Author: TomsWrite

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Romeo Dallaire

Romeo Dallaire

He sent a one-page fax to the United Nations warning them exactly what was coming. They told him to stand down. Three months later, it happened exactly as he said it would.

On January 11, 1994, Roméo Dallaire received an informant. The man had trained the Hutu militia. He told Dallaire his people could kill 1,000 Tutsis in 20 minutes. He showed Dallaire a secret weapons cache. He revealed that every Tutsi in Kigali was being registered — and that he believed the lists were for killing.

Dallaire wrote to United Nations headquarters in New York that same night. One page. Marked most immediate. He asked permission to raid the weapons. He ended the fax in French. Peux ce que veux. Allons-y. Where there is a will, there is a way. Let’s go.

The reply came back the same day. Do not raid anything. Stay inside your mandate. It was signed through the office of Kofi Annan — then head of UN Peacekeeping Operations. Annan would become UN Secretary-General in 1997 and win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001. He has since publicly accepted responsibility for the response. Remember that reply.

Roméo Dallaire was born on June 25, 1946, in Denekamp, Netherlands. His father was a Canadian sergeant. His mother was a Dutch nurse who had watched friends die in the Holocaust. The family moved to Montreal when Dallaire was six months old. He grew up French-speaking in an English country and knew from childhood what it felt like to be the wrong kind of person in the wrong place.

He joined the Canadian Army. Artillery. A career soldier. When he asked for a UN posting, they gave him Rwanda.

The job looked straightforward. Two sides had signed a peace agreement. His mission was to watch them keep it. Dallaire asked for 5,000 troops. He received approximately 2,500 — lightly armed, short on fuel, food, medical supplies, and functioning vehicles. His rules of engagement did not permit the use of offensive force.

He arrived in Kigali on October 22, 1993, as Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda. What he found over the following months alarmed him deeply. The January 11 fax was not a guess. It was a warning with a source, a location, a method, and a timeline. New York read it and told him to take his concerns to the President of Rwanda. The President’s own party was arming the militia. UN officials warned Dallaire about “unanticipated repercussions” and rebuked him for exceeding his mandate.

On April 6, 1994, at approximately 8:20 in the evening, a missile struck the plane carrying President Juvénal Habyarimana over Kigali. The killing began within hours — exactly as the informant had described three months earlier.

Dallaire sent 10 Belgian paratroopers to protect Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana. Government forces intercepted them, disarmed them, tortured them, and killed all 10. The Prime Minister was murdered the same morning. Belgium withdrew its remaining forces. Other nations followed.

On April 21, 1994, the UN Security Council voted to cut Dallaire’s force from 2,500 soldiers to 270. He was ordered to leave Rwanda. The order came three times. He refused three times. He called it an immoral order.

He kept approximately 450 men — Ghanaian soldiers, Tunisian soldiers, a handful of military observers. His deputy, Ghanaian General Henry Anyidoho, refused to withdraw his troops either. Dallaire wrote back to New York: it would be unethical to leave this terrible scene.

So he stayed. With 450 soldiers and no mandate to fire their weapons.

He packed civilians into a stadium, a hospital, a church, and a hotel. That hotel was the Hôtel des Mille Collines. You may know it as Hotel Rwanda — the 2004 film in which Nick Nolte plays the UN colonel who keeps showing up to pull people back from the edge. That character is Dallaire.

He drove into towns at night and extracted people. He sat at tables with the men directing the killing. He shook their hands. He kept people alive an hour at a time.

In Washington, officials were still debating vocabulary. A Pentagon document dated May 1, 1994 — now declassified and publicly available — warned staff to avoid using the word genocide, because a formal genocide finding could legally commit the United States government to act. The CIA had internally classified the situation as genocide on April 23. The word was not said publicly by US officials until late May.

The killing lasted 100 days. More than 800,000 people were murdered. Two million became refugees. Dallaire and his 450 soldiers saved an estimated 30,000 lives.

