AIDS Is A Politic Problem ?

[RedWine]

I got a very nice letter (article) from Matt Bina.I put it here cuz i know you like to know more about Iran and about what's goin' on in our country.you read it and you just think about it.

Thx.

All Iranian Denial Syndrome (AIDS)
At this rate it won't be long before we will witness in Iran what happened to Yugoslavia


Why won't Iran ever advance? As far as I can look back in our history, I see that the only Golden Times of our country was 2500 years ago when Korosh Hakhamaneshi became the ruler of Persia and made his dynasty an ever more powerful nation with liberty, Justice and freedom for her citizens.

But shortly after his death, the decline of Iran began and ever since, Iran has been reducing in size and Majesty and we have lost piece by piece from that empire that Korosh had created down to the small nation that we are left today. King after King have come and gone! Dynasty after Dynasty have come and gone! Until 1979, after 2500+ years of Kingdom, when the Iranian people saw that perhaps, just perhaps, the Kingdom may have been the problem!

So we celebrated the new arrival, of this baby that we named "Islamic Republic"! Well the baby is now 26 years old! So what's the deal? Why are things still so messed up over there? It's not a Kingdom anymore and yet things are still not golden! Relatively speaking the baby is still very young, but it appears that the baby has to be placed in the ICU! The baby is sick! And the Doctors have no clue how to fix her! Do we need another 2500 years to decide?

The fact of the matter is, this disease is just like AIDS but with different words comprising this acronym, it stands for All Iranian Denial Syndrome (AIDS), and we don't know how to treat it. And as long as we don't acknowledge the disease, fixing the symptoms won't cure anything! Sometimes I feel that we don't really want to cure ourselves and we rather live with this disease until death. After all if we get rid of its crippling "Me-Manship" no sorry it's "Me-and-only-Me-Manship" symptoms, what will we do with ourselves all day and all year? Year after year! What will keep us busy and occupy us? And don't you know it ... there is a method to this madness!

If I were to diagnose from the symptoms, I would say that our sub-conscious goal must be to rid Iran of her entirety! And in few more years we'll achieve just that ... after all look at the history! At this rate it won't be long before we will witness what happened to Yugoslavia to unfold exactly in Iran. And many countries such as Kurdistan, Khuzestan, Azerbaijan and others will emerge sooner than you think from her! And not a moment too soon either, my beloved countrymen! More power to you! At least then perhaps you can save yourselves from a total devastation to such countries like Amricaestan, and Engeleesestan!

I would only hope that they are smarter than bringing a foreign occupying force just like this deadly virus into their newly established countries like we did to mess things up again! After all when infected with this AIDS, the ultimate is either death or a day-to-day living at its best. So what does the progress report say for today Doc? Well, we have a new pill on the market called Ahmadinejad with promising results but with only laboratory studies! Take two pills every 8 hours for the next four years! Of course that is if you are still alive!

And if you are lucky enough to die, then you won't have to worry about any of this and it won't concern you anyway. Just like those billion or two before you, that have been coming and going in the past 2500+ years! And where they ended up has no boundaries that would separate them into counties (Bakhshha), states (Ostanha), countries (Keshvarha) or even continents (Ghareha)! There is no occupying force and there are no diseases!

So why don't we give up? Why do we try to continue on? Why can't we Iranian see what awaits all of us on this path to hell and quietly ponder? The keyword is the word "quietly" here! Why does each one of us feel like we have to be the loudest to scream on top of our lungs to convince other Iranians that I am right and they are wrong? Does it matter who is right or semi-right or even wrong? We all are infected with this thing called HIV (Homeless Iranians Virus) and we are all dying anyway! Is that a shocker to you? Well don't despair my friends, If you like I can sugar coat it for you a bit!

... their heart wrenching stories ... their hopes and dreams ... their analytical mambo-jumbos from politics to you name it and on and on and on! But no one can give me a cure! No one can offer a pill to heal my pains of this woman that I have fallen in love head over heels with ... called "Iran"! And all I have to take is this new laboratory pill called ANP (Ahmadinejad's Promise) till the next pills come on the market. Meanwhile I will let you know what happens in heaven if I happen to get there before you!

[ProudPersian]

Another 2500 years or another 2500000000000 years, Iran will not change. It doesn't matter whether his name is Mohammad and the Arabs, Mohammad Reza Shah, or Ayatollah Khomeini, they all have worked to destroy our Iranian culture and constrict our nation. Look Iran is the birth place of Algebra (the arabs like to take credit for this), many other branches of math, the first battery, zoroastrianism, baha'i faith, and many sciences. Iran has more poets and carpets than the rest of the world combined. Iran is where great leaders like Kuroush and Dariush emerged. Leaders who first minted coins, who set up banks, built the first Suez Canal which the Egyptians never could. AND LOOK WHERE IRAN IS TODAY!!
As Bill Gates said, if the operating system is inefficent then the whole system will not function properly, not matter how good it is. If Iran could unite under a strong, secular and nationalist leader it could rebuild itself. Like I always say, if the will of an entire natin is there, nothing will stop them from prospering. BUt AIDS is exactly why Iran never has prospered, Iranians deny it. Most Iranians I talk to say that the Islamic Republic is only a phase in the history of Iran. I wonder am I the only one who wants to change Iran.
And whats with all the BS around with, Persians, Azeris, Armenians, Kurds, Gilanis, Gilakis, Qashqai's and so on. These ethnic groups emerged later in Iranian history, mainly as a result of the alienation caused by invaders. At heart we are all Iranians, descended from the Aryans of ancient Iran. If we let all this sectionalism split Iran up, what will we have left?

[RedWine]

ProudPersian said : As Bill Gates said, if the operating system is inefficent then the whole system will not function properly, not matter how good it is.

100% is true.!

[ProudPersian]

thx Red Wine, chegad topic e jaleb hamash mezari

[RedWine]

thx Red Wine, chegad topic e jaleb hamash mezari

Khosh halam keh dosst dari. :) barayeh man,mohem ineh keh share konam un chizi ro keh midoonam ba to va baghieh va khodam ham chizi yad begiram.

[RedWine]

I WAS recently part of a group of 200 people attending the VII Asia-Pacific Regional Confer-ence of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies hosted by the Singapore Red Cross Society in a hotel ballroom just a little distance away from the twinkling Christmas lights and window displays of Orchard Road.

I was there as part of the Malaysian delegation.

Before the opening ceremony, a roll call confirmed that in all 44 countries were being represented.

Notably missing was a delegation from Iraq. Notably present – for the first time – were Palestine, Israel and Timor Leste.

I was awestruck that such a gathering of people from so many nations around the world were in that ballroom.

Despite the friendly banter and the odd burst of laughter, this was actually no social event.

I realised that this was a serious meeting after I had flipped through the literature in our (very heavy) delegates' bags and read that:

“The global challenges confronting the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies are mounting every day. HIV/AIDS is killing over 8,000 people a day. More than one billion people live on less than US$1 (RM3.59) a day. Every day, 30,000 children under the age of five die. Far too many of them are killed by preventable diseases. Access to basic health services and clean water is still a dream for the majority of the world’s population.”

I tried to read on but the lights were dimmed. Slowly, little girls carrying tea lights walked in. The Singapore Red Cross choir sang two songs and then the little girls gave the tea lights they were carrying to the VIPs in the front row.

It was a simple gesture but full of symbolism: we can - together - bring light and hope to those whose lives are filled with darkness and misery.

The plenary sessions were focused on serious topics but lunch was an opportunity to relax.

On the first day, I sat at a table with Fatima, a delegate from Afghanistan. There were so many things I wanted to ask her.

When a woman delegate from Iran joined us, Fatima told me that many Afghan women of her generation were educated in Iran. Her eyes flashed fire when she spoke about her country's proud history.

At the first day of the conference, “the Federation” was mentioned many times and although I tried my best to be serious, a part of my sillier mind wandered far enough to remind me that the only other time I had heard references made to “The Federation” and where citizens from different places sat together in council were in the Star Wars movies. Except that in Star Wars, the different “peoples” had fish-like heads atop their shoulders, or, like Queen Amidala, had strange make-up and hair.

The women I saw around me weren't the sorts who would spend hours at their dressing table mirrors, but they were among many at the conference who would have had extraordinary experiences.

The more serious side of me did note that what was truly amazing about this conference were not the impressive-sounding titles that the speakers held: For example, Margareta Wahlstrom, the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs; Dr Ta-keshi Kasai, the Regional Adviser on Communicable Di-sease Surveillance and Res-ponse from the World Health Organisation; Gerard Ee, Chair-man of the National Kidney Foundation of Singapore; or Lady Keith from the Inter-national Federation Health and Care Commission.

It was obvious that there was no place for egos here. It didn't matter what our professions or social standings were.

Here we had common goals. Here we were learning about ways to serve our communities at home or help others far from us.

I remember looking around at lunch, as people from different countries sat together at the tables, and wishfully thinking if only we could capture the magic of just that one moment, put it in a bottle, and send it to countries where there is so much anger, hatred and intolerance.

Unfortunately, magic doesn't exist, reality does.

As Lt-Gen Winston Choo, Rtd, Chairman of the Singapore Red Crescent said in his message: “Our 100 million members and volunteers enable us to reach out and meet the needs of the most vulnerable in our region and beyond ... we are from the most diverse, populated and disaster prone regions ... the Final Conference Document shall hopefully express our collective resolve to make a significant difference ... to those we serve.”

The words “to those we serve” reflect one of the goals that all Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies hope to achieve. It was also reassuring for me to know that one of the fundamental principles of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is “Impartiality,” which is defined as making “no discrimination as to nationality, race, religious beliefs, class or political opinions. It endeavours to relieve the suffering of individuals, being guided solely by their needs, and to give priority to the most urgent cases of distress.”

After the conference, I walked past the hotel where I had spent many hours talking to people from other countries. When I saw the brightly-lit Christmas tree in the lobby, I felt a certain sadness as I reflected on being part of a wonderful group of people from around the world who shared one common aim: to serve humanity.

[donsaeid]

thanx for article

AIDS - HIV = http://www.tapesh.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3430

[Khorsheed]

yup! i posted this there :D

[RedWine]

Is ok here. anyway i wanted to post more about that and his relation with islamic akhounds in Iran politic system !

[RedWine]

Twenty years ago, in 1986, I started injecting drugs. First it was cocaine, then heroin. Unbeknownst to me at that time, it had already been five years since public health officials first identified the disease we now call AIDS. My ignorance almost killed me.

And it was abetted by the media, which even now covers IV drug use-related AIDS as an afterthought, despite the fact that it drives the fastest growing epidemics in the world today and was almost entirely responsible for giving the virus a foothold in American minority communities. Though "down low" homosexuality has lately gotten media attention as a source of HIV transmission to heterosexuals, in fact, this has only become important as IV-drug use related AIDS declines.

