7,000 women across the world:

It is a shocking fact that despite the world having 25 years experience of dealing with an HIV epidemic that grows exponentially every year, we are far from finding the solution to the disease. One of the greatest barriers to preventing HIV is that awareness alone cannot prevent its spread. Throughout the world, those who experience poverty and poor healthcare are most at risk.

For women and girls, poverty can mean financial dependence on a partner or on sex work. This often means they cannot insist on using condoms, particularly in countries where a woman's value is measured by her fertility and a choice has to be made between motherhood and HIV. Neither can they insist on abstinence or faithfulness, as the threat of violence, abandonment or destitution is a by-product of their dependence. For millions of adolescent girls in poor countries, susceptibility to rape, forced marriage, dependence on "sugar daddies" and trafficking also put them at high risk.

Addressing poverty and gender inequality among women worldwide is no easy task, but it is one that must be pursued vigorously, as the lives of millions of women are at stake. In many countries, women are leading the way in responding to the HIV epidemic, grandmothers are taking charge of small children whose parents have died of Aids and women and girls are disproportionately involved in caring for sick and dying relatives. So it is not the case that women are powerless victims, yet by focusing on condoms or abstinence in our global response to HIV, we exclude women because these are factors often out of their control.

Bianca Jagger/Guardian UK 01.Dec.06

Ignorance and death:

Dear Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi,
We, Nobel Laureates in the sciences, are gravely concerned about the ongoing trial of five Bulgarian nurses, Valya Chervenyashka, Snezhana Dimitrova, Nasya Nenova, Valentina Siropulo, Kristiana Valcheva, and a Palestinian doctor, Ashraf Ahmad Jum'a, in Tripoli. The six face death-penalty charges of deliberately infecting 426 children with HIV at al-Fateh Children's Hospital in Benghazi in 1998. Strong scientific evidence is needed to establish the cause of this infection. However, independent science-based evidence from international experts has so far not been permitted in court.
[...]
We appreciate the agony and the sadness of the parents of these children and we sympathize with the difficult situation of the Libyan authorities in trying to deal with this matter. However, we feel that if justice is to be served it is essential that the defence should be permitted to present its case.
Among the disallowed scientific evidence is a 2003 report, which Libya requested, and which was provided by Luc Montagnier, a co-discoverer of the virus that causes AIDS, and Italian microbiologist Vittorio Colizzi. The report concluded that the infection at the hospital resulted from poor hygiene and reuse of syringes, and also that the infections began before the arrival of the nurses and doctor in 1998.

Letter to Gaddafi
Richard J. Roberts and 113 fellow Nobel Laureates 17.Nov.06

lex paucium de pluribus speculum nil:

The oligarchs decided to take power through him [Yeltsin]. They had almost unlimited funds, control of all TV channels and most of the other media. They put all these at the disposal of Yeltsin's reelection campaign, denying his opponents even one minute of TV time and pouring huge sums of money into the effort. (The series omits an interesting detail: they secretly brought over the most outstanding American election experts and copywriters, who applied methods previously unknown in Russia.)

The campaign bore fruit: Yeltsin was indeed reelected. On the very same day he had another heart attack and spent the rest of his term in hospital. In practice, the oligarchs ruled Russia. One of them, Boris Berezovsky, appointed himself Prime Minister. There was a minor scandal when it became known that he (like most of the oligarchs) had acquired Israeli citizenship, but he gave up his Israeli passport and everything was in order again.

By the way, Berezovsky boasts that he caused the war in Chechnya, in which tens of thousands have been killed and a whole country devastated. He was interested in the mineral resources and a prospective pipeline there. In order to achieve this he put an end to the peace agreement that gave the country some kind of independence. The oligarchs dismissed and destroyed Alexander Lebed, the popular general who engineered the agreement, and the war has been going on since then.

In the end, there was a reaction: Vladimir Putin, the taciturn and tough ex-KGB operative, assumed power, took control of the media, put one of the oligarchs (Mikhail Khodorkovsky) in prison, caused the others to flee (Berezovsky is in England, Vladimir Gusinsky is in Israel, another, Mikhail Chernoy, is assumed to be hiding here.)

Uri Avnery/Gush-Shalom/CounterCurrents 02.Aug.02
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Gush-Shalom
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Those Americans who were around at the time will remember the fawning p.r. Yeltsin got from the media, and its politicians, in the US.

until it had more information:

It is not clear whether the objects are the cause of his illness, and the hospital has refused to comment on this aspect.
The X-ray ordered on Tuesday afternoon revealed a round object - possibly a package - about the size of a two pence piece in his left abdomen, and similar sized objects in his colon and small bowel.
One of the objects may have ruptured.
Their position implies that they were ingested but it is not clear what the objects are, how or when they entered his body, or whether they are connected to his illness.
In a statement the hospital said its investigations were continuing and it was not willing to make further comment until it had more information.

