Underwear solution :D

Blue Chip, White Cotton: What Underwear Says About the Economy

For one answer to the nation's most pressing economic question -- when will the recession end? -- just take a peek inside the American man's underwear drawer.

There may be some new pairs there, judging by recent reports from retailers and analysts, and that could mean better days ahead for everyone.

Here's the theory, briefly: Sales of men's underwear typically are stable because they rank as a necessity. But during times of severe financial strain, men will try to stretch the time between buying new pairs, causing underwear sales to dip.

"It's a prolonged purchase," said Marshal Cohen, senior analyst with the consumer research firm NPD Group. "It's like trying to drive your car an extra 10,000 miles."

The growth in sales of men's underwear began to slow last year as the recession took hold, according to Mintel, another research firm. This year, Mintel expects sales to fall 2.3 percent, the first drop since the company started collecting data in 2003.

But the men's underwear index -- or, conveniently, MUI -- may also have a silver lining. Mintel predicts that next year, men's underwear sales will fall by 0.5 percent, and as with many economic indicators, a slowing of a decline can be welcomed as a step in the right direction. Retailers are reporting encouraging signs in the men's underwear department. Sears spokeswoman Amy Dimond said stores are beginning to see more sales. At Target, spokeswoman Jana O'Leary said sales of men's underwear have been stronger over the past two months and multi-pair packs are moving.

No less an oracle than former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has given this theory credence, as described in a report on NPR two years ago. But you don't have to take his word for it. Just ask Kenneth Sanford, 59, of Capitol Heights, about his underwear. He said he usually buys new boxers every three months or so in maroon, black or white. But he had to stop working for medical reasons, and now he's having a hard time finding a new job.

To save money, he doesn't go out for ribs with his friends and family as much anymore. And when he indulges, he gets one piña colada instead of two. He hasn't bought a new pair of underwear in at least eight months.

"It's been a while now," Sanford said. "I just don't ever go shopping."

Of course, there are more conventional indicators of the nation's economic health. The gross domestic product fell 1 percent during the second quarter. Consumer spending and consumer confidence have been on a roller coaster this year. Home sales show some signs of bottoming out. But sometimes it is the little things that can be the most telling.

Leonard Lauder, chairman of the cosmetics company Estee Lauder, famously looked to lipstick sales as a barometer of consumers' mind-set during the last downturn. He believed that women were looking for small indulgences to lift their spirits during a tough economic time, though that theory has not held up in this recession, as sales of lipstick at mass retailers fell 8 percent over the past year, according to the research firm Information Resources.

Others look to a reported rise in prescriptions of anti-depressants and sleep aids last year as a sign of consumers' fragile state.

But perhaps no other purchase is as intimate as underwear. Few, if any, other people see it, so it's an easy place to skimp. According to Mintel, men buy an average of 3.4 pairs of underwear in a year. But from 2004 to 2008, the proportion of men buying single pairs at a time increased from 5 percent to 8 percent, while the share of men opting for packs of four or more fell slightly, from 68 to 66 percent -- indicating that shoppers may be trying to save money by buying only when necessary.

"People still need underwear," said Michael Kleinmann, president of FreshPair.com, an online underwear retailer. "They just have less money to spend."

The company sells high-end men's underwear that can run as much as $30 per pair, along with brands that cost less than $10. Kleinmann said that such less expensive pairs have had double-digit-percentage sales growth recently, while demand for pricier pairs is slowing.

Cohen, of NPD, said he hopes the recent positive signs in men's underwear will spill over into other need-based purchases. With the recession nearing two years, shoppers are at the stage where their stuff is simply beginning to wear out, providing an incentive to return to the stores.

"The consumers may be down, but they're not out," said Cohen, who is bullish on an economic recovery. "If this were a true, deep, long, embedded recession, they wouldn't even be buying underwear." 

Source: The Washington Post

 

CIA

Open-source Intelligence

August 20 2009

News reports from The Washington Post [CIA Hired Firm for Assassin Program] and the New York Times [C.I.A. Sought Blackwater's Help in Plan to Kill Jihadists] 

CIA Hired Firm for Assassin Program

A secret CIA program to kill top al-Qaeda leaders with assassination teams was outsourced in 2004 to Blackwater USA, the private security contractor whose operations in Iraq prompted intense scrutiny, according to two former intelligence officials familiar with the events.

The North Carolina-based company was given operational responsibility for targeting terrorist commanders and was awarded millions of dollars for training and weaponry, but the program was canceled before any missions were conducted, the two officials said.

The assassination program -- revealed to Congress in June by CIA Director Leon Panetta -- was initially launched in 2001 as a CIA-led effort to kill or capture top al-Qaeda members using the agency's paramilitary forces. But in 2004, after briefly terminating the program, agency officials decided to revive it under a different code name, using outside contractors, the officials said.

"Outsourcing gave the agency more protection in case something went wrong," said a retired intelligence officer intimately familiar with the assassination program.

The contract was awarded to Blackwater, now known as Xe Services LLC, in part because of its close ties to the CIA and because of its record in carrying out covert assignments overseas, the officials said. The security contractor's senior management has included high-ranking former CIA officials -- among them J. Cofer Black, the agency's former top counterterrorism official, who joined the company in early 2005, three months after retiring from government service.

Blackwater became notorious for a string of incidents in Iraq during which its heavily armed guards were accused of using excessive force. In the deadliest incident, 17 civilians were killed in a Baghdad square by Blackwater guards in September 2007 after the guards' convoy reportedly came under fire.

The plan to kill top al-Qaeda leaders was thrust into the spotlight in July, shortly after Panetta briefed members of two congressional panels about the program. Panetta told House and Senate leaders that he had only recently learned of the program and, upon doing so, had canceled it. Panetta also told lawmakers that he thought they had been inappropriately kept in the dark about the plan -- in part because then-Vice President Richard B. Cheney had directed the CIA not to reveal the program to Congress.

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The CIA declined to comment Wednesday about Blackwater's alleged involvement in the program, which was first reported Wednesday night on the Web site of the New York Times. Efforts to reach Blackwater for comment late Wednesday were unsuccessful.

Agency officials again defended Panetta's decision to terminate the effort and notify congressional overseers.

"Director Panetta thought this effort should be briefed to Congress, and he did so," CIA spokesman George Little said. "He also knew it hadn't been successful, so he ended it. Neither decision was difficult. This was clear and straightforward."

The House Intelligence Committee has launched an investigation into whether the CIA broke the law by failing to notify Congress about the program for eight years. Current and former agency officials have disputed claims by some Democratic lawmakers that the withholding of key details of the program was illegal.

"Director Panetta did not tell the committees that the agency had misled the Congress or had broken the law," Little said. "He decided that the time had come to brief Congress on a counterterrorism effort that was, in fact, much more than a PowerPoint presentation."

