate agreement or disagreement with statements like “If I had to do it over again, I would marry the same person” or “We often do things together.” Next, using blood tests, the Glasers measured the women’s immune-system responses, tracking their levels of antibody production and other indicators of immunity strength. The results showed that the women in unhappy relationships and the women who remained emotionally hung up on their ex-husbands had decidedly weaker immune responses than the women who were in happier relationships (or were happily out of them).
Though pleased with this study, the Glasers knew that they had succeeded in taking the measure of marital happiness and health only at a single moment. The couple were also curious to study the effect of marital stress as it unfolded in real time. What happens to the body minute by minute, hour by hour, when couples engage in hostile marital disputes? To find this out, they recruited a study group of 90 seemingly happy newlywed couples. Each couple was hooked up to tubes so that blood samples could be drawn from the pair at regular intervals, and the husband and wife were seated face to face. Obscured by a curtain, the researchers watched the couples on video monitors; nurses took the blood samples. The participants, as they had been prompted to do, discussed their most volatile topics of marital conflict, like housework, sex or interference from a mother-in-law. “You wouldn’t think in a study situation that they would tear into each other,” Glaser, who is now the director of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research, told me. “But they get into it.” As expected, the couples who exhibited the most negative and hostile behavior during the conflict discussion showed the largest declines in immune-system function during the 24-hour study period.
These data strongly suggested that marital stress could affect the body in striking ways, but the Glaser team had yet to prove that marital conflict had any truly meaningful or lasting effect on health. Kiecolt-Glaser had an idea for another study that would meet this higher standard. She had read about a strange tool used by her dermatology colleagues: a small plastic suction device designed to leave eight tiny blisters on the arm and allow monitoring of the immune-system response at the wound sites. Kiecolt-Glaser’s proposal was to use this blistering device to measure how quickly or slowly physical wounds healed among married couples who had undergone different levels of marital stress.
The experiment had two phases. Each married couple, after their forearms were subjected to the blistering procedure, were asked to talk together for a half-hour: on one occasion they discussed topics chosen to elicit the couples’ supportive behaviors; on another day, after undergoing the blistering procedures again, they discussed topics selected to evoke conflict and tension and tried to resolve them. Before subjecting others to the blistering regimen, each of the Glasers had the device secured to his or her respective forearm to have his or her skin blistered. The sensation is comparable to “someone gently pinching your arm,” Kiecolt-Glaser told me. Nonetheless, the Glasers knew it would be a tough sell to convince others couples to undergo the blistering procedure as well as two weeks of subsequent monitoring of the wounds as they healed. A study grant allowed them to offer $2,000 in total compensation to any couple willing to take part in the experiment. They managed to recruit 42 married couples for the study.
The results were remarkable. After the blistering sessions in which couples argued, their wounds took, on average, a full day longer to heal than after the sessions in which the couples discussed something pleasant. Among couples who exhibited especially high levels of hostility while bickering, the wounds took a full two days longer to heal than those of couples who had showed less animosity while fighting.
Published in 2005 in The Archives of General Psychiatry, the Glasers’ findings help explain epidemiological data showing that couples in troubled marriages appear to be more susceptible to illness than happier couples. The results may also have practical relevance for surgical patients, for instance, waiting for incisions to heal. But most important, the study offered compelling evidence that a hostile fight with your husband or wife isn’t just bad for your relationship. It can have a profound toll on your body.
Kiecolt-Glaser told me that the overall health lesson to take away from the new wave of marriage-and-health literature is that couples should first work to repair a troubled relationship and learn to fight without hostility and derision. But if staying married means living amid constant acrimony, from the point of view of your health, “you’re better off out of it,” she says.
Last year, The Journal of Health and Social Behavior published a study tracking the marital history and health of nearly 9,000 men and women in their 50s and 60s. The study, which grew out of work by researchers at the University of Chicago, found that when the married people became single again — either by divorce or because of the death of a spouse — they suffered a decline in physical health from which they never fully recovered. These men and women had 20 percent more chronic health issues, like heart disease and diabetes, than those who were still married to their first husband or wife by middle age. The divorced and widowed also had aged less gracefully, reporting more problems going up and down stairs or walking longer distances.
