Politics

There is some talk that the Pope might win the Nobel Peace Prize. Given the Church’s continuous attacks on people trying to prevent AIDS or unwanted pregnancies, or its enslavement of young Irish women, I would think the Pope belongs in The Hague for crimes against humanity. The latest outrage is the Church telling people in the developing world that condoms cannot prevent AIDS, so they should not use them.

The Catholic Church has been accused of telling people in countries with high rates of HIV that condoms do not protect against the deadly virus.

The claims are made in a Panorama programme called Sex and the Holy City to be screened on BBC One on Sunday.

It says cardinals, bishops, priests and nuns in four continents are saying HIV can pass through tiny holes in condoms.

The World Health Organization has condemned the comments and warned the Vatican it is putting lives at risk.

The claims come just a day after a report revealed that a young person is now infected with HIV every 14 seconds.

According to the United Nations Population Fund, around 6,000 people between the ages of 15 and 24 catch the virus every day.

Half of all new infections are now in people under the age of 25 and most of these are young women living in the developing world.

…

But according to Panorama, the Church is now telling people that condoms do not work.

In an interview, one of the Vatican’s most senior cardinals Alfonso Lopez Trujillo suggested HIV could even pass through condoms.

“The Aids virus is roughly 450 times smaller than the spermatozoon. The spermatozoon can easily pass through the ‘net’ that is formed by the condom,” he says.

The cardinal, who is president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family, suggests that governments should urge people not to use condoms.

“These margins of uncertainty…should represent an obligation on the part of the health ministries and all these campaigns to act in the same way as they do with regard to cigarettes, which they state to be a danger.”

The programme includes a Catholic nun advising her HIV-infected choir master not to use condoms with his wife because “the virus can pass through”.

The Archbishop of Nairobi Raphael Ndingi Nzeki told Panaroma that condoms were helping to spread the virus.

“Aids…has grown so fast because of the availability of condoms,” he said.

In Kenya, one in five people are HIV positive.

No, my new G4 PowerBook hasn’t arrived yet, but this is almost as good.

Today’s Daily News has this story:

Talk-radio titan Rush Limbaugh is being investigated for allegedly buying thousands of addictive painkillers from a black-market drug ring.

The Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into the leak of a CIA operative’s identity and has asked the White House to preserve all documents that might relevant to the probe, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said Tuesday.

I’m sure we can rest assured that Mr. Ashcroft will pursue this with the same zeal as he is using The PATRIOT Act.

The best coverage of this story is coming from Joshua Marshall. No, he’s not in my blog links. After he got all weird and “oh my God what if Iraq does have WMD we better go to war!” I took him off.

This story, from the September 19 newsletter of the German Embassy, made me cry when I read it.

Navy officials were last week astounded and moved by a Germany frigate’s stirring tribute to their colleagues on the USS Doyle to mark the two-year anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Military vessels routinely render honors to military ships of other countries when they pass at sea by dipping their flag, as a sign of respect. But the German frigate Niedersachsen went above and beyond this normal gesture of respect when it asked to come alongside the USS Doyle on September 11, 2003, the second anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the US.

On this day, as the two ships approached and passed, the entire crew of the German vessel stood top-side in dress-blues, holding their hats over their hearts. And as the ultimate gesture of respect, the Niedersachsen was flying the stars and stripes from its main mast. A US Naval Officer, in an email that also reached the German Embassy in Washington, told of how touched the US crew were by the “classy and emotional” presentation by their German counterparts.

In an interview on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered on September 14, Commander Bernd Kuhbier of the FGS Niedersachsen explained this extraordinary act. “When you are on a warship, you don’t fly a foreign flag on the top mast,” Commander Kuhbier told host Steve Inskeep. “But we though the occasion was suitable to do that, so that’s what we did. We were proud to do so.”

The unexpected gesture touched the US sailors, Vice Admiral Timothy LaFleur described in an unclassified email: “From their main mast they flew our flag and they held their covers over their hearts. Needless to say, the whole crew was choked up and a few tears formed in our eyes. Both ships stayed next to each other in silence for about 5 minutes. These are the days that remind me why I joined the Navy.”

The FGS Niedersachsen and the USS Doyle are both part of NATO’s Standing Naval Force Atlantic (STANAVFORLANT), a permanent peacetime multinational naval squadron composed of destroyers, cruisers and frigates from the navies of various NATO nations.

… an occasional series…

We’re lucky the Bush regime doesn’t just put poor people without health insurance into concentration camps. Their only health proposal this year seems to be making it easier for emergency rooms to deny care to the uninsured.

While watching the credits for Bowling for Columbine, I noticed Yoko Ono was one of the people in the list of acknowledgements. If we were more like Canada, John Lennon would probably still be alive.

Congratulations to Matt from To The Point! He’s quoted in the latest Washington Monthly, in an article on Wesley Clark. He and Simon are doing some great writing, so go read them.

OK. I have to say it: I told Matt he should have a blog the first time I met him.

I love this quote, lifted from the header of Idols of the Marketplace:

If there is anybody in this land who thoroughly believes that the meek shall inherit the earth, they have not often let their presence be known.
— W.E.B. DuBois

Buried in this article in the NY Times, Bush ‘Compassion’ Agenda: A Liability in ’04?, is this nice little quote from Joshua B. Bolten, White House budget director and formerly Mr. Bush’s chief domestic policy adviser.

“Even the president is not omnipotent,” Mr. Bolten said of the House opposition to the AmeriCorps money. “Would that he were. He often says that life would be a lot easier if it were a dictatorship. But it’s not, and he’s glad it’s a democracy.”

Often?

[via Tom Tomorrow]

I’ve had it with Bloomberg. He no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg says President George W. Bush shouldn’t be blamed if the Environmental Protection Agency downplayed the seriousness of airborne pollution after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The report, by the agency’s inspector general, concludes that the White House influenced the EPA to minimize air-quality concerns. “I know the president and I think he’s a very honest guy,” Bloomberg said before Sunday’s Pakistani Independence Day parade. “It would never occur to me not to trust him.”