The effort, known to intelligence officials as the "targeted killing" program, was originally conceived for use in Iraq and Afghanistan, but officials later sought to expand it to other countries in the region, according to a source familiar with its inception.

It was aimed at removing from the battlefield members of al-Qaeda and its affiliates who were judged to be plotting attacks against U.S. forces or interests. The program was initially managed by the CIA's counterterrorism center, but its functions were partly transferred to Blackwater when key officials from the center retired from the CIA and went to work for the private contractor.

Former agency officials have described the assassination program as more aspirational than operational. One former high-ranking intelligence official briefed on the details said there were three iterations of the program over eight years, each with a separate code name. Total spending was well under $20 million over eight years, the official said.

"We never actually did anything," said the former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program remains highly classified. "It never became a covert action."

A second former official, also intimately familiar with details of the program, said the Blackwater phase involved "lots of time spent training," mostly near the CIA's covert facility near Williamsburg. The official said the teams simulated missions that often involved kidnapping.

"They were involved not only in trying to kill but also in getting close enough to snatch," he said. Among team members there was "much frustration" that the program never reached an operational stage, he said.

The CIA -- and Blackwater -- were not the only agents that sought to covertly kill key members of al-Qaeda using small, highly trained teams. A similar effort, officials say, was undertaken by U.S. Special Forces.

"The targets were generally people on a kill or capture list," said a source familiar with Special Forces operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. "How did people get on the list? Well, if we knew that people were involved in planning attacks, they got on the list. More than half were generally captured. But the decision was made in advance that if they resisted, or if it was necessary for any reason, just kill them." 

C.I.A. Sought Blackwater's Help in Plan to Kill Jihadists 

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency in 2004 hired outside contractors from the private security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials.

Executives from Blackwater, which has generated controversy because of its aggressive tactics in Iraq, helped the spy agency with planning, training and surveillance. The C.I.A. spent several million dollars on the program, which did not successfully capture or kill any terrorist suspects.

The fact that the C.I.A. used an outside company for the program was a major reason that Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A.'s director, became alarmed and called an emergency meeting in June to tell Congress that the agency had withheld details of the program for seven years, the officials said.

It is unclear whether the C.I.A. had planned to use the contractors to actually capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance in the program. American spy agencies have in recent years outsourced some highly controversial work, including the interrogation of prisoners. But government officials said that bringing outsiders into a program with lethal authority raised deep concerns about accountability in covert operations.

Officials said the C.I.A. did not have a formal contract with Blackwater for this program but instead had individual agreements with top company officials, including the founder, Erik D. Prince, a politically connected former member of the Navy Seals and the heir to a family fortune. Blackwater's work on the program actually ended years before Mr. Panetta took over the agency, after senior C.I.A. officials themselves questioned the wisdom of using outsiders in a targeted killing program.

Blackwater, which has changed its name, most recently to Xe Services, and is based in North Carolina, in recent years has received millions of dollars in government contracts, growing so large that the Bush administration said it was a necessary part of its war operation in Iraq.

It has also drawn controversy. Blackwater employees hired to guard American diplomats in Iraq were accused of using excessive force on several occasions, including shootings in Baghdad in 2007 in which 17 civilians were killed. Iraqi officials have since refused to give the company an operating license.

Several current and former government officials interviewed for this article spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing details of a still classified program.

Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, declined to provide details about the canceled program, but he said that Mr. Panetta's decision on the assassination program was "clear and straightforward."

"Director Panetta thought this effort should be briefed to Congress, and he did so," Mr. Gimigliano said. "He also knew it hadn't been successful, so he ended it."

A Xe spokeswoman did not return calls seeking comment.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee, also declined to give details of the program. But she praised Mr. Panetta for notifying Congress. "It is too easy to contract out work that you don't want to accept responsibility for," she said.

The C.I.A. this summer conducted an internal review of the assassination program that recently was presented to the White House and the Congressional intelligence committees. The officials said that the review stated that Mr. Panetta's predecessors did not believe that they needed to tell Congress because the program was not far enough developed.

The House Intelligence Committee is investigating why lawmakers were never told about the program. According to current and former government officials, former Vice President Dick Cheney told C.I.A. officers in 2002 that the spy agency did not need to inform Congress because the agency already had legal authority to kill Qaeda leaders.

One official familiar with the matter said that Mr. Panetta did not tell lawmakers that he believed that the C.I.A. had broken the law by withholding details about the program from Congress. Rather, the official said, Mr. Panetta said he believed that the program had moved beyond a planning stage and deserved Congressional scrutiny.

"It's wrong to think this counterterrorism program was confined to briefing slides or doodles on a cafeteria napkin," the official said. "It went well beyond that."

Current and former government officials said that the C.I.A.'s efforts to use paramilitary hit teams to kill Qaeda operatives ran into logistical, legal and diplomatic hurdles almost from the outset. These efforts had been run by the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism center, which runs operations against Al Qaeda and other terrorist networks.

In 2002, Blackwater won a classified contract to provide security for the C.I.A. station in Kabul, Afghanistan, and the company maintains other classified contracts with the C.I.A., current and former officials said.

Over the years, Blackwater has hired several former top C.I.A. officials, including Cofer Black, who ran the C.I.A. counterterrorism center immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks.

C.I.A. operatives also regularly use the company's training complex in North Carolina. The complex includes a shooting range used for sniper training.

An executive order signed by President Gerald R. Ford in 1976 barred the C.I.A. from carrying out assassinations, a direct response to revelations that the C.I.A. had initiated assassination plots against Fidel Castro of Cuba and other foreign politicians.

The Bush administration took the position that killing members of Al Qaeda, a terrorist group that attacked the United States and has pledged to attack it again, was no different from killing enemy soldiers in battle, and that therefore the agency was not constrained by the assassination ban.

But former intelligence officials said that employing private contractors to help hunt Qaeda operatives would pose significant legal and diplomatic risks, and they might not be protected in the same way government employees are.

Some Congressional Democrats have hinted that the program was just one of many that the Bush administration hid from Congressional scrutiny and have used the episode as a justification to delve deeper into other Bush-era counterterrorism programs.

But Republicans have criticized Mr. Panetta's decision to cancel the program, saying he created a tempest in a teapot.

"I think there was a little more drama and intrigue than was warranted," said Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.

Officials said that the C.I.A. program was devised partly as an alternative to missile strikes using drone aircraft, which have accidentally killed civilians and cannot be used in urban areas where some terrorists hide.

Yet with most top Qaeda operatives believed to be hiding in the remote mountains of Pakistan, the drones have remained the C.I.A.'s weapon of choice. Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration has embraced the drone campaign because it presents a less risky option than sending paramilitary teams into Pakistan. 

Redefining capitalism

An editorial from the New York Times

Of Death and Profit

Death has always been the province of rebels and misfits, the ultimate act that defined martyrs and heroes. Contemporary capitalism has added a new dimension to death's finality. It has transformed it into a stellar business opportunity.