In the 80's and 90's in New York (the IV drug use capital of the U.S.), 80% of heterosexual infections and a similar proportion of pediatric AIDS cases originated in infections acquired through IV drug use.

But activists pressed to educate addicts and to make clean needles available and saw remarkable success. In the 90's in New York city, 50% or more of the city's roughly 200,000 drug injectors were HIV positive. Today, the city estimates that only between 7 and 20% [pdf] are infected.

When I was injecting, so-called "addiction experts" claimed that addicts wouldn't protect themselves, that it was useless to provide clean needles or instructions on avoiding needle-sharing because addicts were always reckless and desperate. We were also supposed to be selfish pigs when it came to drugs-- but somehow simultaneously, peace- and-love hippies who enjoyed sharing needles as a "sub-cultural ritual."

Because I was shooting up myself, I knew that this wasn't true. The moment a health educator who happened to be visiting from San Francisco taught me about AIDS, I changed my behavior. I already avoided sharing when possible because it's icky (kind of like using someone else's tampon applicator) and because a fresh needle gives a better high because it's sharper.

After I learned about AIDS, the times I did share, I cleaned the needle with bleach extensively first. Though this has now been found not to eliminate HIV risk, it does dramatically reduce it-- and given how many addicts were infected in NYC when I was using, I do believe that outreach worker may have saved my life with her advice.

Tragically, however, the U.S. still bans federal funding for needle exchange and education programs-- and tries to prevent other nations and its own states from doing it. Research published in the Lancet suggested that 20,000 HIV infections in children, addicts' sex partners and addicts themselves could have been prevented with earlier and more widespread clean needle programs here.

Nonetheless, despite the fact that every scientific and academic body that has ever looked at the needle exchange research has concluded that clean needles save lives, despite the fact that clean needle programs are one of the best-supported practices in public health, the U.S. continues to oppose them. Even China and Iran are doing it now-- but America still places superstition higher than science.

And across the river from New York, New Jersey remains the one state in the union that bans even private organizations from carrying out needle exchange programs. In New Jersey, just under half of the state's infections (45%) are related to IV drug use, which is twice the national average. More than three-quarters of these cases are amongst ethnic minorities.

So, if you want to do something meaningful for World AIDS Day, give a New Jersey legislator a call or email and tell him or her to support Senate Bills 494 and 823 and their counterparts in the Assembly, Assembly Bills 1852 and 2839-- or donate to the Dogwood Center, which has done a great deal of important activism on this issue.

I managed to recover from my addiction-- but only because someone thought my life was worth saving before I was ready to stop using. How many others aren't being given that chance? And how can anyone think that it is "moral" to deny it to them?

[RedWine]

The world is deluged with anti-American propaganda. There is a persistent claim in Latin America that Americans are kidnapping babies and bringing them to the United States to harvest their organs for transplants into American children. There is a worldwide tale that the HIV virus, and therefore AIDS, was created by American military scientists at Fort Detrick, Md.

Millions of people around the world have not only heard this evil nonsense — they believe it.
Most of the United States bashing began early in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, which painted the United States in the blackest possible terms and invented outrageous stories — if its usual exaggerations about real U.S. policies and social issues were not doing enough damage.
The collapse of the Soviet Union did not bring an end to anti-American propaganda. Die-hard Marxists scattered throughout the educational establishment in Europe and elsewhere are always ready to condemn the United States as the source of the world's ills. And many of the earlier fictions invented by the Soviet propaganda apparatus, including the "baby parts" and "AIDS" fantasies, are still being circulated and believed outside our borders.
In his book "The Case for Democracy," Natan Scharansky described the need for a dictator to shift attention away from the misery of his people by creating foreign enemies. The "enemy" of choice has generally been the world's most powerful democracy, the United States, and the vitriol spewing in our direction overseas has become extreme, whether it arises from Cuba, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Belarus or incipient dictatorships such as the one in Venezuela.
Clearly, though, the most dangerous anti-American propaganda has been flooding the Islamic world from radical "madrasses," or Muslim seminaries, and such hateful sources as the Iranian government and al-Qaida. The government of Iran, and the unelected religious dictatorship that supports it, provides money and training for organized terror organizations. What remains of al-Qaida provides encouragement and incitement to individuals and less clearly defined but equally murderous groups.
The radical madrasses have convinced a sizable segment of young Muslim men that the West is evil and that the United States is the Great Satan that leads the West and must be destroyed before the world can be ruled by Islam.
In Europe, the phrase "the '68 generation" is understood to mean a generation of university students radicalized by the war in Vietnam in emulation of the anti-war movement in the United States. In Europe and beyond, those students became teachers whose limited views of the United States were frozen in a '68 time warp.
Unlike American secondary schools, those in much of Europe do not rely on standardized texts for language instruction, but rather on magazine articles and other copied materials chosen by the teachers. Exposure to American life in English classes taught by faithful members of the '68 generation invariably focuses on "problem areas" — slavery, racism, the persecution of Native Americans, crime and the death penalty.
An unemployed Danish drifter named Jacob Holdt traveled around the United States in the early '70s taking photographs of the underprivileged, primarily black Americans. Revealed later as a Soviet "agent of influence," he published a collection of the photos in 1977, along with commentary describing his travels in a book entitled "Amerikanske Billeder," or "American Pictures."
He converted the book into a slide- show presentation for Danish schools and into a full-length motion picture for schools throughout Europe as part of a highly successful industry depicting the United States as a hellhole of racial discrimination and impoverished minorities.
Holdt's heir in the field of misrepresentation of the United States through distortion of documentary materials is Michael Moore, an effective ideologue who produces one-sided political screeds. Moore's films, in particular "Bowling for Columbine" and "Fahrenheit 9/11," have been enormously popular overseas because they seem to confirm the judgment of the '68 generation that the United States is a militaristic, unprincipled den of robber-baron capitalists intent upon conquering the world.
The American film and television industries have conquered the world. However, ask the average foreigner what he associates with Chicago, and he probably will tell you Al Capone. If the subject is Miami, the response will probably be "Miami Vice" — or perhaps now "CSI: Miami."
These are unintended but real effects, and they all link crime and corruption with American cities and American life.
Gunslinger image
President Bill Clinton approved the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1998 with the full knowledge that it would never be ratified by the Senate. (The Senate passed a resolution on July 25, 1997, by a vote of 95-0 stating that it would not ratify the treaty.) President Bush, on the other hand, bluntly announced his intention to withdraw from the treaty in a letter to Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., in 2001. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman then announced that the protocol was "dead."
The Bush administration's initial lack of concern for international reaction not only created a global furor, but also set the precedent for a reputation of ignoring world opinion and pursuing American aims regardless of the global impact.
Part of the problem with our image abroad today is simply that our military power has outstripped that of any potential rival. The easy initial victories in Afghanistan and Iraq convinced tyrannical governments that they were no longer immune to outside removal. Thus, North Korea and Iran jump-started their nuclear weapons programs, and unfriendly propaganda machines began to trumpet the line that the United States was the real threat to world peace, not countries with outlaw regimes such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq that had prompted American military action.
President Bush has become the lightning rod for that worldview, which finds expression in his image overseas as a trigger-happy gunslinger. His televised speech to the American people after 9/11 set exactly the right tone of determined response and bolstered the morale of the entire country. However, the rhetoric that followed drew much too heavily on the cowboy imagery that now plagues him overseas — "dead or alive" and "either with us or against us."
The president's early public use of the word "crusade" in reference to the war on terror is regrettable. In the Islamic world, it is a blood-dripping word evoking images of unjustified invasion and slaughter of innocent Muslims by medieval Christian knights. Osama bin Laden and his followers now regularly refer to coalition forces as crusaders.
However, the president has done far more than strike back with American military muscle. He has reorganized the federal government to respond to the threat and overseen the establishment of a much more effective international anti-terror network. What he has not been able to do and will not be able to do is rally the international community as a whole around the American perception of the threat and lead it to a lasting solution.
Even friendly governments face publics that are unhappy with our president and disillusioned with our country, and our government has unilaterally disarmed in the foreign propaganda arena.
Ignoring international opinion
At the end of World War II, the United States understood that influencing public opinion overseas positively was a crucial part of its foreign affairs effort. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, demonstrated the dangers of allowing a totalitarian state to control all of the information reaching its own people. The Soviet Union was actively promoting the glories of its "socialist paradise" abroad as a cover for its expansionist ambitions.

[RedWine]

Therefore, the United States effort had to be twofold:
● Provide accurate information to captive peoples, and
● Counter hostile propaganda abroad with truthful information about the United States, its people and its policies.
In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the U.S. Information Agency, or USIA, which was given responsibility for coordinating and arranging official American public affairs activities overseas, to include cultural centers and libraries, exhibitions, magazines and pamphlets, audiovisual materials, educational exchanges and other visitor programs, speaker programs, book translations, cultural presentations, and foreign media contact.
After suffering from increasingly low budgets following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the gutted remnants of USIA were absorbed into the State Department in 1999. The information agency director was transformed into an undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs. However, the undersecretary has no operational control over the personnel who actually work on public affairs overseas.
Today, U.S. global public opinion campaigns do not exist. Regional campaigns lack resources. Our former cultural centers and impressive libraries overseas have been closed. In short, our most effective voice overseas has been stilled.
Recommendations
The United States should acknowledge that a substantial amount of the ill will flowing from abroad is based on disagreement with our policies, not misunderstanding of them. Moreover, stains on our image such as Abu Ghraib cannot and should not be defended.
None of that means that our fundamental policies are necessarily wrong.
Islamic terrorists and their supporters will not agree with our policy to kill them before they kill us, and some countries will never acknowledge a serious threat from abroad until it engulfs them.
These are my recommendations to our government:
● Re-establish the U.S. Information Agency, because it possessed the capabilities to defend the U.S. image abroad and engage effectively with foreign publics.
● Failing that, gather all of the elements and personnel of public diplomacy/public affairs at the State Department into one entity, and give the undersecretary real authority to plan and implement public-affairs strategies worldwide.
● Target emotions in the Islamic world and do not shy from symbolic expressions of faith and brotherhood.
● Focus substantial time and effort on repairing our ties with publics in the democracies and emerging democracies. When the democracies are genuinely united in purpose and moral vision, the rest of the world falls into step.
The United States cannot go it alone in international affairs. Other countries will not follow the U.S. lead, or not for long, if they do not respect our ideals and internal moral strength at least as much as they respect our military power.
If we follow Thomas Jefferson's advice to pay "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind," we will surely find that mankind will repay the compliment.

[Khorsheed]

I am glad dear redwine is bringing aids to the light .. .