BBCNews 23.Nov.06

the situation in Russia that has allowed this to occur:

Some Russian media claimed that it was Boris Berezovsky who organized the murder of Sergei Yushenkov through his agent Mikhail Kodanev.
-

He also tried to investigate criminal activities of FSB officers related to money laundering through the Bank of New York and illegal actions of Yevgeny Adamov, a former Russian Minister of Nuclear Energy. This case was under the personal control of President Vladimir Putin. In June of 2003, Shchekochikhin contacted the FBI and got an American visa to discuss the case with US authorities. However, he never made it to the USA because of his sudden death.
[...]
Shchekochikhin died suddenly on July 3 2003 after a short and mysterious illness. His relatives were denied an official medical report about the cause of his illness, and were forbidden to take specimens of his tissues to conduct an independent medical investigation. Nevertheless, they managed to send a specimen of his skin to London, where a tentative diagnosis was made of poisoning with thallium...
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Politkovskaya
Yushenkov
Shchekochikhin

wikipedia
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Berezovsky and Abramovich are Russian "oligarchs" living in London.

the justices must decide whether the EPA is required to take action or whether the agency retains the discretion to decide for itself how best to respond to world-wide environmental threats.

A short meditation on certain words:

You have to figure there were plenty of them at first, mostly young, mostly male - not all, but mostly. And they just wouldn't get in line, wouldn't go along with the way it was and was going to be.
Zoo-keepers in the early days had that, the animals that just wouldn't break to the way things were, and you figure most of them died pretty quickly, one way or another.
Same with this, they died most of them, a lot of them killed in their chains, maybe rarely some elder would get them in time and talk it down, show the only way forward as acceptance at least for a while etc. But that strength when it's on fire doesn't listen too well. And you have to figure the men who worked hands-on for the combines that brought that strange cargo from the one seashore to the other had the same problem, and people use words for that, they need and find words to name what they work with, utility decrees it - they name the thing that's causing the problem.
Let's meditate briefly on the names the slavers must have had among themselves for the young bucks fresh from the jungle who wouldn't break without the energy expense of beating them down.
Some word in Dutch for the ones you want to watch out for, because they'll wait, and jump when they think you're not looking - or in English, or Spanish, French, Belgian.
Unpredictable, dangerous, but powerful, and valuable for that.
"Rogue elephant" is an example of this. Cowboys had terms for the cattle they worked, to exactly the same purpose.
We've lost those words for the early ones, the ones filtered out from just before the darkness became a way of life, because we stopped needing them, we don't need a word to describe a young African captured and sold from hand to hand and fighting every chance he gets, it doesn't come up anymore - maybe they're there in some antique book, maybe a particularly erudite philologist can come up with one - the Slaver's Glossary - but nothing remains in the common tongue of what must have passed spontaneously and naturally from one grim overseeing soul to another, as they did their brutal work, making their money off the backs of human lives breaking.
What's gone is a word for the ones who were a danger as long as they had some strength, and that defiant life in their eye - not as general as "nigger", more specific, more immediate, a little less obvious, and far more heinous in its import and its content.

rockets fail

Truth in Science:

The teaching pack, which includes two DVDs and a manual, was sent to the head of science at all secondary schools in the country on September 18 by the group Truth in Science. The enclosed feedback postcard was returned by 89 schools. As well as 59 positive responses, 15 were negative or dismissive and 15 said the material was "not suitable".
"We are not attacking the teaching of Darwinian theory," said Richard Buggs, a member of Truth in Science. "We are just saying that criticisms of Darwin's theory should also be taught."
"Intelligent design looks at empirical evidence in the natural world and says, 'this is evidence for a designer'. If you go any further the argument does become religious and intelligent design does have religious implications," added Dr Buggs.
But leading scientists argue that ID is not science because it invokes supernatural causes. "There is just no evidence for intelligent design, it is pure religion and has nothing to do with science. It should be banned from science classes," said Lewis Wolpert, a developmental biologist at the University of London and vice-president of the British Humanist Association.

