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Opinion: A Summit That's Hard to Swallow: World Leaders Enjoy 18-Course Banquet; Discuss How to Solve Global Food Crisis Tuesday 08 July 2008 » by: James Chapman, The Daily Mail photo The G8 leaders enjoyed an 18-course dinner as they discuss how to stop wasting food and combat world hunger. (Photo: Getty Images) Just two days ago, Gordon Brown was urging us all to stop wasting food and combat rising prices and a global shortage of provisions. But yesterday the Prime Minister and other world leaders sat down to an 18-course gastronomic extravaganza at a G8 summit in Japan, which is focusing on the food crisis. The dinner, and a six-course lunch, at the summit of leading industrialised nations on the island of Hokkaido, included delicacies such as caviar, milkfed lamb, sea urchin and tuna, with champagne and wines flown in from Europe and the U.S. But the extravagance of the menus drew disapproval from critics who thought it hypocritical to produce such a lavish meal when world food supplies are under threat. On Sunday, Mr Brown called for prudence and thrift in our kitchens, after a Government report concluded that 4.1million tonnes of food was being wasted by householders. He suggested we could save up to £8 a week by making our shopping go further. It was vital to reduce 'unnecessary demand' for food, he said. Last night's dinner menu was created by Katsuhiro Nakamura, the first Japanese chef to win a Michelin star. It was themed: Hokkaido, blessings of the earth and the sea. But Dominic Nutt, of the charity Save the Children, did not approve. 'It is deeply hypocritical that they should be lavishing course after course on world leaders when there is a food crisis and millions cannot afford a decent meal,' he said. 'If the G8 wants to betray the hopes of a generation of children, it is going the right way about it. The food crisis is an emergency and the G8 must treat it as that.' In 2005, at the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, world leaders promised to increase global aid by £25billion a year by 2010 and raise aid to Africa, the world's poorest continent, by £12.5billion. But the bloc of rich nations is only 14 per cent of the way towards hitting its target. Britain is meeting its commitments in full, but other countries are understood to be dragging their feet - and there are fears the figures on global aid could be watered down. French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi, who face pressure to cut spending at home, are understood to be leading the charge to weaken the Gleneagles proposal. Tory international development spokesman Andrew Mitchell said: 'The G8 have made a bad start to their summit, with excessive cost and lavish consumption. 'Surely it is not unreasonable for each leader to give a guarantee that they will stand by their solemn pledges of three years ago at Gleneagles to help the world's poor. 'All of us are watching, waiting and listening.' A World Bank study released last week estimated that up to 105million more people, including 30million in Africa, could drop below the poverty line because of rising food prices. Yesterday the European Union agreed to channel £800million in unused European farm subsidies to African farmers, as part of its response to the global food crisis. 'The EU really can give a boost to agriculture in developing countries,' Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, told the meeting. The money will be used to buy seed and fertiliser and fund agriculture projects in Africa. The meal was served at the Windsor Hotel, on the shores of Lake Toya, where the presidential suite costs £7,000 a night. Japan has spent a record sum of money and deployed about 20,000 police to seal off the remote lakeside town of Toyako for the three-day talks. Slim Pickings From the Russian Leader Britain's relations with Russia remained chilly last night as Mr Brown held the first talks with President Dmitry Medvedev. He is understood to have pressed for the extradition of former KGB officer Andrei Lugovoy, wanted for the London poisoning of dissident Alexander Litvinenko. But Mr Medvedev refused to budge on that issue - or on the closure of British Council offices in Russia and arrest of its employees. A Kremlin official said the talks had 'not avoided any sharp corners'. Mr Medvedev had concentrated on 'the prospects of restoring relations to the level they were on several years ago', he said. Mr Brown 'brought up the issues that particularly concerned the British side, such as the British Council and activities of certain major oil companies and a number of certain-well-known cases', he added. 'Dmitry Medvedev gave necessary explanations and pointed to the importance of a long-term approach in UK-Russian co-operation.' There were signs Russia may support tougher action against Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. It has been reluctant to support sanctions, but British sources at the G8 summit said opposition was easing. The G8 is expected to support a proposal of a UN envoy to broker an exit for Mugabe.

Iran complains to U.N. about Clinton comment Wed Apr 30, 2008 7:26pm EDT By Claudia Parsons UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Iran complained to the United Nations on Wednesday about U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's comment the United States could "totally obliterate" Iran in retaliation for a nuclear strike against Israel. Iran's deputy ambassador to the United Nations sent a letter to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the president of the Security Council expressing Iran's condemnation of "such a provocative, unwarranted and irresponsible statement." Clinton made the remarks last week while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination. The New York senator said she wanted to make clear to Tehran what she was prepared to do if she becomes president in the hope that this warning would deter any Iranian nuclear attack against the Jewish state. "I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran (if it attacks Israel)," Clinton said in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America." "In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them," she said. "That's a terrible thing to say but those people who run Iran need to understand that because that perhaps will deter them from doing something that would be reckless, foolish and tragic," Clinton said. Iran, which Washington and its allies charge is seeking nuclear arms, has voiced war-like rhetoric in recent years amid speculation its nuclear facilities could face U.S. or Israeli military action. Tehran denies it is trying to acquire nuclear weapons and says it needs nuclear technology to generate electricity. Israel is widely believed to have nuclear weapons but, as part of a policy of "strategic ambiguity," has not confirmed or denied the nature of its arsenal. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad outraged the international community in 2005 by saying "Israel should be wiped off the map." In the letter dated April 30, Deputy Ambassador Mehdi Danesh-Yazdi said he wanted to reiterate Iran's rejection of all weapons of mass destruction including nuclear weapons. "Moreover, I wish to reiterate my government's position that the Islamic Republic of Iran has no intention to attack any other nations," he said. "Nonetheless .... Iran would not hesitate to act in self-defense to respond to any attack against the Iranian nation and to take appropriate defensive measures to protect itself." (Editing by Chris Wilson)

Tomgram: Petraeus, Falling Upwards Selling the President's General The Petraeus Story By Tom Engelhardt You simply can't pile up enough adjectives when it comes to the general, who, at a relatively young age, was already a runner-up for Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 2007. His record is stellar. His tactical sense extraordinary. His strategic ability, when it comes to mounting a campaign, beyond compare. I'm speaking, of course, of General David Petraeus, the President's surge commander in Iraq and, as of last week, the newly nominated head of U.S. Central Command (Centcom) for all of the Middle East and beyond -- "King David" to those of his peers who haven't exactly taken a shine to his reportedly "high self-regard." And the campaign I have in mind has been his years' long wooing and winning of the American media, in the process of which he sold himself as a true American hero, a Caesar of celebrity. As far as can be told, there's never been a seat in his helicopter that couldn't be filled by a friendly (or adoring) reporter. This, after all, is the man who, in the summer of 2004, as a mere three-star general being sent back to Baghdad to train the Iraqi army, made Newsweek's cover under the caption, "Can This Man Save Iraq?" (The article's subtitle -- with the "yes" practically etched into it -- read: "Mission Impossible? David Petraeus Is Tasked with Rebuilding Iraq's Security Forces. An Up-close Look at the Only Real Exit Plan the United States Has -- the Man Himself"). And, oh yes, as for his actual generalship on the battlefield of Iraq… Well, the verdict may still officially be out, but the record, the tactics, and the strategic ability look like they will not stand the test of time. But by then, if all goes well, he'll once again be out of town and someone else will take the blame, while he continues to fall upwards. David Petraeus is the President's anointed general, Bush's commander of commanders, and (not surprisingly) he exhibits certain traits much admired by the Bush administration in its better days. Launching Brand