Controversy Shadows AIDS Summit. South African President Thabo Mbeki’s wrong-headed rejection of the expensive but effective protease inhibitors (which have been a revolutionary breakthrough in treatment of AIDS in the first world) even with subsidies from pharmaceutical manufacturers, and his reliance on advisors skeptical that HIV causes AIDS, sit squarely in the face of the onrushing South African AIDS epidemic. The opening of the 13th International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, the first time it occurs on the African continent or indeed in the developing world, is sure to highlight tensions in the face of impending tragedy. 95% of the world’s people with AIDS live in developing countries.

Ominous Start for Program to Insure Drugs for Elderly. Nevada has pioneered a drug prescription plan for the elderly similar to the one the US House of Representatives approved last month, but it appears to be going nowhere. ‘…a state assemblywoman who is

co-chairwoman of a task force monitoring use of the money,

said: “I have my doubts that an insurance company will be

able to offer meaningful drug benefits under this program. If

an insurance company does bid on it but the benefits are

paltry, senior citizens will be up in arms.” ‘

GettingIt: A rant, not about “reality TV” but its critics: “…there’s really nothing to be

said about excrement, aside from the

occasional poop joke. So shut the fuck up. It

is stupid and redundant to scrutinize it at

length with your college-educated mind (or

even better, criticize it from a distance) and

declare that it smells bad. “

Intifada redux? This appears to be a photo of Palestinian-American academic Edward Said throwing a stone at Israeli soldiers from across the south Lebanese border, apparently from the Jordan Times. [It is said to be an unreliable link so it might not open for you.] And Palestinian woman reportedly shot dead by Israeli troops. [Nando Times]

New front in the war against science :

“An underground of ‘dissident’ scientists and self-described experts publish their theories in newsletters and on the Web, exchanging ideas in a great battle

against ‘the temple of relativity.’ According to these critics, relativity is not only wrong, it’s an affront to common sense, and Einstein was

a cheat.” A number of fundamentalist, paranoid, prejudicial and otherwise hysterical trends seemingly converge here, but is there a non-lunatic fringe as well? [Salon] On a related topic, a less-than-lukewarm review of Michael Paterniti’s Driving Mr. Albert, in which a journalist and a pathologist take off on a cross-country encounter with America, the universe and themselves, carrying the preeminent scientific brain of the 20th century in the trunk.

Nando Times: Missile Test Fails: “The missile interceptor

the Pentagon is developing as the key component of a national missile defense not only missed

its intended target over the Pacific Ocean early Saturday, it didn’t even attempt to hit it….The $100 million test was the third to attempt an intercept, and the second to fail….It remained unclear Saturday whether the Pentagon still believed the missile defense project

was ready to move toward deployment.”

New Scientist: They’ve seen a ghost. Resonances caused by swarming electrons around atoms precisely placed in “quantum corrals” produce “ghost images” of the atoms at a distance. It’s like a quantum analogy to a whispering gallery. Because these structures, in essence, transmit information, they may become the basis of subatomic-scale circuitry.

New Scientist: “What we’re trying to do is to build a Web browser for

parrots…”

Prevalence of Intimate Partner Violence and Injuries In a random telephone survey in Washington in 1998 just reported in Morbidity and Mortality, >23% of females and >16% of males reported that they had been the victims of domestic battering during their lifetime. More than 90% of battered women, and ~50% of battered men, had experienced consequent injury.