[AnNahar] A sharp rise in new HIV infections in the Middle East and North Africa is a worrying trend, despite some positive developments, UNAIDS chief Michel Sidibe told Agence La Belle France Presse on Friday.
While the epidemic remains very "concentrated" within the region, with homosexuals, sex workers, migrants and drug addicts comprising the vast majority of cases, the Arab world has seen a dramatic increase in new cases in recent years.
This compares with a fall in global infection rates of 35 percent.
"There are regions we are worried about, notably the Middle East and North Africa, where a relatively quick rise in the number of new infections has been observed. The virus in these regions is difficult to contain," Sidibe said.
With 225,000 people infected and 22,000 new cases in 2013, "the epidemic is not huge, but what is worrying is above all the trend... In just a few years we've gone from 10,000 people infected to 225,000," he added, speaking on the sidelines of a regional HIV/AIDS conference.
Equally, access to treatment across the region is very poor, with Sidibe comparing medical coverage in the Middle East, of just 18 percent, to around 80 percent in certain African countries ravaged by the disease.
In the Middle East, only "11 percent of children with AIDS have access to treatment", he said.
Among the main obstacles to tackling the problem in the region are the "very strong stigma and discrimination" towards people at risk and "all the politics and laws" that penalize the same people, he added.
The UNAIDS official noted some progress in terms of governments taking the problem seriously, with the Arab League ...an organization of Arabic-speaking states with 22 member countries and four observers. The League tries to achieve Arab consensus on issues, which usually leaves them doing nothing but a bit of grimacing and mustache cursing... adopting its first strategy for combating the virus, and a convention aimed at protecting people living with HIV.
But the texts must still be ratified by different member states.
"I don't think the rest of the world is more tolerant than the Arab world, I believe it's a problem of approach, that they will get there," Sidibe said.
#1
Malaria protection is generally viewed as a genetic trade-off, it evolved only in people who carried genes for sickle-cell anemia, an inherited disease in which blood cells are misshapen [shaped like sickles]. Perhaps HIV is actually a genetic or behavioral equilibrium.
"Shut up," the NYT explained. I've downloaded the kindle sample to decide for myself (link).
[WashExaminer] The New York Times ...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize... bestseller list hasn't waited a millisecond to put Hillary Clinton ... sometimes described as The Liberatress of Libya and at other times as Mrs. Bill, never as Another Frederick T. Frelinghuysen ... 's book atop its influential chart after just a week of sales, but has totally ignored another top-10 hardcover from noted conservative and critic of President B.O., Dinesh D'Souza.
His new book, on sale for three weeks, isn't just absent from the top 10 lists already set for the next two Sundays, but totally missing from the list of the nation's top 25 nonfiction hardcovers despite having sales higher than 13 on the latest Times chart.
According to sales reports provided to Secrets, D'Souza's new book America: Imagine a World Without Her, sold 4,915 in the first week and 5,592 in the second week. Had it been included on the upcoming June 22 Times hardcover nonfiction list, it would have ranked No. 8, and then No. 11 on the June 29 list that puts Clinton's sales at 85,721. The lists are widely circulated in the publishing industry before they go public.
#1
It is probably not going to make any difference as the people who are fond of this left-wing rag probably wouldn't buy Dinesh D'Souza's book anyway. Banishing the book by the NYTs might even help sales.
[EAGNEWS.ORG] SWANLEY, England — Parents of students at Crockenhill Primary School in Kent, England are fuming over a school-sanctioned pole dancing demonstration that featured performers as young as four years old.
One of the ladies that was performing it was wearing a crop top with one of the shoulder sleeves missing — it was quite revealing," according to one several parents who stormed out of the event at the school's summer fete Sunday. "The shorts they had on showed more than they should and a lot of people were leaving as a result of it."
"I don't think it would have been as bad if they had been more appropriately dressed," the father told the Daily Mail. "If it was a leotard, fair enough, but for what they were wearing, and having their faces all made up, it just wasn't right.
"I felt like I was entering something quite unsavory."
Officials with the school and local Revolutions Pole Academy arranged for the performance at Crockenhill's summer school festival as a way to encourage physical fitness. Officials contend the routine, which also featured Disney music and adults dressed as characters from The Lion King, was perfectly acceptable, the Daily Mail reports.