Then it came for him. He later wrote that death became a desired option. The Canadian Army medically released him in 2000. In June of that year, at age 53, he was found in a park in Quebec City — under a bench, drunk, alone.

He got back up.

In 2003 Dallaire published Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. It won Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction in 2004. He testified before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda against the men who planned the genocide. In 2005, Canada appointed him to the Senate. In 2007 he founded what became the Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative at Dalhousie University — an organisation that trains soldiers and police across Africa and Latin America to recognise and protect child soldiers. It is still running today.

Roméo Dallaire is 80 years old. He is still working.

He warned them three months in advance. In writing. With a name, a location, and a method. They told him to stand down. They cut his force. They ordered him to run. He stayed with 450 soldiers who were not allowed to fire their weapons and saved 30,000 people anyway.

The fax he sent on January 11, 1994 is a public document. Anyone can read it. It is one page long. The last line is the only one written in French. Where there is a will, there is a way. Let’s go.

New York read that line and wrote back no.

Thirty-two years later, he is still going anyway.

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Elisabeth Bik

(Tom: Gosh I love people with talent, courage and integrity!)

Elisabeth Bik

Elisabeth Bik is a Dutch microbiologist. PhD from Utrecht in 1996. Fifteen years at Stanford medical school working on microbiomes.

An ordinary scientific career. Right up until 2013.

That year she found out somebody had plagiarised a piece of her own published work.

So she started hunting plagiarism. Nine months of it. Then she opened a PhD thesis that had lifted text from somewhere else, and her eye caught something different.

A duplicated image.

She sat there thinking, wait. That happens?

That same evening she opened a handful of papers in PLOS One. She found more before bed.

She had discovered something about herself. She can see things in images other people cannot.

A duplicated patch. The same cell photograph appearing twice in one paper under two different labels. A band on a gel copied, flipped, and pasted back in.

January 2014. She found duplicated and altered images across a set of papers from an American medical school.

So she started doing it in her spare time. Evenings. Weekends.

Then she decided to find out how common it actually was.

She sat down and went through 20,621 published biomedical papers. Forty journals. Twenty years of the literature.

By eye. There were no tools for this. She just looked.

She found inappropriate image duplication in 782 of them.

One in 25.

And 196 of those were not honest mistakes. Those were figures that had been altered. Rotated. Flipped. Shifted. Somebody sat down and did it on purpose.

Her own reaction was flat. One in 25 papers I looked at had image problems. I thought that is a lot.

Now the part that says the most about the system.

She wrote to the researchers. She wrote to the journal editors.

Mostly nothing came back.

So in 2016 she published the whole thing herself, with Arturo Casadevall and Ferric Fang, in the journal mBio.

Understand who was not doing this work.

Scientific publishing is an industry worth billions. There are editors. There are peer reviewers. There are universities with entire research integrity offices.

Nobody had been looking at the pictures.

One woman with good eyes was doing it unpaid, after dinner.

And these are the papers medicine is built on. Every drug your doctor reaches for sits on top of this literature.

2018 she left her job in industry and made it her full time work.

Nobody employs her. She is funded by strangers donating through a subscription page.

Since then she has raised concerns about more than 7,600 papers. By late 2024 that had fed into more than 1,300 retractions. Over 1,000 corrections. Hundreds of formal notices of concern.

Papers by senior figures. University presidents. Institute directors. Drug company research.

Then in 2020 she looked at hydroxychloroquine.

The Marseille professor Didier Raoult had published a study reporting success using it against Covid. The claim went around the world. Governments moved on it. Millions of people took it.

Bik went through the paper and raised problems with the methodology and the missing patient data. Then she raised concerns about dozens more papers from him and his institute.

29 April 2021. A lawyer acting for Raoult and his colleague Eric Chabrière filed a criminal complaint with a prosecutor in Marseille.

Aggravated moral harassment. Attempted blackmail. Attempted extortion.

She denies all of it. The payment remark they pointed to was a joke, she said, and her donation page is public.

Her inbox filled with threats. Anonymous accounts went after her appearance. Somebody promised her justice in a real prison in France.

