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  • Pray For My Health? May Be Not

    Here is something to ponder.

    "In the largest scientific test of its kind, heart surgery patients showed no benefit when strangers prayed for their recovery. And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications. Doctors in the $2.4 million study could only guess why.

    The researchers emphasized that the study could not address God’s existence or answer prayers made on another’s behalf. It looked only for an effect from the specific prayers offered in the research, they said.

    Researchers also said they didn’t know why patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of complications than patients who only knew that such prayers were a possibility.

    Maybe they became anxious by the knowledge that they’d been selected for prayers, Bethea said: "Did the patients think, ‘I am so sick that they had to call in the prayer team?’ "

    The study followed about 1,800 patients at six medical centers. It was financed by the Templeton Foundation, which supports research into science and religion, and one of the participating hospitals. It will appear in Tuesday’s issue of the American Heart Journal.

    Researchers tested the effect of having three Christian groups pray for particular patients, starting the night before surgery and continuing for two weeks.

    The study looked for complications within 30 days of the surgery. Results showed no effect of prayer on complication-free recovery.

    But 59 percent of the patients who knew they were being prayed for developed a complication, versus 52 percent of those who were told it was just a possibility."

  • Start Your Day on A Positive Note ….

    Check out the backwards moving clock at Various Misunderestimations – counting seconds to a Bush free world.   

  • Darkness At Noon

    Although the mystery of eclipses has long  been solved and they no longer cause the fear and trembling that unnerved the primitive man, eclipses continue to fascinate.  A total solar eclipse in particular, is one of the coolest metereological phenomena and also one of the rarest. I saw a total solar eclipse in February of 1980 in New Delhi. We went up to the rooftop terrace of the house at the appointed time and the world went dark for just a few minutes.  But even this short duration of the eclipse was enough to fool the birds – they started flying back to the treetop nests just as they would at dusk. It was an impressive celestial show. 

    Yesterday there was a total solar eclipse visible at various parts of the world cutting a long swath from Brazil to Mongolia. The path of the eclipse by-passed  the United States which will witness the next total solar eclipse in the year 2017. 145608main_eclipse_330

    "Starting at dawn in eastern Brazil, then sweeping across northern Africa and central Asia before ending at sunset in Mongolia, the moon will  block[ed] the light of the sun for several minutes today in a narrow band of territories. Observers in Africa, Europe and Asia who are outside that path will be treated to a partial eclipse.

    Such a total eclipse is relatively rare–the next one for observers in the U.S. will not happen until August 21, 2017–because the moon must cross our planet’s orbital plane exactly when it, Earth and the sun are aligned, and its nighttime side faces us. This eclipse will offer astronomers a chance to study the corona–a super-heated, spectral cloud of emissions surrounding the sun–and NASA scientists have set up camps in Africa to attempt to observe the direction and speed of matter in the solar atmosphere as it is shaped by the sun’s magnetic fields.

    This eclipse is even more special because whereas in most total eclipses totality lasts for less than two minutes, this time the moon will block the sun’s light for more than four minutes in the center of the eclipse path. During those four minutes, the affected swath of land will be completely dark and stars will be visible in the sky, along with the normally indiscernable solar corona.

    NASA has planned a series of webcasts, podcasts and live television coverage of the eclipse from Turkey beginning at 5 A.M. Eastern Standard Time. More information can be found here —David Biello"

    Don’t forget to see the NASA photos.

  • Weapons of Mass Distraction

    When Americans feel bad about themselves – lack of healthcare, public services, educational opportunities, fair wages etc., they tend to vote Democrat.  When they feel angry about others – foreigners (or enemies within) destroying their buildings, jobs or culture, they vote for Republicans. It is no wonder then that Republicans always like to talk the language of war, drumming up jingoistic fervor and invoking marauding hordes of unsavory, faithless "foreigners and fifth columns" at the borders, at airports and in our schools and universties planning and plotting to do us great harm.  The memory of tilting airplanes flying into buldings and the specter of Islamofascists (applicable to Osama not to Saddam) armed with WMDs, nuclear dirty bombs striking in the future have helped the Republicans win the last couple of elections. Karl Rove saw to it – by not letting the public forget for a moment that they were helpless children protected only by the unwavering machismo of George W. Bush and the stoic fortitude of Uncle Cheney. Right up to the 2004 election, the most reliable weapon In Bush – Rove- Cheney’s arsenal of fearmongering was Iraq. But that WMD has since been blunted, dismantled and declared a dud.  Absent the reliable vote getting machinery of Iraq, the Republicans have swiftly and efficiently turned their attention to new enemies – "aliens" from south of the border and homegrown ones lurking maliciously in the heart of secular America. The new battle cry is shrill, ugly and for the most part as laughably deceptive as the imminent Iraqi threat was in 2002. I hope Americans will see through the scare tactics and remember the just wars we need to wage at home and the unjust war in Iraq that we need to bring to an end.