[RedWine]

One morning in 1998, at Hobee's coffee shop, near Stanford University, a young money manager named Peter Thiel decided to gamble on an Internet startup.

Thiel ended up investing $240,000 in the company, which eventually became PayPal Inc., the giant of online payments. Thiel ran PayPal, took it public and, in 2002, sold it to EBay Inc. for $1.5 billion. Thiel, then 34, walked off with $60 million. He bought himself a Ferrari 360 Spyder and moved into a condo at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco.

Thiel had managed to pilot PayPal through the biggest financial bubble in history. And yet, the way he saw things, that bubble had never really popped. To Thiel, the Nasdaq Stock Market frenzy of the 1990s had simply morphed into a U.S. housing frenzy and other economic dangers. People still believed the good times could last forever.

So a few weeks after selling PayPal, Thiel set out to beat the bubble a second time. He opened a hedge fund firm called Clarium Capital Management LLC in his three-bedroom apartment at the Four Seasons.

Since then, Thiel, now 39, has emerged as one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the country. He's parlayed an initial $10 million fund into a firm with $2.1 billion in assets under management -- and more than tripled investors' money.

As of Oct. 31, Clarium, now tucked away in futuristic, glass-walled offices near the Golden Gate Bridge, had returned a cumulative 230.4 percent.

Libertarian

A self-styled freethinker and avowed libertarian, Thiel has had a hell of a run. A graduate of Stanford Law School, he's practiced securities law, traded derivatives, led PayPal and built a multibillion-dollar hedge fund -- all before the age of 40. He's also bought 7 percent of Palo Alto, California-based Facebook, a social-networking Web site for high school and college students that turned down a $1 billion offer from Yahoo! Inc. in September.

Along the way, Thiel has co-authored a book decrying political correctness at Stanford, backed a Nascar magazine (it failed) and executive produced the 2005 movie ``Thank You for Smoking,'' a satirical look at today's spin culture in which the hero, Big Tobacco spokesman Nick Naylor, defends the rights of smokers and cigarette makers. In September, Thiel pledged $3.5 million to Aubrey de Grey, a Cambridge University-based gerontologist searching for the key to human immortality.

Now, Thiel has set out to concoct a 21st-century version of the Quantum Fund, the freewheeling macro hedge fund that George Soros used to run. Macro funds trade crude oil, Eurodollars, Japanese bonds, sugar futures -- you name it. The macro part comes from managers' attempts to use macroeconomic principles to spot winning trades.

Betting on Deflation

Back in 1992, Soros made a killing wagering that the British government would devalue the pound. Today, Thiel is buying U.S. Treasury bonds and energy stocks, betting on deflation and higher oil prices. With annualized returns of 26.3 percent in the three years ended on Sept. 30, Clarium ranks among the world's top macro funds, according to Hedge Fund Research Inc., a Chicago- based firm that tracks the industry.

For years, billionaire macro managers such as Soros, 76, and Julian Robertson, 74, dominated the hedge fund scene. In 1990, about 71 percent of the industry's then $39 billion in assets were stashed in macro funds, according to HFR.

Then, as the tech boom ignited the longest bull stock market in U.S. history, hedge fund investors deserted the macro men to chase high-flying Nasdaq stocks.

Macro Reckoning

The same forces that made Thiel a multimillionaire ended macro funds' reign. Soros lost big when the Nasdaq bubble burst and eventually passed his New York-based Soros Fund Management LLC to sons Robert and Jonathan. Robertson shorted tech stocks during the runup, lost billions and quit managing other people's money, telling clients he no longer understood the markets. Today, macro hedge funds collectively sit atop $146 billion, or less than 11 percent of the industry's $1.34 trillion in assets, according to HFR.

These days, Wall Street firms and fund managers control more hedge fund money than Soros or Robertson ever did. The 20 largest hedge fund firms collectively manage $316.1 billion, or 24 percent of total industry assets, according to HFR. The largest, New York-based Goldman Sachs Group Inc., manages $29.5 billion. Westport, Connecticut-based Bridgewater Associates Inc., the second largest, has $28 billion. No. 3, New York-based D.E. Shaw & Co., manages $23.2 billion.

Seismic Shift

These giants exemplify a seismic shift taking place on Wall Street. During the 1980s, hedge funds catered mostly to rich people. Today, insurance companies, endowments and pension funds have invaded the market in hopes of earning the investment returns they'll need to keep their promises to clients and retirees.

Many institutional investors don't want to take the risks that managers like Soros did.

``Larger investors would rather make a little and risk a little than make a lot and risk a lot,'' says Sol Waksman, president of Fairfield, Iowa-based Barclay Group, a hedge fund consulting firm.

Thiel, by contrast, is a throwback to the days when managers like Soros and Robertson made -- and sometimes lost -- vast fortunes by staking everything on their views of the world economy.

``We are trying to pursue a systemic view of the world like that which Soros and others said they pursued,'' Thiel says.

Big Bets

Thiel has wagered all of his clients' money on his conviction that aftershocks from the go-go '90s will jar the U.S. His vision of the future isn't pretty. The housing bubble will collapse and economic growth will stall, he says. An oil shock will add to the pain.

Few money managers are prepared for the turbulence ahead, Thiel says. Clarium is ready, he says.

``The hedge fund's mission is to make sense of an extraordinary moment in time in the world -- a time of retail sanity amid wholesale madness,'' Thiel says.

On a sunny September morning, Thiel and his 10 traders and analysts are at work in Clarium's offices in the Presidio, the former U.S. Army post, now a national park, on the edge of San Francisco Bay.

It's an odd place to find a hedge fund. Like most San Francisco money managers, Thiel used to work downtown, in the city's financial district. Then, last June, he moved Clarium to the Presidio, where Star Wars director George Lucas has built a gleaming new headquarters. A statue of Jedi master Yoda gazes over one of the courtyards.

Death Star

Star Wars happens to be Thiel's favorite movie. That's not why he came here, though. Thiel has built his hedge fund on the premise that people follow the herd. Swept up in the crowd, they lose sight of reality. Thiel moved from the Bank of America Center downtown to keep his team away from other money managers and investment bankers who might cloud their thinking.

Yoda would feel right at home here. Press a button, and the doors hum open -- BRRRMMMM! -- as if you were boarding the Death Star. The 22,000-square-foot (2,044-square-meter) digs include a library stocked with leather-bound works of Charles Darwin, William Makepeace Thackeray, Guy de Maupassant and Leo Strauss. Every few months, Thiel brings in eminent scholars from the worlds of math, psychology and economics to address his troops.

Ralph Ho, Thiel's chief operating officer, says Clarium is part hedge fund and part think tank.

``We are trying to repeat the George Soros of the late '90s and learn from his mistakes,'' says Ho, who was PayPal's treasurer.

[RedWine]

French Guru

Thiel's view of human behavior -- and the markets -- was shaped by French literary critic Rene Girard. Girard, now a Stanford professor emeritus, maintains that people essentially borrow their desires from others. To Girard, our longing for a certain object is provoked by the desire of another person for this same object. Girard calls this ``mimetic desire.''

Such behavior often drives financial markets, Girard says. Sometimes, people want to buy a stock simply because they see everyone else buying it.

``The market is a quintessential mimetic phenomenon,'' says Girard, who had dinner with Thiel's team at Clarium this past August.

By the time Thiel arrived at Stanford, America's culture wars, smoldering since the 1960s, were flaring on campus.

Political Correctness

Students were complaining the curriculum was skewed toward the European canon of great books -- Aristotle, Shakespeare and the like -- and gave short shrift to non-Western cultures, women and minorities. Students debated whether to impose a speech code prohibiting racist, sexist and homophobic remarks.

Thiel says the shift toward political correctness troubled him. Students weren't just attacking Chaucer or Kant -- they were undermining academic rigor and the freedom of speech, he says. So, in 1987, as a sophomore, Thiel founded the Stanford Review, now the university's main conservative newspaper. The Review's motto is Fiat Lux, which is Latin for Let There Be Light. Several of the paper's former editors, including Ken Howery and David Sacks, later joined Thiel at PayPal. Clarium General Counsel Gibney was also a Review editor.

``The Review stood for free speech, no speech code, admission on merit and great works in the curriculum,'' says Sacks, who later got Thiel to help him produce ``Thank You for Smoking.'' Sacks is now president of Los Angeles-based Room 9 Entertainment.

Provocateur

The Review set out to provoke and offend, says Rachel Maddow, a former Stanford activist who is now a host on Air America Radio, a progressive talk station.

``They took a particularly mean-spirited and juvenile approach to the consequences of their actions,'' Maddow says. ``They were very good at generating an uproar.''

Thiel graduated in 1989 and went on to Stanford Law School. He hung out with Sacks, playing chess and debating the finer points of Leo Strauss, the political philosopher who is considered a father of U.S. neoconservatism.

In 1995, the pair wrote an op-ed essay in the Wall Street Journal poking fun at Stanford's curriculum. The piece prompted a letter to the editor from then Stanford President Gerhard Casper and then Provost Condoleezza Rice, now U.S. Secretary of State.

``[They] concoct a cartoon, not a description, of our freshman curriculum,'' Casper and Rice wrote.

Later that year, Sacks and Thiel made headlines with a book entitled ``The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Political Intolerance on Campus.'' One of the examples of political correctness that Thiel and Sacks cite in their book involves a law student named Keith Rabois.

Outrage

In a misguided attempt to assert his freedom of speech, Rabois yelled ``Faggot! Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS'' outside a lecturer's home. He was hounded out of Stanford, Thiel and Sacks say. Rabois later joined PayPal.

Rabois's behavior was offensive and stupid, Thiel says. He says he still thinks the incident was overblown.

``The extreme reaction to it was not quite proportionate to what happened,'' he says.

After collecting his law degree, Thiel clerked for U.S. Federal Circuit Judge Larry Edmondson in Atlanta and then joined Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York. He lasted seven months and three days before quitting out of boredom, he says.

He jumped to CS Financial Products, a unit of what's now Credit Suisse Group, where he traded derivatives and currency options for a little more than a year. Then he went home to California, raised $1 million from his friends and family and started his first macro fund, Thiel Capital Management.

Hedge Fund Beginnings

With no track record, Thiel struggled to drum up investors, he says. By early 1998, he had more than $4 million under management. That year, he hired his first employee: Howery, who'd been managing editor of the Review.

By this time, Internet stocks were on fire, and Thiel was insisting that his fledgling firm get an office on Sand Hill Road, the venture capital hub in Menlo Park, California.

Silicon Valley real estate developer Tom Ford eventually rented the duo a utility closet in his office at 3000 Sand Hill Road, headquarters of Sequoia Capital, Sand Hill Advisors and Mohr Davidow Ventures.

``There were two desks and no windows, so Peter brought in pictures of outdoor scenes to put on the wall,'' Howery, now 31, says.