She posts under her own name. Almost nobody else in this field does.

Then more than a thousand researchers signed an open letter standing behind her.

2021 she was given the John Maddox Prize. 2024 the Einstein Foundation Award. She gave that prize money away. It funds other people doing the same work.

Now the honest caveat, because she would want it there.

Her method has real critics. The digital forensics expert Hany Farid has argued that eye-based analysis cannot be audited. You can’t audit her brain, is how he put it. A validation exercise put her accuracy at around 90 percent, which means roughly one call in ten needs another look.

Fair. And it does not touch the number underneath.

One in 25.

Because here is what has not been fixed.

Ten years on, many of those original 782 papers are still sitting in the journals. Uncorrected. Some of them well past anything you could blame on an innocent error.

She is still going. Still unpaid.

An industry worth billions had nobody looking at the pictures.

She did it in the evenings, for free, and they tried to have her charged for it.

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Old vs Younger Muscles

Old vs Younger Muscles

Eggs are the best source of protein but they are inadequate to maintain or build muscle mass in older muscles.

As you age this ratio of protein intake to body weight needs to be increased. The older your body, the more protein is required to maintain muscle mass. It is now commonly recognised that people over 70 need closer to 2 grams of protein a day per kilo of body weight.

And because older bodies have a protein response ceiling, they do need the protein intake spaced over the day – .4 grams of protein per meal per kilo of body weight, 30 grams of protein per meal, rather than loaded at one meal.

Inside our muscle cells the signal to grow new muscle is controlled by what scientists have labeled mTORC1 (mechanistic target of rapamycin complex 1). If switched off, no new muscle tissue is built from the available protein. When switched on, the body grows new muscle.

As we age the same amount of protein does not produce the same muscle building response it did in our youth. The switch is not inactive, it just takes more protein the activate the switch. Specifically the amino acid Leucine.

In our youth, only 1.7 grams of Leucine was needed to flip the mTORC1 switch to ON. After age 70, 2.8 to 3 grams of Leucine per meal is required to flip the switch.

To flip that switch and counter anabolic resistance we need more leucine than is available from a regular serving of two or three eggs for breakfast. We need to supplement with 35-40 grams of whey protein or with 3 grams of the specific amino acid Leucine.

The optimum window for protein ingestion after resistance training narrows as we age. To realise maximum benefit from protein post resistance exercise, have it within 30 minutes of your workout.

Vitamin D upregulates protein synthesis pathways and supports satellite cell proliferation, new muscle fiber creation and regeneration. 70% of people tested have less than the optimal blood level of Vitamin D (75-125 nmol/L). This helps explain why two people with the same diet and exercise will experience vastly different muscle mass gains.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDt9-pS7rI0

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Billy Mills

Billy Mills

He was a young man alone in a hotel room, at the lowest moment of his life, certain the world had no place for him.

He had been an orphan since he was twelve. He had been told, over and over, in a hundred ways, that he did not belong. And on that night, the weight of it all had nearly finished him.

Then he heard a voice — and what he did next would carry him all the way to one of the greatest moments in the history of the Olympic Games…

His name is Billy Mills.

Mills was born in 1938, an Oglala Lakota, and raised on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota — one of the poorest places in America. His mother died when he was eight. His father died when he was twelve. And in the space of those four years, a boy became an orphan.

But his father had left him something worth more than money. Sydney Mills had told his grieving son to look past his broken heart toward a dream: “You have broken wings now, son. But someday you could have the wings of an eagle.”

Billy found his wings in running — good enough to earn a scholarship to the University of Kansas and a place among the nation’s best college athletes. But even there, the cruelty followed him: a photographer setting up a team picture once ordered him out of the shot, because of the color of his skin.

It was one rejection too many, piled on a lifetime of them. And in a hotel room near Louisville, the darkness nearly swallowed him whole. He came to the very edge of giving up.

And then he heard something — not with his ears, but from somewhere deeper: a voice that sounded like his late father’s, saying one word. Don’t.