    Examples of the cynical GOP strategy: 

    Republican Brian Kennedy is running for the U.S. House in an Iowa district that is thought to have an illegal immigrant population of fewer than 5,000.

    So why was he recently in Laredo, 1,300 miles to the south, visiting health clinics, meeting with local law enforcement officers and U.S. customs agents, posing for pictures, holding a teleconference with reporters back home and in general underscoring his call to "lock the border"?

    The answer is simple: He sees it as good politics, and national polls seem to back him up as the Senate Judiciary Committee takes up an immigration bill today.  Seventy-one percent of Americans asked say they are more likely to vote for a candidate who favors tighter controls on illegal immigration, compared with 11 percent who would be less likely, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll conducted in mid-March. The poll also found that 59 percent oppose President Bush’s proposal to allow illegal immigrants who hold jobs to apply for legal, temporary worker status.

    AND

    "American society looks down on Christianity, U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay asserted Tuesday at a conference of religious conservatives, but God and Jesus Christ have chosen Christians to stand up for faith.

    DeLay, who is facing tough times of his own, offered a half-hour speech that was part history lesson and part sermon to a crowd of about 300 gathered at a Washington hotel for a two-day conference titled "The War on Christians and the Values Voter in 2006."

    Sugar Land Republican said some commentators — the "chattering classes" — will argue that there is no war on Christianity in this country.

    "But in a sense, there always has been and always will be," he said. "Our faith has always been in direct conflict with the values of the world. We are, after all, a society that provides abortion on demand, has killed millions of innocent children, degrades the institution of marriage and all but treats Christianity like some second-rate superstition."

  • Last Resort? You Decide

    The Bush administration has repeatedly asserted that invading Iraq was not a war of choice but one of last resort. We now know the lies, half truths and cooked intelligence that went into justifying Bush’s "war" – the one he and his cronies had probably planned even when the twin towers in NYC were still intact. First there were the Downing Street memos. Now more evidence has emerged that Bush wanted to attack Iraq, no matter what. When Saddam Hussain’s dreaded WMD’s proved to be non-existent, G.W.B. wanted to precipitate matters by trapping Saddam into  firing at a UN plane  and providing the casus belli  he wanted as a fig leaf….  Only, he was planning to camouflage a US plane to resemble a UN plane !  The discussion between Bush and Blair sounds awfully like a banter between smug and obnoxious middle schoolers discussing strategy for a video game…. Boy George’s fantasy war game.   

    Bush saw Iraq war as inevitable

    "In the weeks before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, as the United States and Britain pressed for a second UN resolution condemning Iraq, President George W. Bush’s public ultimatum to Saddam Hussein was blunt: Disarm or face war.

    But behind closed doors, the president was certain that war was inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made it clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Blair’s top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.

    Stamped "extremely sensitive," the five-page memorandum, which was circulated among a handful of Blair’s most senior aides, had not been made public.  Several highlights were first published in January in a book, "Lawless World," written by a British lawyer and international law professor, Philippe Sands.

    The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Bush predicted that it was "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Blair agreed with that assessment.

    The memo also shows that Bush and Blair acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a U.S. surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Saddam.

    The latest memo is striking in its characterization of frank, almost casual, conversation by Bush and Blair about the most serious subjects. At one point, the leaders swapped ideas for a postwar Iraqi government.
    "As for the future government of Iraq, people would find it very odd if we handed it over to another dictator," Blair is quoted as saying.
    "Bush agreed," Manning wrote.