It was about this time that Thiel happened upon a young software engineer named Max Levchin. What followed would change both men's lives forever.

PayPal Opportunity

It was a sweltering August day, and Levchin -- who was dreaming about an Internet startup -- was milling around campus looking for a place to escape the heat. He stumbled into an air- conditioned building where Thiel was lecturing students on international finance. The two hit it off and agreed to meet for breakfast at Hobee's, a Palo Alto institution known for its blueberry coffeecake.

There, Levchin, then 23, asked Thiel to invest in his idea for a startup to develop a secure way for handheld computers to communicate. Thiel bought in.

``We thought we would only be there for six months to help the company raise additional financing,'' Howery says.

Instead, Thiel ended up putting his hedge fund career on hold and devoting the next four years to the company, which grew into PayPal.

His quick decision to back the company was typical Thiel, Levchin says. ``Peter is very fast. He usually decides in 1.5 seconds,'' Levchin says. A few months later, in December 1998, Thiel himself joined the startup as chief executive officer.

[RedWine]

Grand Ambitions

Thiel had grand ambitions for the company. ``PayPal was the new currency for the world economy,'' he says. Like many young dot- commers, he believed the Internet would empower the individual. For Thiel, PayPal was all about freedom: It would enable people to s***t currency controls and move money around the globe.

Before Thiel could change the world, however, he had to guide PayPal through life-threatening challenges. Russian hackers were stealing millions from the company. Credit card companies were claiming PayPal was violating their rules. By early 2000, PayPal had only enough money to stay afloat for eight weeks and was losing more than $10 million a month, according to Luke Nosek, a former PayPaldirector of strategy.

That March, as the Nasdaq Composite Index roared its way to a record 5,048, Thiel set out to raise money from venture capital investors. Dot-com fever was running high, and VCs valued the money-losing PayPal at $500 million.

``Everyone thought that wasn't high enough,'' Sacks says.

Nasdaq Bust

Everyone except Thiel. He looked at the Nasdaq frenzy and concluded the dot-com bubble was about to pop. He seized his opportunity. Based on the $500 million valuation, Thiel raised $100 million, more than his colleagues had planned, and closed the deal in three weeks, on March 31, 2000.

He was just in time. The next day, the Nasdaq began a plunge that would eventually send it tumbling 67 percent in 18 months.

``If he hadn't made that call, the company wouldn't be around today,'' Howery says of Thiel.

By mid-2001, Thiel had positioned the company as the pre- eminent Web payment service and was contemplating an initial public offering. He registered for the IPO just weeks after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

The day PayPal stock began trading, Feb. 15, 2002, the shares soared 55 percent. Out in the parking lot of PayPal's Palo Alto offices, Thiel and his crew celebrated by doing ``keg stands.'' That's when you're held upside down over a running beer keg and chug as much of the flowing brew as you can. Thiel raced around playing 10 games of speed chess simultaneously. He won all but one, against his Stanford buddy Sacks. Thiel, who says he hates to lose at anything, swept the pieces off the board.

``Peter smashed the pieces,'' Sacks recalls. Thiel doesn't apologize for his competitive streak. When someone calls him a bad loser, he replies, ``Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser.''

EBay Comes Knocking

Thiel won big with PayPal. Eight months later, in October 2002, EBay agreed to buy the company for $1.5 billion.

The PayPal crew cashed-in and moved on. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim founded video-sharing Web site YouTube Inc. and sold it to Google Inc. in October for $1.65 billion. Levchin went off and founded Slide, a photo-sharing site.

Executive Vice President Reid Hoffman founded Linked-In Corp., a business networking site. Vice President Jeremy Stoppelman created Yelp, a site that helps people find restaurants, shops and other businesses in their area. And Thiel went back to hedge funds and founded Clarium.

PayPal Veterans

Thiel has invested in several of his former employees' startups through a $50 million venture capital firm, the Founders Fund, which is run by Howery and Nosek. Thiel says he regrets not having invested in YouTube. ``It kind of fell through the cracks,'' he says. Thiel has high hopes for Facebook, however. ``It is the largest independent Web 2.0 company,'' says Thiel, who's one of three Facebook board members.

Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook with zero business experience, calls Thiel a mentor. ``He helped shape the way I think about the business,'' Zuckerberg, 22, says. When Thiel backed the startup in 2004, he told Zuckerberg to move to Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard and did just that. If Facebook one day pulls off a deal like YouTube's, Thiel would pocket about $100 million.

On a cloudy September afternoon, Thiel is picking at a chicken pesto salad in his 32nd-floor apartment on the Upper East Side of New York, explaining his plan for Clarium.

``Our long-term goal is to rehabilitate the more classical approach to qualitative investing,'' Thiel says. ``Nowadays, people think everything is mathematical or that everything is just noise and random. There is no in-between space.''

[RedWine]

The Faith Forum on Tuesday featured speakers Father Joseph O'Brien, executive director of AIDS outreach at the Saint Therese Center and representative from Catholic Newman Center, Pastor Ralph Supper from the Community Lutheran Church, Dr. Sayed Qazi, representative from the Muslim Student Association, Art Gafke from the Protestant Campus Ministry and moderator Joe Valenzano, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication.

They each represented a different background and religion, but each of them discussed the calling they have from God to respond to the AIDS pandemic.

O'Brien said that, when the outbreak of AIDS first started to surface, it created a tremendous amount of ignorance and fear, including within himself.

Such ignorance included the nickname "gay cancer" and statements such as "God is punishing you because you are gay."

"When the pandemic started, we did not know what was going on," O'Brien said. "All we knew is people were dying."

Supper explained ignorance can lead to great changes, which indeed it did.

Despite shared ignorance about AIDS, action started to form at a grassroots level within churches.

"We have a higher calling," Supper said. "We can either follow Christ or follow our ignorance."

O'Brien told his story about starting AIDS outreach. He said he moved to San Francisco and met people he knew he would be burying in six months.

He even discussed encounters with women and children who were not homosexual yet had the virus.

"How can I say to them this is God's will," O'Brien said.

Qazi added that God will eventually ask, "Did you accept my people?"

Qazi brought home his point through the story of a man who turned away three people, each of them that was in a state of brokenness such as homelessness and poverty, each asking for help. On judgment day, he was told by God that he turned away God when he himself was in that state of brokenness.

The man was confused and asked God how could he, God Almighty, be in a state of brokenness.

God said the man turned him away by turning His people away who were broken.

The story was related back to the AIDS pandemic and how all people of religion are called to help.

Even though it "took a while to gear up," Gafke said, organizations began to take charge.

Qazi said that Uganda called for a Jihad on AIDS, portraying the different Muslim responses to the epidemic.

Supper said 1994 is when the grassroots effort to stop AIDS truly began to take off, but by the year 2000, after the United States' own celebrities and athletes were diagnosed, the country had a well-developed program.

The panelists then began to discuss bringing the benefits of their efforts to other countries not as fortunate as the United States.

"What's going on in the Unites States is horrendous," O'Brien said. "What's happening in Africa is horrendous."

Qazi said that most Muslims don't live in resourceful countries such as the United States.

In countries such as Saudi Arabia, the topic of AIDS goes ignored. Qazi said Sadie Arabia won't own up to their problem.

However the approach of AIDS is different in Iran. The country knows its people will practice drug use, so clinics offer free, clean needles to hand out to the people of Iran.

He also said if two people go to obtain a marriage license, a mandatory HIV test and counseling session is required.

Valenzano gave a scenario of leper colonies being segregated back in ancient times, which led to questions about people with AIDS being segregated, as some people have wanted, and how suffering has helped bring whole communities together.

O'Brien said, usually when people are infected and find out, he has seen them put their lives together and gain a more spiritual connection with God.

Gafke explained AIDS had a positive effect on the medical field, as strange as it may sound at first. He said that medical practitioners take better precautions, not only when it comes to AIDS but other diseases as well. He added that doctors treat everyone like they have HIV in order to be as accurate and as cautious as possible.

Supper explained that discrimination is not the way to go. He said the religious community is called to be the connectors between those infected and those who are not aware of what AIDS really is and to help educate everyone.

"If we are not educated on someone's history, it leads to discrimination," Supper said.

"In my mind, there is not going to be a silver bullet solution to this problem," Qazi added.

"The one thing that stands between an HIV-infected person and the church is a welcome mat," O'Brien said.

[RedWine]

When NATO leaders meet for their summit in Riga, Latvia, at the end of this month, there will be a ghost at the feast: Afghani-stan's opium. Afghanistan is in danger of falling back into the hands of terrorists, insurgents and criminals, and the multi-billion-dollar opium trade is at the heart of the country's malaise. Indeed, NATO's top general, US Marine General James Jones, has called drugs the "Achilles heel" of Afghanistan.

This year's record harvest of 5,534 tonnes of opium will generate more than US$3 billion in illicit revenue -- equivalent to almost half of Afghanistan's GDP. Profits for drug traffickers downstream will be almost 20 times that amount.

Opium money is corrupting Afghan society from top to bottom. High-level collusion enables thousands of tonnes of chemical precursors, needed to produce heroin, to be trucked into the country. Armed convoys transport raw opium around the country unhindered. Sometimes even army and police vehicles are involved. Guns and bribes ensure that the trucks are waved through checkpoints. Opiates flow freely across borders into Iran, Pakistan and other Central Asian countries.

PAYOFFS

The opium fields of wealthy landowners are untouched, because local officials are paid off. Major traffickers never come to trial because judges are bribed or intimidated. Senior government officials take their cut of opium revenues or bribes in return for keeping quiet. Perversely, some provincial governors and government officials are themselves major players in the drug trade. As a result, the Afghan state is at risk of takeover by a malign coalition of extremists, criminals, and opportunists. Opium is choking Afghan society.

Within Afghanistan, drug addiction is rising. Neighbors that used to be transit states for drugs are now major consumers, owing to similar dramatic increases in opium and heroin addiction. Intravenous drug use is spreading HIV/AIDS in Iran, Central Asia and the former Soviet Union. In traditional Western European markets, health officials should brace for a rise in the number of deaths from drug overdoses, as this year's bumper opium crop will lead to higher-purity doses of heroin.

REMEDIES

What can be done?

First, the veil of corruption in Afghanistan must be lifted. Afghans are fed up with arrogant and well-armed tycoons who live in mansions and drive top-of-the range Mercedes limousines -- this in a country where barely 13 percent of the population have electricity and most people must survive on less than US$200 a year.

It is time for the Afghan government to name, shame and sack corrupt officials, arrest major drug traffickers and opium landlords, and seize their assets. Donors have trained police and prosecutors and built courts and detention centers. Now it is up to the government to use the judicial system to impose the rule of law.

