Day: October 9, 2001

New York to Celebrities: Please Stay Away from Ground Zero

MSNBC reports that so many celebrities have tried to make their way to the World Trade Center disaster zone that New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s office has asked celebrities to stay away, noting that they are often a distraction.

One of the offenders seems to be the most annoying woman in show business, Barbara Walters.

As for the famous, slipping through the three main police checkpoints surrounding the site has been relatively easy. Walters stopped by on September 16 with two cousins, one of whom lost a nephew in the disaster. Without obtaining permission, the ABC News personality was allowed access and toured the area for 15 minutes, even stopping to take a picture with an ironworker.

The one celebrity that really floored me was Don King. What the hell does Don King need to be doing traipsing around the rubble of the tower?

On the brighter side, the MSNBC article does note that a few stars have shown up and done good deeds without demanding the full tour of ground zero. Elton John, for example, showed up at the command center for the recovery effort and handed out food without demanding that he get his picture taken with the rubble.

Kofi Annan Concerned about U.S. Statements (or, 800,000 Dead Rwandan’s Can’t Be Wrong)

Reuters is reporting that United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan told reporters that he and others world leaders were “disturbed” by a letter in which John Negroponte, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said that the United States may eventually have to widen the war against terrorism to include attacks on countries other than Afghanistan (likely Iraq, Sudan, and/or Somalia). Specifically, Annan pointed to a line in Negroponte’s letter that said, “We may find that our self-defense requires further action with respect to other organizations and other states.”

Normally, I might give some credence to Annan’s concerns, but unfortunately the UN Secretary General has a history of being “disturbed” at efforts to defend people from butchers.

In 1994, for example, Maj. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, then head of a UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, practically begged Annan intervene to prevent genocide. Daillaire had received reliable information about preparations for mass killings of Tutsis in that country. Annan, and then U.S. president Bill Clinton, firmly denied Dallaire’s requests and Annan couldn’t even be bothered to speak out publicly about what he knew until the genocide was well underway.

So Much for ‘Surgical’ Air Strikes

On Sunday I was watching coverage of the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan and cringed as the broadcasters wholeheartedly adopted the military lingo about ‘surgical strikes’ and ‘precision’ bombings. But as MSNBC reports, even if these bombs and missile were that accurate (and we know from the Gulf War post-mortems that they are not), inevitably civilians will die from this precision bombing.

In this case, the U.S. managed to kill several United Nations aid workers in an incident eerily similar to the bombing of the Chinese embassy during the Kosovo war. Apparently the building the UN aid workers were staying at had been used as a radio station in the early 1990s, but was no longer being used in that capacity.

Besides which, I still don’t understand the U.S. rationalization that a radio or television station is a legitimate military target. If so, are newspapers and printing presses also legitimate targets?

As for the American media, I had to laugh at the current obsession CNN and other news outlets seem to have with the Arab satellite news channel, Al-Jazira (anyone out there have any idea on the correct spelling)? Most of the coverage seems to be geared toward portraying the news channel as biased against the United States.

But it’s hard to take accusations of bias seriously from networks who run graphics of waving American flags and red, white and blue ribbons along the bottom of the screen during their broadcasts.

South Africa Suppresses AIDS Report; United Nations Warns of Epidemic in Asia

A report that the government of South Africa tried to suppress indicates that AIDS is now the number one killer in that nation. Meanwhile, a United Nations report suggests that the AIDS epidemic is starting to hit Asia.

South Africa’s Medical Research Council prepared a report on the extent of the AIDS epidemic in that nation that was finished earlier this year. The government of Thabo Mbeki, however, suppressed the report and refused to allow it to be released. Somebody recently leaked a copy of the report to Johannesburg’s Mail and Guardian.

The report indicates that in 2000, one of every four deaths in South Africa was caused by AIDS, making it the single largest cause of death. Unless something is done about the epidemic, by 2010 it will have killed 5 to 10 million people.

“Without treatment to prevent AIDS,” the report claimed, “the number of AIDS deaths can be expected to grow within the next 10 years to more than double the number of deaths due to all other causes.”

The report called for widespread use of anti-AIDS drugs, which so far the Mbeki government has rejected.

Meanwhile, ahead of the 6th International Congress on AIDS in Asia, the United Nations released a report that the AIDS epidemic is beginning to spiral out of control in that region of the world.

The UN considers AIDS to be an epidemic if infection rates exceed 2 percent of the adult population of a country. In Burma, 7 percent of the adults are infected with the disease, while along the borders of China and Thailand, the infection rate is believed to be above 10 percent.

Yet despite the fact that about 40 percent of all people infected with AIDS worldwide live in Asia, most Asian countries have so far refused to recognize that the disease poses a major threat.

Source:

Asia warned of AIDS epidemic. Larry Jagan, The BBC, October 5, 2001.

AIDS ‘leading killer’ in South Africa. The BBC, October 5, 2001.

Huntingdon Life Sciences to Become Life Sciences Research in Effort Aimed to Thwart Animal Rights Activists

Huntingdon Life Sciences has apparently found what it think is a solution to at least some of the problems it faces by being chartered in Great Britain and have its stock grade on the London Stock Exchange. A company, Life Sciences Research Inc. has been set up for the purpose of acquiring all Huntingdon Life Sciences stock.

Assuming this goes through, current Huntingdon Life Sciences stock will be converted into stock for Life Sciences Research. Rather than be listed on the London Stock Exchange, the new company will be listed on the NASDAQ Over the COunter Bulletin Board.

In a press release, Andrew Baker, Huntingdon’s Executive Chairman, said the move was being made both for long term strategic reasons as well as because of a more favorable regulatory climate in the United States. Baker said,

The US securities markets offer both a more developed market for our industry and greater shareholder privacy, which, as everyone is aware, has been a serious issue for our shareholder.

Brian Cass, Huntingdon’s Managing Director added, “This transaction offers us the best of both worlds, with the benefits of an American stock trading facility, and the continuance of our existing UK and US laboratory operations.”

Source:

Huntingdon and LSR Announce Transaction. Huntingdon Life Sciences, Press Release, Business Wire, October 9, 2001.

Does a Genetic Disorder Cause Some Anorexia Cases?

A claim popularized by feminists is that anorexia (and other eating disorders) are caused by unhealthy media images of thin women. In the past decade this claim has been undermined by cross-cultural studies of societies with very different ideal female body images, but a recent Dutch survey is the first to provide any evidence that anorexia may have a genetic as well as psychological component.

American researchers began by studying mice who experience an eating disorder similar to anorexia. Research determined that the mice were deficient in a protein called agouti, which was involved in the formation of skin pigment. The substance had a second use, however — its presence in the brain was necessary to stimulate the mice to eat. Those mice who produced too little of this protein suffered from an anorexia-like eating disorder.

Dutch researchers then turned to human beings. Taking blood samples from 145 patients diagnosed with anorexia, the researchers found that 16 of the patients had genetic mutations of the gene that produces the agouti protein in human beings.

This follows up on earlier research that found high risks of anorexia in people whose relatives also suffered from the disorder. According to the BBC, studies of twins have shown that when one twin suffers from anorexia, the other twin has an extremely high 50 percent risk of suffering from anorexia as well. Having a family member who suffers from anorexia increases the risks of suffering from the disorder from 1 in 200 to 1 in 30.

Rather than being simplistically caused by images of thin females in the media, anorexia is turning out to be a very complex disorder with a number of likely factors contributing to its development.

Source:

Anorexia ‘has genetic basis’. Marlene Smits, The BBC, October 7, 2001.