The American Medical
Association approved a resolution Tuesday asking
the government to consider making the “morning-after” contraceptive available
over-the-counter.

Road rage: “What is it about getting into a car that turns a decent,
upright citizen into a raving maniac?” A recent study shows that about one-sixth of people who are not quick to anger in the rest of their lives lose it behind the wheel. One contributing factor may be deindividuation, the process preventing us from relating to the driver of another car as a person because you only get “partial status information” about them. Even trying a conciliatory gesture from inside your car stands a chance of being wildly misinterpreted by the driver you just cut off.

Culturally, anger may be sanctioned as a way of helping yourself feel better, but neurochemically there is a price — once you get angry, you tend to stay angry longer. (Some people may be particularly predisposed in this direction by low serotonin levels as well.) And the angry brain is, in a way that makes evolutionary sense, a less efficient information processor. Also see the Global Web Conference on Aggressive Driving. New Scientist

Move over Casanova. “When you’re single no one wants to know. Yet the minute
you get a partner, the others come running. Ever
wondered why?” New Scientist

Welcome to the Complete Review.This book review site, to one of whose reviews Robot Wisdom linked recently, really gets the point about being web-enabled.

The Politics of Terror. “The war in Chechnya is not over. More than a year after
the federal troops first intervened, bombs, mines and
bullets continue to kill civilians. Despite the illusion of
normalization upheld by the Russian authorities, and the
resignation of the international community, the violence
against civilians is ongoing, and has merely changed its
appearance. Data from Chechnya hospitals shows that
the undiscriminate use of force is still causing many
civilian casualties.” Médecins sans Frontières

Autopsy: Actor killed by L.A. police shot in back CNN

Texas executes 38th convict so far this year, the most in any state in one year. Two further executions are scheduled for Texas before Jan. 1, and seven have been put on the docket for 2001 already. Now, how many people are on federal death row awaiting Jan. 20th?

Abandoned Tugboat Drifts 20 Miles in Puget Sound.

Estrogen Deprivation Leads To Death Of Dopamine Cells In The Brain, a finding by Yale researchers that could have implications
for post-menopausal women. Science Daily

Emerging Disease News (cont’d.): Ebola doctor buried as Uganda despairs. “Uganda was plunged into mourning on Tuesday as the doctor who had led the country’s two-month battle against the deadly Ebola epidemic
was buried hours after he died from the virus.

Matthew Lukwiya, the medical superintendent at St Mary’s Hospital in Lacor, died on Tuesday morning despite round-the-clock efforts by doctors to save him.” Reuters

AltaVista discontinues free Internet access. “…AltaVista announced that it will terminate its free Internet
access service on December 10th…because 1stUp Corp., the
company that provided the service and infrastructure, is going out of
business.

AltaVista also stated that after a thorough investigation it was unable to
find another supplier to provide a free Internet access service. As a
result, the company has made special arrangements with MSN to offer
U.S.-based AltaVista members three free months of unlimited Internet
access, which will cost $21.95 per month thereafter. Geek.com

More on Houellebecq: “Whether by design or default, Houellebecq is an ideal
media-adapted writer for America: he is obnoxious, a
one-man circus of existential confusion, trafficking in sex,
anomie, death and crucially, contradiction – he is the very
embodiement of what he rages against. He even propositions
the Times’ writer visiting him in Dublin. She demurs, but how
– how French. (And how appropriate that his home is in the
most vulgar, over-hyped yuppie capital of Europe.)

…

The good news is that The Elementary Particles is, in one
sense, already old news. It was published two years ago in
France, and France has apparently moved on. Newswatch

Downer “To have a sane argument about drug policy, the media needs
to consider the Robert Downey, Jr.’s and Darryl Strawberry’s
of the world who repeatedly fail treatment, perhaps because
they simply aren’t ready to stop using. The treatment
providers have few answers for them other than keep
forcing them back into care, even when it clearly isn’t
helping.” Newswatch

Domestic Violence Deja Vu President Clinton: ‘ “In America today, domestic violence is the number one
health risk for women between the ages of 15 and 44 …
Every twelve seconds, another woman is beaten. That’s
nearly 900,000 victims a year.” A dreadful state of affairs, if
true. The trouble is that all three of these statements are
untrue.’ Newswatch

Courtship in the south of France 35,000 years ago “was nasty,
brutish and short. The boys would go out in groups of three and
track an unsuspecting girl across the rolling Provençal
landscape; then, when she was happily playing with a couple of
old flints they would pounce. Chat up lines were rudimentary
(Him: “Nargo!” Her: “Hama!” Him: “Yeda!”) but effective. After a
while, however, the hunter got captured by the game: intrigued
by her matted hair and eyebrows, the butchest caveman got
quite affectionate, and even parted with a juicy hunk of
marrowbone.” The Guardian