The reported $100 million that Michael Jackson's estate made in the first seven weeks after he died easily surpassed the $52 million generated last year by the estate of Elvis Presley, formerly the highest-grossing dead celebrity, according to Forbes magazine. It is way ahead of Marilyn Monroe's $6.5 million last year, James Dean's $5 million and John Lennon's $9 million.

Death has long been a savvy financial move in the visual arts: it guarantees that the supply of new works has come to an end, conferring scarcity value upon the existing oeuvre. For an artist it is better to die old, however. Death can reduce the value of young artists by taking them from the market before immortality is assured.

The soaring valuations of dead rebels are a more recent phenomenon. They tend to be most profitable when they die young. It was probably the 1960s that ushered in rebellion as a consumer good. Its first icon might have been Che Guevara, the Argentine heartthrob who was shot in Bolivia in 1967, setting off an eventual revolution in the T-shirt industry. But Alberto Korda made no royalties from his iconic photograph of Che as it was emblazoned across young chests from Greenwich Village to the Left Bank in Paris.

The Jackson camp isn't making that mistake. According to The Times, there is already a film deal, a commemorative coin, a line of school supplies and a $150 coffee table book. And investors are weighing future returns. In 2004, an entrepreneur bought 85 percent of the company that owns the rights to all of Elvis Presley's intellectual property.

But for all the attractions of money, capitalism still poses a danger for the misfit, the rebel, the hero who risk being swallowed by the profit motive and spat back — in more marketable versions of themselves.

In the 1990s, Apple Computer's "Think Different" campaign saluted "the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers," and declared, "the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do." Many people were convinced these lines were from Jack Kerouac, who drank himself to death in 1969. They were pure ad copy. 

City checklist

Is Your City a Great City?

Take a look around your town with this checklist, to see how it measures up.

In Great Cities...

Community goals are a top priority in city planning

ÂûÊCitizens regularly participate in making their public spaces better and local leaders and planning professionals routinely seek the wisdom and practical experience of community residents.

ÂûÊResidents feel they have responsibility and a sense of ownership for their public spaces.

ÂûÊNeighborhoods are respected, fostered and have unique identities. There is a sense of "pride of place."

ÂûÊPublic spaces are planned and managed in a way that highlights and strengthens the culture of a particular community.

The emphasis is on pedestrians, not cars

ÂûÊPedestrians and bicyclists are more numerous than vehicles (on at least some streets).

ÂûÊStreets function as ÒplacesÓ and have numerous attractive destinations along them.

ÂûÊTransit options are available to get to places where people want to go and are used by all kinds of people.

ÂûÊParking does not occupy most of the public space; free parking is difficult to find.

ÂûÊThere is a walkable commercial center convenient to every neighborhood that provides everyday needs and services (grocery store, pharmacy, library, medical services, coffee shop etc.)

New development projects enhance existing communities

ÂûÊNew developments, both public and private, are designed to include mixed uses and to be easily reached without using a private vehicle.

ÂûÊDevelopments are human scale and connect with places to cut through rather than mega scale, internalized and islands unto themselves.

ÂûÊThere is a mix of new housing types and layouts that allows and encourages people to grow old there.

Public spaces are accessible and well-used

ÂûÊThere are public places within both neighborhoods and downtowns where people can gather informally and regularly.

ÂûÊParks feature attractions for people of different ages and are used at different times of day; they are more than simply recreation facilities.

ÂûÊThe waterfront allows people to actually reach the ocean, lake or river.

ÂûÊAmenities (benches, transit waiting areas, etc) are comfortable, conveniently located and designed to support the intended use.

ÂûÊNegative uses or users do not dominate the public spaces.

ÂûÊBoth children and seniors can easily and safely walk to where they want to go (e.g. children can walk to school, seniors can walk to movies, grocery stores).

Civic institutions are catalysts for public life.

ÂûÊSchools are centrally located to support other neighborhood activity.

ÂûÊThe library is a multi-purpose and popular place where people go for many different types of activities.

ÂûÊCivic institutions (museums, community centers, hospitals, government buildings, etc.) have resources and activities that appeal to people of all ages and all cultures in the community.

Local economic development is encouraged

ÂûÊThere are many locally owned businesses-markets, mom-and-pop stores, street vendors, and larger independent stores; these local businesses are encouraged by the city; people know their retailers by name.

ÂûÊThe mix of locally owned businesses is such that at least some of them are "third places" -places where people can just spend time.

ÂûÊLocal businesses work with schools to provide internships or part time jobs.

Public spaces are managed, programmed and continually improved.

ÂûÊThe public realm is managed to maximize community interaction and to facilitate public outcomes.

ÂûÊSpaces are managed to provide opportunities for generations to mix.Ê

Courtesy: The Project for Public Spaces

Les Paul, Guitar Innovator, Dies at 94

From the New York Times

20090814

Les Paul, the virtuoso guitarist and inventor whose solid-body electric guitar and recording studio innovations changed the course of 20th-century popular music, died Thursday in White Plains, New York. He was 94.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, the Gibson Guitar Corporation and his family announced. 

Mr. Paul was a remarkable musician as well as a tireless tinkerer. He played guitar alongside leading prewar jazz and pop musicians from Louis Armstrong to Bing Crosby. In the 1930s he began experimenting with guitar amplification, and by 1941 he had built what was probably the first solid-body electric guitar, although there are other claimants. With his guitar and the vocals of his wife, Mary Ford, he used overdubbing, multitrack recording and new electronic effects to create a string of hits in the 1950s.

Mr. Paul's style encompassed the twang of country music, the harmonic richness of jazz and, later, the bite of rock 'n' roll. For all his technological impact, though, he remained a down-home performer whose main goal, he often said, was to make people happy.

Mr. Paul, whose original name was Lester William Polsfuss, was born on June 9, 1915, in Waukesha, Wis. His childhood piano teacher wrote to his mother, "Your boy, Lester, will never learn music." But he picked up harmonica, guitar and banjo by the time he was a teenager and started playing with country bands in the Midwest. In Chicago he performed for radio broadcasts on WLS and led the house band at WJJD; he billed himself as the Wizard of Waukesha, Hot Rod Red and Rhubarb Red.

His interest in gadgets came early. At the age of 10 he devised a harmonica holder from a coat hanger. Soon afterward he made his first amplified guitar by opening the back of a Sears acoustic model and inserting, behind the strings, the pickup from a dismantled Victrola. With the record player on, the acoustic guitar became an electric one. Later, he built his own pickup from ham radio earphone parts and assembled a recording machine using a Cadillac flywheel and the belt from a dentist's drill.