Petraeus Recently, in an almost 8,000 word report in the New York Times, David Barstow offered an unparalleled look inside a sophisticated Pentagon campaign, spearheaded by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in which at least 75 retired generals and other high military officers, almost all closely tied to Pentagon contractors, were recruited as "surrogates." They were to take Pentagon "talking points" (aka "themes and messages") about the President's War on Terror and war in Iraq into every part of the media -- cable news, the television and radio networks, the major newspapers -- as their own expert "opinions." These "analysts" made "tens of thousands of media appearances" and also wrote copiously for op-ed pages (often with the aid of the Pentagon) as part of an unparalleled, five-plus year covert propaganda onslaught on the American people that lasted from 2002 until, essentially, late last night. Think of it, like a pod of whales or a gaggle of geese, as the Pentagon's equivalent of a surge of generals. In that impressive Times report, however, one sentence has so far passed unnoticed; yet, it speaks the world of General Petraeus, and of how this administration and its chosen sons have played their cards from the moment George W. Bush mounted a pile of rubble on September 14, 2001, at Ground Zero in New York City and began to sell his incipient War on Terror (and himself as commander-in-chief). From that day on, the propaganda campaign, the selling war, on the American "home front" has never stopped. Here, in that context, is Barstow's key sentence: "When David H. Petraeus was appointed the commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet with the [Pentagon's retired military] analysts." In other words, on becoming U.S. commander in Iraq, he automatically turned to the military propaganda machine the Pentagon had set up to launch his initial surge -- on the home front. Think of the train of events this way: In January 2007, pummeled in the opinion polls, his Iraq policy in shambles and the Republican Party in electoral disarray, George W. Bush and his advisors decided to launch a last-minute home-front campaign to buy time on Iraq. It was, the President declared in an address to the American people, his "new way forward in Iraq." In Vietnam-era terms, the plan itself involved a relatively modest "escalation" of 30,000 troops, largely into the Baghdad area -- that being all the troops the overstretched U.S. military then had available. It gained, however, the resounding nickname, "the surge." (That word, strangely enough, had essentially been pilfered from the heart of "insurgent," a term previously used to designate the enemy.) By then, of course, the President himself was a thoroughly tarnished brand, not exactly the sort of face with which to launch 1,000 ships or even 30,000 troops into a self-made hell against the urgent wishes of the American people. Instead, he pushed forward his all-American general -- the smart, bemedaled, well-spoken, Princeton PhD and counterinsurgency guru, beloved by reporters whom he had romanced for years, and already treated like a demi-god by members of both parties in both houses of Congress. He became the "face" of the administration (just as American military and civilian officials had long spoken of putting an "Iraqi face" on the American occupation of that country). In the ensuing months, as New York Times columnist Frank Rich pointed out, the surging Brand Petraeus campaign only gained traction as the President publicly cited the general more than 150 times, 53 times in May 2007 alone. Never has a President put on the "face" of a general more regularly. Now, let's return to that single sentence from Barstow. Having been put forward by Bush as his favorite general and the savior of his Iraq policies, Petraeus seems to have promptly turned to the Pentagon's favored military "analysts" for a hand. The general's initial surge, that is, was right here at home via those figures the Pentagon had embedded in the media and liked to refer to as its "message force multipliers." Let's keep in mind that one of those figures, retired Army general Jack Keane, a "patron" to Petraeus during his rise in the ranks, was, along with Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, an "author" of, and key propagandist for, the surge strategy, as well as the head of his own consulting firm, on the board of General Dynamics, and a national security analyst for ABC News. So, in case you were wondering why the hosannas to Petraeus nearly reached the heavens and why the "success" of the surge was established so quickly in this country (despite four years of promises followed by disaster that might have called for media caution), look first to those surging retired generals and to the general who had already established himself as a military brand name. And let's keep in mind that the Times' Barstow has pulled back the curtain on but one administration program of deception. It is unlikely to have been the only one. We don't yet fully know the full range of sources the Pentagon and this administration mustered in the service of its surge. We don't know what sort of thought and planning, for instance, went into the transformation of any Sunni insurgent who didn't join the new Awakening Movement and become a "Son of Iraq" into a member of "al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia" -- or, more recently, every Shiite rebel into an Iranian agent. We don't know what sort of administration planning has gone into the drumbeat of well-orchestrated, ever more intense claims that Iran is the source of all our ills in Iraq, and directly responsible for a striking percentage of U.S. military deaths there. Recently, according to the New York Times, "senior officers in the American division that secures the capital said that 73 percent of fatal and other harmful attacks on American troops in the past year were caused by roadside bombs planted by so-called 'special groups'" (a euphemism for Iranian-trained groups of Shiite militiamen). We don't have a full accounting of the many carefully guided tours of Iraq given to inside-the-Beltway think-tank figures like Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, former military figures, journalists, pundits, and congressional representatives, all involving special meet-and-greet contacts with Petraeus and his top commanders, all leading to upbeat assessments of the surge. We don't have the logs of our surge commander's visitors these last months, but we know, anecdotally at least, that, during this period, no reporter, no matter how minor, seemed incapable of securing a little get-together time to experience the general's special charm. Put everything we do know, and enough that we suspect, together and you get our last surge year-plus in the U.S. as a selling/propaganda campaign par excellence. The result has been a mix of media good news about "surge success," especially in "lowering violence," and no news at all as the Iraq story grew boringly humdrum and simply fell off the front pages of our papers and out of the TV news (as well as out of the Democratic Congress). This was, of course, a public relations bonanza for an administration that might otherwise have appeared fatally wounded. Think, in the president's terminology, of victory -- not over Shiite or Sunni insurgents in Iraq, but, once again, over the media here at home. None of this should surprise anyone. The greatest skill of the Bush administration has always been its ability to market itself on "the home front." From September 14, 2001 on, through all those early "mission accomplished" years, it was on the home front, not in Afghanistan or Iraq, that administration officials worked hardest, pacifying the media, rolling out their own "products," and establishing the rep of their leader and "wartime" Commander-in-Chief. As White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card explained candidly enough to the New York Times, when it came to the launching, in September 2002, of a campaign to convince Congress and the public that an invasion of Iraq should be approved: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Falling Upwards As a general and a personality, Petraeus fit the particular marketing mentality of this administration perfectly. Graduating from West Point too late for Vietnam -- he wrote his doctoral thesis on that war -- he had, before the President's invasion, taken part only in "peacekeeping" operations in places like Haiti. In March 2003, a two-star general, he crossed the Kuwaiti border as commander of the 101st Airborne Division. After Baghdad fell, his troops occupied Mosul, a relative quiet city to the north, largely untouched by invasion or war. There, he gained a reputation (at least in the U.S.) for having a special affinity for Iraqis and for applying top-notch, outreach-oriented counterinsurgency tactics. In those early months, he always seemed to have a writer in tow. In 2004-2005, for his next tour of duty -- already with the ear of the President and of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz -- he returned to Iraq as the Newsweek Can-He-Save-It guy. His giant task was to "stand up" Iraqi security forces. Again, he had writers in tow. The Washington Post's columnist David Ignatius, for instance, twice paid extended visits to the general during that tour, returning from helicoptering around the Iraqi countryside all aglow and writing glowingly of the job Petraeus was doing (as he would again over the years, as so many other journalists and commentators would, too). The general himself wasn't exactly shy on the subject of his accomplishments. He