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Government offers humanitarian aid and security assistance in the hope of a stake in country's future energy industry

Government offers humanitarian aid and security assistance in the hope of a stake in country's future energy industry. Engineers and visitors explore an exploratory well near Dharoor town in Puntland Engineers and visitors tour an exploratory well in Somalia's semi-autonomous Puntland region. Photograph: Reuters The Observer home Mark Townsend and Tariq Abdinasir Saturday, February 25, 2012 Britain is involved in a secret high-stakes dash for oil in Somalia, with the government offering humanitarian aid and security assistance in the hope of a stake in the beleaguered country's future energy industry. Riven by two decades of conflict that have seen the emergence of a dangerous Islamic insurgency, Somalia is routinely described as the world's most comprehensively "failed" state, as well as one of its poorest. Its coastline has become a haven for pirates preying on international shipping in the Indian Ocean. David Cameron last week hosted an international conference on Somalia, pledging more aid, financial help and measures to tackle terrorism. The summit followed a surprise visit by the foreign secretary, William Hague, to Mogadishu, the Somali capital, where he talked about "the beginnings of an opportunity'' to rebuild the country. The Observer can reveal that, away from the public focus of last week's summit, talks are going on between British officials and Somali counterparts over exploiting oil reserves that have been explored in the arid north-eastern region of the country. Abdulkadir Abdi Hashi, minister for international cooperation in Puntland, north-east Somalia – where the first oil is expected to be extracted next month – said: "We have spoken to a number of UK officials, some have offered to help us with the future management of oil revenues. They will help us build our capacity to maximise future earnings from the oil industry." British involvement in the future Somali oil industry would be a boon for the UK economy and comes at a time when the world is increasingly concerned about the actions of Iran, the second-biggest oil producer in Opec. Hashi, in charge of brokering deals for the region's oil reserves, also said Somalia was looking to BP as the partner they wanted to "help us explore and build our oil capacity". He added: "We need those with the necessary technical knowhow, we plan to talk to BP at the right time." Somali prime minister Abdiweli Mohamed Ali said his government had little choice but to entice western companies to Somalia by offering a slice of the country's natural resources, which include oil, gas and large reserves of uranium. "The only way we can pay [western companies] is to pay them in kind, we can pay with natural resources at the fair market value." Britain is not the only country looking to develop Somalia's vast natural resources. Last month oil exploration began in Puntland by the Canadian company Africa Oil, the first drilling in Somalia for 21 years. Hashi, who sealed the Africa Oil deal, said the first oil was expected to be extracted within the next "20 to 30 days". The company estimates there could be up to 4bn barrels (about $500bn worth at today's prices) in its two drilling plots. Other surveys indicate that Puntland province alone has the potential to yield 10bn barrels, placing it among the top 20 countries holding oil. Chinese and US firms are among those understood to have also voiced interest about the potential for oil now that, for the first time in 20 years, the country is safe enough to drill. Yet it is the extent of oil deposits beneath the Indian Ocean that is most exciting Somali officials. One said the potential was comparable to that of Kuwait, which has more than 100bn barrels of proven oil reserves. If true, the deposits would eclipse Nigeria's reserves – 37.2bn barrels – and make Somalia the seventh largest oil-rich nation. The state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation has tried to acquire an interest in Somalia's reserves. Senior officials from the Somali transitional government are adamant that the imminent extraction of oil in Puntland next month would kickstart a scramble from the multinationals. On Thursday, the last day of the London conference, BP and Shell unveiled an initiative to support job-creation projects in the coastal regions of Somalia. A subsidiary of Shell was thought to have acquired exploration concessions in Puntland before the descent into lawlessness in 1991. A BP spokesman said there were "no plans" to work in Somalia and no official had recently visited the country. Source: The Observer

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Your Brain May Be "Wired" For Addiction (But You Don't Have To Surrender)

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Addiction is one of the most common mental health problems there is: Drug use alone affects tens of millions of Americans, and that’s only the illegal ones. Even more people deal with addictions to other things – alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, food, and various behaviors. People who are familiar with addiction, and certainly the researchers who study it, may wonder whether their brains are fundamentally different from non-addicts, making them more prone to addiction’s grasp. Now, a new study offers an interesting answer to this very basic question.
The problem with studying behaviors (and also what makes them so cool) is that there are both psychological and biological components to them. After all, you can’t have a behavior without some cellular activity to go along with it. But even mapping out the biology behind behaviors doesn’t explain everything, since there’s always the lingering question of which came first, the chick or the egg: or here, whether differences in the brain lead to a given behavior, or whether it’s the other way around.
Researchers at Cambridge setup a wonderfully simple study to address some of these issues. We know that there’s a strong family component to addiction – but it’s not been clear whether it’s the brain changes that are handed down through the generations or the family environment in which one grows up that’s conducive to developing addictions (the old nature/nurture question). It’s also known that people who are addicts seem to have deficits in self-control, which is even seen in differences in certain areas of the brain that govern it. But whether it’s brain changes that are actually handed down from parent to child, and make some families more prone to addiction, had yet to be shown.
To figure out the answer to this question, the researchers studied pairs of siblings, one of whom was a drug addict and the other of whom was not. The pairs took a “stop-signal test,” in which one has to stop a particular action whenever one gets a cue to do so. Earlier studies have shown that because the test challenges your self-control – or your capacity to inhibit your own behavior – the test correlates well with addiction risk. Unrelated pairs of people did the same task, serving as controls.

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The siblings – regardless of whether they were addicts or non-addicts – took significantly longer to halt their behavior than the control group. This could suggest that self-control runs in families, and the level of self-control between siblings is similar, regardless of whether they are addicts or not (more on this in a sec).
But do these behavioral differences correspond to brain changes? They seem to. Another part of the study looked at some of the brain’s white matter tracks, which serve as the lines of communication between brain cells in different areas. In the sibling pairs, there were deficiencies in the tracks that connected the emotion areas of the brain to the ones that govern self-control. So in other words, both addicted and non-addicted siblings had deficits in the connections involved in telling one to stop the behavior that one is engaged in.
The sibling pairs also had enlargements in the gray matter (brain cells) in regions that are known to be involved in addiction. All of these changes, in white and gray matter, could have “predisposed” the [siblings] to drug-taking,” the researchers conclude.
If you find this depressing because you have a relative who’s an addict (or come from a long line of addicts), don’t despair. Remember, one of each pair did not take drugs. Even with their “predisposed” brains, one sibling did not succumb to their brain morphology and become drug-addicted. It’s not totally clear why, but among the many reasons, it could have to do with minor differences in upbringing, and/or other variations in the brains of the un-addicted siblings, like some yet undiscovered “resilience factors that counteract the familial vulnerability.” Put another way, there are probably things going on in the unaddicted siblings’ brains/personalities that could help protect them and explain why they didn’t “succumb” to addiction.
The research also has implications for other disorders, like ADHD and OCD, in which people have problems in regulating their behavior. In fact the authors say that “like addiction, OCD is characterized by dysfunctional habits and ‘out-of-control’ behavior.” And in ADHD, people cannot ignore the stimuli that they should, which could be due in part to a faulty control center in the brain. Drug addiction involves a similar (albeit perhaps more severe) lapse in control: “Pathological habits in drug addiction typically result in compulsive drug-taking behaviors when prefrontal control fails to regulate behavior,” the authors say.
More research will be needed to understand how drug addiction is passed on, but the new study gives some nice clues into how “predisposition” may be transmitted. Just remember, your brain may be set up to lean in one direction, but you don’t have to follow it.

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