From country music Mr. Paul moved into jazz, influenced by players like Django Reinhardt and Eddie Lang, who were using amplified hollow-body guitars to play hornlike single-note solo lines. He formed the Les Paul Trio in 1936 and moved to New York, where he was heard regularly on Fred Waring's radio show from 1938 to 1941.

In 1940 or 1941 — the exact date is unknown — , Mr. Paul made his guitar breakthrough. Seeking to create electronically sustained notes on the guitar, he attached strings and two pickups to a wooden board with a guitar neck. "The log," as he called it, if not the first solid-body electric guitar, became the most influential one.

"You could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be sounding," Mr. Paul once said.

The odd-looking instrument drew derision when he first played it in public, so he hid the works inside a conventional-looking guitar. But the log was a conceptual turning point. With no acoustic resonance of its own, it was designed to generate an electronic signal that could be amplified and processed — the beginning of a sonic transformation of the world's music.

Mr. Paul was drafted in 1942 and worked in California for the Armed Forces Radio Service, accompanying Rudy Vallee, Kate Smith and others. When he was discharged in 1943, he was hired as a staff musician for NBC radio in Los Angeles. His trio toured with the Andrews Sisters and backed Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby, with whom he recorded the hit "It's Been a Long, Long Time" in 1945. Crosby encouraged Mr. Paul to build his own recording studio, and so he did, in his garage in Los Angeles.

There he experimented with recording techniques, using them to create not realistic replicas of a performance but electronically enhanced fabrications. Toying with his mother's old Victrola had shown him that changing the speed of a recording could alter both pitch and timbre. He could record at half-speed and replay the results at normal speed, creating the illusion of superhuman agility. He altered instrumental textures through microphone positioning and reverberation. Technology and studio effects, he realized, were instruments themselves.

He also noticed that by playing along with previous recordings, he could become a one-man ensemble. As early as his 1948 hit "Lover," he made elaborate, multilayered recordings, using two acetate disc machines, which demanded that each layer of music be captured in a single take. From discs he moved to magnetic tape, and in the late 1950s he built the first eight-track multitrack recorder. Each track could be recorded and altered separately, without affecting the others. The machine ushered in the modern recording era.

In 1947 Mr. Paul teamed up with Colleen Summers, who had been singing with Gene Autry's band. He changed her name to Mary Ford, a name found in a telephone book. 

They were touring in 1948 when Mr. Paul's car skidded off an icy bridge. Among his many injuries, his right elbow was shattered; once set, it would be immovable for life. Mr. Paul had it set at an angle, slightly less than 90 degrees, so that he could continue to play guitar.

Mr. Paul, whose first marriage, to Virginia, had ended in divorce, married Ms. Ford in 1949. They had a television show, "Les Paul and Mary Ford at Home," which was broadcast from their living room until 1958. They began recording together, mixing multiple layers of Ms. Ford's vocals with Mr. Paul's guitars and effects, and the dizzying results became hits in the early 1950s. Among their more than three dozen hits, "Mockingbird Hill," "How High the Moon" and "The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise" in 1951 and "Vaya Con Dios" in 1953 were million-sellers.

Some of their music was recorded with microphones hanging in various rooms of the house, including one over the kitchen sink, so that Ms. Ford could record vocals while washing dishes. Mr. Paul also recorded instrumentals on his own, including the hits "Whispering," "Tiger Rag" and "Meet Mister Callaghan" in 1951 and 1952.

The Gibson company hired Mr. Paul to design a Les Paul model guitar in the early 1950s, and variations of the first 1952 model have sold steadily ever since, accounting at one point for half of the privately held company's total sales. Built with Mr. Paul's patented pickups, his design is prized for its clarity and sustained tone. It has been used by musicians like Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page and Slash of Guns N' Roses. The Les Paul Standard version is unchanged since 1958, the company says. In the mid-1950s, Mr. Paul and Ms. Ford moved to a house in Mahwah, N.J., where Mr. Paul eventually installed both film and recording studios and amassed a collection of hundreds of guitars.

The couple's string of hits ended in 1961, and they were divorced in 1964. Ms. Ford died in 1977. Mr. Paul is survived by three sons, Lester (Rus) G. Paul, Gene W. Paul and Robert (Bobby) R. Paul; a daughter, Colleen Wess; his companion, Arlene Palmer; five grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.In 1964, Mr. Paul underwent surgery for a broken eardrum, and he began suffering from arthritis in 1965. Through the 1960s he concentrated on designing guitars for Gibson. He invented and patented various pickups and transducers, as well as devices like the Les Paulverizer, an echo-repeat device, which he introduced in 1974. In the late 1970s he made two albums with the dean of country guitarists, Chet Atkins.

In 1981 Mr. Paul underwent a quintuple-bypass heart operation. After recuperating, he returned to performing, though the progress of his arthritis forced him to relearn the guitar. In 1983 he started to play weekly performances at Fat Tuesday's, an intimate Manhattan jazz club. "I was always happiest playing in a club," he said in a 1987 interview. "So I decided to find a nice little club in New York that I would be happy to play in."

After Fat Tuesday's closed in 1995, he moved his Monday-night residency to Iridium. He performed there until early June; guest stars have been appearing with his trio since then and will continue to do so indefinitely, a spokesman for the club said.

At his shows he used one of his own customized guitars, which included a microphone on a gooseneck pointing toward his mouth so that he could talk through the guitar. In his sets he would mix reminiscences, wisecracks and comments with versions of jazz standards. Guests — famous and unknown — showed up to pay homage or test themselves against him. Despite paralysis in some fingers on both hands, he retained some of his remarkable speed and fluency. Mr. Paul also performed regularly at jazz festivals through the 1980s.

He recorded a final album, "American Made, World Played" (Capitol), to celebrate his 90th birthday in 2005. It featured guest appearances by Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Sting, Joe Perry of Aerosmith and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. The album brought him two Grammy Awards: for best pop instrumental performance and best rock instrumental performance. He had already won recognition from the Grammy trustees for technical achievements and another performance Grammy in 1976, for the album "Chester and Lester," made with Chet Atkins.

In recent years, he said he was working on another major invention but would not reveal what it was.

"Honestly, I never strove to be an Edison," he said in a 1991 interview in The New York Times. "The only reason I invented these things was because I didn't have them and neither did anyone else. I had no choice, really."

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The Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll???

BooksReviewsElijahWald

How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music

Oxford University Press

$24.95

Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0195341546, Hardcover)

"There are no definitive histories," writes Elijah Wald, in this provocative reassessment of American popular music, "because the past keeps looking different as the present changes." Earlier musical styles sound different to us today because we hear them through the musical filter of other styles that came after them, all the way through funk and hiphop.

