I went along to hear Rose Mapendo speak, having written an article in the Globe earlier this year about Rose and Mapendo International founder Sasha Chanoff and his work rescuing refugees. I also wrote on Saturday about Kitty Dukakis, the former Bay State first lady who has quietly worked for refugees for 30 years, and has been a key adviser to Chanoff since he launched Mapendo in 2003.

Dukakis offered an opening tribute to Rose Mapendo and to Chanoff, a Marlborough native who founded Mapendo International in Cambridge in 2003 to rescue the forgotten refugees who have fallen between the cracks of the United Nations and other major refugee organizations. Mapendo has rescued nearly 5,000 refugees since then and helped them resettle in the United States.

Often tearful, Mapendo recounted in heart-wrenching detail how she and her husband and children were arrested in 1998 in her Tutsi village in eastern Congo, how her husband was taken out and killed, and how she bore his twins on the cement floor of her cell. She and her nine children made it to a holding center, and Chanoff -- defying orders from his bosses -- helped her escape to a new life in Arizona. She was named humanitarian of the year by the US branch of the UN refugee agency this year.

She and other refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo sang a haunting song, and she said more than once: "God has been faithful to me."

Rabbi Keith Stern, welcoming the Mapendo team, noted the parallels of modern refugees with Europe's Jews who escaped the Holocaust or were consumed by it. "All of us understand that our roots are deeply connected to refugees who struggled, who suffered. And all too often, there was no one to extend a hand. If we, in this beautiful city of Newton, do not lend a hand, then we really cannot say that we learned anything."

Bunn, an expert on nuclear security and proliferation issues, argues that a new round of negotiations with Iran has virtually zero chance of getting Iran to stop all enrichment of uranium, however tough the sanctions become. Iran already has 8,000 centrifuges in place, after all. So insisting on zero centrifuges would all but ensure there is no deal -- a dangerous outcome that could raise the chances of a military showdown.

Bunn says the best alternative for the United States and its European partners is to reach a deal that would allow Iran very limited enrichment in exchange for full transparency and strict controls on Iran's nuclear program. That would fulfill the ultimate Western goal of ensuring Iran does not pursue a nuclear weapons program.

Here's a link to the report, titled Beyond Zero Enrichment: Suggestions for an Iranian Nuclear Deal.

Bunn is a lead investigator for the Managing the Atom program in the Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, one of the country's leading academic research institutes on nuclear and defense policy issues.

During her visit to the Philippines on Thursday, Clinton cut the ribbon at a book fair organized by Education Development Center's Philippines branch. The event was at Malanday National High School in Marikina City, near the capital, Manila. The school was heavily damaged during recent flooding, and Clinton pledged additional US support for the recovery effort.

The EDC project, called Education Quality and Access to Learning and Livelihood Skills Project, has organized book fairs around the country. The events "let teachers use pre-paid vouchers to choose the books they and their students need most, increasing the likelihood of high-impact, creative teaching and learning in the classroom."

Clinton joined 66 teachers and 2,000 students who used their vouchers to select from the 50,000 English, science, and math books that were made available during the marketplace event and take them back to their school classrooms. The books come from Brothers' Brother Foundation, a Pittsburgh--based group that has collected and distributed more than 80 million books since 1958.

The EDC and Brothers' Brother Foundation both have major operations in the Philippines. A current EDC initiative is distributing nearly 50,000 free copies of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary to more than 700 elementary schools in Mindanao, a war-torn Muslim island in the south of the archipelago.

Yvette Tan, an EDC staffer in the Philippines, says teachers identified dictionaries as critical tools to get students more interested in reading and preparing them to grapple with subjects taught in English, including science and math. The US Agency for International Development is funding the dictionary project, which is cosponsored by the National Bookstore Foundation.

Harvard's Kennedy School of Government today is honoring the creators of an innovative bus system that has dramatically reduced traffic congestion and pollution in the city -- and that could be a model for similar innovation elsewhere in the world.

At a ceremony this evening, the 2009 Roy Family Award will be presented to the Mexico City Metrobus project, and to its major partners who made it a reality through an unusual collaboration:
EMBARQ - The World Resources Institute Center for Sustainable Transport, and a major Mexican environmental non-profit group called CEIBA worked with the Mexico City government to help plan and build the express bus line right through the heart of the city.