It will be difficult, but not impossible, to re-establish confidence in the central government. Putting major drug traffickers behind bars at the new maximum-security prison at Pul-i-Charki, near Kabul, would be a good start.

Of course, Afghanistan does not bear sole responsibility for its plight. The heroin trade would not be booming if Western governments were serious about combating drug consumption. It is a bitter irony that the countries whose soldiers' lives are on the line in Afghanistan are also the biggest markets for Afghan heroin.

JOINT EFFORT

Furthermore, Afghanistan's neighbors must do more to stop insurgents, weapons, money and chemical precursors from flowing across their borders into the country.

Coalition forces should take a more robust approach to the drug problem. counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency are two sides of the same coin. Improving security and the rule of law must include destroying the opium trade. Allowing opium traffickers to operate with impunity gives them a free hand to raise money to pay for the arms and fighters battling the Afghan army and NATO forces.

The UN Security Council has authorized the International Security Assistance Force to take all necessary measures to fulfill its mandate. NATO troops should be given the green light to help the Afghan army fight opium -- destroy the heroin labs, disband the opium bazaars, attack the opium convoys, and bring the big traders to justice. And they should be given the tools and manpower to do the job. There is no point in trying to win the hearts and minds of major drug traffickers.

DEVELOPMENT

Farmers are a different story. Forced eradication risks pushing farmers into the hands of extremists, and thus will not lead to the sustainable reduction of opium fields. Indeed, as we have seen in some Andean countries, it can be counter-productive. Therefore, security and development must go hand in hand.

To achieve this, Afghanistan needs more development assistance. International support so far has been generous, but it is still well below per capita equivalents for other post-conflict situations -- and the need is much greater. Farmers will be weaned off opium over the long term only if they have sustainable livelihoods.

At the moment, the drug lords of Afghanistan are prospering, and rural communities are suffering. That situation needs to be reversed. We must punish the traffickers and reward the farmers.

We cannot afford to fail in Afghanistan. Recent history has given us graphic evidence of what would happen if we do. But any solution in Afghanistan depends on eliminating its opium.

[RedWine]

An HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention program in Iran founded by two local physicians is providing antiretroviral drugs and clean needles to HIV-positive people in the country, the Washington Post reports. The program -- which was founded in 1997 by Arash Alaei and Kamiar Alaei and initially treated about one patient per week -- operates 70 clinics throughout the country. The program has been featured on the World Health Organization's Web site and commended for its "best practices," the Post reports. In addition, Iran's Disease Management Center solicited a five-year plan to fund the program -- which has drawn $3 million annually from the Global Fund To Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria; the Clinton Foundation; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and several countries. The Iranian government also will provide $8 million to $12 million annually, Arash Alaei said. According to Arash Alaei, 68% of HIV-positive individuals in Iran have "a history of needle-sharing," and the program has begun to distribute sterilized, disposable needles and to reduce the spread of HIV. In addition, the program this year launched a media campaign that provides lectures and pamphlets about HIV to high school students. Arash Alaei, along with 14 other Iranian physicians, last week visited Washington, D.C., to participate in discussions -- hosted by the Aspen Institute -- about the American and Iranian health systems .

[RedWine]

Funds used by the British government to purchase condoms to limit the spread of HIV/AIDS in the developing world would better be spent on anti-retroviral drugs for the millions of affected women and children, said the president of the English and Welsh bishops' conference.


In a Dec. 3 “BBC Sunday AM” interview two days after British Prime Minister Tony Blair criticized the Vatican on MTV, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor of Westminster questioned the value of condoms in ultimately combating AIDS.

In the wide-ranging interview, the cardinal discussed the tension between political and moral leadership, the role of religion in society, celibacy and the Holy Land.

“The way to combat AIDS is primarily, as everyone should know,” he said, “behavioral change, monogamous partnerships between a man and a woman.”

In pointed criticism of the Vatican's stance on contraception, Blair used a television interview on World AIDS Day to insist that religious leaders “face up to reality” and drop their opposition to condoms to help the fight against AIDS.

Noting that the preaching of abstinence was not enough, Blair said that "the danger is if we have a sort of blanket ban from religious hierarchy saying it's wrong to do it, then you discourage people from doing it in circumstances where they need to protect their lives."

The prime minister said that the government would increase the number of condoms distributed in the developing world and spending £1.5 billion over the next several years to fight HIV/AIDS.

Yet Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor pointed out that the Catholic Church has assumed great responsibility for the care of those suffering from AIDS throughout the world. “Worldwide, but especially in Africa, over a quarter of healthcare particularly for AIDS victims is given by the Catholic Church and its agencies,” he said.

Africa, he said, referring to discussions he has had with the continent’s bishops, is “flooded with condoms” that has “meant more promiscuity and more AIDS.”

“I’d like to say to the prime minister it’d be much better if we used that money to provide more anti-retroviral drugs, medicines, for the millions of children and women who are affected.”

Acknowledging that the Vatican has a report on and is studying the use of condoms within marriage where one of the partners is HIV positive, the cardinal said the Catholic Church “stands by what it says” against the use of condoms.

He said he agreed with the Nov. 26 assessment by Catholic Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Birmingham, England, that secular democracy today is engaged in an intense, aggressive reshaping of society’s moral landscape and that what is lawful according to the government is not necessarily moral.

“The moral shape of a country is shaped by its people, by its leaders, but also by its religious leaders, and by the ethos,” Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor said. “And in this country, where this is still in many ways a Christian country, that's our heritage.”

Noting that “sometimes the laws that are passed don't always reflect that,” the cardinal said that the nation needs to “beware that laws don't actually militate against that heritage, that Christian heritage, and that moral framework within which this country works.”

He said that laws promoting gay equality in the country force the church in conflict with the government on issues such as education and social services, such as the running of shelters and adoption.

Such laws, he said, “would actually limit the religious freedom of a particular religious denomination, in this case the Catholic Church,” as well and other Christians as well.

The drive to keep the church “out of politics” and the “Christophobic” efforts to “privatize totally religion” in Britain and other countries in Europe denies the vital role that the Catholic Church and other Christian churches have to play on issues, such as “the rights of the individual … family … (and) other elements of our national life,” he said.

“To put Christianity and what it means on the periphery of society (and) let it be something which is purely in the personal realm,” the cardinal said that “I think that that is wrong.”

“You cannot divorce religion and life,” he said. “What all of us, certainly we who are Christian leaders, are saying is that public space for debate has got to be. We've got to have a place in it.”

He said that celibacy in the Latin church is “a good law,” and that the problem of vocations would not be solved by a relaxation of the discipline of clergy celibacy.

“If you were to say to me, ‘wouldn’t it be much easier if more priests were allowed to be married,’ I don’t agree,” Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor said.

“You see, the crisis today,” he said, “is not a crisis of celibacy, it’s a crisis of faith.”

“When you get a deeper faith and a stronger faith, then you will get priests coming forward,” he said.

He noted that he will be going to the Holy Land with Anglican primate Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury and British church leaders from the Baptist and Orthodox churches “on a pastoral visit to encourage the minority Christian community,” including in Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

The visit is “very important,” he said, as “it would be very sad if Christians were … being forced to leave because of the political situation there.” He added that some are.

“The Holy Land is our land, too,” the cardinal said of Christians, “where there is the birthplace and life of Christ.”

[Sepideh_UK]

Intresting....
Thanx alot Agha Siamak.

[Khorsheed]

hello redwine . .i would like you to tell me the websites from you get the hiv articles.. i need them for a class. . .

[RedWine]

hello redwine . .i would like you to tell me the websites from you get the hiv articles.. i need them for a class. . .

Read your PM my dear :=) .

[Khorsheed]

yes. . thanks

[RedWine]

BEIJING- A Chinese province which has been ravaged by AIDS plans to force all couples in the worst-hit areas to take compulsory HIV tests before being married, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday.


The results of the free tests in Yunnan, obligatory from January 1, will be given by health authorities to the would-be spouse of anyone who tests positive and does not tell their partner.

The rules are part of new AIDS prevention and control laws passed by the regional legislature, with target areas specified by health authorities at a later date.

At the end of September Yunnan had 47,314 people officially living with HIV or AIDS -- or a quarter of the national total, Xinhua said. Located near the heroin-producing Golden Triangle, it became an AIDS hotspot because of intravenous drugs use.

"In a province like Yunnan where AIDS is prevalent, the new regulation can better safeguard the rights of people who are susceptible to HIV infection," the report quoted Zhang Changan, director of the office of the Provincial Committee for AIDS Prevention and Control, as saying.

The Health Ministry said last week that the reported number of Chinese HIV/AIDS cases at the end of October was 183,733, up from 144,089 at the end of 2005, but both Beijing and the United Nations estimate the true number of cases at about 650,000.

[Sepideh_UK]

loool
cool...
its actually good idea...
but look at the increase in number of ppl getting infected every yr....:(

[RedWine]

Politics in the U.S. "took an important turn" last week when Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) were invited to speak at an HIV/AIDS conference hosted by Rick Warren -- an author and the founding pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif. -- and to address the role of religion in the fight against the pandemic, E.J. Dionne, a Washington Post columnist, writes in an opinion piece. According to Dionne, Warren "faced down right-wing pressure" after inviting Obama to address the conference and "sent a signal: A significant group of theologically conservative Christians no longer wants to be treated as a cog in the Republican political machine." Obama in his speech at the conference "took on the moral message of evangelical AIDS activists -- and then challenged them," Dionne writes. Obama said, "[I]f condoms and potentially things like microbicides can prevent millions of deaths, then they should be made more widely available ... I don't accept the notion that those who make mistakes in their lives should be given an effective death sentence." In addition, according to Dionne, "Warren speaks for a new generation of evangelicals who think that harnessing religious faith too closely to electoral politics is bad for religion and who are broadening the evangelical public agenda to include a concern for global poverty and the scourge of AIDS" (Dionne, Washington Post, 12/5).

[RedWine]

Muslim clerics from 25 African countries failed to reach consensus on the use of condoms in preventing HIV/AIDS at a meeting on the semi-autonomous Tanzanian island of Zanzibar.

The Network of African Islamic Faith-based Organisations met in November to discuss issues that included HIV/AIDS and gender-based violence, but could not to agree on a unified HIV/AIDS strategy.

When the network was launched in March 2005, in Abuja, Nigeria, the religious leaders stated in their declaration: "We support all appropriate methods of preventing HIV/AIDS. These include abstinence, being faithful and, when absolutely necessary, correct and consistent use of the condom between couples."

Nevertheless, many clerics at the meeting rejected the use of condoms on the grounds that they promoted promiscuity, particularly among the youth. "The majority still stick to 'no promoting condoms', and believe in abstinence and being faithful as preventive measures - condoms can only be used by HIV-positive couples," said Zanzibar's Dr Issa Ziddy, deputy secretary of the network.