"We had the dance company come along and they were involved in aerial skills and it's run by someone in our community," Crockenhill's headmaster, Sarah Warshow, told the news site.
"There was one performance by the teacher and some of the children. It's great for the children to keep fit and it's fun as well," she said. "We felt it was good to support it — there's nothing sleazy about it."
Revolutions owner Cat Ledbetter performed a pole dance at the event to the Disney tune Let it Go, from the movie Frozen. She said some parents are just over-reacting.
"The children involved all had a fantastic time and have benefited greatly from their lessons," she told the Daily Mail. "It's fun and it's keeping them fit."
Ledbetter added that "the pole workout is one of four or five workouts they do and a staple part of my business.
"To separate it and tell them they can't do it would be putting a stigma on it. I'm very sad for the school and it's quite upsetting for the children to hear these comments."
Oddly enough, nobody seems to be more upset about the whole situation than LaToya Jackson.
"This is so disturbing to hear. What are we teaching our girls? Look at society. What are we doing here?" Jackson told Dr. Drew during a guest appearance on Dr. Drew on Call. "It so disturbing … the message that you are giving them that it's ok to do that, to grow up and do this. I'm just, I'm just so upset about this."
Posted by: Fred ||
06/22/2014 00:00 ||
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#1
You can see why the Birmingham Fruits of the Loon got a toe-hold.
#3
Better income chance with a trade later on than spending four years at an American university for a useless humanities degree and decades of debt. Instead of being screwed over by those tenured professors, they'll get to do the same to the professors (see-Blue Angel)
#7
Steve White: Gotcher answer rat cheer. Scroll down for video and use the full screen mode. The good stuff (such as it is) starts at 1:40.
My view: it's a gymnastics routine with unnecessarily skimpy costumes. Some of the provocative poses the girls assume aren't any more provocative than what you'd find in the Olympics, but the costumes they're wearing are sexier than those of Olympic gymnasts. (Disclaimer: I last watched Olympic gymnastics in a year beginning with "19", so maybe I'm wrong.)
The four-year-olds run up at the end of the video, and are not wearing anything particularly interesting, as I recall.
I don't know what the deal is with the giant ring thing. That seems more spectacle than athletics. The three-girls-on-a-pole looks like it belongs in the opening credits of a Bond film.
[BALTIMORE.CBSLOCAL] Elkton police say a woman's body was found in a car that had been parked on a department store parking lot for three weeks.
Department front man Lt. Joseph Zurolo tells The News Journal of Wilmington, Del., that the body was found about 3 p.m. Thursday. He said a groundskeeper at Wal-Mart detected a foul odor and told store managers, who called police.
Officers found the decomposed body of a woman lying in the back seat.
Zurolo says the car was parked in an isolated spot on the lot. He says the store's surveillance videos showed the car pulling into the lot on May 29.
Police say video shows a woman getting out of the driver's side and get into the back seat.
Zurolo says foul play is not involved.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/22/2014 00:00 ||
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#1
Wal-Mart allows overnight parking, it's strange. Check your local one out at 5 am for an interesting look at Americana.
DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — The Ebola outbreak ravaging West Africa is ''totally out of control,'' according to a senior official for Doctors Without Borders, who says the medical group is stretched to the limit in responding.
The outbreak has caused more deaths than any other of the disease, said another official with the medical charity. Ebola has been linked to more than 330 deaths in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, according to the World Health Organization.
International organizations and the governments involved need to send in more health experts and increase public education messages about how to stop the spread of the disease, Bart Janssens, the director of operations for the medical group in Brussels, told The Associated Press on Friday.
''The reality is clear that the epidemic is now in a second wave,'' Janssens said. ''And, for me, it is totally out of control.''
The Ebola virus, which causes internal bleeding and organ failure, spreads through direct contact with infected people. There is no cure or vaccine, so containing an outbreak focuses on supportive care for the ill and isolating them to limit the spread of the virus.
The current outbreak, which began in Guinea either late last year or early this year, had appeared to slow before picking up pace again in recent weeks, including spreading to the Liberian capital for the first time.
