Not with a bang but a whimper: A Wilderness Ecosystem in Collapse. The vast subarctic ecosystem of the Aleutian Islands has suddenly gone to hell in a handbasket. In just a handful of years, there has been a catastrophic reduction in the biodiversity of the Gulf of Alaska, and no one knows why. Sea mammals, crustaceans and varieties of fish, and the kelp forests that were the foundation fothe food chain have vanished. Scientists are beginning to unravel the tangled, cascading chain of effects that has led to this “regime shift”; and it’s not encouraging how fragile a web the ecosystem turns out to be. As usual, the ultimate causes of such a disastrous upset to the vital balance appear to be manmade efffects. “If this rugged, remote ecosystem is

collapsing, can any place on Earth be safe?”Indeed, there is growing suspicion that other ocean realms are undergoing such a drastic change, just with no one there to see. LA Times

Annals of the Decline and Fall (cont’d.): Films aren’t as good as they used to be, it is generally conceded. ‘Foreign-language “art house” films are still being made but… they

are a diminished force in our cultural life – on cinema and television screens and in

the eyes of the critics.’ Will serious thoughtful filmmaking survive “Hollywood’s

feelgood factor”?

WWGD? Gandhi’s Spirit Hovers as India Debates Iodized Salt. “India has made

tremendous progress in

eradicating the ancient

scourge of iodine deficiency

— the single most

preventable cause of mental

retardation — by making

cheap, iodized salt available

to most of its billion people.

But a recent government

decision has jeopardized

these advances, medical

researchers say.

Indeed, India’s entire

scientific establishment,

including the Indian Medical

Association and the Indian

National Science Academy,

seems aghast that Prime

Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee

and his Health Ministry lifted a two-year-old ban on the sale

of noniodized salt in September. In doing so, the

government bowed to a lobbying campaign by Hindu

nationalists, Gandhians and small- scale salt producers.

…Those on both sides of iodization claim to be the true

inheritors of Gandhi’s legacy. The scientists say Gandhi

would be happy that salt has become a way to ensure that

even India’s poorest children do not have their intelligence

dulled by a lack of iodine, while some followers of Gandhi

contend that he would object to the compulsory iodization

of salt.” New York Times

Switched on: “In lab mice all over the world, genes are being turned

on and off like light bulbs to find out what they do.

Scientists have rewound Huntington’s disease,

probed the roots of memory and staged the onset of

prion disease. And that’s just in the brain. The man

who made it all possible is Hermann Bujard, chairman

of the Centre for Molecular Biology at the University

of Heidelberg, Germany. With his colleagues, Bujard

developed the Tet system which allows genes to be

controlled remotely–from outside a living organism.

What started as a hobby has spawned two thousand

research papers and contributed to work that led to a

Nobel prize last month–for somebody else.” New Scientist

Making them fit the genital norms: “The rationale for clitoridectomy in (the 19th century) was

straightforwardly terrible, and ridiculously unscientific. By contrast,

modern theories seem slightly more humane, but when you get down to

it, the same question of gender links the Victorian Age’s clitoridectomy

to its Dot-Com Age cousin. We have been altering the healthy genitals

of our children-—boys as well as girls-—for 135 years so that a girl will

look and act like a girl, and a boy will look and act like a boy, according

to social norms. The strict division between female and male bodies and

behavior is our most cherished and comforting truth.

“All over this country there are people whose clitorises have been

removed, either totally or partially. They range from your great-aunt’s

roommate in the nursing home to your neighbor’s two-year-old. They

include hundreds of women from every generation. Some were born

clearly female; some were born clearly male but were reassigned as

female and then had their genitals altered; and some were babies whose

sex was not so easy to define. Although statistics for childhood clitoral

surgery are extremely difficult to gather, one can extrapolate a figure

from the number of babies born each year in the U.S., the number born

with conditions that produce enlarged clitorises, and the number-—most

of them-—who will undergo clitoroplasty. Approximately five times a

day in the U.S., surgeons change the size and shape of a child’s healthy

clitoris. Few of these children are capable of expressing what they want.

Some, if given the choice later in life, might choose clitoroplasty. But

judging from the responses of women who had the surgery done either

without their agreement or at an age when they were too young to know

what they were agreeing to, many would have preferred to stay the way

they were.” Ms. Magazine