Perhaps the most striking finding concerned single people who had never married. For more than 100 years, scientists have speculated that single people, because they generally have fewer resources, lower income and perhaps less logistical and emotional support, have poorer health than the married. But in the Chicago study, people who had divorced or been widowed had worse health problems than men and women who had been single their entire lives. In formerly married individuals, it was as if the marriage advantage had never existed.
Does marrying again benefit those who divorce, in terms of health? In the Chicago study, remarriage helped only a little. It seemed to heal emotional wounds: the remarried had about the same risk for depression as the continuously married. But a second marriage didn’t seem to be enough to repair the physical damage associated with marital loss. Compared with the continuously married, people in second marriages still had 12 percent more chronic health problems and 19 percent more mobility problems. “I don’t think anyone would encourage people to stay in a marriage that is really making them miserable,” says Linda J. Waite, a University of Chicago sociologist and an author of the study. “But try harder to make it better.” Even if marital problems seem small, Waite says, the data suggest it’s wise to intervene early and try to resolve them. “If you learn to how to manage disagreement early,” she says, “then you can avoid the decline in marital happiness that follows from the drip, drip of negative interactions.”
Other researchers have also studied how the “drip, drip” of negativity can erode not only a marriage itself but also a couple’s physical health. A number of epidemiological studies suggest that unhappily married couples are at higher risk for heart attacks and cardiovascular disease than happily married couples. In 2000, The Journal of the American Medical Association published a three-year Swedish study of 300 women who had been hospitalized with severe chest pains or a heart attack; the study found that those who reported the highest levels of marital stress were nearly three times as likely to suffer another heart attack or require a bypass or other procedure. It is notable that these increased risks weren’t associated with other forms of stress. For instance, women who were stressed-out at work weren’t at any higher risk for a second episode of heart problems than women who were happy in their jobs.
Of course, all couples — happy or unhappy — are bound to experience some form of marital conflict. Surely this does not mean everyone is doomed to ill health; some conflicts are better than others. The University of Utah psychology professor Timothy W. Smith has addressed this question, studying how what he calls the “emotional tone” of conflict affects heart risk. In one study, he recruited 150 couples, most of whom were in their 60s and married for an average of 36 years. All were in general good health with no signs of heart disease. Smith collected video recordings of the couples discussing stressful topics like money management or housework. The arguments were then “coded” to indicate the number of warm, hostile and controlling statements and words that were used in the course of the dispute. In addition, the couples were put in heart-scanning machines to measure coronary calcium levels, which are a useful indicator of heart-disease risk. Smith then compared each person’s conflict style with their coronary calcium score.
Smith’s results suggest that there are important differences between men and women when it comes to health and the style of conflict that can jeopardize it. The women in his study who were at highest risk for signs of heart disease were those whose marital battles lacked any signs of warmth, not even a stray term of endearment during a hostile discussion (“Honey, you’re driving me crazy!”) or a minor pat on the back or squeeze of the hand, all of which can signal affection in the midst of anger. “Most of the literature assumes that it’s how bad the arguments get that drives the effect, but it’s actually the lack of affection that does it,” Smith told me. “It wasn’t how much nasty talk there was. It was the lack of warmth that predicted risk.”
For men, on the other hand, hostile and negative marital battles seemed to have no effect on heart risk. Men were at risk for a higher coronary calcium score, however, when their marital spats turned into battles for control. It didn’t matter whether it was the husband or wife who was trying to gain control of the matter; it was merely any appearance of controlling language that put men on the path of heart disease.