Other participants felt the organisation needed to make a clear statement in favour of condom use in the fight against HIV/AIDS. "I think it is high time we define the preventive measures. Let us strengthen advocacy in abstinence [A] and being faithful [B], but also promote the use of condoms [C] for those who fail to stick to A and B," said Ebyan Salah, a Gender Advisor to the Somalia Transitional Federal Government. "Every tool must be used, including promoting condoms."

Despite the long political crisis in Somalia and current efforts to build a government, many people in the country were aware of HIV/AIDS. Activists, including Muslim leaders, spoke openly about the pandemic, but promoting condom use remained largely taboo, and they were difficult to find on the market, she said.

Dr Hamid Suleiman, of the Zanzibar AIDS Commission, told delegates that condom use was not encouraged by the island's clerics either and they were not directly involved in the campaign against HIV/AIDS until 2002.

At the 2005 Abuja summit, Muslim religious leaders from Nigeria, Senegal and Tanzania, among others, agreed that they should disseminate information on HIV/AIDS in sermons and at religious events.

Fortunately, for the last three years Muslim leaders in Zanzibar have helped a lot in controlling the spread of HIV/AIDS," Suleiman said. "Since the majority population are Muslims, the message can spread well."

Zanzibar's HIV still relatively low prevalence has reached 0.9 percent, but in 2002 it was estimated at just 0.6 percent. Health workers on the island say lack of information and worrying trends like increased injecting drug use could see the island's problem continue to grow unless urgent action is taken.

[RedWine]

نتايج تحقيقات تازه دانشمندان در شهر کيسوموی کنيا نشان داده است که ممکن است ميان شيوع دو بيماری بسيار رايج در آفريقا يعنی اچ آی وی- ايدز و مالاريا ارتباطی وجود داشته باشد.
اين تحقيقات که در مجله علوم در آمريکا به چاپ رسيده، نشان می دهد وقتی افراد به بيماری مالاريا مبتلا می شوند، در اثر بروز تغييرات در سيستم ايمنی، احتمال بيشتری وجود دارد که شريک جنسی خود را به ويروس اچ آی وی آلوده کنند.

در عين حال، افراد آلوده به ويروس اچ آی وی نيز بيشتر مستعد ابتلا به مالاريا هستند.

دانشمندان می گويند ارتباط دو بيماری با هم، باعث شيوع گسترده هر دوی آنها در ميان مردم منطقه جنوب صحرای آفريقا می شود.

به گفته آنها، رشد پنج درصدی موارد آلودگی به ويروس اچ آی وی در شهر کيسومو در کنيا را می توان به مالاريا نسبت داد و ده درصد از موارد ابتلا به مالاريا را می توان ناشی از آلودگی به ويروس اچ آی وی خواند.

دانشمندانی که درباره علل شيوع سريع اچ آی وی - ايدز در اين شهر تحقيق می کردند، وقتی متوجه شدند رفتارهای پر خطر جنسی به خودی خود توضيح دهنده نرخ بالای انتقال اين بيماری نيست، به وجود رتباط ميان آن و بيماری مالاريا مشکوک شدند و در پی کشف تاثير آنها بر هم برآمدند.

اين دانشمندان نتيجه گرفتند که وقتی افراد آلوده به اچ آی وی مورد حمله پشه ناقل مالاريا قرار می گيرند، ميزان ويروس اچ آی وی در بدن آنها و به تبع آن، خطر انتقال اين ويروس نيز افزايش می يابد.

خبرنگاران می گويند اين تحقيق جديد می تواند تاثيرات مهمی در نحوه مبارزه دولت ها و مقام های بهداشتی با هر دو بيماری داشته باشد.

[Sepideh_UK]

Thanx alot agha SIamak.

[RedWine]

Score AIDS $




Health experts, not political leaders, should be determining strategies to battle the spread of HIV/AIDS.

The first of this month marked World AIDS Day, and health experts reported that many countries fail to direct prevention at at-risk populations. Instead, they target general populations, not putting their resources to best use.

Prevention also is taking a backseat to antiretroviral drugs. But health experts say we still don’t have a vaccine against AIDS, and drugs only control the effects of the disease once someone has contracted it. They do not stop the spread of AIDS.

Dr. Jim Yong Kim, an AIDS expert at Harvard University, advocates a “prevention score” for governments to rate how they are allocating their AIDS dollars. It’s a good idea.

[RedWine]

https://www.lighttounite.org/

[RedWine]

The Congress passed a three-year reauthorization of the Ryan White CARE Act during the final hours of the 2006 legislative session. The bill had been held up in by controversy over how to fund the nation’s HIV/AIDS programs equitably in both rural and urban areas.

New York State stood to lose an estimated $100 million during the five-year life of the bill as it was originally written. Now, the most the state stands to lose in 2007 is about $8.7 million, and even then, it would be eligible for supplemental funding the following year.

All four New York and New Jersey Senators blocked a vote until a deal could be struck that minimized the funding cuts to places like New York while still providing more funds to rural areas that have emerging epidemics.

Some HIV/AIDS activists say the real legacy of the contentious fight to pass Ryan White this year will be a more unified effort to find an alternative that provides universal access to care and treatment.

"One of the more interesting things that might come out of this really divisive reathorization is that people are going to be more willing to crack this thing open," said Robert Cordero, vice president for development and governmental relations of Housing Works Inc., a New York-based AIDS advocacy group. "I think this coalition is broad enough and there’s enough political will with this new Congress to look beyond Ryan White for a program that would really provide access for people with AIDS no matter where they live."

Cordero noted that the Ryan White CARE Act, which was first passed in 1990, was never intended to be a long-term solution to the nation’s AIDS epidemic. Even the acronym "CARE" stands for "Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency."

"It was really an emergency response," Cordero said. Sixteen years later, Ryan White has grown into a complicated web of funding streams directed at the different support services needed by segments of the population who are at varying stages of fighting the disease.

In short, a person who is HIV positive in rural New Mexico may have access to considerably less treatment and care than an HIV-positive individual on the west side of Chicago.

"What that reveals is that you’ve got to change public policy to respond to that," Cordero said. "The CARE Act is holding things together at the seams, but it’s inadequate at really addressing the AIDS epidemic."

A 2004 report by the Institute of Medicine about the delivery of HIV/AIDS care found that the financing and delivery system for publicly financed HIV care was too complex and that it undermined "the significant advances made in the development of new technologies to treat HIV/AIDS…"

The analysis, which was commissioned by Congress, concluded, "The Committee’s principal recommendation to address system deficiencies is the establishment of a new federal program for financing HIV care."

Sen. Edward Kennedy is scheduled to hold oversight hearings on the matter starting this coming January, which Cordero said would really "jump start the conversation" in Congress.

Some of the fixes might include extending Medicaid or Medicare or both to people living with HIV or AIDS.

Cordero added that the "sunset provision" in this bill, which halts Ryan White funding after three years instead of the usual five years, is a net positive for advocacy groups. He explained that with a longer waiting period, people usually table Ryan White and go back to focusing on different issues.

Instead, said Cordero, "We are ready to got full steam ahead to pull as many members of the community together as possible and work on an advocacy strategy to get universal access."

AIDS activists have already started educating possible presidential candidates such as Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson on AIDS policy.

"All of them are working people earlier than I’ve ever seen," Cordero said, noting that most HIV/AIDS activists didn’t reach out to President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry until 2003/2004.

[RedWine]

Much is being written in the international media about the twin elections in Iran, which take place on Friday. Some, like veteran Iranian journalist Amir Taheri, are expecting the "first major political defeat" for Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad.

One election will be for municipalities, the other for the Council of Experts (COE). This congressional body of 86 ayatollahs selects the supreme leader of Iran and supervises his activities. Members have to be experts in Islamic jurisprudence so they can debate



Islamic law, and see that the grand ayatollah does not violate the Holy Koran.

The COE can hire and fire the supreme leader, a post held since 1989 by the strong and all-powerful Ayatollah Ali al-Khamenei. It is currently headed by the old and ailing Ayatollah Ali Meshkini, who has re-nominated himself for office but stands a very slim chance of succeeding since he is supported neither by Ahmadinejad nor by Khamenei.

For this reason, Ahmadinejad has his eyes set on winning elections for the COE, which are by direct votes for an eight-year term. Khamenei, who is 66 and also in frail health, is likely to be ousted - if Ahmadinejad gets his way - before the new council's term expires in 2014.

By all accounts, the president does not like the overpowering influence that Khamenei has on Iranian politics. Some expect that if the president's list wins the elections, they would ask Khamenei to step down on the grounds of ill health.

The man earmarked to replace Khamenei by the president is Ahmadinejad's ideological mentor, Ayatollah Mohammad Taghli Misbah Yazdi. Born in 1934, the radical cleric studied in Qom and was educated in Islam by none other than Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic in 1979. He graduated with honors from the religious seminary in 1960 and worked as editor-in-chief of a anti-Shah journal called "Revenge".

He was also a member of the board of directors at an influential religious school in Iran. In recent years, he has headed the Imam Khomeini Education and Research Institute and is a current member of the outgoing COE. During the 1990s he rose to fame for seriously challenging the reformist president Mohammad Khatami, arguing that contact with the West is un-Islamic and claiming that the reformists were straying from the pure revolutionary ideals of Khomeini.

He encouraged disobedience to Khatami through his writings and sermons on Fridays, prompting the former president to describe him as a "theotrician of violence". Yazdi's day in the sun came when his student Ahmadinejad was voted to power in August 2005. To him, Western culture means "misleading ideas" and it resembles injecting Iran "with the AIDS virus".

If this man becomes the new leader of Iran, all talk about curbing Ahmadinejad's powers and re-engaging Iran in dialogue with the West will come to an abrupt end. But luckily for opponents of the Iranian president, his ambitions face strong obstacles from within Iranian politics. These have been created by the Khamenei-backed Guardian Council.

This body is made up of 12 officials (six being clerics appointed directly by the supreme leader) and has ultimate executive, judiciary and electoral authority. The remaining six members are lawyers appointed by a judicial authority, which in turn is approved or vetoed by Khamenei.

Although Khamenei originally supported Ahmadinejad's rise to power in 2005, the two men have parted on a variety of issues and the president sees Khamenei as an obstacle to his powers at the presidency. He wants - but cannot so long as Khamenei is in power - to clip the wings of the supreme leader. Khamenei, a smart man by all accounts who also served as president in the 1980s, realizes the threat coming from Ahmadinejad. That is why he ordered his supporters - all 12 members of the Guardian Council - to veto most of the 493 candidates running for elections on Friday who are declared supporters of the president.

Among those vetoed are Yazdi's son. They also banned any woman from standing for office at the CEO. All reformists running for office were also rejected because they are trying to pass an amendment in the Iranian constitution allowing non-clerics into the CEO - something that Khamenei curtly refuses as well.