The dedicated Metrobus route opened in 2005 along a 12-mile stretch of the massive Insurgentes Avenue, a principal north-south boulevard that is often called the longest urban avenue in the world. In 2008, the route grew by about 20 more miles, including a new southern corridor. Together, the lines have more than 80 stations.

I lived in Mexico City from 1997 to 2002, and I can attest to the nightmarish traffic conditions fueled by the peseros (named for their ancestors, smaller private taxis that charged one peso for a ride). But already by the late 1990s, Mexico City was making steady progress in reducing pollution, through a relentless focus on reducing vehicle emissions. It helped that as the economy improved, more people were able to replace polluting ancient gas guzzlers.

The new Metrobus is a quantum leap toward better quality of air and life.

The Harvard announcement of the award in September noted: "Metrobus has reduced carbon dioxide emissions from Mexico City traffic by an estimated 80,000 tons a year. The new buses, which operate on clean-burning ultra low sulfur diesel fuel, make more than 450,000 trips per day.
Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard has applauded the Metrobus system, saying he wants to extend the system to 10 bus lines."

Ebrard came to Cambridge for the ceremony tonight and for a Harvard seminar on how Mexico City managed to pull its notoriously fractious political players together to make the bus system happen.

Harvard noted that the groups set up the Center for Sustainable Transport in Mexico, a not-for-profit providing technical support for the Metrobus system from day one. The World Bank, Global Environment Facility and the Shell, Caterpillar and Hewlett Foundations offered financial support.

To make it work, the Metrobus leaders partnered with the owners of the polluting minibuses. After a year of talks, a consortium was set up including about 350 bus owners and drivers. In all, the award notes, "a total of 839 polluting mini-buses have been permanently removed from the roads."

Nancy Kete, director of EMBARQ, said in a statement, “We always knew that creating a public-private partnership model was necessary to overcome the political challenges that often impede sustainable transportation.” She added: “Our goal was to pull the disparate groups together and help them find compromises. We wanted to show that cooperation was a better strategy than competition.”

Obama today nominated Dr. Rajiv Shah, a 36-year-old former official with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Shah is a medical doctor and was confirmed by the Senate earlier this year for his current role as a senior official at the Agriculture Department dealing with food security, so he has already been vetted and should easily win approval for the USAID job.

Shah's nomination also formally puts an end to speculation that Obama would tap Dr. Paul Farmer, the global health pioneer and co-founder of Boston-based Partners in Health. Farmer was said to be a front-runner for the USAID position earlier this year, but his candidacy apparently became bogged down in the Obama Administration's onerous vetting procedures, prompting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to howl publicly about how "ridiculous" the nominating process had become.

During the summer, Capitol Hill staffers said that Farmer was no longer under consideration, either because he had withdrawn from consideration or was ruled out for some reason. Farmer declined public comment all along, and pressed ahead with his many health and development projects in countries including Haiti and Rwanda, in addition to his work at Partners and as chairman of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

In August, former President Bill Clinton, who is the UN special envoy to Haiti, named Farmer his deputy envoy, recognizing Farmer's 25 years of work there building up the nation's health services.

A number of legislators have joined non-governmental organizations in calling on the administration to revitalize its aid strategy, and to give more prominence to development assistance as a core element of foreign policy, along with diplomacy and military muscle.

Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Boston-based Oxfam America, welcomed the appointment of Shah, citing his "solid experience in international agriculture and health."

Offenheiser said Shah will take over "at a crucial moment in history. For many years, USAID has been under-resourced and politically marginalized. But today’s international challenges – from the financial crisis to climate change -- make it more important than ever to rebuild USAID from a compliance agency for NGOs and contractors to what it once was: the world's most prestigious development agency."

“US development efforts have become diffuse and USAID’s development objectives unclear, with the Pentagon and more than 20 other federal agencies increasingly engaged in development activities," Offenheiser said in a statement. "There is a need to reassert the leadership role of USAID in managing US overseas development assistance, and strengthen its ability to deliver concrete results that will enhance USAID’s standing and credibility. Most importantly, there is a need for a national global development strategy to guide the US government's efforts to fight global poverty."

I wrote in the Globe today about this Iraq mediation project, and about the broader mediation industry that has mushroomed in the last 40 or so years in the Boston area.