''This is the highest outbreak on record and has the highest number of deaths, so this is unprecedented so far,'' said Armand Sprecher, a public health specialist with Doctors Without Borders.
According to the WHO, the highest previous death toll was in the first recorded Ebola outbreak in Congo in 1976, when 280 deaths were reported. Because Ebola often touches remote areas and the first cases sometimes go unrecognized, it is likely that there are deaths that go uncounted during outbreaks.
The multiple locations of the current outbreak and its movement across borders make it one of the ''most challenging Ebola outbreaks ever,'' Fadela Chaib, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organization, said earlier in the week.
But Janssens' description of the Ebola outbreak was even more alarming, and he warned that the countries involved had not recognized the gravity of the situation. He criticized WHO for not doing enough to prod local leaders; the U.N. health agency did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
''There needs to be a real political commitment that this is a very big emergency,'' he said. ''Otherwise, it will continue to spread, and for sure it will spread to more countries.''
But Tolbert Nyenswah, Liberia's deputy minister of health, said the highest levels of government are working to contain the outbreak, noting that Liberia had a long period with no new cases before this second wave.
With more than 40 international staff currently on the ground and four treatment centers, Doctors Without Borders has reached its limit to respond, Janssens said. It is unclear, for instance, if the group will be able to set up a treatment center in Liberia, like the ones it is running in in Guinea and Sierra Leone, he said.
Janssens said the only way to stop the disease's spread is to persuade people to come forward when symptoms occur and to avoid touching the sick and dead. He said this outbreak is particularly challenging because it began in an area where people are very mobile and has spread to even more densely populated areas, like the capitals of Guinea and Liberia. The disease typically strikes sparsely populated areas in central or eastern Africa, where it spreads less easily, he said.
By contrast, the epicenter of this outbreak is near a major regional transport hub, the Guinean city of Gueckedou.
Between this and AIDS and the spreading of MERS from Saudi Arabia during the annual Haj, not to mention the various vicious wars across the continent, quite possibly overpopulation will no longer be a problem in Africa. The Arab world has all of that, excepting only Ebola, which leads to the question about a future lack of overpopulation in that region.
Posted by: Steve White ||
06/22/2014 00:00 ||
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#1
Hell they got something better than Ebola TW, they got Holy Mens, Automatic Weapons, they got Jihad!
#2
Hell, just pray to Allah for health, course you know, you won't get it, not that you would want GOOD health.
Just take what Allah sends you.
Posted by: Redeck Jim ||
06/22/2014 4:30 Comments ||
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#3
I blame poverty, lack of job opportunity, and the secondary effects of a 300 year period of western colonial oppression. Prior to the modern era, the region enjoyed 40,000 to 60,000 yeas of unparalleled progress and growth.
#5
But ... how is this related to Global Man-made Climate Modification?
"Change", you know, might allow for natural causes, whereas "modification" suggests a conscious intent.
Posted by: Bobby ||
06/22/2014 10:42 Comments ||
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#6
Gentlemen, people are suffering from a hellacious disease, and all you want to do is snark about it?
There are people I know personally and care about in Liberia. People with good sense, love for their neighbors, and the drive and guts to fight the ignorance that causes so much suffering.
I dare you to take the two minutes you would ordinarily use to make a snotty comment, and go look up a way to help improve health in Africa. Here are a few:
Tostan, http://www.tostan.org/ Fights against Female Genital Mutilation throughout Africa. Grassroots women's efforts begun in Senegal
Dignity Liberia
http://www.dignityliberia.org/
Provides medical treatment for women with obstetric fistula. Some women suffer from complications for years without treatment.
Compassion International,
Compassion.com
and
Vision Trust
visiontrust.org
Both organizations specialize in children's health, education, and nutrition through child sponsorship.
#7
Genital Mutilation is a disease? How about an insane barbaric cultural norm? Washing dead bodies with Ebola is a known transmission vector, yet their "Culture" compels them to do it.
Yes their conditions are hellacious at times, but I see too few going beyond tribalism and ignorance to help themselves rise above. See: the next tribal militia attack
Posted by: Frank G ||
06/22/2014 12:07 Comments ||
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#8
Washingdead bodies with Ebola is a known transmission vector, yet their "Culture" compels them to do it.