As its blasphemous title suggests, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll rejects the conventional pieties of mainstream jazz and rock history. Rather than concentrating on those traditionally favored styles, the book traces the evolution of popular music through developing tastes, trends and technologies--including the role of records, radio, jukeboxes and television --to give a fuller, more balanced account of the broad variety of music that captivated listeners over the course of the twentieth century. Wald revisits original sources--recordings, period articles, memoirs, and interviews--to highlight how music was actually heard and experienced over the years. And in a refreshing departure from more typical histories, he focuses on the world of working musicians and ordinary listeners rather than stars and specialists. He looks for example at the evolution of jazz as dance music, and rock 'n' roll through the eyes of the screaming, twisting teenage girls who made up the bulk of its early audience. Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and the Beatles are all here, but Wald also discusses less familiar names like Paul Whiteman, Guy Lombardo, Mitch Miller, Jo Stafford, Frankie Avalon, and the Shirelles, who in some cases were far more popular than those bright stars we all know today, and who more accurately represent the mainstream of their times.

Written with verve and style, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll shakes up our staid notions of music history and helps us hear American popular music with new ears.

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The Popmatter writes...

Do not be drawn in by the title. Elijah Wald, the author of several books including a fine study of Robert Johnson and the blues, tells us that when he was a child he loved Meet the Beatles, but from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, on had no interest in their music. Turns out this book is not at all about the Beatles, who are mentioned in the introduction and then barely again for over 200 pages.

Wald's one-line thesis is that the Beatles were great while they were playing songs you could dance to, songs that drew upon and paid tribute to black artists such as Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, and Chubby Checker, but that they lost him when they turned rock into art and experimentation, and created a new musical aesthetic.

The transformation is worth exploring, but Wald is not up to the task. Doing so would require a thorough investigation of the '60s, a meditation on generational shifts, and, most of all, an investigation into drug culture and the great metamorphosis of rock 'n' roll.

Wald provides none of this. Instead he surveys the history of popular music and its various genres and sub genres: swing, jive, jazz, boogie-woogie, R&B, rock, folk, country, western, pop, rockabilly and on and on and on. If the world is divided into lumpers and splitters, those who see forests and those who see trees, Wald is in love with every branch of the ramifying bush that is popular music.

This is not a bad thing, and readers will certainly learn a great deal about artists and songs popular in their day but of which little trace remains. Exhibit number one for Wald is Paul Whiteman, the "Jazz King" of the '20s whose career stretched into the '50s. In a sense, Wald yearns for Whiteman to be as venerated as Duke Ellington or Benny Goodman if for no other reason than because he was more popular at one time.

"Listening with modern ears," Wald observes, "it is virtually impossible to hear how fresh and exciting the Whiteman band must have sounded in the early 1920s." Wald laments the loss, but he does not analyze how jazz came to be seen predominantly as an African American tradition to modern ears.

Wald does raise important questions about how taste changes. His scatter-shot history discusses such topics as recording technologies, the locations where fans heard live music and danced to it, the role of radio and then television, female audiences, and the relationship between rock and race.

He is especially animated on this last issue. Although he does not discuss such important work as Craig Werner's A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America,  Wald moves away from the standard line that sees early rock 'n' roll as the appropriation of black music, the "black roots/white fruits" thesis. With Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins, Wald notes, "it ceased to be possible to describe the scene simply in terms of black originators and white imitators."

And yet he sees rock's turn toward experimentation and art as a repudiation of dance beats and a break from black performers who, according to Wald, "were thinking in different terms from the new rock groups." That assertion may come as news to Isaac Hayes, Arthur Lee, Stevie Wonder, and Jimi Hendrix, among others, who served with many white counterparts as originators. The question of race and rock is essential, but it is an issue that requires much closer analysis than Wald provides.

The lack of depth is related to the excessive detail and repetition that plagues the book, and Wald seems to sense it. "By now some readers are probably rolling their eyes," he asserts at one point. It certainly is challenging when, on a single page, the following names appear: Bill Anderson, Skeeter Davis, Marty Robbins, Jimmy Dean, Lorne Greene, the Beach Boys, Acker Bilk, David Rose, Lawrence Welk, the Trashmen, the Rip Chords, Jan and Dean, the Ventures, Dick Dale, and Duane Eddy.

It's unfortunate that Wald stopped listening to the Beatles once they shifted artistic gears. It's like readers who only bought Herman Melville's south sea romances, or movie-goers who only saw Woody Allen's slapstick comedies. And then there are those fans who abandoned Bob Dylan once he grabbed an electric guitar.

If, as Bruce Springsteen suggested, Elvis freed our bodies and Dylan freed our minds, then the Beatles did both and in the process took aim at our souls. It was Dylan who first introduced the Fab Four to marijuana, and it was the drug culture of the '60s more than any other single factor that forever changed what we heard and how we listened.

In 2004, Brian Burton, also known as Danger Mouse, remixed Jay-Z's The Black Album with the Beatles White Album to create The Grey Album. The Beatles thereby became part of a new groove which in turn allowed us to hear the group in fresh ways. Come to think of it, in their time they sampled and rapped and experimented with rhythms and sounds. This gives me an idea for a book. Think I'll call it How the Beatles Invented Hip Hop. 

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Reflections from the American press...

"I couldn't put it down. It nailed me to the wall, not bad for a grand sweeping in-depth exploration of American Music with not one mention of myself. Wald's book is suave, soulful, ebullient and will blow out your speakers."--Tom Waits

"Wald is a meticulous researcher, a graceful writer and a committed contrarian... an impressive accomplishment."--New York Times Book Review

"A complex, fascinating and long-overdue response to decades of industry-driven revisionism."--Jonny Whiteside, LA Weekly

"It's an ambitious project, but Wald's casual narrative style and eye for a juicy quote give it a lightness that even a novice to pop, rock, or jazz history can appreciate... The title is appropriate: This is a provocative book, in all the right ways."--The Onion AV Club

"Wald is a sharp, fair critic eager to right the record on popular music... deepens the appreciation of American popular music."--Boston Globe

"This is a debatable premise... you don't have to agree with it to admire this book... It is as an alternative, corrective history of American music that Wald's book is invaluable. It forces us to see that only by studying the good with the bad--and by seeing that the good and bad can't be pulled apart--can we truly grasp the greatness of our cultural legacy."-- Malcolm Jones, Newsweek

"A serious treatise on the history of recorded music, sifted through his filter as musician, scholar, and fan... It's a brave and original work that certainly delivers."-Christian Science Monitor

"A smart, inclusive celebration of mainstream stars, such as 1920s bandleader Paul Whiteman and the Fab Four, who introduced jazz, blues, and other roughhewn musical forms to mass audiences."--AARP Magazine

"A powerfully provocative look at popular music and its impact on America."--Dallas Morning News

"As catchy and compelling as a great pop single, this revisionist retelling is provocative, profound and utterly necessary... Clearly the product of years of passionate research, it's so rife with references and surprising anecdotes that it's potentially overwhelming, but Wald makes a superlative tour guide-- frank, funny and generous but judicious with his inclusions-- and his book is a beguiling, blasphemous breeze."--Philadelphia City Paper