Negotiating in Diwaniyah, with help from mediators trained by Cambridge-based CMG-Mercy Corps, photo by Sa'ad al-Khalidy

Another view of the negotiation in the Diwaniyah mayor's office in the summer of 2008. Photo by Sa'ad al-Khalidy

There wasn't space for these images of one negotiation in progress, in Diwaniyah, south of Baghdad, in the summer of 2008. The photos were taken by Sa'ad al-Khalidy, the mediation program coordinator in Iraq for Mercy Corps, which merged with CMG four years ago. They give a clear sense of the interplay between the locak sheiks and tribal officials as they tackle a dispute over a plot of inherited land.

The caption for the main picture illustrating the story omits the nice detail that the current coordinator for the Iraq program at CMG, Arthur Martirosyan, is shown in front of a portrait of Roger Fisher, taken in the stately Roger Fisher House in Cambridge. Fisher is the lengendary Harvard Law School professor who wrote "Getting to Yes" in 1981, the best-selling, user-friendly manual on managing conflict that captured the essence of years of his scholarly thinking. Fisher went on to found CMG in 1984, and has taken part in mediating many global conflicts around the world, from Northern Ireland to Latin America and South Africa.

Arthur Martirosyan, in front of a portrait of Roger Fisher. Photo by Yoon Byun, Globe Staff.

Brandeis promises to post a link to the archived video of the debate either today or Monday at the website of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, which cosponsored the debate with the International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life.

And here's a link to the article I wrote about the forum in today's Globe.

Several Israeli correspondents based in Washington came to Waltham for the event. Some of the online accounts include:

An article by Yitzhak Benhorin on YNetnews.com, the website of the largest Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, goes into more detail on Goldstone's explanation of why he believes Israel adopted a strategy that was designed to inflict widespread destruction in Gaza.

An account on the site of Ahrutz Sheva, israelnationalnews.com, notes that the UN General Assembly adopted an Arab-backed resolution on the Goldstone report just hours before the debate took place. The United States and several other Western countries voted no.

And the Brandeis Hoot student newspaper wonders in an editorial whether Goldstone and Gold -- and those in the audience -- were really listening to each other or just defending their own viewpoints.

During Israel's invasion of Gaza, two Israeli tank shells struck Abuelaish's house and killed three of his daughters. The Palestinian doctor spoke of that personal loss, but he sought to focus more on the need for both sides to look at their own failings, and find ways to break through the cycle of finger-pointing and suffering. I spoke with Abuelaish between stops and wrote an article about his life and work in the Sunday Globe.

Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish. Globe staff photo by John Tlumacki.

The real impact comes in Abuelaish's interaction with his varied audiences as they wrestle with his message. My former Globe colleague, Charlie Radin, who is now at Brandeis, wrote a moving column in the Jewish Advocate describing one such exchange at a Brandeis talk.

The Advocate, sensibly, does not give away its content, but here's a link to the intro.

Radin recounts an exchange between Abuelaish and an Israeli "refusenik" who has refused military service and blames her own government for the deadlock. She criticized Abuelaish for an apparent lack of Palestinian nationalism. Radin recounts the doctor's reply: those involved need to look at themselves, and examine their own conduct, before they aim the blame at others. He criticizes Palestinians for launching rockets at Israeli civilians -- and he asks Israelis to look at their own conduct in a self-critical light.

Radin writes:

"Abuelaish has put his finger on something important. We must first look in the mirror.

"This does not mean weeping and expressing outrage at the casualties on one side while speaking politically correct platitudes about regretting the deaths of noncombatant women and children on the other - wherever those deaths occur.

"I have been to Gaza and to Jerusalem in the immediate aftermath of horrors, and while there is no equivalency in ways, means or intentions, it is a fact that many, on both sides, have become emotionally calloused. And it is a fact that this callousing of the heart and soul has become, in itself, an obstacle to peace."

Worth the price of the latest issue.

Senator John Kerry, chairman of the influential Foreign Relations Committee, will deliver an opening address, followed by Massachusetts Congressman Bill Delahunt, who has a longstanding involvement with Latin American issues through his seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

The event, open to the public but with limited seating, runs from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. in the Trustees Ballroom, 9th Floor, 1 Silber Way (formerly 1 Sherborn Street) in Boston. More details are at the site of the co-sponsoring Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer Range Future.

Congress is considering legislation to lift the 46-year-old travel ban. Growing numbers of Cuban-Americans, who had long supported it, now favor lifting the measure, thinking that more American travel to Cuba would help persuade the country to embrace change. But the Cuban-American delegation in Congress still supports the ban as necessary to isolate Cuba and pressure it to embrace reforms. There appears to be less support to lift the economic embargo, but its usefulness is also being debated intensely.