In both cases, the emotional tone of a marital fight turned out to be just as predictive of poor heart health as whether the individual smoked or had high cholesterol. It is worth noting that the couples in Smith’s study were all relatively happy. These were husbands and wives who loved each other. Yet many of them had developed styles of conflict that took a physical toll on each other. The solution, Smith noted, isn’t to stop fighting. It’s to fight more thoughtfully. “Difficulties in marriage seem to be nearly universal,” he said. “Just try not to let fights be any nastier than they need to be.”
Researchers have also started to examine the salutary health effects of social relationships, including those of a good marriage. In one recent study, James A. Coan, an assistant professor of psychology and a neuroscientist at the University of Virginia, recruited 16 women who scored relatively high on a questionnaire assessing marital happiness. He placed each woman in three different situations while monitoring her brain with an f.M.R.I. machine, which offers a way to observe the brain’s response to almost any kind of emotional stimulation. In one situation, to simulate stress, he subjected the woman to a mild electric shock. In a second, the shock was administered, but the woman held the hand of a stranger; in a third, the hand of her husband.
Both instances of hand-holding reduced the neural activity in areas of the woman’s brain associated with stress. But when the woman was holding her husband’s hand, the effect was even greater, and it was particularly pronounced in women who had the highest marital-happiness scores. Holding a husband’s hand during the electric shock resulted in a calming of the brain regions associated with pain similar to the effect brought about by use of a pain-relieving drug.
Coan says the study simulates how a supportive marriage and partnership gives the brain the opportunity to outsource some of its most difficult neural work. “When someone holds your hand in a study or just shows that they are there for you by giving you a back rub, when you’re in their presence, that becomes a cue that you don’t have to regulate your negative emotion,” he told me. “The other person is essentially regulating your negative emotion but without your prefrontal cortex. It’s much less wear and tear on us if we have someone there to help regulate us.”
With so much evidence establishing a link between marital stress and health, a new generation of research is set to explore the ways in which couples can mitigate the damaging effects of relationship stress. The Glasers are now conducting studies testing whether regular supplements of fish oil, rich in omega-3 fatty acids, can mitigate some of the physical symptoms of stress on the immune system.
The couple are also embarking on a new study looking at the interplay between nutrition and marital stress. Earlier research at Ohio State showed that when study subjects were given intravenous fat injections during times of stress, it took longer for triglycerides, fats that are associated with heart disease, to leave the bloodstream. But Kiecolt-Glaser is more interested in the real-world equivalent of the study: What happens to the body’s ability to cope with fats when couples fight at dinnertime? To find out, she’s planning to feed married couples two types of meals — one relatively healthful meal and one high-fat meal equivalent to fast food. During the meal the couples will be asked to discuss topics of high stress, and a blood analysis will offer a glimpse of the effect that mealtime conflict has on the body’s ability to metabolize fats. “It’s an ideal way,” Kiecolt-Glaser says, “to look at what happens to couples in the real world, where so many family conflicts happen over a meal.”
For the Glasers, their nearly 30 years of professional collaboration have not only given them new insights into the role of stress and health but have also helped them in their own marriage. Like every married couple, they have their disagreements, Glaser told me. But years of watching married couples interact and measuring the subsequent physical toll that conflict takes on their bodies has taught the Glasers the importance of taking time off together and making sure their disagreements don’t degenerate into personal attacks. “Don’t fight dirty,” he advised. “You never go far enough down the road where you hurt each other. We know enough to avoid those kinds of arguments.”
Kiecolt-Glaser added that the couple’s research shows that some level of relationship stress is inevitable in even the happiest marriages. The important thing, she said, is to use those moments of stress as an opportunity to repair the relationship rather than to damage it. “It can be so uncomfortable, even in the best marriages, to have an ongoing disagreement,” she said. “It’s the pit-in-your-stomach kind of thing. But when your marital relationship is the key relationship in your life, a disagreement is really a signal to try to fix something.”
Tara Parker-Pope is the Well columnist for The New York Times and the author of “For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage,” to be published next month.
Amid catastrophe in Haiti, a new controversy about adoptions Saviours or kidnappers?