wrote, for instance, a strategically well-placed op-ed in the Washington Post in September 2004, just as the administration was rolling out another "product," the President's run for a second term. In it, with just enough caveats to cover himself professionally, he waxed positive about the glories of Iraqi soldiers standing up. It was a piece filled with words like "progress" and "optimism," just the sort of thing a President trying to outrun a bunch of Iraqi insurgents to the November 4th finish line might like to see in print in his hometown paper. The general picked up his third star on this tour of duty. Next came a stint at home where he oversaw the rewriting of the Army's counterinsurgency manual, while touting himself as the expert of experts on that subject, too. And then, of course, in February 2007, a fourth star in hand, he took charge of the U.S. command in Iraq for its surge moment. Last week, of course, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates appointed him head of the Pentagon's Central Command with responsibility for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for our proxy war in Somalia. His duties will soon stretch from North Africa into Central Asia. The appointment, however, came after the fact. By then, as George W. Bush's personal general, he had already left the actual Centcom commander, Adm. William "Fox" Fallon in the dust. The President dealt with him directly, bypassing the Centcom commander; and, even before Fallon's ignominious resignation, Petraeus was already traveling the Middle East as, essentially, the President's personal representative, engaging in acts normally reserved for the head of Centcom. His appointment was seconded by Presidential candidate John McCain ("I think he is by far the best-qualified individual to take that job…"), signaling the degree to which the Bush administration is now preparing optimistically for McCain's war (or, alternatively, for Obama's hell). But here's the strange thing when you look more carefully at Petraeus's record (as others have indeed done over these last years), the actual results -- in Iraq, not Washington -- for each of his previous assignments proved dismal. What the record shows is a man who, after each tour of duty, seemed to manage to make it out of town just ahead of the posse, so that someone else always took the fall. On his time in Mosul, former ambassador Peter Galbraith offered this description: "As the American commander in Mosul in 2003 and 2004, he earned adulatory press coverage… for taming the Sunni-majority city. Petraeus ignored warnings from America's Kurdish allies that he was appointing the wrong people to key positions in Mosul's local government and police. A few months after he left the city, the Petraeus-appointed local police commander defected to the insurgency while the Sunni Arab police handed their weapons and uniforms over en masse to the insurgents." Mosul has remained a hotspot of insurgency ever since. On his next tour, when it came to all the "progress" training the Iraqi army, let Rod Nordland, the author of that "fawning" -- his retrospective adjective, not mine -- Newsweek cover piece of 2004, suggest an obituary, as he did in 2007: "[Petraeus] rose to fame not by his achievements but by his success in selling them as achievements. He's first of all a great communicator… Training the Iraqi military and shifting responsibility to them was the mantra Petraeus sold to hundreds of credulous reporters and hundreds of even more credulous visiting CODELs (congressional delegations)… By the time he left, the training program was clearly on its way to spectacular failure. By the end of last year that had become received wisdom; it became convenient for the brass to blame the fiasco on the politically less popular and media-friendless Gen. George Casey. Entire brigades of police had to be pulled off the street and retrained because they were evidently riddled with death squads and in some cases even with insurgents. The Iraqi Army was all but useless, a feeble patient kept on life support by the American military." Just recently, in hearings before Congress, Petraeus himself introduced two new words to describe the post-surge security situation in Iraq: "fragile and reversible." Take that as a tip for the future. Fragile indeed. The surge landscape the general helped create has, from the beginning, been flammable and unstable in the extreme. It has, in recent weeks, been threatening to break down in Shiite civil strife, even as, under an American aegis, the Sunnis have been rearming and reorganizing for the day when they can take back a Baghdad that was largely cleansed of their ethnic compatriots during the surge months. Americans are once again dying in increasing numbers (though little attention has yet been paid to this in the media), as are Iraqis. It will be a miracle if post-surge Iraq doesn't come apart before November 4, 2008, not to say the end of George Bush's term in January. The problem is: Putting a face -- that is, a mask -- on something has nothing to do with changing it in any essential way, no matter how you brand it and no matter who's listening to you elsewhere. This August or September, when the general takes over at Centcom, he will leave behind (as he has before) the equivalent of an IED-mined stretch of Iraqi roadside ready to explode, possibly under the coming U.S. presidential election. It remains to be seen whether he will once again have made it out of town in the nick of time and relatively unscathed. The miracle, of course, was that, so late in the game, the American media swallowed the President's (and the general's) propaganda on the surge campaign which, on the face of it, was ludicrous. Stranger still, they did so for almost a year before the situation started to fray visibly enough for our TV networks and major papers to take notice. For that year, most of them thought they saw a brass band playing fabulously when there was hardly a snare drum in sight. That result may be a public-relations man's dream, but it was thanks to a con man's art. The question is: Can the President make it back to Texas before the bottom falls out in Iraq? And will the general continue to fall ominously upward? Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

Conservative bias alleged in textbook Publisher now says it will review the book, as will College Board The Associated Press updated 7:04 p.m. ET April 8, 2008 WASHINGTON - Talk about a civics lesson: A high-school senior has raised questions about political bias in a popular textbook on U.S. government, and legal scholars and top scientists say the teen's criticism is well-founded. They say "American Government" by conservatives James Wilson and John Dilulio presents a skewed view of topics from global warming to separation of church and state. The publisher now says it will review the book, as will the College Board, which oversees college-level Advanced Placement courses used in high schools. Matthew LaClair of Kearny, N.J., recently brought his concerns to the attention of the Center for Inquiry, an Amherst, N.Y., think tank that promotes science and has issued a scathing report about the textbook. "I just realized from my own knowledge that some of this stuff in the book is just plain wrong," said LaClair, who is using the book as part of an AP government class at Kearny High School. Textbook is widely used The textbook is designed for a college audience, but also is widely used in AP American government courses, said Richard Blake, a spokesman for the publisher, Houghton Mifflin Co. Blake said the company "will be working with the authors to evaluate in detail the criticisms of the Center for Inquiry." Blake said some disputed passages already have been excised from the newest edition of the book. Both authors are considered conservative. Dilulio, a University of Pennsylvania professor, formerly worked for the Bush administration as director of faith-based initiatives. Wilson is the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. Neither responded immediately to calls seeking comment. LaClair said he was particularly upset about the book's treatment of global warming. James Hansen, the director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, recently heard about LaClair's concerns and has lent him some support. Hansen has sent Houghton Mifflin a letter stating that the book's discussion on global warming contained "a large number of clearly erroneous statements" that give students "the mistaken impression that the scientific evidence of global warming is doubtful and uncertain." The edition of the textbook published in 2005, which is in high school classrooms now, states that "science doesn't know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all." A newer edition published late last year was changed to say, "Science doesn't know how bad the greenhouse effect is." Controversy over climate change The authors kept a phrase stating that global warming is "enmeshed in scientific uncertainty." While there are still some scientists who downplay global warming and the role of burning fossil fuels, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists and peer-reviewed scientific research say human activity is causing climate change. Last year an international collection of hundreds of scientists and government officials unanimously approved wording that said the scientific community had "very high confidence," meaning more than 90 percent likelihood, that global warming is caused by humans. LaClair also was concerned about the textbook's treatment of U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding prayer in school. The book shows a