"Elijah Wald's provocative, meticulously researched new book, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, turns the stock rock-and-roll narratives on their head."--Very Short List

"Brilliant and provocative... the most challenging and head-clearing history of American popular music to be published in decades."--The Buffalo News

"Wald explains musical and recording techniques and sociological phenomena in an engaging style accessible to a wide range of readers. Throughout, he makes a compelling case for why the figures most historians have disregarded or footnoted need to be considered in order to understand the totality of American popular music. This is an ideal companion to the plethora of standard histories available. Highly recommended." --Library Journal starred review

"Wald's arguments are as nuanced as his scope is wide, which makes this a fascinating and useful volume--required reading for any fan of pop music."--Memphis Flyer

"Fascinating... It's hard to imagine any American music buff coming away from this book without a fresh perspective and an overwhelming desire to seek out Paul Whiteman CDs. Highly recommended."--San Jose Mercury News

"Wald's book may be the literary equivalent of revisionist Civil War histories which tell the war through the eyes of soldiers rather than the generals, for he highlights how consumers actually heard and experienced music over the years, whether as screaming teeny-boppers watching Dick Clark's Bandstand or swing afficionados dancing to Glenn Miller at the Roseland."--HistoryWire.com

"Walds eminently readable book is a scholarly, provocative and opinionated account of the history of pop music from Sousa to the Stones, from genteel parlor piano recitals to arena rock spectacles."--Kansas City Star

"A bracing, inclusive look at the dramatic transformation in the way music was produced and listened to during the 20th century... One of those rare books that aims to upend received wisdom and actually succeeds."--Kirkus Reviews

"Some of the smartest historiography I've ever read. The examples and turns of phrase sometimes make me laugh out loud, and nearly every page overturns another outmoded assumption. Wald just calls it like he sees it and transforms everything as a result."--Susan McClary, MacArthur Fellow and author of Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality

"This is a ground-breaking book, a muscular revisionist account that will get people thinking quite differently about the history of pop music. I've learned much from it and admire the writing style that is so light on its feet, lucid and elegant."--Bernard Gendron, author of Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant Garde

Happy reading!!!

:-)

Burma v Myanmar

PrivateInvestigations

Should it be Burma or Myanmar?

The eyes of the world's media are focused on Rangoon, where tensions are rising in the streets, yet news organisations and nations differ in what they call the country.

The ruling military junta changed its name from Burma to Myanmar in 1989, a year after thousands were killed in the suppression of a popular uprising. Rangoon also became Yangon.

THE ANSWER

It's known as Myanmar in many countries and at the UN

The Adaptation of Expression Law also introduced English language names for other towns, some of which were not ethnically Burmese.

The change was recognised by the United Nations, and by countries such as France and Japan, but not by the United States and the UK.

A statement by the Foreign Office says: "Burma's democracy movement prefers the form 'Burma' because they do not accept the legitimacy of the unelected military regime to change the official name of the country. Internationally, both names are recognised."

It's general practice at the BBC to refer to the country as Burma, and the BBC News website says this is because most of its audience is familiar with that name rather than Myanmar. The same goes for Rangoon, people in general are more familiar with this name than Yangon.

But look in a Lonely Planet guidebook to Asia and the country can be found listed after Mongolia, not Brunei. The Rough Guide does not cover Burma at all, because the pro-democracy movement has called for a tourism boycott.

HOW IS MYANMAR PRONOUNCED?

There are various ways

'My' may be 'mee' as in 'street' or 'my' as in 'cry'

And stress can be on the first, second or third syllable

Mark Farmener, of Burma Campaign UK, says: "Often you can tell where someone's sympathies lie if they use Burma or Myanmar. Myanmar is a kind of indicator of countries that are soft on the regime.

"But really it's not important. Who cares what people call the country? It's the human rights abuses that matter.

"There's not a really strong call from the democracy movement saying you should not call it Myanmar, they just challenge the legitimacy of the regime. It's probable it will carry on being called Myanmar after the regime is gone."

Colloquial name

The two words mean the same thing and one is derived from the other. Burmah, as it was spelt in the 19th Century, is a local corruption of the word Myanmar.

They have both been used within Burma for a long time, says anthropologist Gustaaf Houtman, who has written extensively about Burmese politics.

"There's a formal term which is Myanmar and the informal, everyday term which is Burma. Myanmar is the literary form, which is ceremonial and official and reeks of government. [The name change] is a form of censorship."

If Burmese people are writing for publication, they use 'Myanmar', but speaking they use 'Burma', he says.

This reflects the regime's attempt to impose the notion that literary language is master, Mr Houtman says, but there is definitely a political background to it.

Richard Coates, a linguist at the University of Western England, says adopting the traditional, formal name is an attempt by the junta to break from the colonial past.

The UN uses Myanmar, presumably deferring to the idea that its members can call themselves what they wish

Richard Coates, Linguist

"Local opposition groups do not accept that, and presumably prefer to use the 'old' colloquial name, at least until they have a government with popular legitimacy. Governments that agree with this stance still call the country Burma.

"The UN uses Myanmar, presumably deferring to the idea that its members can call themselves what they wish, provided the decision is recorded in UN proceedings. There are hosts of papers detailing such changes. I think the EU uses Burma/Myanmar."

Other countries to rename themselves like this include Iran (formerly Persia), Burkina Faso (Upper Volta) and Cambodia (Kampuchea).

"They've substituted a local name for an internationally acknowledged one for essentially nationalistic and historical reasons." 

Source: BBC

The Great American Power

A news report from the New York Times, published on August 12 2009.

__________________________________________________________________________

A Window Into CIA's Embrace of Secret Jails

In March 2003, two C.I.A. officials surprised Kyle D. Foggo, then the chief of the agency's main European supply base, with an unusual request. They wanted his help building secret prisons to hold some of the world's most threatening terrorists.

Mr. Foggo, nicknamed Dusty, was known inside the agency as a cigar-waving, bourbon-drinking operator, someone who could get a cargo plane flying anywhere in the world or quickly obtain weapons, food, money — whatever the C.I.A. needed. His unit in Frankfurt, Germany, was strained by the spy agency's operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Mr. Foggo agreed to the assignment.

"It was too sensitive to be handled by headquarters," he said in an interview. "I was proud to help my nation."

With that, Mr. Foggo went on to oversee construction of three detention centers, each built to house about a half-dozen detainees, according to former intelligence officials and others briefed on the matter. One jail was a renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest, Romania, the officials disclosed. Another was a steel-beam structure at a remote site in Morocco that was apparently never used. The third, another remodeling project, was outside another former Eastern bloc city. They were designed to appear identical, so prisoners would be disoriented and not know where they were if they were shuttled back and forth. They were kept in isolated cells.