He didn’t give up. Instead, through his tears, he reached for a piece of paper and a pen, and he wrote down a single sentence — a goal so wildly beyond him that he had no earthly reason to believe it. “Gold medal,” he wrote. “Olympic 10,000-meter run.” He had no evidence he could do it. He wrote it anyway, and he began, from that night, to chase it.

Around that time, he met a young woman named Patricia. They married in 1962, while still in college, and she became the steady anchor that would hold his life together for the next sixty years and more.

After Kansas, Mills became an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps and kept training — even as his own body fought him. He had hypoglycemia and diabetes, which made his energy crash late in long races. And of every event he could have chosen, he’d fallen in love with the one his body was least built for: the 10,000 meters, the longest race on the Olympic track.

By 1964, against the odds, he’d made the U.S. Olympic team — though almost no one noticed. His best time trailed the world record, held by Australia’s great Ron Clarke, by nearly a full minute. When the team reached Tokyo, they didn’t even give Mills proper racing shoes at first; those were saved for the men expected to win.

Billy Mills was not one of those men.

On October 14th, 1964, nearly forty runners lined up on a rain-soaked cinder track in Tokyo’s National Stadium. Ron Clarke set a brutal pace from the gun, trying to break the field apart. By the halfway point, only a handful of runners could still hang on.

Somehow, impossibly, Billy Mills was one of them.

As the stadium lights came on against the darkening sky, the real race began. With two laps to go, three men pulled clear: Clarke, Tunisia’s Mohamed Gammoudi, and Mills. On the final lap, weaving through runners being lapped, there was contact — Mills was bumped and knocked off stride, and Gammoudi burst into the lead. Mills dropped to third, his blood sugar crashing, his vision starting to blur.

Every camera in the stadium was locked on the two favorites. Mills was fading into the background of his own race.

And then, with about a hundred meters to go, Mills glanced at a runner beside him and thought he saw, on the man’s singlet, the image of an eagle. His father’s words came roaring back. Wings of an eagle. “I can win,” he thought. “I can win.”

He swung wide into an open lane, onto firmer ground, and he unleashed everything he had left on that final straightaway — a burst of speed no one in that stadium believed was still in him.

On the broadcast, the announcers were still calling the duel between Clarke and Gammoudi when analyst Dick Bank grabbed the microphone and screamed the words that became legend: “Look at Mills! Look at Mills!”

He blew past Gammoudi. He blew past Clarke. And Billy Mills — the orphan from Pine Ridge nobody had come to watch — broke the tape in 28 minutes, 24.4 seconds: a new Olympic record, nearly fifty seconds faster than he had ever run in his life.

No American had ever won Olympic gold in the 10,000 meters. And in the more than sixty years since, no American ever has again.

Afterward, Mills went looking for the runner whose eagle had lifted him — and found there had been no eagle on the man’s jersey at all. He had imagined it. The wings his father promised him had been inside him the whole time.

Mills was never forgotten. His story became the 1983 film Running Brave; he was inducted into hall of fame after hall of fame; in 2012, President Obama awarded him the Presidential Citizens Medal; and in 2024, at eighty-six, he returned to the Olympics in Paris to donate his 1964 Team USA tracksuit to the sport’s museum.

Yet if you ask Billy Mills what that race in Tokyo really meant, he doesn’t talk about the medal. He talks about healing. Tokyo, he has said, was where a broken soul finally found some peace — where the vision that had once kept him alive was proven real.

And then he did the most Lakota thing of all. In his tradition, one who receives a great gift holds a “giveaway,” returning the blessing to the community. In 1986, Mills co-founded Running Strong for American Indian Youth, which today brings clean water, food, shelter, and hope to Native communities across more than thirty states.

Now in his late eighties, Billy Mills still lives with Patricia, his wife of more than sixty years, and still travels to speak to Native young people about the power of a dream.

He didn’t just outrun Ron Clarke and Mohamed Gammoudi that night in Tokyo. He outran the voice that had told him, his whole life, that he didn’t belong — and spent the rest of that life making sure the children of Pine Ridge would never face that voice alone.