picture of kids praying in front of a Virginia high school and states, "The Supreme Court will not let this happen inside a public school." Blake said the photo was cut out of the most recent edition. The textbook goes on to state that the court has ruled as "unconstitutional every effort to have any form of prayer in public schools, even if it is nonsectarian, voluntary or limited to reading a passage of the Bible." Those examples are not correct, says Charles Haynes, a religious liberties expert at the First Amendment Center in Washington. "Students can pray inside a public school in many different ways," Haynes said, adding they can pray alone or in groups before lunch or in religious clubs, for example. Haynes said students can't disrupt the school or interfere with the rights of others. The court has said the prayer can't be state-sponsored, so a teacher can't lead a prayer and a school can't require it, Haynes said. Another part of the book that the report criticizes deals with a Supreme Court decision overturning a Texas law banning sexual contact between people of the same sex. The authors wrote that the Supreme Court decision had a "benefit" and a "cost." The benefit, it said, was to strike down a rarely enforced law that could probably not be passed today, while the cost was to "create the possibility that the court, and not Congress or state legislatures, might decide whether same-sex marriages were legal." Derek Araujo, the report's author, said that's a matter of opinion and that gay-rights activists, for example, see it differently. "The major problem with this is they describe the costs and benefits of the system in a very political way," he said. 'Trying to lead the reader' LaClair added that he perceived a bias in the book too. "All the statements for the most part were trying to lead the reader in one direction and not giving a fair account of everything," he said. It's not the first time LaClair has raised alarm bells over teaching at his school. A few years ago, he tape recorded a teacher making religious remarks to his students. Many people at the school were upset with LaClair for raising the issue. "I'm not looking to cause a huge controversy, but I want the students to be taught correct information," LaClair said. His mother, Debra, says she thinks her son is giving his peers another kind of civics lesson. "When he sees something that is incorrect, he wants to fix it," she said. "That's him. That's what he does." Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

February 4, 2008 Male Circumcision No Aid to Women in Study By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN BOSTON — A number of studies showing that circumcision among men reduces their risk of infection from the AIDS virus has raised the hope that the procedure would also benefit their female sexual partners. But the expectations were challenged Sunday by a new study showing that male circumcision conferred no indirect benefit to the female partners and, indeed, increased the risk if the couples resumed sex before the circumcision wound was fully healed, usually in about a month. The study did confirm the benefit of male circumcision in lowering the incidence of herpes and other genital ulcers among men. Findings of the study, which was conducted in an area of high incidence of H.I.V., the AIDS virus, were reported at the 15th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. Although the findings did not reach statistical significance, they still underscore the need for more effective education among men who undergo circumcision and their female partners, the authors of the study said. The study — conducted by the same team of researchers from Johns Hopkins and Uganda who had shown circumcision’s benefits among men in earlier studies — is believed to be the first clinical trial to provide scientific data on the effects on women of circumcision in their male partners. For many years, epidemiologists observed that the incidence of AIDS was higher in areas of Africa where men were not circumcised and lower in areas where men were circumcised. But many scientists were skeptical that circumcision played a role in acquiring H.I.V. Then in recent years, three scientifically controlled studies in Kenya, South Africa and Uganda convinced the skeptics by showing that male circumcision could reduce the risk of H.I.V. infection by 50 percent to 60 percent. Although circumcision is no cure-all, the World Health Organization endorsed the procedure last year, increasing demand for it among men in many areas of Africa. When trained workers performed the procedure, the incidence of infection and mishap is much lower than when traditional ritual circumcisers perform it. Male circumcision took on new importance because of the failure of scientists to develop a vaccine to prevent AIDS. The success rates of male circumcision were high enough for many AIDS experts to call the procedure a virtual “vaccine.” Some AIDS experts also said there were strong indications that male circumcision of infected men also protects their sexual partners. “Some infected men inevitably will seek circumcision because it leaves a physical mark” that would remove the stigma of being infected, Dr. Maria Wawer of Johns Hopkins, a co-author of the study, said at a news conference. Also, if fewer men became infected because they got circumcised, that could provide a benefit to their sexual partners, said another author, Dr. David Serwadda of Makerere University in Kampala. In the study reported here, all the men and women agreed in writing to participate after they were informed about other ways to prevent H.I.V. infection, wound care and abstention from sex after the surgical circumcision. The men were offered free condoms and the couples were counseled and tested for H.I.V. There were 1,015 H.I.V.-infected men who agreed to having circumcision immediately or waiting two years for purposes of a scientific control group. The timing was chosen at random, researchers said. The 770 married men were asked to invite their spouses to participate in the study, and 566 did. Among the women, 245, or 43 percent, were not H.I.V. infected. The analysis focused on the 161 couples who enrolled at the same time and in which the men were infected but their spouses were not. There were 93 couples in the group where the man had an immediate circumcision and 68 in the control group where the man delayed having the procedure for two years. In both groups, the incidence of infection was highest in the first six-month follow-up period, 27.3 in the immediate group and 17.8 in the delayed one. The incidence declined for the rest of the study period, 5.7 in the immediate group compared with 4.1 in the delayed group. The higher incidence was found among the couples who resumed sexual intercourse more than five days earlier than a trained health professional certified the circumcision wound had healed fully compared with the couples who resumed intercourse within five days of certified circumcision wound healing. Dr. Wawer said in an interview that because the numbers in the study were small and the results not statistically significant, additional studies were needed to determine more precisely potential benefits among men and women as well as ways to reduce potential risks associated with early resumption of sex. Rates of condom use, vaginosis (a bacterial vaginal infection), vaginal discharge, painful urination and infection of the genital-urinary tract were about the same among women in each group.

February 6, 2008 Editorial A Shameful Record The United States leads the world in a shameful category: the number of people it has locked up for life without parole for crimes committed by juveniles. Juvenile crime should not be taken lightly, but young people should not be completely written off. According to Human Rights Watch, 2,380 people in this country are serving life sentences for crimes they committed before they turned 18. That makes the United States an extreme global outlier. Sentencing juveniles to life without parole is at odds with international law; the vast majority of the world’s countries ban the practice. Some juvenile criminals commit horrible crimes, and the justice system should punish them accordingly. Juveniles, though, are not adults. Even their brain development is different, making them less able than older people to resist impulses. Consideration should also be given to the nature of the crime. In some cases, juveniles have been imprisoned for life for acting as accessories or lookouts for adults. Putting a 16-year-old who played such a role in jail for perhaps 65 years is an extraordinarily harsh, and expensive, societal response. There are ongoing efforts in several states to impose sorely needed balance to the law. In California, the Legislature recently failed to act on a bill that would have allowed the more than 225 inmates serving life sentences there for crimes committed as minors the right to appear before a parole board after serving 25 years in prison. The bill deserves to be reintroduced, and to pass. California is hardly the only state that needs to rethink its approach. As many as 38 states sentence minors to life without the chance of parole, including Pennsylvania, the worst offender, where hundreds of inmates — estimates range from 360 to 433 — have no hope of ever being released because of crimes they committed between the ages of 13 and 18. There are now more than 2 million people behind bars in the United States. Locking up juveniles for life without parole is unfair and a poor use of criminal justice resources. California, and the other states, should rethink this misguided policy.