Guardian UK 27.Nov.06
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Cheap science fiction cliches of sports arenas filled with cheering and jeering spectators as lycra-bound hi-tech heroes compete in Roman-style games of mortal combat and decide the fate of whole subsets of the populace.
The important thing is the artificial choice between one of only two teams and which side are you on?
Choose.
We also have vegan entrees for those so inclined.
What's that squealing noise?

deep sorrow:

'It is hard to believe that what would now be a crime against humanity was legal at the time,' the Prime Minister will say. 'Personally I believe the bicentenary offers us a chance not just to say how profoundly shameful the slave trade was - how we condemn its existence utterly and praise those who fought for its abolition, but also to express our deep sorrow that it ever happened, that it ever could have happened and to rejoice at the different and better times we live in today.'
[...]
The Prime Minister's decision to make a statement on the issue will reignite the debate on the role of apology in modern politics. He was criticised when, in 1997, he said he 'reflected' on the deaths caused by the Irish Potato Famine.

Guardian UK 26.Nov.06
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I had a hard time understanding the first guy that told me that leasing a car, once you get into the economic brackets he was moving through, makes far more sense than buying one.
Even though the immediate monthly fees are generally higher, the overall cost, the actual ding for the actual ride, is far lower. No maintenance, and you don't have to worry about selling it when it gets too old to suit the bill.
Owning human beings, especially human beings capable of long hours of strenuous manual labor, is very cost-intensive. You have to feed them, and water them, and protect them from the elements and predators.
You don't just go beating them to death when they don't work to your standards of efficiency, except now and again as an example to the rest; unless, like in the Belgian Congo back in the day, you had a more than plentiful supply to hand, and the labor involved was in the short-term extraction of local resources, in this case rubber, and you could therefore afford to run through them like disposable gloves.
In the American colonies, and the Carribbean - in most of the places it would be appropriate for Blair to be apologizing for the British having brought the unwilling and violently coerced Africans his critics identify with - good slaves were hard to come by and worth substantial amounts of money. Consequently they had to be maintained, which meant fed, sheltered, even doctored up a little - to protect the investment.
Leasing human beings is much cheaper in the long run, and has almost none of the overhead slavery inevitably brings.
So the Irish Potato Famine so-called, kicking loose untold hundreds of thousands of relatively starving and thus more than willing laborers, men and women, and children too let's remember, more than willing to work all day and all week for enough food to keep from dying in their tracks.
It isn't slavery if there's wages paid, no matter how low those wages are.
And they would be having to find their own shelter at the end of that working day now, wouldn't they.
For sure it's none of yours where they sleep, or when, so long as they're back to work on time and doing a full day's worth while they're there.
And they can bloody well feed themselves if they want to eat now can't they?

freedom to leave:

Iraq no longer has neuro-surgeons, no cardiac surgeons, few pediatric doctors - they are all gone, killed or fled to neighboring countries...

Informed Comment 24.Nov.06

Helena Cobban clearly and frankly points out the necessity for directly involving Iran in a responsible withdrawal of American forces from Iraq.
She also points out Maureen Dowd's ommission of this in Dowd's NYTimes column on various and sundry strategies for said withdrawal.
As well as potential stumbling blocks:

... So once we have sketched these kinds of "realistic" paths forward in the Middle East, it becames immediately clear that (1) the Israelis are not going to like a lot of what must lie ahead in these scenarios, and (2) their friends in the Democratic Party won't like it, either...
That's where the key role in the ISG of Lee Hamilton, a very experienced man who was head of the Democratic-controlled House International Relations Committee for many years, will come in...
The Israelis have already, as I can see, started to read the tea-leaves, and are desperately trying to figure how they stop this train. The bombastic old war-horse Efraim Sneh has again threatened that Israel will will go ahead and bomb Iran on its own if no-one else will do the job. And Olmert is rushing to the US in the coming days...
But Israel's rightwing leadership has lost a lot of the clout it once had within the US system, by virtue of the now-evident collapse of the neocon network as well of some of the political clout of the Zionist evangelicals.
The Middle East will be waking up to a new day. Let's hope the ever-looming catastrophes can be avoided and a new sense of realism prevail.

Helena Cobban/JustWorldNews 22.Nov.06

Attacks on the media have also increased:

The death toll of civilians in Iraq reached a new high of 3,709 in October, with sectarian violence to blame for most of the killings, a United Nations report said on Wednesday.

"Sectarian violence seems to be the main cause," the report said, adding the death toll for September was 3,345.

Mail&Guardian 22.Nov.06
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There were 2,973 fatalities:

246 on the four planes (no one on board any of the hijacked aircraft survived), 2,602 in New York City in the towers and on the ground, and 125 at the Pentagon.

September 11, 2001 attacks wikipedia

The night before last month's grand opening :

At the lavish ceremony, Chief Superintendent Kevin Hurley, the fourth most senior officer in the force, praised the scientologists for the support they had provided after the July 7 attacks, when followers of L Ron Hubbard's movement appeared at the police cordons of the Aldgate bomb site offering help to those involved in the emergency operation. The relationship flourished in the following months, according to the City police's register of hospitality, which all officers are required to fill out.