Amid catastrophe in Haiti, a new controversy about adoptions
From The Economist print edition
Out of Haiti, but not to the highest bidder
IT MUST have seemed like a good idea at the time. The New Life Children’s Refuge, a Christian group from Idaho, saw no need to bother with paperwork or official permission when they decided to take 33 Haitian children to the Dominican Republic where they apparently hoped to build an orphanage.
Furious officials arrested ten of the group’s members on charges of kidnapping (which they deny). Many of the children turned out to have families. A similar row erupted in 2007 when workers from Zoé’s Ark, a French charity, were accused of kidnapping 103 children in Chad. Ostensibly orphans from the Darfur region of Sudan, destined for adoption in France, many turned out to be local children, and not orphans. Six charity workers were jailed.
The sentiment behind inter-country adoption may sound noble and often is. Why should governments stand between loving people in one country and needy children in another? Support for inter-country adoption is particularly strong in America, where parents adopt more foreign children than all the rest of the world. Some would-be adopters may at times be overhasty but Michele Bond, the senior State Department official dealing with the issue, insists that those concerned act from the best possible motives.
But inter-country adoptions happen in a fuzzy and sometimes murky world. One worry is that demand creates supply. Outsiders’ money can distort the decisions of officials and parents in poor countries. That may hamper chances of the most desirable outcome, in which children are fostered by relatives or adopted locally. Very few children described as orphans have no living relatives. If they move to another country, their chances of staying in touch with family members shrivel. Even the most ardent free-marketeers do not support free trade in children, with blonde female babies attracting a hefty premium.
Another worry is that adopted children may disappear from view when they cross international borders. International law stipulates that reports on the adopted child should be sent regularly to the source country. In some countries that is observed punctiliously. In others it is in effect voluntary. American law, in particular, does not require parents to send such reports. Once in America, an adopted child is treated like any other, with the state getting involved only in cases of evident abuse. Officials in countries such as Ethiopia or Ukraine may lack the means or motivation to chase up dilatory American parents.
Many critics of inter-country adoption cite experiences in Romania. Following reports of scandalous conditions in orphanages there after the collapse of communism, outsiders flocked to adopt children. But of the 30,000 children adopted by foreigners between 1990 and 2000, around 20,000 are now untraceable, according to Rupert Wolfe Murray, who worked as a lobbyist on the issue.
Roelie Post, who as a European Commission official dealt with adoption in the run-up to Romania’s entry to the European Union, has written a book on her experience of dealing with what she sees as a powerful adoption lobby that preys on weak and poor countries. Mr Wolfe Murray says that after wars and natural disasters adoption agencies descend like “vultures” to find suitable children. The countries that provide the most children for international adoption include China, Vietnam, Kazakhstan and, until recently, Guatemala, which are also among those with the weakest legal systems, he notes.
Most adoption agencies are non-profit outfits that see their work as entirely charitable. They may charge only expenses and a reasonable fee, according to The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption. An international treaty with a supporting bureaucracy, it has had growing clout since America joined it in 2008. But the sums involved leave ample room for doubt. A Love Beyond Borders, an agency helping would-be parents adopt children from Haiti and elsewhere, says the process may cost more than $30,000.
The Hague rules also govern the agencies’ accreditation. That should, for example, stop the practice (often criticised as exploitative) of putting photographs of “children awaiting adoption” on their websites. But American agencies may dodge that by saying that they are seeking accreditation, or cite some other endorsement, for example by the consulate of the country they are dealing with.
As legal regimes on adoption tighten, activity tends to shift. When Romania banned inter-country adoption, agencies moved to lightly regulated Moldova and then Ukraine. Hans van Loon, the secretary general of The Hague regulatory body, highlights Guatemala, once the source of 5,000 annual adoptions, mainly to America. That seemed a lot for a country of 13m people. (Only about 10,000 foreign adoptions a year take place in China.) Now the number has dropped to zero after a temporary suspension. When it resumes, he expects only a few hundred children, mainly with disabilities, to be adopted.