March 20, 2008 British Memoirist Is Denied U.S. Entry By MOTOKO RICH Sebastian Horsley, a British author who has written an eyebrow-raising memoir detailing a life of rampant drug use and voluminous encounters with prostitutes, was turned back at Newark Liberty International Airport on Tuesday as he tried to enter the United States for a book party and New York news media tour. Mr. Horsley, whose memoir, “Dandy in the Underworld,” was published last week in paperback by Harper Perennial, a unit of HarperCollins, said he was detained by United States customs authorities for eight hours and questioned about his former drug addiction, use of prostitutes and activity as a male escort. “I’m absolutely shattered and upset and gutted about not being able to come to America,” Mr. Horsley said in a telephone interview from London, where he had returned on Wednesday. “I was very much looking forward to meeting everybody.” Lucille Cirillo, a spokeswoman for the New York office of United States Customs and Border Protection, said she could not comment on specific cases. But in an e-mail message, she said that under a waiver program that allows British citizens to enter the United States without a visa, “travelers who have been convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude (which includes controlled-substance violations) or admit to previously having a drug addiction are not admissible.” In “Dandy of the Underworld” Mr. Horsley, who is notorious in Britain, writes of being raised by alcoholic, sexually promiscuous parents and bouncing through several schools. He details a debauched life of cocaine, heroin, opium and amphetamine use, writing that he spent more than £100,000 (nearly $200,000) on crack cocaine and £100,000 to consort with more than 1,000 prostitutes. He also chronicles his trip to the Philippines to be hung from a cross, an event that was recorded by a photographer and videographer and formed part of an art exhibition that was extensively covered by the news media in his home country. Carrie Kania, publisher of Harper Perennial, said Mr. Horsley’s party, which was scheduled for Wednesday in Manhattan, would go on without him. “I believe this book is very important,” Ms. Kania said. “It certainly moved me, and we’re going to continue to back it 100 percent.” British public records are not available in the United States, and it was not possible to verify independently many of the details in Mr. Horsley’s memoir. In interviews, though, he has been repeatedly coy about what is real and what is contrived. “It’s better to be quotable than honest,” he told Time Out London in February. In an interview with The Independent last September, he said: “I don’t speak, I quote. I am a fraud. I have cobbled together my personality from hundreds of little bits. I am simultaneously the most genuine and the most artificial person you will ever meet.” In his interview with The New York Times on Wednesday, Mr. Horsley insisted the memoir was true. “I’m a dandy, so I like to play with words,” he said. “I am real, but in an artificial way, because I like to play with language. But my story is completely true.” Ms. Kania said that the book, published in Britain in September by an imprint of Hodder Headline, had been through a “lengthy legal review” by the British publisher. But Harper did not independently fact-check it. Mr. Horsley said he was surprised he was deported, since he had previously traveled to the United States six times, twice to visit relatives in Boston and four times to New York. “God bless America, land of the free, but sadly not the land of the depraved,” he said. He referred to the recent resignation of Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York, in the wake of revelations that he had frequented prostitutes. “I’m not a politician, I’m an artist,” Mr. Horsley said. “Depravity is part of the job description.” He added that he regarded his memoir as “a very moral book in the same way that Bret Easton Ellis’s ‘American Psycho’ was a moral book.” He added, “I’m not a bad person.” Jack Begg contributed reporting.

By Tanene Allison February 27, 2008 Lawrence “Larry” King was shot to death and the media thought that you didn’t need to know about it. Larry, as you might have now learned, was fifteen and in his junior high school computer lab when Brandon McInerney, 14, followed through on a previously declared threat and shot King. The mainstream media apparently didn’t think that you needed to know that King had recently come out as gay and had started to wear lipstick, mascara, earrings, and a pair of particularly fierce high heeled boots. The first LA Times article on the shooting made no reference to Larry’s sexual orientation, or his manner of dress. When the mainstream media first reported the murder, it was stated that the violence stemmed from a “personal dispute” between the two boys. In contrast, ten years ago, the first AP story on Matthew Sheppard’s assault included information about his sexual orientation, a fact that had played a role in his victim status. Youth groups across the country began holding marches in King’s honor. Details of his death was spread virally on youth-dominated, Facebook. Queer media outlets bubbled over with coverage of the story. The mainstream media remained silent. Only now, two weeks after King’s murder, is the mainstream media providing coverage of the story. All of those who did not cover the story when it was, well, news, are now covering how it was a story no one else covered either. Anderson Cooper, wrote in his blog: “Tonight… we are focusing on a story that hasn’t received the attention it deserves…According to many accounts, he had been bullied repeatedly, and some parents have even claimed students knew of threats to Lawrence’s life. At this point it doesn’t seem clear how much school officials knew of the bullying, but a full investigation needs to be done. If this had been an African-American student bullied by a teenage skinhead, would it have received more attention? “Would school officials have taken it more seriously if it had been a Christian campus leader attacked by another student because of his/her religious beliefs? I don’t have the answers to those questions, but I do think they are worth asking.” All good questions, and I’m grateful they’re being asked, but where was Cooper two weeks ago? Not that Cooper is alone in his delay. It took the two Democratic candidates for President thirteen days to release comments on King’s death. The New York Times took four days before running an AP snippet on the murder, and eleven days before they wrote their first story. MTV News, a leader in coverage of youth issues, ran its first story on King nine days after the murder. You get the idea. I bring this all up because these are indeed questions to which there are no easy answers. It is not a new concept that violence against the queer community is often seen as a non-story. And yet, despite temptation to declare this mainstream silence as a blatant expression of homophobia, I believe it’s more complicated than just that. As a journalist who presently works in a position where it is my job to notice civil rights stories the media is ignoring, and to seek appropriate coverage, this case particularly stood out for me. Despite my daily intake of large amounts of newsfeeds, I also first learned of this story via a friend’s Facebook post. Although this particular story falls outside of the purview of my job, I began emailing various journalist friends to figure out what was going on with their silence. These email exchanges quickly produced no real answers. In an exchange with one of my most queer-friendly, mainstream media pals, no answers were found to the question of the silence. It was almost as if the institutional hindrances to seeing this as a story were so thick that they were impossible to define. I asked my journalist source why the story hadn’t received the coverage it deserves. She said she didn’t really know, but likely the large shooting outside of Chicago was simply seen as a larger story. I pointed out that King was shot and two news cycles went by before the Illinois shooting. I pointed out that it was hard not to see shades of homophobia in the media not seeing King’s death as a big story. She wrote back that a boy wearing women’s clothing is exactly the type of thing the media would love to make a story out of. I replied that regardless of that assumption, the lack of coverage would say otherwise. This went on for a number of rounds. Our exchange ended with her agreeing to research the story a bit more, and with her asking if I had contacts for King’s friends and family. I had to point out that I wasn’t inquiring to pitch her for my work; that I was merely an upset citizen, trying to make sense of the silence. Her news organization took days more before they ran their first piece of coverage. That “Mainstream Media” is made up of endless such folks, people who cared about the story, who engaged in private exchanges about it. And yet, and yet, the coverage remained absent. I believe that we know the answer to Anderson Cooper’s questions. Yes. Yes, the death of Queer folks earns less mainstream outrage. (Has anyone heard of Simmie “Beyonce” Williams Jr.? Another feminine dressing, out-as-gay, young male of color, who was murdered this last weekend? Or Senesha Steward, who was killed in early February? It also deserves to be examined what role the races of these youth played in the lack of coverage their murders were given.) Yes, such crimes tend to be taken less seriously. What I don’t know is why. Why the impenetrable silence on this story, when reporters in numerous organizations agree that it was always a story worth covering? And perhaps even more bizarrely, why the sudden onrush of belated coverage? Why is it now popular for the mainstream media to cover how unpopular it was for the mainstream media to cover King’s death in the weeks after it first occurred? Lawrence King is dead. And were it not for groups of hurt and angry young people, none of us may have ever heard King’s name. Whether the mainstream media agrees or not, that fact is something worth our attention. Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. * Digg * del.icio.us * Reddit * StumbleUpon * Technorati * Fark * Facebook * NewsVine * YahooMyWeb Filed under: Crime, Culture, News 3 Responses to “Why the mainstream media doesn’t care about the murder of gay teens” 1. Shams, on February 28th, 2008 at 1:31 pm Said: As a member of the MSM also, and as someone who did not hear about the story until it appeared in the magazine that I work for, I think the response time lagged for a couple of reasons, none of them involving homophobia. 1) King is a racial/ethnic minority. Racial/ethnic minorities do not attract the MSM’s attention as much as attractive white people do, period. Race/perceived race/nationality, I believe, trump homophobia in the newsroom in terms of attracting coverage. Look at all the young Latinas and Asian and black women who were pregnant and killed by lovers during the time that Lacy Peterson was big, big news (like every week/day news). They were all ignored, regardless of their sexual orientation and gender identity. Minority women (gay, straight, bi, etc), transwomen and teenaged girls are always ignored when they go missing like Natalee Holloway. I am convinced this had more to do with Lawrence King’s race than with his sexuality/gender identity. Newsrooms in the mainstream media are almost completely devoid of ethnic-looking Spanish-speaking Americans and other minority groups in this country, so when they’re looking for a story, the editors are looking for a story about themselves. Period. This is obviously a problem, but it’s a negligence problem, not malicious avoidance. I know that in my newsroom, there are a lot of people looking and searching specifically for stories about people in the queer/two spirit communities. Myself included. We are on a personal as well as an editorial mission to broaden our scope and to get our own community represented. 2) His family situation is complicated. He was a ward of the state. When you have a child killed that was in foster care, there are a number of legal difficulties to writing a story about that child. End of story. I’m sure that this took a lot of time to work through. And that may have had some effect on the way it was reported initially. For instance, after the shooting, it became clear to most observers that it was a hate crime. But you’re dealing with a suspect who is a minor, who is not convicted or even charged. You cannot say that he “committed a hate crime” or that it is “an apparent hate crime.” Your sources in the police department can say that, but to print it, is slander until the DA charges him with a hate crime. Until someone is charged, you can’t speculate on the motive. Until someone is convicted, you cannot say that they “committed” anything. There are a lot of legal and logistical things that go on in mainstream newsrooms that the blogging and online community do not have to deal with. Whether they turn out to be positive hurdles or negative hurdles has yet to be determined and is the subject of much debate (ie. how do we get the story in the book as fast as possible without putting ourselves in a legally risky position? How do we report out a story that involves speculation and underage criminality and a legal guardianship that respects privacy?) Before blaming the MSM for being slow in its response due to something as charged as homophobia or outright racism, think about other possibilities of unintentional negligence (never a good thing, I admit), legal difficulties and barriers to finding out information. Blogs can print speculation. The Wall Street Journal cannot. 2. Bob Zuley, on February 28th, 2008 at 3:39 pm Said: February 25, 2008 BY NEIL STEINBERG Sun-TimesColumnist Why hast thou forsaken him? A reader inquires why no one in Chicago has yet written aboutLawrence King, the Oxnard, Calif., boy who was murdered two weeks ago forthe crime of being gay. King, 15, had begun sometimes coming to class wearing makeup, acapital offense in the view of 14-year-old Brandon McInerney, who,according to police in the town north of Malibu, strode into their middleschool computer lab Feb. 12 and shot King in the head in front of twodozen classmates. “Where’s the moral outrage?” asks reader Bob Zuley, who answershis own question: “This hateful behavior is learned by a society thatcondones homophobia expressed through families that practice bigotry,churches and schools that practice exclusion, and national leaders thatfight to prevent equality and acceptance.” Sounds right to me. But is that the complete answer? One couldonce count on Chicago’s active gay community to raise an outcry oversuch matters, but they have gone quiet in recent years. I’m mystifiedas to why — perhaps the reduced lethality of the AIDS crisis haslowered the flame under gay social activism. Perhaps gays have growncomfortable and secure — a tad prematurely, perhaps, given crimes such as theone against King. Perhaps their voices are lost in the swelling informational cacophony. Religious groups are another matter. They’re always going on howthey love the sinner while loathing the sin. That said, and given how religion is responsible for much of the vacant faux moralblather that underlies hatred of gays, you’d think they’d step up after casessuch as King’s with the bold pronouncement that, vile as the sin of homosexuality is, you shouldn’t murder gays, at least not whilethey are still children. We seem to expect the entire Muslim community torise as one and publicly denounce every act committed in their faith’sname anywhere in the world. Why shouldn’t our home-grown faiths take responsibility for the fruit of their efforts? Typically, condemnation for a crime falls upon the criminal. Butwhen that criminal is a child, it is easier to see the hand ofsociety at work. Lawrence King died for your sins. 3. Bob Zuley, on February 28th, 2008 at 3:40 pm Said: . . . from the Illinois House of Representatives FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE FOR MORE INFORMATION: February 27, 2008 State Rep. Greg Harris (773) 348-3434 Greg@GregHarris.org Rep. Harris’ Statement in Response to the Murder of Lawrence King 15 year-old victim attacked due to his sexual orientation CHICAGO – I am gravely concerned about senseless acts of violence occurring across our nation. On February 12th of this year, 15 year old Lawrence King of Oxnard California was murdered by a classmate while in his school’s computer lab. Lawrence King was not a victim of the kind of random violence that has become prevalent in our nation’s schools, most recently at Northern Illinois University in my home state of Illinois; rather he was targeted because he was openly gay. He was not harming anyone, he was not threatening anyone; he was killed because he had the courage to be himself. I am outraged by this act of classroom violence and wish to make clear that intending harm against people based on their sexual orientation is, without exception, completely and totally unacceptable, as are attacks based on religion, race, ethnicity, gender or any personal characteristic. Members of the gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transsexual and questioning community deserve to live their lives proudly without fear of being victimized by these despicable acts of targeted violence. I urge my colleagues across the nation to join me in condemning this act of disturbing brutality

WHY CORNER answers our why, how and what queries with informative and educative articles. It’s all about answers, general knowledge, education and news stories.