Laville/Guardian 22.Nov.06

We're keeping an eye on the various nodes of debate, lucid and not so, viz the overall question of what's going on with all that supernatural stuff.
It's hard personally at this time because of the near-extinguishing presence of militant swine in the immediate vicinity - swine of all stripes, both metaphysical and rational-positivist, both committed and unconcerned with the specifics, both benignly forbearant and viciously intolerant etc etc.
But the main thing no matter what, the Hauptstuffe, would seem to be the obvious - we're here - we gain knowledge of what those two terms mean in increments, building on what we know, and can verify.
But there's a here already, and religion as it should be purports to converse with that - to talk to what's out there.
This is not the same as the dangerous asinine assumptions of proprietary ownership organized religion is breaking under the weight of, it's the larger and more deeply traditional stance of metaphysical questioning as it's always been.
The debate's been polarized into the easily led and maintained camps of atheists v. dogmatics, and we're told we have to choose one or the other.
Which generally means there's someone else lurking around in the shadows of the conflict, gathering the rewards and proceeds that are made ripe by the confusion.

There's no need for argument,
there's no argument at all:

New alarms are sounding over signs that China may be developing space weapons, reinforcing suspicions that the People's Liberation Army is increasingly interested in the final frontier as a theater of war.

The latest alert came Thursday from an independent panel - created by Congress to assess the economic and security situations in China - that questions Chinese intentions and urges lawmakers to lean on the Bush administration to talk with Beijing about curtailing space militarization.

Spotts/CSM 20.Nov.06

that are Caesar's:

Tom Noe, a prominent coin dealer accused of taking at least $2 million, was convicted last week of theft, corrupt activity, money laundering, forgery and tampering with records.
[...]
"I think it's important to consider that this was a one-time crime and set of circumstances that I think will never echo at any point in the history of this state again," Mitchell said.
Separately, Noe already has been sentenced to two years and three months in federal prison after pleading guilty earlier this year to funneling $45,000 to President Bush's re-election campaign.

CBSNews 20.Nov.06

oh domino:

Much is made of the dangers to the United States if we leave the current situation to spin (further) out of control without our presence and guidance. John McCain, who should know better, claims this to be different from Vietnam because, with Vietnam, they were not going to attack us over here. Any careful reading of the Vietnam era, however, belies such statements: similar claims were made about fallen dominoes and the "red" menace coming to the shores of the United States.

Abrams/Huffington 19.Nov.06
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roll me over Romeo:

...around $5.7 in Chinese exports to the U.S. for every $1 in Chinese imports from the U.S.

there you go:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke played down fears expressed by U.S. lawmakers that China might shake the U.S. economy by selling significant chunks of the U.S. debt it holds.
In his first appearance before the Senate as the head of the U.S. central bank, Bernanke was pressed by Banking Committee members on the question of the U.S. economy's vulnerability to changes in China's U.S.-dollar denominated assets.
But Bernanke said he is not "deeply" concerned about the issue.
"I don't think that the Chinese ownership of U.S. assets is so large as to put our country at risk economically," he said February 16.
At the end of 2005, China, with $820 billion in such assets, was the second-largest holder of U.S. debt after Japan, which held about $10 billion more.

Zwaniecki/usinfo.state.gov
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domino:

The ultimate consequence of monitizing US debt is that it expands the money supply which, various schools of economics believe, results in inflation. In recent years, the debt has soared and inflation has stayed low, but, as China currently holds over $1 trillion in dollar denominated assets (of which $330 billion are US Treasury notes), that situation could change should China ever chose to divest itself of a portion of those reserves.

Wikipedia

a little lower than the angels
Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings:

In an interview with Al-Jazeera, the Arabic TV station, the prime minister agreed with the veteran broadcaster Sir David Frost when he suggested that intervention had "so far been pretty much of a disaster".

Mr Blair said: "It has, but you see, what I say to people is, 'why is it difficult in Iraq?'

It's not difficult because of some accident in planning, it's difficult because there's a deliberate strategy [...] to create a situation in which the will of the majority for peace is displaced by the will of the minority for war."

Branigan/Guardian 18.Nov.06

Science or superstition, in China:

Hundreds of nomads, prodded by the government, have sold their herds and fled the land around the lakes. Others like Tsende have rammed a Buddhist prayer pole into a hillside and prayed to the dragon. Told that some scientists offer another explanation for the weather - climate change - Tsende is unimpressed.

"The result is the same," he said with a shrug.

Yardley/NYTimes 19.Nov.06