The United Nations yesterday urged all countries with devastating Aids epidemics to launch mass male circumcision programmes following evidence that the surgical procedure can protect against HIV infection. The World Health Organisation and UNAids, the joint UN programme on HIV/Aids, made the official recommendations after a meeting of experts in Montreux, Switzerland, to consider the evidence from three trials in Africa, which were stopped early when it became clear that men who had been circumcised were up to 60% less likely to get HIV than those who had not. Experts accept circumcision is a sensitive issue, tied in to social and religious traditions. During sectarian fighting in India, Muslims and Hindus at one time would tell friend from foe by pulling down their trousers – all Muslims were circumcised. But research suggests men and women in Africa would accept male circumcision if it lowered the risk of Aids, and WHO experts yesterday held out the prospect of cultural change over a decade or more. Catherine Hankins, associate director of the WHO, said that within about a decade in the 1980s and 1990s, South Korea went from no circumcision of boys to circumcising 90%, influenced by the example […]
SEARCY, ARK. - Attacks leveled at those of faith represent a great threat against America, a federal appeals court judge said at Harding University. Judge Janice Rogers Brown, a member of the Silver Spring, Md., church, spoke on ‘Faith and Freedom’ as part of Harding’s American Studies Institute lecture series. ‘In my view, Christianity at its best is the foundation of reason and liberty,’ said Brown, a judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. ‘The true American religious tradition, the one that disciplines power, subjugating it to reason, truth and, ultimately, an all-powerful God, is not a threat to liberty but its best defender.’ Brown said those who attack the religious right ‘essentially argue (that) the true American religion demands acceptance of, indeed submission to, a common political vision - their vision.’ In the 20th century, secular humanism crept into American and Western governments, promising openness and tolerance for diverse groups, religions and philosophies, she said. ‘What we got was narrow positivism, moral relativism and the totalitarian reign of the radical multiculturalist,’ Brown said. ‘It promised peace. What we got was a process of permanent revolution, tumult, strife and […]
Income inequality grew significantly in 2005, with the top 1 percent of Americans - those with incomes that year of more than $348,000 - receiving their largest share of national income since 1928, analysis of newly released tax data shows. The top 10 percent, roughly those earning more than $100,000, also reached a level of income share not seen since before the Depression. While total reported income in the United States increased almost 9 percent in 2005, the most recent year for which such data is available, average incomes for those in the bottom 90 percent dipped slightly compared with the year before, dropping $172, or 0.6 percent. The gains went largely to the top 1 percent, whose incomes rose to an average of more than $1.1 million each, an increase of more than $139,000, or about 14 percent. The new data also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980. Prof. Emmanuel Saez, the University of California, Berkeley, economist […]
NEW YORK — Off-price retailer TJX Cos Inc. said that information from about 45.7 million credit and debit cards was stolen in a computer data security breach over an 18-month period. The operator of the T.J. Maxx and Marshall’s chains also said that personal information — including names, addresses and personal ID numbers — of about 451,000 people who returned merchandise without a receipt was stolen, adding to the 3,600 it had previously identified. The company gave the numbers in a regulatory filing late on Wednesday, more than two months after first disclosing that its computer system had been compromised by hackers. Data from about 75 percent of cards was either expired or had masked data, meaning that the card numbers were not readable, the company said in the filing. The company said it believes its computer system was accessed by an unauthorized user in July 2005, then on subsequent dates in 2005 and from mid-May 2006 to mid-January 2007. It added that no customer data was stolen after December 18, 2006. Last week six people in the Miami, Florida area were arrested in connection with the purchase of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth […]
WASHINGTON — Eight federal prosecutors were fired last year because they did not sufficiently support President Bush’s priorities, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ former chief of staff says in remarks prepared for delivery Thursday to Congress. Separately, the Justice Department admitted Wednesday it gave senators inaccurate information about the firings and presidential political adviser Karl Rove’s role in trying to secure a U.S. attorney’s post for one of his former aides, Tim Griffin. In a letter accompanying new documents sent to the House and Senate Judiciary committees, Justice officials acknowledged that a Feb. 23 letter to four Democratic senators erred in asserting that the department was not aware of any role Rove played in the decision to appoint Griffin to replace U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins in Little Rock, Ark. Sampson, in remarks obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press, spoke dismissively of Democrats’ condemnation of what they call political pressure in the firings. ‘The distinction between ‘political’ and ‘performance-related’ reasons for removing a United States attorney is, in my view, largely artificial,’ he said. ‘A U.S. attorney who is unsuccessful from a political perspective … is unsuccessful.’ Democrats have described the firings as an ‘intimidation by purge’ […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