Delahunt introduced the House bill to lift the US travel ban to Cuba, noting that Americans have the right to travel to Vietnam, Iran and North Korea, but not to Cuba. He frames it more as a matter of freedom to travel than of US-Cuba relations. In September, Obama lifted restrictions on Cuban-Americans traveling back to their native country, but other Americans still may not travel to Cuba.

Academics at the conference include Harvard Professor Jorge Dominguez, a Cuban-born expert in Latin American politics and economics who visited Cuba earlier this year. In a recent article in Harvard magazine, Dominguez offers vivid impressions of the changes in Cuba since Raul Castro succeeded his brother Fidel as president in February 2008.

The conference will be cochaired by BU Professor Paul Hare, a former British diplomat who was ambassador to Cuba from 2001 to 2004, and BU Professor Susan Eckstein, who has written extensively on Cuba.

Arun Gandhi, 75, was born in South Africa and was raised partly in India by his grandfather in the years leading up to Mahatma Gandhi's assassination in 1948. The grandson spent much of his career as a writer for the Times of India, and moved to the United States in 1987. He set up a peace institute, the M.K. Gandhi Non-Violence Institute, now based at the University of Rochester. He has taught and lectured widely.

He will speak at a fundraiser on Friday evening, Nov. 6, in Brookline, and at free events on Saturday at 10 a.m. at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, 138 Tremont St., Boston, and at 7 p.m. Saturday at All Saints Parish, 1773 Beacon Street, Brookline.

For details check out the website of the Global Strategy of Non-Violence, an organization created by Newton peace activist Andre Sheldon.

Arun Gandhi has long espoused non-violence in the spirit of his grandfather, and has given talks and courses in many countries. He has weathered controversy, particularly over remarks in a Washington Post blog entry about Jewish identity that were widely criticized as anti-Semitic and dismissive of the Holocaust. He apologized, but he has defended his criticism of Israel's government for denying rights to Palestinians.

He blogs regularly for the Washington Post's On Faith blog on religion.

Fatemeh Haghighatjoo is one of Iran's most prominent dissidents. She'll be speaking at a dinner Thursday night hosted by Boston International, the organization of young professionals interested in global issues. The dinner is at 7 p.m. at Maggiano's in the Back Bay, at 4 Columbus Avenue in Boston. The cost of the dinner is $38.00, and RSVP is required.

I wrote a profile of Haghighatjoo in the Globe in July, at the height of the protests in Iran over the presidential election results. A former member of Iran's Parliament, she resigned in 2004 after she was charged and convicted for her outspoken criticism of the ruling Islamist leadership. She has lived in the Boston area since 2005, when she became a visiting fellow at MIT's Center for International Studies. She is currently a visiting fellow at the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at UMass Boston's McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies.

A former physician's assistant who has lived and worked in many developing countries, Sheehan created Containers2Clinics, a non-profit, to turn the idea into reality. The first clinic will be delivered to Bani in the Dominican Republic in January. Sheehan, who grew up in Plymouth and lives in Dover, hopes that will be the first of 50 such clinics in five years.

Elizabeth Sheehan, founder of Containers2Clinics. Bill Greene, Globe Staff photo.

The Dominican clinic will be run by Waltham-based Infante Sano, (Spanish for "Healthy Infant"), another impressive non-profit in the Boston area. Infante Sano was founded by Bill Haney, a filmmaker and biotech entrepreneur, and since 2006 has set up training programs in three Dominican communities to improve the skills and resources available to doctors and nurses to treat mothers and infants. Infante Sano works with Children's Hospital and other partners.

Haney describes the work done so far on the Infante Sano website: "In Bani, San Cristobal and La Romana we've now trained hundreds of doctors and nurses in neonatal resuscitation, emergency obstetric care, and care for newborn babies - reaching over 35,000 mothers and infants. We've remodeled and re-equipped three hospitals' infant and maternal care facilities, shipping almost $2 million dollars of supplies and equipment for a mere investment of $50k. We've opened two clinics for impoverished mothers and children and had more than 5,500 visits annual from them. Our local staff numbers 14 and we've built critical partnerships with the Dominican Ministry of Health and clinical partners across the country. We are confident that our programs are improving the health and wellbeing of women and children and we are poised to spread our model across the DR and build partnerships to implement in other countries."