Slate Magazine medical examiner The Pill, a Rock Opera Its long-running health saga. By Amanda Schaffer Posted Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2008, at 4:59 PM ET Last week, British researchers published decisively good news about birth control pills: They lower the risk of ovarian cancer—substantially. The longer women take the pill, the lower their odds of getting this kind of cancer. And some of the benefits seem to persist, even decades after women go off the contraception. The new analysis pooled large amounts of data. It was elegantly done. And it's worth celebrating, partly because health claims about the pill are often much harder to parse. Consider the mental tightrope we've been asked to walk when it comes to the effect of oral contraception on sex drive, cardiovascular disease, and breast cancer: The pill may sap our libidos (say Scottish doctors)—but it may also be linked to more frequent orgasms (say Italian ones). It increases the risk of blood clots, and may slightly increase the risk of strokes (which remains very small). But it doesn't seem to up the odds of a heart attack, at least for nonsmokers, and might even offer some cardio protection. At the same time, in contrast to the new findings that it protects against ovarian cancer, the pill may slightly increase the risk of breast cancer. And, then again, it may not, especially when newer formulations with lower doses of estrogen are considered. In other words, oral contraception is a moving target for medical research, and its health history would make for a first-rate feminist rock opera. The grand finale? The pill gets better with age. When Margaret Sanger first dreamed of a "magic pill" to prevent unwanted pregnancy, and then its actual appearance came to symbolize sexual and personal freedom for women, few wanted to dwell on tough questions about potential health hazards. But in 1969, journalist Barbara Seaman forced the issue with her book The Doctor's Case Against the Pill. Congressional hearings followed, helping to galvanize a feminist backlash against the pill, and against doctors and medical paternalism in general (see: the 1970s). Today, though more than 100 million women around the world use oral contraception, suspicion lingers about possible risks like cancer and strokes. And pro-lifers gleefully fan the flames, claiming against all reason and medical evidence that the pill causes early abortions. All of which is to say that whether new findings about the pill weigh in for health benefits or for risks, they are always freighted. Take one evergreen headline: "Does the Pill Make Women Frigid?" In 1995, Scottish researchers found that women taking pills with estrogen and progestin in them reported decreased interest in sex (though women taking progestin-only pills did not). More recently, the idea that women's sex drive is linked to testosterone levels has gained ground. (That's the theory behind the testosterone skin patch, one candidate for Lady Viagra.) Some forms of the pill seem to indirectly reduce women's blood levels of testosterone—and that decline may persist even after they stop taking the pill, one study suggests. But the testosterone story has caveats. Women's sex drive clearly depends on a host of factors, many of them psychological. Surely, the freedom of sex without fear of pregnancy can be a turn-on. And recently, Italian researchers found that women who took birth control pills containing 30 micrograms of estrogen and 3 milligrams of a progestin called drospirenone reported greater sexual enjoyment and greater frequency of orgasm than they did before. Sounds almost like Lady Viagra. Claims about the pill and cardiovascular disease also go both ways. In 1961, the Lancet reported that a nurse using oral contraception had suffered a pulmonary embolism—the first such report to appear in the literature, according to this 2005 review. In the years that followed, several epidemiological studies found that the pill upped the odds of blood clots, pulmonary embolisms, strokes, and heart attacks (although the risks of these problems remained small). In 1988, for instance, data from the large and prospective Nurses Health Study showed that women taking oral contraception were two and a half times as likely to have heart attacks as women who were not. More recently, however, research has tried to tease out the impact of the pill on women who smoke, or have diabetes or hypertension, from its effect on women who don't. The Nurses Health Study concluded that for nonsmokers, the pill does not increase the risk of heart disease. Other studies back this up, as well. And in 2006, researchers at Cedars-Sinai Research Institute in Los Angeles found that past use of oral contraception may actually lower women's risk of heart problems. (Still, wild cards like this unpublished study, which turned up higher rates of atherosclerosis in women taking the pill for extended periods of time, keep everyone on edge.) And then there is breast cancer. In the mid-1990s, a large meta-analysis linked birth control pills to a small increase in women's odds of getting breast cancer. The increased risk began to decrease again when they stopped taking the pill, but took 10 years to disappear entirely. By contrast, in 2002, another major study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that use of the pill was not associated with breast cancer risk, even for women who took it for longer periods of time or used formulations with higher doses of estrogen. Since then, more dueling findings have appeared. In the end, the bottom line tends toward reassurance. Recent evidence suggests that newer pills pose less of a risk than older ones. And a helpful summary published this month argues that when all is said and done, today's birth control pills "do not play a clinically important role in the risk of breast cancer." (See here for a rundown of other health claims about the pill, good and bad.) Meanwhile, the news on ovarian cancer has long been consistently good. Friday's findings, published in the Lancet, seal the deal. Researchers pooled data from 45 epidemiological studies, including more than 23,000 women with ovarian cancer and more than 87,000 controls. They found that for every five years on the pill, women's relative risk of ovarian cancer was reduced by 20 percent. After 15 years on the pill, the risk was cut in half. The pill probably protects against this kind of cancer because it suppresses ovulation, in which the ovary releases an egg. The group estimates that 200,000 cases of ovarian cancer and 100,000 deaths from the disease have been prevented to date by oral contraception. Whatever else we don't know about the magic pill, here's to that. Amanda Schaffer is a science and medical columnist for Slate. Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2183035/

The other day, I admitted to a friend that I don't have health insurance."What?!" he gasped. "But you're married. Isn't that part of the deal?" He reacted as if I had just told him that I believed in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or a flat tax -- something embarrassingly ridiculous. Because that's what being uninsured is these days -- a character flaw. It's how you can pay taxes, volunteer, donate to public radio and still be considered a drain on society. As my friend was, you may be wondering, "Seriously, how can you not have health insurance? Don't you work? Are you illiterate? Do you have no self-worth whatsoever?!" The short answer is, my husband and I are both freelancers so we have no workplace insurance. And the $500-plus monthly premium? You might as well say our health depended on our adding a new wing to our apartment. The uninsured are a puzzling group for California lawmakers. Telling the uninsured not to be uninsured, for example, is the solution they came up with. And taxing smokers (banking on their inability to quit but sufficient longevity to make it profitable) to pay for the poor is how lawmakers proposed to fund it. They called it ABX1 1. This wasn't good legislation. Good legislation has supporters; ABX1 1 had apologists. And it came to an ignoble end last week, killed by an 11-1 vote in a state Senate committee.Even though I'm not for radical change, I do favor radical improvement. ABX1 1 was neither. It came around on its face: It appeared that the cure was the same as the disease. Personally, I make above $47,000 a year, the cutoff for subsidized policies under the plan. I also live in a city where median home prices are still about half a million dollars. Now, while Countrywide Financial Corp. may have happily approved me for a loan a couple of months ago, that doesn't mean I have any money. So the mandate to buy insurance would have fallen on a lot of broke ears, not just mine.Healthcare costs in this country, according to the World Health Organization, are the highest in the Western world. And the chasm between medical care for those with money and those without is potentially deadly. I once had a plantar wart that was near-fatal. True story. Some people gamble at casinos for kicks; I eat uncooked fish. There isn't a moment that I don't know that I am one accident or diagnosis away from complete financial ruin. Where are the riots? Where's the outrage? Didn't Michael Moore do a documentary on this? The uninsured and the underinsured need true political advocates. There's only one way I see that happening. We should force all our elected officials in California to live uninsured for at least 2 1/2 months of the year. Believe me, healthcare will get reformed quicker if their lives and livelihoods depend on it. One in five Californians are uninsured -- so all our elected officials should be uninsured for one-fifth of the year until they fix the problem. What good would that do? In 1993, San Francisco passed a nonbinding measure encouraging public employees from the mayor on down to take public transit at least twice a week. How's that city's transit system now? Among the best in the country.People take vows of poverty to learn humility. People fast to learn gratitude for abundance. People live off the grid to teach themselves -- I don't know -- candle-making skills. Living uninsured can teach our elected officials to care for the healthcare system. (Lesson one -- negotiate drug prices. There are more Californians than Canadians. Hint. Hint.) Call it a fact-finding mission. Make it sound heroic. It's no more absurd than what they came up with.Tina Dupuy is a writer and comedian in Los Angeles.