The existence of the network of prisons to detain and interrogate senior operatives of Al Qaeda has long been known, but details about them have been a closely guarded secret. In recent interviews, though, several former intelligence officials have provided a fuller account of how they were built, where they were located and life inside them.

Mr. Foggo acknowledged a role, which has never been previously reported. He pleaded guilty last year to a fraud charge involving a contractor that equipped the C.I.A. jails and provided other supplies to the agency, and he is now serving a three-year sentence in a Kentucky prison.

The C.I.A. prisons would become one of the Bush administration's most extraordinary counterterrorism programs, but setting them up was fairly mundane, according to the intelligence officials.

Mr. Foggo relied on C.I.A. finance officers, engineers and contract workers to build the jails. As they neared completion, he turned to a small company linked to Brent R. Wilkes, an old friend and a San Diego military contractor.

The business provided toilets, plumbing equipment, stereos, video games, bedding, night vision goggles, earplugs and wrap-around sunglasses. Some products were bought at Target and Wal-Mart, among other vendors, and flown overseas. Nothing exotic was required for the infamous waterboards — they were built on the spot from locally available materials, the officials said.

Mr. Foggo, 55, would not discuss classified details about the jails. He was not charged with wrongdoing in connection with the secret prisons, but instead accused of steering other C.I.A. business to Mr. Wilkes' companies in exchange for expensive vacations and other favors. Before leaving the C.I.A. in 2006, he had become its third-highest official, and his plea was an embarrassment for the agency.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, the intelligence world's embrace of dark-of-night snatch-and-grabs, hidden prisons and interrogation tactics that critics condemned as torture has stained the C.I.A.'s reputation and led to legal challenges, investigations and internal divisions that may take years to resolve. The Justice Department is now considering opening a criminal investigation, with much of the attention focused on the agency's network of secret prisons, which have become known as the "black sites."

From Fringes to Spotlight

The demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had transformed Mr. Foggo from a fringe player into the C.I.A.'s indispensable man. Before the 9/11 attacks, the Frankfurt base was a relatively sleepy resupply center, running one or two flights a month to outlying stations. Within days of the attacks, Mr. Foggo had a budget of $7 million, which quickly tripled.

He managed dozens of employees, directing nearly daily flights of cargo planes loaded with pallets of supplies, including saddles, bridles and horse feed for the mounted tribal forces that the spy agency recruited. Within weeks, he emptied the C.I.A.'s stockpile of AK-47s and ammunition at a Midwest depot.

He was a logical choice for the prison project: aggressive, resourceful, patriotic, ready to dispense a favor; some inside the C.I.A. jokingly compared him to Milo Minderbinder, the fictional character who rose from mess hall officer to the black-market magnate of Joseph Heller's World War II novel "Catch-22."

Early in the fight against Al Qaeda, agency officials relied heavily on American allies to help detain people suspected of terrorism in makeshift facilities in countries like Thailand. But by the time two C.I.A. officials met with Mr. Foggo in 2003, that arrangement was under threat, according to people briefed on the situation. In Thailand, for example, local officials were said to be growing uneasy about a black site outside Bangkok code-named Cat's Eye. (The agency would eventually change the code name for the Thai prison, fearing it would appear racially insensitive.) The C.I.A. wanted its own, more permanent detention centers.

Eventually, the agency's network would encompass at least eight detention centers, including one in the Middle East, one each in Iraq and Afghanistan and a maximum-security long-term site at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that was dubbed Strawberry Fields, officials said. (It was named after a Beatles song after C.I.A. officials joked that the detainees would be held there, as the lyric put it, "forever.")

The C.I.A. has never officially disclosed the exact number of prisoners it once held, but top officials have put the figure at fewer than 100.

At the detention centers Mr. Foggo helped build, several former intelligence officials said, the jails were small, and though they were built to house about a half-dozen detainees they rarely held more than four.

The cells were constructed with special features to prevent injury to the prisoners during interrogations: nonslip floors and flexible, plywood-covered walls to soften the impact of being slammed into the wall.

The detainees, held in cells far enough apart to prevent communication with one another, were kept in solitary confinement 23 hours a day. For their one hour of daily exercise, they were taken out of their cells by C.I.A. security officers wearing black ski masks to hide their identities and to intimidate the detainees, according to the intelligence officials.

Just like prisons in the United States, the jailers imposed a reward and punishment system: well-behaved detainees received books, DVDs and other forms of entertainment, which were taken away if they misbehaved, the officials said.

C.I.A. analysts served 90-day tours at the prison sites to assist the interrogations. But by the time the new prisons were built in mid-2003 or later, the harshest C.I.A. interrogation practices — including waterboarding — had been discontinued.

Winning a Promotion

Mr. Foggo's success in Frankfurt, including his work on the prisons, won him a promotion back in Washington. In November 2004, he was named the C.I.A.'s executive director, in effect its day-to-day administrative chief.

The appointment raised some eyebrows at the agency. "It was like taking a senior NCO and telling him he now runs the regiment," said A. B. Krongard, the C.I.A.'s executive director from 2001 to 2004. "It popped people's eyes."

Mr. Foggo soon became embroiled in agency infighting. The C.I.A. was reeling from criticism that it had exaggerated Iraq's weapons programs. Mr. Foggo came to Washington as part of a new team that almost immediately began firing top C.I.A. officials, causing anger among veteran clandestine officers. Mr. Foggo's fast rise and blunt approach unsettled some headquarters officials, according to Brant G. Bassett, a former agency officer and friend who served with Mr. Foggo.

"Dusty went in there with a blowtorch," Mr. Bassett said. "Some people were overjoyed, but there were a few others who said, we've got to take this guy down."

In 2005, before he came under investigation, Mr. Foggo and other officials, including John Rizzo, the agency's top lawyer, paid a rare visit to some of the prison sites, assuring C.I.A. employees that their activities were legal, according to former intelligence officials. Mr. Foggo also met with representatives of Eastern European security services that had helped with the prisons. He expressed gratitude and offered assistance — a gesture the officials politely declined.

In February 2007, Mr. Foggo and Mr. Wilkes were indicted. Prosecutors believed that the C.I.A. had paid an inflated price to Archer Logistics, a business connected to Mr. Wilkes that had a $1.7 million C.I.A. supply contract. In return, the prosecutors claimed, Mr. Wilkes had taken Mr. Foggo on expensive vacations, paid for his meals at expensive restaurants and promised him a lucrative job when he retired.

"I was taking a trip with my best friend," Mr. Foggo said in his defense. "It looked bad, but we had been taking trips together since we were 17 years old."

Mr. Foggo said he had turned to Mr. Wilkes' companies to bypass the cumbersome C.I.A. bureaucracy, not to provide a sweetheart deal to his oldest friend. "I needed something done by someone I trusted in private industry," Mr. Foggo said.