#10
Frank, one of the problems has been getting the word out about washing the bodies. In a big area you focus your efforts on places you know have the disease nearby. Then the disease pops up someplace unexpected.
Posted by: James ||
06/22/2014 14:56 Comments ||
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Squinty asks, Are cultures eligible to receive Darwin awards?
Of course they are. Some even elect Obama, downhill all the way.
[HOSTED.AP.ORG] Self-styled Druids, new-agers and thousands of revelers have watched the sun rise above the ancient stone circle at Stonehenge to mark the summer solstice - the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere.
English Heritage, which manages the monument, says some 36,000 sun-watchers gathered on the Salisbury Plain about 80 miles (130 kilometers) southwest of London on Saturday. Police say the event was peaceful with only 25 arrests, mainly for drug offenses.
Couples kissed, dancers circled with hoops and revelers took part in a mass yoga practice as part of the free-form celebrations.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/22/2014 00:00 ||
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the event was peaceful with only 25 arrests,
Yeah, roght.
Posted by: Redeck Jim ||
06/22/2014 10:27 Comments ||
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Couples kissed, dancers circled with hoops and revelers took part in a mass yoga practice as part of the free-form celebrations.
Hence the term... "hooping it up."
We are the Crop Circle Illuminati of Albion. Mock us at your own peril.
[World Bulletin] Turkmenistan and South Korea have agreed to build a natural gas-processing plants worth $4 billion in the Central Asian country after South Korean leader Park Geun-Hye met with counterpart Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov on Friday.
The deal was one of many signed, permissing Turkmengaz and South Korea's LG and Hyundai to build the gas-processing plants in Turkmenistan, during Park's first visit to Turkmenistan as part of her Central Asia tour.
Turkmenistan has the fourth largest gas reserves in the world estimated at 32 trillion cubic meters. Already producing around 80 billion cubic meters of gas per year of export for Chinese, Russian, Iranian and central Asian markets, Turkmenistan is also becoming an alternative to Russian gas for Europe.
Along with a number of projects to increase its export of gas to meet demand, a planned pipeline from Turkmenistan across the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan and Turkey is set open the way for gas to be transported to the European market.
#2
Just get it over and annex eastern Ukraine. Obama and the EU aren't going to stop it, and the fools there have been brainwashed by propaganda. They deserve the Russian fascist jackboots they are asking for on their necks.
[NDTV] Russian President Vladimir Putin ...Second and fourth President and sixth of the Russian Federation and the first to remain sober. Putin is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from polonium poisoning. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to Putin. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead... has ordered troops in central Russia on "full combat alert," the defence minister said on Saturday, a day after the Kremlin confirmed it was beefing up its military presence at the border with Ukraine.
"In accordance with his (Putin's) order, from 11:00 am Moscow time (0700 GMT) the troops of the central military district as well as formations and military units located on its territory have been put on full combat alert," Russian news agencies quoted Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu as saying.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/22/2014 00:00 ||
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The cascading effects of incompetence, impudence, and failure on display. It's right there in the history books. Well, at least the pre-Marxists ones. Hey, we're modern, urban, and beyond all that record of human behavior. What could go wrong.
#4
He's already figured Obama will do nothing. So only logistics is holding him back now, in all likelihood. Russians don't take a dump, son, without a plan.
The Armenian Defense Ministry said two Armenian soldiers were killed in the latest clashes between Armenian and Azerbaijani military forces. According to the ministry, one soldier was killed near the border with Azerbaijan's breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh on June 19, while another one died in a gun battle near Armenia's border with Azerbaijan's Naxcivan Autonomous Republic.
Meanwhile, media reports in Azerbaijan say two Azerbaijani women and a child were injured after being shot by Armenian solders near Nagorno-Karabakh.
[NEWS.YAHOO] A South Korean conscript soldier shot and killed five of his fellow unit members and injured five others late on Saturday at a guard post near the heavily armed border with North Korea, a South Korean official said.
The exact circumstances of the incident at the remote guard post were not immediately clear and the official could not provide further details, although there was no indication that North Korea was involved in the incident.