    At their meeting, Bush and Blair candidly expressed their doubts that chemical, biological or nuclear weapons would be found in Iraq in the coming weeks, the memo said. Bush spoke as if an invasion was unavoidable. The two leaders discussed a timetable for the war, details of the military campaign and plans for the aftermath of the war.
    Bush devoted much of the meeting to outlining the military strategy. The memo says that Bush said the planned air campaign "would destroy Saddam’s command and control quickly." Bush also said he expected the Iraqi Army to "fold very quickly." He also told Blair that the Iraqi Republican Guard would be "decimated by the bombing."

  • Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Fed Up With Playing the Punching Bag for Xenophobes

    According to police estimates, over 500,000 people in Los Angeles marched today to protest HR 4437, a nasty piece of nativist work passed last December by the House of Representatives. The bill makes it a felony crime to be within US borders without US approved documentation. It also authorizes the construction of 700 miles of wall along the roughly 2,000 mile US-Mexican border, an idea, it might be noted, for which historical precedents suggest very poor efficacy (I don’t mean to equate Mexicans with any invading force, just point out to the conservative immigration strategists who do, and who think this wall is a good idea: give me a break). Oddly enough, the bill proposes no such wall along the Canadian border.

    While the wall has gained the most attention in the justifiably offended Mexican press, the item which has gained similar attention in the American press is a definition of "alien smuggling" which would subject those who so much as take a wounded person found near the border to the hospital to a potential 5 year prison term. Humanitarian groups, and most prominently the Catholic Church, have denounced the bill for this morally grotesque provision, which literally makes it a crime to help someone. As a theological matter, the Catholic Church’s concern is understandable, since the alien smuggling provisions read like a series of contradictions to the various biblical commandments regarding foreigners. See, e.g. Exodus 23:9: "Do not oppress the foreigners living among you. You know what it is like to be a foreigner. Remember your own experience in the land of Egypt." (Not that politically conservative evangelicals seem to trouble themselves with careful hermeneutics). As a side, political matter, when I saw the various pieces about Los Angeles Cardinal Mahony’s call to priests and parishoners to disobey the law if it passes, I couldn’t help but think "now, that would be an interesting case to see go before the new Supreme Court line-up." This is not stereotyping of the Catholic Justices on my part; Roberts has specifically said that he would recuse himself in a case where the law required a ruling that the Catholic Church might find immoral. Unfortunately, my concern over the bill becoming law outweighs my curiosity.

    I was one of the 500,000 who marched today. Maybe you can spot me in the picture below:

    La_protest_la_times_pic_1

    Actually, I didn’t make it as far as this intersection, since I was hobbling on a knee with seven or so stitches in it, following a dog attack while jogging yesterday. When I saw the overhead photo after returning home, I was astonished. From below, it looked like this: La_protest_flag_capes_1

    Unfortunately, I was confined to taking pictures of the largest demonstration in Los Angeles history with my cell phone, since, as usual, I had forgotten a camera.

    Many demonstrators carried flags, or wore them as capes. Most carried American flags or Mexican flags, or both, though I also recognized Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Puerto Rico, among others.

    More than the flags, I was taken with the signs, in Spanish and English. Some mass-made ones specifically mentioned HR 4437, demanded general Amnesty for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in America, or declared an end to the topic with "America is a country made for immigrants. Period." Others were personal "I am not a criminal" or "I’m proud to be an immigrant." Some riffed on the historical irony of Anglo Americans calling indigenous or mestizo Mexicans, "aliens." 

    I was particularly taken with the sign of these folks behind me, which might have been carried at one of the demonstrations my grandfather attended in the 1930s. The one on the left says, "Nobody should be criminalized for attempting to survive," while the one in the middle says, "The Masses Will Not Stand for Reactionary Bourgeois Attacks on Working Class." The right one said something or other about the Proletariat (not exactly precise, committed reporting, I know, but imprecision strikes me as appropriate for someone who uses the term "Proletariat" in his signage).

    La_protest_marxist_signs_2 Demonstrators effectively filled downtown, but the center of the march was along Broadway. Those who know Los Angeles may appreciate the symbolic appropriateness of this route, where derelict Art Deco movie palaces abandoned in the middle of the last century now teem with immigrants’ market stalls, selling everything from blue jeans to diamonds to mole negro. Perhaps no other street in Los Angeles makes so transparent Latinos’ contribution to the economy as entrepreneurs and consumers. La_protest_casa_de_india_1

    As in many parts of Los Angeles, such as Koreatown, where I work, some store signs provided evidence of layers of immigration not easily decipherable at first glance. Is the "Casa India," at right, which serves "Indian and Mexican food," run by Indians catering to Mexicans, or Indians who immigrated from Mexico?