(CBS/AP) Democrat John Edwards bowed out of the race for the White House on Wednesday, saying it was time to step aside "so that history can blaze its path" in a campaign now left to Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. "We do not know who will take the final steps to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but what we do know is that our Democratic Party will make history," Edwards said in New Orleans, where he launched his campaign in late 2006. "We will be strong, we will be unified, and with our convictions and a little backbone, we will take back the White House in November." Edwards said Clinton and Obama had both pledged that "they will make ending poverty central to their campaign for the presidency." "This is the cause of my life and I now have their commitment to engage in this cause," he said before a small group of supporters. He was joined by his wife Elizabeth and his three children, Cate, Emma Claire and Jack. It was the second time Edwards sought the Democratic presidential nomination. Four years ago he was the vice presidential running mate on a ticket headed by John Kerry. Four years later, he waged a spirited, underfunded race on a populist note, pledging to represent the powerless against the corporate interests. He finished second in the Iowa caucuses that led off the campaign, but he was quickly overshadowed - a white man in a race against the former first lady and a 46-year-old black man, each bent on making history. Edwards said that on his way to making his campaign-ending statement, he drove by a highway underpass where several homeless people live. He stopped to talk, he said, and as he was leaving, one of them asked him never to forget them and their plight. "Well I say to her and I say to all those who are struggling in this country, we will never forget you. We will fight for you. We will stand up for you," he said, pledging to continue his campaign-long effort to end what he frequently said was "two Americas," one for the powerful, the other for the rest. The former North Carolina senator did not immediately endorse either Clinton, seeking to become the first female president, or Obama, the strongest black candidate in history. Both of them praised Edwards - and immediately began courting his supporters. "John Edwards ended his campaign today in the same way he started it - by standing with the people who are too often left behind and nearly always left out of our national debate," Clinton said. Obama, too, praised Edwards and his wife. At a rally in Denver, he said the couple has "always believed deeply that two Americans can become one, and that our country can rally around this common purpose," Obama said. "So while his campaign may have ended, this cause lives on for all of us who still believe that we can achieve that dream of one America." The impact of Edwards' decision will be felt in one week's time, when Democrats hold primaries and caucuses across 22 states, with 1,681 delegates at stake. Four in 10 Edwards supporters said their second choice in the race is Clinton, while a quarter prefer Obama, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo poll conducted late this month. Determining where Edwards' supporters will go, if they go to any candidate at all, will be tough, according to CBS News director of surveys Kathy Frankovic. In a post on CBSNews.com's Horserace blog, she noted that those who voted for Edwards were least likely to support one of the other top two candidates for the party's nomination. "So Edwards might not be able to move his voters to either of the other candidates en masse," Frankovic wrote. "Some of his supporters will clearly opt not to support either Clinton or Obama." Edwards amassed 56 national convention delegates, most of whom will be free to support either Obama or Clinton. As expected, Edwards said he was suspending his campaign rather than ending it, but aides said that was simply legal terminology so that he can continue to receive federal matching funds for his campaign donations. An immediate impact of Edwards' withdrawal will be six additional delegates for Obama, giving him a total of 187, and four more for Clinton, giving her 253. A total of 2,025 delegates are needed to secure the Democratic nomination. Edwards won 26 delegates in the Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina contests. Under party rules, 10 of those delegates will be automatically dispersed among Obama and Clinton, based on their vote totals in those respective contests. The remaining 16 remain pledged to Edwards, meaning his campaign will have a say in naming them. Three superdelegates - mainly party and elected officials who automatically attend the convention and can support whomever they choose - had already switched from Edwards to Obama before news of Edwards' withdrawal from the race. Edwards waged a spirited top-tier campaign against the two better-funded rivals, even as he dealt with the stunning blow of his wife's recurring cancer diagnosis. In a dramatic news conference last March, the couple announced that the breast cancer that she thought she had beaten had returned, but they would continue the campaign. Their decision sparked a debate about family duty and public service. But Elizabeth Edwards remained a forceful advocate for her husband, and she was often surrounded at campaign events by well-wishers and emotional survivors cheering her on. The campaign ended as it began 13 months ago - with the candidate pitching in to rebuild lives in a city still ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. Edwards embraced New Orleans as a glaring symbol of what he described as a Washington that didn't hear the cries of the downtrodden. Edwards burst out of the starting gate with a flurry of progressive policy ideas - he was the first to offer a plan for universal health care, the first to call on Congress to pull funding for the war, and he led the charge that lobbyists have too much power in Washington and need to be reigned in. The ideas were all bold and new for Edwards personally as well, making him a different candidate than the moderate Southerner who ran in 2004 while still in his first Senate term. But the themes were eventually adopted by other Democratic presidential candidates - and even a Republican, Mitt Romney, echoed the call for an end to special interest politics in Washington. Edwards' last primary was in his home state of South Carolina last week. He finished a poor third, wining only his home country, his victory in the 2004 race a distant memory.

Nicki Bennett is an American aid worker who bounces around from one hot spot to the next, working for Oxfam. She has been deployed to Sudan, eastern Congo, Chad, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia and Guatemala. She is currently in Bangladesh working on post-hurricane reconstruction. When I told my friends that I was being deployed to support an emergency humanitarian response in Bangladesh earlier this month, most of them gave me a blank look. “Bangladesh? But…there’s no war there.” Thinking pause. “Or even a famine.” Confused pause. “Is there? Some look sheepish and start digging through their brains for any vague recollection of media reports they may have overheard. Eventually a small number of people seem to remember. “Ah yes, there was a storm there a couple of months ago, right? Something like a tsunami?” Kind of, I nod. Something called tropical cyclone Sidr struck the country’s coastal areas at a speed of more than 155 miles per hour on Nov. 15, ju