Other candidates turned down include pro-business and modernizing clerics supportive of former presidents Mohammad Khatami and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who challenged Ahmadinejad for the presidency in 2005. The very fact that Khamenei and the Guardian Council allowed Rafsanjani to run for the CEO, given his animosity toward the wild policies of Ahmadinejad, is also an indicator that they want to make life more difficult for the president.

Victory for Rafsanjani, however, is doubtful, since both Ahmadinejad and Khamenei are opposed to him, and it is rumored that he is in favor of reaching a deal with the United States on Iran's nuclear program. In short, Khamenei has engineered elections that guarantee continuity of his post as the grand master of Iranian elections. Iranian observers are saying that out of the 86 seats contested at the CEO, only 17 new members will be voted into office. The remaining 69 clerics will all be pro-Khamenei.

For the above reasons, along with a recent Iranian poll affiliated with the Rafsanjani-led Expediency Council, show that the future is not promising for Ahmadinejad. Khamenei, however, has not come out to challenge Ahmadinejad - at least not yet - and insists on being a godfather to all Iranians. He has even called on all able citizens to vote, saying that it is a national and religious duty.

Despite that, Iranian observers claim that voter turnout will be no more than 49%. The poll showed that out of the Iranians surveyed, 90% said that their support for the president had diminished over the past 16 months. This was made clear by student demonstrators on December 11 at the Amir Kabir University of Iran, when young men burned pictures of Ahmadinejad and raised slogans that read "death to the dictator".

Unable to crack down on the rioters, for fear of losing support in the upcoming elections, Ahmadinejad did not arrest or harass them. On the contrary, he released a statement saying that he was pleased by the demonstrations. They reminded him of his student days under the Shah in the 1970s when students were prohibited from expressing their views.

If he fails to control the COE, however, Ahmadinejad plans to take the municipality elections through a list of candidates headed by his sister, Parvan Ahmadinejad. Her list is called "The Enchanting Scent for Services", and it is campaigning on the same youth-related issues that Ahmadinejad touted when he was voted in in 2005. The ambitious president, however, will not be satisfied unless he wins the COE.

One might ask, how is it that this president, who surprised the world with his victory in 2005, finds himself in a difficult position today, unable to impose his will on Iranian society? Is the Ahmadinejad myth a fabrication created by the US? Is the superman president really human - and weak - after all? Perhaps the Americans concentrated on Ahmadinejad more than they should have, because the real powerbroker in Iran is Khamenei - not Ahmadinejad.

It is Khamenei who supports Hezbollah and Khamenei, rather than the president, who is stubborn when it comes to Iran's nuclear issue. Ahmadinejad is simply a figure of state who has limited domestic authority and by no means is a dictator like Saddam Hussein. He achieved victory not because of his revolutionary views, nor for his support and conviction in the Islamic Revolution, but rather because of his promises to grassroots Iranians. By rhetoric, action, dress and origin, he mirrored their plight and realities.

But Ahmadinejad promised more than he could deliver, forgetting during election time that he was not the ultimate ruler and would have to share power with the Majlis (parliament), the Guardian Council, the COE - and Khamenei.

Young Iranians, born after the revolution of 1979, had not experienced the autocracy of the Shah and were (and still are) unimpressed by the revolutionary rhetoric of the 1980s. They wanted a president who could provide jobs for the university-educated Iranians who were unemployed. They wanted a leader who could combat the 16% unemployment rate (21.2% among women and 34% in the 15-19 age group.)

Currently, 800,000 Iranian youth enter the job market every year and Ahmadinejad would have to double job creation efforts to meet this staggering number. This would require huge investment and an economic growth rate of more than 6% per year. Iran's economy is now down to 1.9%, after growth of 4.8% for 2004-2005.

One slogan devised under Ahmadinejad read: "$550 for every Iranian citizen", Ahmadinejad also won because he was Khamenei's man since the supreme leader did not want to deal with a political strongman like Rafsanjani. It was believed that Ahmadinejad would follow Khamenei's orders and not defy him.

Rafsanjani, however, would have worked with Khamenei as an equal. The supreme leader wanted someone he could manipulate. For the exact same reasons, he is now working against Ahmadinejad, who apparently no longer wants to be manipulated or overpowered.

Rather than criticize Ahmadinejad, the US could bide its time and see how Friday's polls play out. Change can be achieved - through evolution of the Iranian regime and its own system of checks-and-balances - rather than revolution, or war.

[RedWine]

The five Bulgarian nurses accused of intentional HIV infection in Libya could receive confirmation of their previous death sentences, Reuters news agency said.

Libya accused the Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian medic of deliberate HIV infection of 426 children in the town of Benghazi. The six were sentenced to death by firing squad, but Libya’s Supreme Court ordered re-trial in the end of 2005.

A final court sitting is scheduled for December 19 2006 and the court is expected to pronounce the verdicts.

“The immediate fate of the medics is in the hands of a Libyan court but their longer term prospects are even less clear. They are hostage to a larger geo-political drama,” Reuters said.

According to the United States and the European Union Libya had to release the six because several scientific reports proved that the infection occurred years before their arrival to Benghazi.

Libya would also profit from their release, because the trial hindered the country’s slow recovery of diplomatic relations with the Western world, Reuters said.

Libya might win but it would also lose from an eventual verdict of not guilty. Such sentence would mean that foreign experts were right pointing at Libya’s healthcare system as the real culprit and ‘domestic unrest’ could be expected, Reuters said.

Muamar Gadaffi, Libya’s leader, would probably “keep the medics as a bargaining chip” to win financial compensation for the families of the infected children, said Reuters.

George Joffe, Cambridge University's Centre for International Studies lecturer, said that the nurses would be found guilty and could hope for clemency only after Libya received compensation.

Western countries showed reluctance to pressure Libya, because such would threaten their own interests in Libya’s oil reserves, Joffe also said.

[RedWine]

In the year to come, thousands of Caribbean people will die of AIDS and thousands more will become infected with the HIV virus. In just the past two decades, over 6,000 AIDS deaths were reported in the Caribbean, but the actual number is admittedly higher due to underreporting or misdiagnosis.

All the while, as people die and infection increases, imperialist governments in the United States and Europe reveal their racism as they economically strangle Caribbean countries such as Haiti and the Dominican Republic. They offer no reparations for the centuries of damage and exploitation done to these nations and peoples. Capitalist drug companies are even reluctant to provide the desperately needed antiretroviral drugs that can improve the quality of life and life expectancy for those living with HIV/AIDS.

In Haiti, the Bahamas, Barbados, the Dominican Republic and Guyana, the AIDS epidemic has spread beyond those called “high risk” to the general population. This occurs once the infection rate in the general population reaches approximately 5 percent. At such a rate the HIV virus spreads even more rapidly.

AIDS is most devastating to Haiti, where 12 percent of the urban and 5 percent of the rural population are estimated to be infected with the terrible disease.

By the end of 1999, 83,000 children under the age of 14 had been orphaned by AIDS in the Caribbean.

Furthermore, the AIDS epidemic is placing tremendous burdens on health care systems and on the labor force. As of 2006, 83 percent of AIDS cases in the Caribbean were found in the age group 15 to 54 years old, considered the prime age span of the work force. This epidemic not only affects personal lives and relationships but has the potential to negatively impact various key sectors, from agriculture, tourism and

mining to trade, as well as national budgets.

In the Caribbean, AIDS is a “hurricane” disaster, said Dominica’s Minister of Planning Artherton Martin in his closing statement at a recent HIV/AIDS conference: “We must deploy against HIV/AIDS as we would any other disasters. In fact, it is worse than hurricanes because it destroys people, our most important resource.”

Haitians in Dominican Republic

Amelia Cayo, 53, who is part Haitian and a Creole speaker, is one of 43 AIDS patients receiving free antiretroviral therapy from a clinic in the Dominican Republic sponsored by Bateye Relief Alliance Dominicana, a nongovernmental organization. She is one of many people who will be destroyed by AIDS if left untreated. Like many victims to the virus, she is on a time-consuming regimen of antiretroviral treatments, taking as many as four to seven different pills three times a day.

Cayo comments, “I feel better since I started the pills, and you can be sure I will keep taking them.” She and other descendants of Haitian sugarcane workers are part of an estimated 200,000 residents of bateyes, migrant worker communities adjacent to the mostly now-fallow sugarcane fields. Before the opening of the center, the estimated 3,000 bateye residents in the area received no medical care whatsoever.

There are currently only 3,500 people taking drugs, and they receive little or no medical attention. Among the country’s bateye inhabitants, roughly 5 to 12 percent are HIV-positive. Alliance Executive Director María Virtudes Berroa says sugarcane workers have been systematically excluded from the public health system because of racial, economic and social discrimination.

The Bateye health group has already lost funding in education and prevention programs for 30 bateye communities and at this point is reaching only a tiny portion of the people with AIDS in the bateyes. Wendy Valdez, a physician in the Cinco Casas bateye, said, “It would be disastrous if we had to stop.”

It has been suggested that an individual could receive antiretroviral therapy for less than $1 a day—which of course would exclude profits for the drug companies. However, under common political and funding trends, including all the programs underway and all the funds donated towards the Global AIDS effort, these medicines reached fewer than 1 million people by the end of 2005.

Worldwide, including the Caribbean, 5 to 6 million people urgently need antiretroviral treatment (ART), due to the severity of their illness, but only 300,000 people in developing countries receive these medicines. Many grassroots efforts have shown that ART can be delivered in poorer countries as effectively as developed countries. The World Health Organization says that increasing the availability of antiretroviral therapy makes it more likely that people will come forward for HIV testing, learn their status, receive counseling and care and become knowledgeable about preventing the spread of the virus.

Nevertheless, by the year 2015 the Caribbean region stands to have nearly 3.5 million people living with the virus, according to UNAIDS.

Yet there is a small beacon of light in the Caribbean, 90 miles from U.S. shores on the island of Cuba. The Cuban government has sent at least 4,000 doctors and health personnel to the poorest countries in the Caribbean, those most hard hit by AIDS, with the idea of creating an infrastructure able to provide the population with medications and the necessary follow-up. (www.cubaweb.com)

The immediate ongoing need is for the international community to come forward with the raw materials for further products and services. Yet, with the ongoing war on people of color and the poor, what can Caribbean countries and individuals like Amelia Cayo hope for from greedy capitalist nations?

[RedWine]

Libyan civil society condemns "politisation" of medics` case


Tripoli, Libya, 12/29 - Libyan civil society organisations have expressed solidarity with families of the 426 children allegedly injected with the AIDS-causing virus, saying the case is of judicial nature and must not be politicised to serve foreign interest.

In a communiqué issued here late Wednesday in Tripoli, the organisations, after a solidarity match also called for "moral compensation of the victims and their families.

Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were on 19 December sentenced to death by a Tripoli court after they were found guilty of deliberately inoculating Libyan children with HIV at the Benghazi Paediatric Hospital, about 1000 kilometres east of capital Tripoli.

The death sentence elicited varied reactions from the international community, with the outgoing UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, expressing concern. Bulgaria has sought the help of the European Union to bear pressure on Libya`s political leadership to intervene.

However, through the communiqué, the organisations said Libyan courts were competent, could handle any case to international standards and must be independent from the executive or political interference, and can therefore not be forced to renounce its decisions.

[RedWine]

As virtually every poll attests, people across the globe are discouraged about the state of the world. From the ravages of famine, to HIV/AIDS, to the numerous conflicts and war, not to mention the threats manifest in the belligerents of North Korea and Iran, there appears to be every reason to believe that ours is a world fraught with unprecedented problems.

Although that is an intuitively accurate appraisal it is, at the most fundamental level, incorrect. Therein lies the heart of our problem, which is the astounding lack of consensus regarding the most basic truths concerning successful civilizations. Indeed, an objective observer would be shocked that modern humans appear to have forgotten or have profoundly misinterpreted the lessons of over 2000 years of recorded history.

The most salient lesson is that human conflict is a timeless phenomenon that can be mitigated only by making the most serious demands of any nation or regime unwilling to comply with the rule of law. The only language that aggressors understand is that of another group willing to wreak carnage at the first sign of aggression. There are sufficiently large numbers of nations capable of taking such a collective stand, but the will to do so is conspicuous by its absence.

Underlying that reticence is our inbred habit of blurring--or inverting--good and evil. The result is that we are suffering from a powerful political anemia that hobbles the our ability to confront even the most glaring examples of evil, such as that in Darfur. If we find ourselves standing idly by as innocents are being slaughtered--a horrific repeat performance of Rwanda in the 90s--how, pray tell, are we to confront the likes of a fledgling nuclear menace such as North Korea, much less the would-be nuclearized Iran?

The answer is that we can't unless and until we recognize in our deep and long history the same pattern of human conflict and suffering that so much in evidence today. Indeed, evil never fully recedes but is merely reanimated in more lethal forms as time progresses. That leaves us few palatable options, but they become far more acceptable if we can demonstrate the likely result of inaction.

The politics that so deeply infuses this process both here in America and nearly worldwide, is causally implicated in the inexcusable inertia we are suffering. Desperate for political hegemony and willing to sacrifice every historically hallowed virtue, both parties, but in particular those on the left appear perfectly willing expose our nation to the threat of Islamic terrorism.

Coupled with the noxious cultural plague called political correctness, we gladly acquiesce to the charges of racism and xenophobia from the very agents who would decimate our nation. Political claudication is an unsightly thing to witness, but that is precisely what we are suffering, and there is no apparent end in sight.

All of that being stated, there is yet every reason to believe that 2007 will be a great year because political momentum is not only driven by internal events it is also compelled by events out of our control. Forthwith, the following observations are made:

1. Iraq will move towards greater stability because its own citizens will become more intimately involved in its security, not because our prospective talks with Iran and Syria bear any fruit.

2. Although Iran will move closer to obtaining a nuclear weapon, Israel's voice will be heard and it will clarify its intention to prevent Ahmadinejad from doing so; internal Iranian strife will also play a role in destabilizing his regime.

3. China will play a more direct--which is to say, resolute--role in dealing with North Korea, which will effectively keep Kim Jong Il in his box; Japan will also clarify its intent to become a nuclear power should the North make further threats.

4. Nominal progress will be made to stop the carnage in Darfur, and with respect to HIV/AIDS, with President Bush taking a stronger role in forcing the United Nations to act.

5. Finally, the likelihood of an attack on American soil is increased the further we are from 9/11 and therefore, we should brace ourselves for a serious assault in one or more of our major cities.

If that happens it will provide a belated wake-up call for those who breathe the rarefied air of liberalism, at which time from the ashes will arise, Phoenix-like, a United States finally acting in unison to confront the heinous forces of Islamic extremism.

Far from ideal, but as history demonstrates, it is real world circumstances that drive events and how we respond to them is the ultimate arbiter of whether we will prevail against the forces that are so dedicated to our destruction.

[RedWine]

In a smart boutique displaying an array of minis***ts and skimpy tops, the shopkeeper was too busy attending to his female customers to listen to a sermon on HIV/Aids. "I don't know anything about it at all. Come back after I've finished with my customers," he told the volunteer health education worker.
The volunteer, Amir Fattahi, was unsurprised. Observation and experience told him he had interrupted no ordinary business transaction. The four young women, he surmised, were prostitutes striking a deal with the shopkeeper offering sex in exchange for free or cheap clothes, an increasingly common arrangement in Tehran's fashion shops.

Health education workers say the practice undermines efforts to combat HIV/Aids in Iran, where the disease is increasingly spread through sexual contact. Along with health officials they believe Iran's strict sexual mores are loosening among its predominantly young population. An official drive has been launched to raise HIV/Aids awareness, which lags behind that in the west.
However, experts say the fight to stop the disease spreading is being hampered by a lack of hard facts. While the latest figures show 13,704 registered HIV cases, World Health Organisation and Iranian health ministry estimates put the true figure at between 70,000 and 120,000. Experts believe many infected young people do not seek blood tests because they are too ill-informed or are afraid of their parents finding out.

In the Qaem mall in north Tehran's affluent Tajrish district, where two floors are dedicated to women's fashion, several shopkeepers admitted to first-hand experience of receiving offers of sex. Arash, 23, said he had been propositioned 40 or 50 times in his store. "I reckon that 50% of shopkeepers have accepted sex in return for clothes," he said.

Ahmed Reza, 23, admitted having accepted such offers. "I was sitting outside the shop when two women came and said they wanted to try various manteaus [overcoats]," he said. "They asked for a bargain and I offered them the standard discount. But they said, 'We cannot pay that - if you give us a good discount and your mobile number, we will serve you'. So I gave them more discount and got their mobile numbers.

"I can tell a prostitute by their attitudes and body language. When she asks the price of something, I say it's much more than it really is. Then I reduce it when she asks for discount, so she think she's getting a great bargain and offers sex."

Iran's Islamic authorities attempted a clampdown on the trade by deploying policemen and plainclothes security guards inside shopping malls.

"I don't think [the prostitutes] are HIV/Aids-aware," said Mr Fattahi, a team leader with Iran Positive Life, a volunteer group part-funded by Unicef. "If they are infected and have sex with three or four shopkeepers a day, you can imagine the danger. I think most of the shopkeepers know the risk but they can't resist the temptation. Most times, the opportunity arises too quickly to take precautions."

Iran Positive Life is trying to raise shopkeepers' awareness in the hope that it will rub off on the prostitutes. Every evening, teams of volunteers tour boutiques asking shop assistants about their level of HIV/Aids knowledge. On one tour, joined by the Guardian, most of those canvassed knew it could be contracted from unsafe sex and that using condoms could provide protection.

However, experts say this awareness often does not translate into personal practice and is not passed on to prostitutes. "We have found that while people know about HIV, their information is not necessarily enough for them to use precautionary methods when engaging in sex," said the group's managing director, Amir Reza Moradi, who became HIV positive after receiving an infected blood transfusion.

"At the same time, it's hard for us to reach sex workers, so our education workers go to malls and speak to shopkeepers ... If the shopkeepers become educated and change their attitudes, hopefully the sex workers will notice and change their own ways."

Iran Positive Life's volunteers have spoken to an estimated 5,000 young Iranians in shopping centres, parks and coffee shops since the group launched its "peer education" programme three months ago. It has opened counselling services at health centres in an effort to estimate how many cases result from sexual transmission, rather than from drug addicts' infected needles.

Official resistance to a more explicitly sexual message is strong. While the government has a five-year plan to tackle HIV/Aids, its information campaigns have been criticised as inadequate. Yet the religious hierarchy apparently needs no convincing. A recent survey of 17 senior ayatollahs produced a near-unanimous response condoning condom use and in favour of educating the young on sexually transmitted diseases.

In numbers

300,000
Estimated number of Iranian women who work as prostitutes.

20
Average age of prostitutes in Iran. Many are girls who have run away from home.

120,000
Estimated number of HIV cases is 70,000-120,000. Estimated number of infected women aged 15-49: 11,000. Number of Iranian deaths from Aids: 1,600 (2005 figures).

[RedWine]

بر اساس آخرين آمار، شمار مبتلايان به HIV / ايدز در كشور تا تاريخ اول دى ماه 85، به 14 هزار و90 مبتلا رسيد كه از اين ميزان يكهزار و 760 نفر به علت ابتلا به ايدز جان خود را از دست دادند.

به گزارش خبرنگار بهداشت و درمان ايسنا از 14 هزار و 90 مبتلا به HIV و ايدز شناسايى شده تا كنون 13 هزار و 308 نفر مرد (4/94 درصد) و 782 نفر زن ( 6/5 درصد) هستند. همچنين از 864 فرد مبتلا به ايدز (مرحله نهايى بيمارى) در كشور، 789 نفر مرد (3/91 درصد) و 75 نفر زن (7/8 درصد) هستند.

بر پايه اين گزارش آماري، تعداد فوت*شدگان بر اثر ابتلا به ايدز تا كنون يكهزار و 760 نفر گزارش شده كه از اين تعداد يكهزار و 695 نفر (3/96 درصد) مرد و 65 نفر (7/3 درصد) زن هستند.

بر اساس آمار نهايى مبتلايان به HIV /ايدز، بر حسب جنس و سن، در رده سنى 25 تا 34 سال 4 هزار و 407 مبتلا به HIV / ايدز (8/40 درصد ) بيشترين مبتلا قرار دارد و رده سنى 35 تا 44 سال با 3 هزار و 338 مبتلا (9/30 درصد) در مرحله بعدى به لحاظ فراوانى ابتلاست.

به گزارش ايسنا، راه انتقال غالب در مبتلايان به HIV / ايدز شناسايى شده در كشور اعتياد تزريقى (9/64 درصد) و سپس راه انتقال نامشخص (5/25 درصد)، آميزشى (5/7 درصد) دريافت خون و فراورده*هاى خونى (7/1 درصد) *و بالاخره مادر به كودك 5/0 درصد است.

بر اساس موارد ابتلا به HIV* / ايدز بر حسب راه انتقال و سن نيز در رده سنى 25 تا 34 سال راه انتقال به ترتيب اعتياد تزريقي، نامشخص، آميزشي، دريافت خون و فراورده*هاى خونى و بالاخره مادر به كودك گزارش شد.

اين در حاليست كه در رده سنى 35 تا 44 سال نيز اعتياد ت