    After joining the march for several blocks, my boyfriend and I veered off into the open-air Grand Central Market, where he ate some reputedly very good fish tacos (I didn’t get a taste), and I had a delicious caldo de pescado, filled with fresh tasting fish, carrots, zuchinni, and cilantro. The market was swamped with an enormous variety of people, excited, serious, laughing, cheers occasionally erupting without an obvious trigger. I’ve never been more proud and happy to live in Los Angeles.

  • Five Word Book Reviews. (Thanks, Matt!)

    What I most enjoy writing on this blog are book reviews.(Followed closely by criticisms of the Bush administration). You may have noticed that I publish only positive reviews – books that I would like my readers to read.  But these posts are also the hardest to compose. I always feel that I have to tell everything I liked about a book and its author. So my reviews end up being quite long ( "plot driven" as my daughter commented once) and I spend a considerable amount of time writing, editing and re-editing them. But there are so many books that I have liked or loved which I want to mention here. I cannot possibly hope to review each one in such painstaking manner. So I started thinking about short cuts.

    Luckily, I recently stumbled upon fellow blogger Matt’s brilliant strategy at Cerulean Blue. He had reviewed ten books using just two words for each (four, for one that he had to describe twice) within a single post! Since then I have wanted to emulate his admirable minimalistic style here. But lacking Matt’s talent for economy with words, I was able to only whittle down my wordiness (this introduction is proof enough) to five – for now. I promise to keep trying.

    All books reviewed here are fiction selected from the past reading list of my wonderful book club ["Brightwater Evening Book Club"], which was established seven years and some eighty five books ago – and we are still reading. 

    (Those interested in a more in-depth and informative book review, please visit Professor Amardeep Singh’s blog  where he discusses William Dalrymple’s "City of Djinns",  a truly charming book about Delhi, India – the interesting and historic city of my birth and youth.)

  • Charity Begins And Ends At Home – In The Bush Family

    I am sure everyone remembers the famous quip by Barbara Bush after she made a courtesy call on the stunned and exhausted Katrina evacuees at the Houston Astrodome.

    "[F]ormer First Lady Barbara Bush concluded that the poor people of New Orleans had lucked out.

    "Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them," Mrs. Bush told American Public Media’s "Marketplace" program. On the tape of the interview, Mrs. Bush chuckles.."

    The statement caused the outrage and derision that it deserved. Many concluded that George Bush’s own tone deaf response to the havoc caused by Katrina and his inability to appreciate the extent of the resultant human misery was directly related to his upbringing by parents who were similarly insensitive and self absorbed. 

    Perhaps to make amends for the embarrassing gaffe, Barbara Bush recently donated a sum of money (the amount is undisclosed) to Houston area schools which have taken in a substantial number of children from New Orleans displaced by Katrina.  Except …. there is a catch to this gift giving.  The Houston Chronicle reports that the money was donated with specific instructions that it can only be spent for buying educational software from Ignite Learning – a company owned by her son, Neil Bush.  Why am I not surprised?

    "Former first lady Barbara Bush donated an undisclosed amount of money to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund with specific instructions that the money be spent with an educational software company owned by her son Neil.

    Since then, the Ignite Learning program has been given to eight area schools that took in substantial numbers of Hurricane Katrina evacuees.

    "Mrs. Bush wanted to do something specifically for education and specifically for the thousands of students flooding into the Houston schools," said Jean Becker, former President Bush’s chief of staff.

    Regarding the fact that Bush’s earmarked donation also benefited her son’s company, Becker said, "Mrs. Bush is obviously an enthusiastic supporter of her son. She is genuinely supportive of his program," and has received many letters from educators who support it. Bush "honestly felt this would be a great way to help the (evacuee) students."