The incident took place in the Goseong county, a mountainous region that borders the North on the eastern end of the peninsula.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency said there was an operation to capture the conscript who is believed to be on the run carrying a firearm and live ammunitions.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/22/2014 00:00 ||
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Google Reportedly Unveiling Health Data Tracking Service at I/O Conference
The new "Google Fit" health data tracking service will compete with Apple's recently announced HealthKit data collection services, according to a report.
Google will debut its plans for a new health data tracking service called "Google Fit" at the upcoming Google I/O developers conference as part of its recent push into high-tech wearables.
The rumored Google Fit strategy, which was first reported by Forbes earlier this month, calls for Google to "aggregate data through open APIs, instruction sets that allow apps to share information, and will also announce partnerships with wearable device makers at its I/O conference," according to the article.
The new service will "collect and aggregate data from popular fitness trackers and health-related apps, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the company's plans," and will be launched at the June 25-26 Google I/O conference in San Francisco, the story reported.
gateway quotes a WSJ article below
We have emails suggesting that IRS staff aided Sen. Levin in putting together his letters of complaint to the IRS. We have staff for House Democrat Elijah Cummings asking the IRS for information to use in Mr. Cummings's campaign against a specific conservative organization, True the Vote. Ms. Lerner got involved in that one"--querying her staff as to whether they'd helped Mr. Cummings.
As to Ms. Lerner's behavior, consider that House Ways & Means Chairman Dave Camp first sent a letter asking if the IRS was engaged in targeting in June, 2011. Ms. Lerner denied it. She engineered a plant in an audience at a tax conference in May 2013 to drop the bombshell news about targeting (maybe hoping nobody would notice?). She has subsequently asserted a Fifth Amendment right to silence in front of the only people actually investigating the affair, Congress. Now we learn that her hard drive supposedly defied modernity and suffered total annihilation about 10 days after the Camp letter arrived.
Posted by: lord garth ||
06/22/2014 00:00 ||
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This is before the Exchange Server blowed up? Or after the Exchange Server blowed up? Or does the IRS use some proprietary snap chap like mail system?
WTF? I mean WTF? This is stupid, like Mark Steyn says "They're laughing at us now". But mind you, the inter webs never forget, I n due time someones going to the slammer.
#5
It's a near certainty that the NSA has copies of all of these emails, but will never admit that. Also, yesterday there was a report that the IRS was using an email backup service. Focus on that. Forget the hard drive, it's a dead letter and a distraction at this point.
#6
I wonder if damaging Lerner e-mails might be among the Snowden documents? Then the Russians could use them to keep the US from interfering in their adventures?
#9
The only thing that will fix this is jail time. Nort country club jail, but PMITA federal penitentiary. Problem is the person who is supposed to do that is the AG. Who is as crooked an AG as has ever filled that office.
Posted by: Frank G ||
06/22/2014 11:54 Comments ||
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Oops, no, the IRS canceled the contract with the email backup service right after Lerner's drive crashed. How convenient. This is not incompetence.
"But Sonasoft's six-year business relationship with the IRS came to an abrupt end at the close of fiscal year 2011, as congressional investigators began looking into the IRS conservative targeting scandal and IRS employees' computers started crashing left and right."
Time to start fitting the IRS leadership for prison blues.
#16
My hard drive could crash, and it has before, but copies of emails I received are still on the comcast server. Knowing who sent/replied to my emails would be a finger pointing to where my sent emails went.
#19
The emails should be available then? If not there is a huge conspiracy going on in our Federal government that requires a huge flush.Posted by JohnQC 2014
John - If it's all the same to you, hows about we proceed with the "huge flush" regardless of the conspiracy ?
[TELEGRAPH.CO.UK] Pope launches strongest papal attack on organised crime since Pope John Paul in 1993 in impromptu comments about southern Italy's 'Ndrangheta crime group
Posted by: Fred ||
06/22/2014 00:00 ||
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Wel, at least for once, he will not be taken out of context.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Hillary Clinton
We are the Crop Circle Illuminati of Albion. Mock us at your own peril.
...Second and fourth President and sixth of the Russian Federation and the first to remain sober. Putin is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from polonium poisoning. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to Putin. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead...
North Korea
Google Reportedly Unveiling Health Data Tracking Service at I/O Conference