Inter-country adoption may often be wonderful for the children and families concerned. But it does not solve the problems of poverty and abuse that make it so seemingly desirable.
Books to read: 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (Hardcover)
13 Bankers
| By | C. E. Selby |
I grew up in the home of a banker. But Dad was a small-town bank president in what we call “community banks.” And the bank still exists and is doing well in Vermont. But my dad, when he retired in the early 70s, said, “Banking isn’t banking any more.” I had no idea what he was talking about, mainly because I was never much interested in banking. But I have become quite interested in it now that this country has become economically handcuffed by these so-called bankers.
This is a very well written book with a very comprehensive set of notes (footnotes) at the end. In other words, anyone writing comments about these authors being conspiracy theorists is simply ignoring the content of the book. Having said this, however, I want to acknowledge that the book isn’t written for people who don’t have at least a little knowledge about how the world of finance works. In other words, I found myself lost in many places. But I cannot fault the writers or the writing. I simply don’t have what we English teachers would call “prior knowledge,” the essential tool to reading.
The authors are not bashing anyone. The book is structured so the reader is provided with some history (and it is sourced history) before being presented with what happened and how it happened. I like how objective Johnson and Kvak are. To use a phrase that I captured from a cable channel I would never watch, this is “fair and balanced.”
What most interested this reader is the case the writers make for “The American Oligarchy.” Indeed that is what we have with these “financial elites” that run Wall Street. They are so tightly tied into our non-functioning Congress (and to some degree a too-tied-to-Wall-Street White House and to five very-tied-to-Wall-Street on the Supreme Court).
I intend to give this book as a gift to a few people I know who really need accurate information. But do “tea baggers” read I wonder.
Ethiopian Tea Party head Dr Berhanu Nega is heading to Brussels
Ethiopian Tea Party
Berhanu Nega, leader of opposition Ginbot 7 is heading to Brussels to attend a hearing on the Horn of Africa at European Parliament in Brussels to be held on 26 April 2010. Berhanu is expected to witness the lessons learned from Ethiopia’s 2005 elections and the current challenges. He will be accompanied by Mr. Siegfried Pausewang, Senior Researcher, Chr. Michelsen Institute in Norway.
The hearing is organized by group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists & Democrats in the European Parliament.
The MEP group hearing, whose topic is “Challenges in the Horn of Africa,” will be moderated by Ms. Ana Gomes MEP, Me. Veronique de Keyser MEP, Chief Election Observer Sudan and Mr. Thijs Berman MEP.
In another news, the European Union on Friday launched its observer mission for upcoming elections in Ethiopia, which rights groups say have already been tainted by political repression.
In the aftermath of Prime Minister Meles Zenawis’ hotly disputed victory in 2005, around 200 protestors were shot. An unknown number of opposition figures, including Birtukan Mideksa, head of the Unity for Democracy and Justice party, remain imprisoned.
The government in Addis Ababa accused the EU’s chief observer at the time of helping to spark the violence, but the head of the 2010 mission, Thijs Berman, emphasized the mission’s neutrality.
“I know there has been criticism of the former EU mission, but we will carry out our mission knowing our responsibilities,” he told journalists in Addis Ababa. “We wont interfere.”
Human rights groups and the opposition have accused Zenawi’s government of suppressing political opposition in the country.
According to Human Rights Watch, Zenawi’s ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has tightened its grip on society since the previous poll and brooks no opposition.
Analysts expect a landslide victory for the government in the polls, which are set to take place on May 23.
“If as expected … the party wins a landslide victory it is unlikely to be a victory of democracy,”Georgette Gagnon, Africa Director for HRW, told journalists in Nairobi in March. “It will be a vindication of a strategy of oppression and control.”
Ethiopia denies the accusations.
The EU mission consists of 10 experts, 90 long-term-observers and more than 60 short-term observers, operating under a budget of 8 million euros (10.8 million dollars).