  • No Constant Gardener in Sight

    We know well about the outsourcing of glittering hi-tech jobs to India and manufacturing ones to China. The justification is the easy availablity of well trained, hardworking, disciplined labor forces willing to work for less than the average worker in the west.  What is less well known is that these hugely populous nations, with large numbers of uneducated rural poor are also the "beneficiaries" of another kind of outsourcing. One that neither the Indian and Chinese, nor the western governments want to advertise from the rooftops. These countries serve as guinea pigs for western pharmaceutical companies, with the consent of the host governments. Phase III drug trials for diabetes, stroke and other diseases, requiring thousands of "volunteers" are conducted in India, China and Brazil on the mostly uneducated, probably unsuspecting and definitely unsophisticated rural poor. To attract the fees associated with human clinical trials, the Indian government has recently relaxed restrictions that used to earlier require companies to demonstrate the safety of the drugs in  phase I and II trials. The drug testing is conducted with little oversight and the lure of money and perks for participation, like holidays in Hawaii, is turning several local doctors into enthusiastic "researchers".

    The town of Sevagram in central India has long been known for three things: its heat, which is oppressive even by Indian standards; its snakes, which are abundant; and its ashram, a derelict and increasingly malarial retreat preserved as a tribute to Mohandas Gandhi, who lived here… Last year, Sevagram began garnering even more cachet. A German pharmaceutical company called Boehringer Ingelheim, whose latest stroke-prevention drug was making its way through the clinical pipeline, approved the town’s hospital as a trial site……

    [D]eveloping countries have been scrambling to catch Big Pharma’s eye – India most aggressively of all. Like high tech call centers and software farms, which were meant to transform India’s computer industry by creating skilled workers and a stockpile of modern equipment, drug trial outsourcing is seen as the fast route to economic and scientific growth – a money train that the country can’t afford to miss. With this in mind, the government is working to advertise India’s most pharmacologically appealing qualities, notably its doctors (English-speaking and educated abroad) and its vast number of ailing patients – 32 million diabetics alone. Many of these patients are also, in the delicate parlance of the drug world, "treatment naive," meaning they’ve never taken any medication for their illnesses. This is a perk for trial managers, because it lowers the risk of unforeseen drug inter­actions and avoids the troublesome process of weaning patients off one medication and onto another.

    Last year, the government took a more controversial step, amending a long-standing law that limited the kind of trials that foreign pharmaceutical companies could conduct. That law allowed companies to test drugs on Indian patients only after the drugs had been proven safe in trials conducted in the country of origin. In January, the government threw out that constraint. India, the brilliant hub of outsourced labor, was positioning itself in a newly lucrative role: guinea pig to the world.

    Rest of the story here.

  • Friedmania – Liberal Sadism At the NYT

    The New York Times was the most conspicuous cheerleader for the Iraq war among major national news outlets. Judith Miller of NYT played the dedicated moll to the Bush administration's gangsters and the criminal Ahmed Chalabi.  She was jettisoned by her patrons only after it was revealed (mostly due to the dogged reporting by bloggers) how "close" she was to her "sources". William Safire, another neo-con (or paleo-con) on the newspaper's editorial staff has retired and we will be spared his verbosity and repugnant views of the world, especially the middle east. 

    There still remains a dangerous voice on the NYT's editorial page. Thomas Friedman, who pontificates on the state of the world from several sides of his mouth is even more dangerous than the conservative and libertarian commentators because he masquerades as a liberal. His penchant for contradictory non-sense and half truths is appalling. Friedman was one of the first to climb the "new" China-India bandwagon. He paints a one sided picture of India – of gleaming high tech cities, savvy middle class consumers, a cheerful, disciplined "English speaking" work force (perfect for outsourcing jobs by US companies) and math and engineering whizzes marching to a glorious Asian sun rise. What he does not describe is the India where the majority still lives in poverty relying on a poor and shaky infrastructure of unreliable basic services. Where elected leaders are often corrupt. Where drinking water is not always safe or easily available and the war against AIDS and other communicable diseases is being fought by a valiant few with meager resources. Friedman's China is all Shanghai high rises and super highways appearing overnight. He completely ignores the high handed, ruthless manner in which the totalitarian government of China brings about some of these economic miracles by wiping out villages and polluting the countryside.