This year MIT is also making the audits even more accessible to a television-attuned generation. Some audits are now being presented in video format.

Don't tune in looking for a global version of Jon Stewart. These are more akin to brief televised academic lectures. But they live up to the basic goals of the audits when they were launched -- to challenge the conventional wisdom, the easy (and sometimes false) assumptions that often inform foreign policy-making. In the first audit in 2005, for example, Professor Richard J. Samuels, an Asia expert who is director of the center, and MIT political science Professor M. Taylor Fravel took on the conventional view that the United States commanded unchallenged influence in Asia when in fact US influence had been steadily waning in several key aspects.

The initial video audits come from Jim Walsh, a research associate at the center and an international security specialist, assessing the current standoff between Iran and the West over its nuclear program (and not acscepting the conventional wisdom that Iran is definitely trying to build a nuclear weapon); and from Fotini Christia, an assistant professor of political science, on the political wrangling in Afghanistan and its implications going forward.

Another is from Anat Biletzki, analyzing President Obama's speech in Cairo and its view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Biletzki, a longtime peace activist in Israel and a visiting fellow at MIT's center, is sharply critical of what she views as US tolerance of Israeli settlements in Palestinian areas as the primary obstacle to progress.

Dr. Julio Frenk, who took up his post as dean of the school in January, previously served as Mexico's health minister and as a senior World Health Organization executive. Frenk's wife, Felicia Knaul, is a Harvard-trained global health economist and a breast cancer survivor who is the principal organizer of the conference.

Knaul's personal experiences with the disease prompted her to examine the increasing prevalence of breast cancer in the Third World -- and she has produced acclaimed research showing that breast cancer has overtaken cervical cancer as a threat to women in Mexico, and probably in other developing countries. She also has created a foundation in Mexico to improve awareness of the disease and the need for early detection. I wrote an article in the Globe in April about her life and work.

Dr. Julio Frenk and his wife, Felicia Knaul. Globe file photo, George Rizer, Globe Staff

Frenk told me at the time that he hoped to encourage even greater focus at the School of Public Health on how Harvard can foster action programs as well as research into health-based obstacles to growth in poor countries. The symposium, from Tuesday through Thursday, is clearly a major expression of that commitment. The conference events are open to the Harvard community but registration is required and space is limited, and some of the sessions are already full. Here is the agenda and contact information is here.

The conference will be opened on Tuesday by Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust. Speakers include Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning Harvard economist who has studied global development constraints; Lawrence Shulman, Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President for Medical Affairs at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; Geeta Rao Gupta, President, International Center for Research on Women; Marina A. Njelekela, Chairperson, Medical Women´s Association of Tanzania; Alejandro Mohar, Director, National Cancer Institute of Mexico; Peter Piot, Director, Institute for Global Health, Imperial College London and former Executive Director, UNAIDs; and, John Seffrin, CEO, American Cancer Society.

People in the Boston area will be able to hear Malalai Joya speak about her life and her views at several events this week coinciding with the publication of her brand new book, "A Woman Among Warlords."

Joya appears at a public forum at MIT on Thursday, Oct. 29, at 7 p.m., Oct. 30, in building 10, room 250, 77 Massachusetts Avenue. She will be at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard Kennedy School on Friday, October 30 at 2:30 p.m. And she will speak at Emerson College on Friday at 7 p.m., in the Bordy Auditorium. Finally, she will speak on Saturday, Oct. 31, at 2 p.m. in Dorchester at 91 Lyndhurst Street.

Shelagh Foreman, of Massachusetts Peace Action, notes that Joya is a former teacher "who set up secret schools for girls, an orphanage and free clinic in her impoverished home province of Farah during the Taliban era. She ran for parliament in 2005 to protect her schools and won, becoming the youngest person elected to Afghanistan's new Parliament at the age of 27. In
2007, she was suspended from Parliament for her persistent criticism of warlords and drug barons and their overwhelming presence in the Parliament."

Mass Peace Action has long opposed the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and lately has stepped up its opposition to increasing the number of US troops in Afghanistan, as President Obama is now under pressure to do. The group is part of United For Justice and Peace, the coalition of anti-war groups in the greater Boston area, which has details of Joya's events on its web site.

Joya is just beginning a nationwide tour to discuss her book. She will appear at the National Press Club in Washington on Monday, and will be in California later next week.