    Friedman has supported the Iraq war from the beginning although of late, he has taken to criticizing the Bush administration's inept handling of it. His views on Iraq have been transparently dishonest – mixed signals of the velvet glove and the iron fist. Now that there is no sane solution left and no meaningful "open letter" to Bush and his cronies to compose, he has suggested the bloodiest solution so far.  In his latest article in the New York Times (sorry, a Times Select link), Friedman slyly suggests that in order to solve the "Iran Problem", the latest bee in Bush's bonnet, the US should consider abandoning Iraq in its current unstable state.  Not because the war is looking  increasingly more costly and useless in terms of US and Iraqi lives and resources, but because Friedman believes that Iraq in the midst of a sectarian civil war will be a nightmare on Iran's doorstep.  Iran will be so consumed by trying to keep a violent Shia – Sunni strife spilling over into its own borders that its threat to the US (and its allies) will be effectively neutralized. Friedman is betting on the historical Persian- Arab rivalry raising its ugly head and resulting in mutual bloodshed.  US will have thus killed two birds without firing a single more shot because the birds themselves will tear each other apart ! So much for peace and democracy in the middle east. Friedman says all this with a straight face and an avuncular calm that is as disgusting as it is unsurprising to those of us who have never been charmed by his one sided simplistic solutions to complex world matters. Marie Antoinette's naive "Let them eat cake" was not as heartless as Friedman's calculated and callous "Let the Muslims slaughter each other" solution.

    Since the link I have provided to the article will not open to the full article for many readers, here is a link to a detailed analysis of the article from another source.

    (more…)

  • Splitting Hairs

    On the third anniversary of the Iraq war, George Bush discussed the war in Iraq and on global terrorism in Cleveland Ohio today – part of the White House’s efforts to "set the facts straight". After his speech Bush took questions from an audience which for a change, consisted of ordinary members of the public and not handpicked partisans.

    "Q. Mr. President, at the beginning of your talk today you mentioned that you understand why Americans have had their confidence shaken by the events in Iraq. And I’d like to ask you about events that occurred three years ago that might also explain why confidence has been shaken. Before we went to war in Iraq we said there were three main reasons for going to war in Iraq: weapons of mass destruction, the claim that Iraq was sponsoring terrorists who had attacked us on 9/11, and that Iraq had purchased nuclear materials from Niger. All three of those turned out to be false. My question is, how do we restore confidence that Americans may have in their leaders and to be sure that the information they are getting now is correct?

    THE PRESIDENT: That’s a great question. (Applause.) First, just if I might correct a misperception. I don’t think we ever said — at least I know I didn’t say that there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein. We did say that he was a state sponsor of terror — by the way, not declared a state sponsor of terror by me, but declared by other administrations. We also did say that Zarqawi, the man who is now wreaking havoc and killing innocent life, was in Iraq. And so the state sponsor of terror was a declaration by a previous administration. But I don’t want to be argumentative, but I was very careful never to say that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks on America."

    Okay, Mr. President.  But you did say this in your State of the Union Address in 2003. What’s the significant difference between making a sly innuendo and saying it in so many words? A majority of Americans connected the deliberately misleading dots and came to the conclusion you wanted them to come to.

    "With nuclear arms or a full arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, Saddam Hussein could resume his ambitions of conquest in the Middle East and create deadly havoc in that region. And this Congress and the America people must recognize another threat. Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own."

  • Freakish Blog Event! Please Help

    I NEED HELP FROM WEB SAVVY READERS.

    This morning, I discovered a blog by clicking on the referring URL of a reader from Muscat, Oman.  It took me to a blog which looks just like mine, including the blog description but is called "Manoj Blogger".  As it happens (and this really freaked me out), Manoj is the name of my brother-in-law, who is a reputed journalist in India with an official archival blog which is at: http://mjoshi.blogspot.com  My brother-in-law, Manoj Joshi provides a link to my blog on his page.

    This other blog is quite empty and if you click on its banner name (Manoj Blog), it brings you HERE -to Accidental Blogger ! When you go to this blog, the address on the browser that shows up, is of THIS blog – Accidental Blogger. What is this person up to? How has he/she hijacked my address? The creepy blog’s address reads:  http://mrk1008.blogspot.com

    Can someone please tell me what is going on?  And should I worry?

  • Andrea Yates : Five Years Later

    Remember Andrea Yates?  The Houston woman who on June 20, 2001 systematically drowned her five young children in the bath tub and then calmly called the police?  She is up for retrial. She will be tried a second time for the murders and her insanity or the lack of it will again be an issue. The defense lawyers are expected to argue aggressively that Andrea needs treatment, not incarceration.  The prosecution will argue that she knew what she was doing. The most damning evidence against Andrea is the 911 phone call she made after she killed the children. Much more has become known about the Yates family in the intervening years. But there is no change in Texas insanity laws. So Andrea will be retried with the same evidence under the same laws.

    "Between 2001 and 2004, four Texas women became famous — notorious, actually — for the deaths they inflicted on their children. Two opted for drowning, one grabbed a knife and the other used a heavy rock. But their choice of method was less significant than the method in their madness. All were convinced they were doing right by their children, according to their attorneys. So intense was their disturbed mental state that it was capable of overpowering the strongest, most basic human instinct.

    In the aftermath of their horrific acts, the most pertinent question was not the most obvious one. Why they did it was not really answerable except in the vaguest of ways: They’re insane. Of greater urgency was the one thrown in the lap of the legal system: What to do with them?  In each case, prosecutors offered the same response: Try them, convict them, send them to prison — save for the case of Andrea Yates, where they chose the extreme option of attempting to have her executed. Even a Harris County jury would not agree to that, convicting her of capital murder and giving her a life sentence for drowning her children in the bathtub of their Clear Lake home.

    This week a new jury is expected to begin wrestling with that issue again as Yates stands trial a second time. Her 2002 conviction was thrown out because of erroneous testimony by a psychiatrist.

    Although they won a conviction in the Yates case, prosecutors have had less luck with the others. Deanna Laney, who bludgeoned two sons to death outside of their Tyler home in 2003, was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Lisa Diaz of Plano, who drowned her two daughters later that year, received the same verdict. Last month, Dena Schlosser’s trial ended in a hung jury, with 11 voting for acquittal. Prosecutors intend to retry Schlosser, also from Plano, who cut off her infant daughter’s arms in 2004.

    "The fact that you have different results in these cases is itself a problem," said Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who has written about the insanity defense. "I’ve yet to meet anyone who seriously argues Andrea Yates was not insane. But by sticking to a rigid standard of only knowing right and wrong, you exclude the most common forms of insanity: people responding to evil voices."

    Damning phone call

    Texas law requires only that the jury find that the defendant knew his or her conduct was wrong. The fact that Yates called police after drowning her children indicates that, at least, she understood that society considered it wrong. Such knowledge often trumps an otherwise delusional state.

    "People like Yates may very well be able to articulate that they knew what they were doing was wrong," Turley said, "yet they were unable to keep from yielding to an irresistible impulse."

    Turley and others argue that the insanity definition should be broadened to where it used to be. Juries used to be allowed to consider irresistible impulse. That was the basis upon which John Hinckley was found not guilty of the attempted assassination of President Reagan."

    From the very beginning public opinion about Andrea Yates has been evenly divided between those who saw  a monstrous murderer and those who recognized in Andrea a severely disturbed individual who needed psychiatric care urgently. No one doubts Andrea’s sickness – she had attempted suicide twice and had been treated for mental illness several times. No one questions the fact that she killed her children. The disagreement is over "why". Andrea’s husband Rusty Yates is the most enigmatic character in this sordid saga. It is very puzzling why Rusty – a seemingly clean cut, sane, devoutly Christian NASA engineer who lived day in and day out with this woman, did so little to help her. Family members and friends of the Yates saw a zoned out, paranoid Andrea who for some time before the murders, had even stopped caring for her personal hygiene. Many of them alerted Rusty to the alarming deterioration in Andrea’s personality and asked him to take her to the doctor.

    "You’ve got a pre-June 20th Rusty and a post-June 20th Rusty," said Bob Holmes, who met Yates in 1989, when the couple was dating. Holmes is counted among those who knew the couple and who question the way he dealt with his wife’s mental illness, which seemed to materialize in their marriage after the birth of their fourth child, Luke.

    "Did he lose his children? Yes. Do I feel bad for him? Absolutely," said Holmes, who along with his wife, Debbie, met then-Andrea Kennedy 20 years ago. "But he’s the one person who could have stopped it."

    Thirteen days before she systematically drowned her children, Bob Holmes saw the Yates family in the grocery store. The woman he had known for years as a "24/7" mom was alone with a cart. Her children, who had always gathered around her, grouped around their father.

    "She looked like a paranoid animal," Holmes recalled. "A dangerous animal. If you see a dog in the corner, with that kind of look, do you care what’s going on in his head? She was very scary during that period."

    The second criminal trial of Andrea Yates begins this Monday.  Houstonians will be watching it with as much interest as the Enron trial which is currently under way.  And what about Rusty?  Well, he just got married again.