Downfall in Court

Mr. Wilkes maintains his innocence, but he was eventually convicted in a bribery scandal involving former Representative Randall Cunningham of California. Mr. Foggo pleaded guilty and is serving a sentence on the fraud count, but he still maintains that he was unfairly prosecuted.

His lawyer, Mark J. MacDougall, said he believed that Mr. Foggo's legal problems stemmed in part from controversies over his stint as executive director. "Nobody ever accused Dusty Foggo of putting a dime in his pocket, failing to do his job, or compromising national security," Mr. MacDougall said. "Dusty may have made some mistakes, but this case was driven by professional animosity at C.I.A. and personal ambition."

When Mr. Foggo's lawyers tried unsuccessfully to obtain access to agency files about his role in the prison program, prosecutors complained that he was trying to disclose a secret program. Mr. Foggo claimed that he was reluctant to divulge his role in classified programs and pleaded guilty, in part, to avoid revealing his secrets.

In an Aug. 1, 2007, letter, a C.I.A. lawyer informed Mr. Foggo's lawyers that they could not review any classified files related to the prisons. The agency's letter concluded, "In light of the president's statements regarding the extraordinary value and sensitivity of the C.I.A. terrorist detention and interrogation program, the C.I.A. denies your request in its entirety."

Source: The New York Times

HIV/AIDS Breakthrough

Structure of HIV genome 'decoded'

Scientists say they have decoded the entire genetic content of HIV-1 - the main cause of Aids in humans.

They hope this will pave the way to a greater understanding of how the virus operates, and potentially accelerate the development of drug treatments.

HIV carries its genetic information in more complicated structures than some other viruses.

The US research, published in Nature, may allow scientists the chance to look at the information buried inside.

HIV, like the viruses which cause influenza, hepatitis C and polio, carries its genetic information as single-stranded RNA rather than double-stranded DNA.

The information enclosed in DNA is encoded in a relatively simple way, but in RNA this is more complex.

We are also beginning to understand tricks the genome uses to help the virus escape detection by the human host

Ron Swanstrom

Study author

RNA is able to fold into intricate patterns and structures. Therefore decoding a full genome opens up genetic information that was not previously accessible, and may hold answers to why the virus acts as it does.

The team from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said they planned to use the information to see if they could make tiny changes to the virus.

"If it doesn't grow as well when you disrupt the virus with mutations, then you know you've mutated or affected something that was important to the virus," says Ron Swanstrom, professor of microbiology and immunology.

"We are also beginning to understand tricks the genome uses to help the virus escape detection by the human host."

Deep inside

Dr David Robertson from the University of Manchester welcomed this "definitive analysis".

"What this may reveal is some of the proteins operating at a level below the structures, which may have all sorts of functions within the virus.

"More generally, if we can unpick the structures then we can compare the systems of different viruses and gain new understanding of how they work."

Keith Alcorn of the HIV information service NAM added: "Encouraging the virus to mutate is not a new idea, but it is one of a number of options on the table.

"How important this information will be for the development of new drugs remains to be seen, but it is a useful addition to what we know." 

––––

Monkey viruses 'created HIV'

Two different strains of a virus affecting monkeys probably combined to create the form of HIV which has spread around the world, say scientists.

They believe the two strains of Simian Immunodeficiency Viruses (SIVs) first came together in chimpanzees who had eaten monkeys carrying the different strains.

The viruses' DNA then merged, creating a new form - the forerunner of HIV-1.

This was then passed to humans - possibly through the handling of contaminated chimpanzee flesh.

The theory has been put forward by a team from Nottingham University, who carried out an extensive genetic analysis of SIV strains.

In particular they focused on a strain called SIVcpz, which is found in chimpanzees and which has previously been shown to be closely linked to HIV-1.

In some ways, SIVcpz was found to resemble SIVrcm, a virus endemic in red-capped mangabeys.

But in other respects it closely matched another form of the virus, SIVgsn, which is found in the spot-nosed monkey.

Chimpanzees are known to hunt and eat both species of monkey.

Cross-species transmission

Writing in the journal Science, the researchers said: "Because chimpanzees are known to hunt smaller monkey species, the simplest explanation appears to be that both SIVrcm and SIVgsn have been acquired by chimpanzees and recombined in that host."

They said the finding was important evidence that another primate species besides humans acquired SIV by cross-species transmission under natural conditions.

Last year French researchers found that SIVgsn contained a particular gene which gave it the potential to jump from monkeys to man.

The Nottingham researchers also warn that because of the similarity between chimpanzees and humans, any virus that successfully adapts to spreading among chimpanzees would be a candidate for a further jump to humans - a potential new strain of HIV.

Exactly how SIVcpz was transmitted to humans to re-emerge as HIV is not known.

One theory is that "bush meat" consumption may have been to blame.

If people had cut themselves while preparing infected meat, they could have acquired the virus.

SIVs are a large family of viruses, carried by many species of monkeys in Africa, but chimpanzees are the only apes known to be naturally infected. 

Source: BBC

Through the Looking Glass

Through the Looking Glass of a Pacifist

Violence rules the roost in Manipur – the state government as well as the militant organisations are responsible for this deplorable condition. The bloodshed continues unabated and the only thing that has persisted is the hope for a better tomorrow.

BY KAPIL ARAMBAM

Like an individual, every community has its distinctive traits and ways of life. At a glance, observers in the state would say violence, corruption, drugs and cheap lifestyle amongst other things, provide the platforms where the farce is set. These are the parasitic elements of any backward region and are, not surprisingly, rampant in our neighbourhood. The resulting frustration is manifested in our daily life, where the elected government is bent on intimidation while non-state actors are defying them at will. The general public are sandwiched between the two, and are disoriented lot between the devil and the deep sea.

A confused identity and a sense of belonging nowhere are the building blocks of this absurd plot in the valley. But there are dreams, and plenty of them, which are sustaining our life and making survival possible. The struggle for achieving them has become all the more difficult as many have lost faith in it while others are embroiled in the chaos and lack of clarity to accomplish the task.

The hope of a peaceful and self-reliant society is all we have got for posterity. We need to change ourselves, get rid of the violent and lazy mentality, and make ourselves visible in the global space.

It has called for figuring out our roots. Asking ourselves where we belong might puzzle us again. Still we know we do belong to a root. Belonging is a feeling – not just a membership. It involves being included or accepted by others in a group. Hopefully, it is not politics this time around, but rather a universal feeling of love that we have for our birthplace. We belong to humanity, and we know it. In deed, this consciousness oil the social reality, however harsh it may be in contemporary times.

But how do we justify the security forces causing mayhem in a crowded place? Is there any authority out there? Or are they so busy fighting the rebels, who are clamouring for freedom from the jungles? Why do we remain a mute spectator to bloody gunfights in our backyards? Is it done just by staging those boring sit-in protests or organising senseless general strikes? How do we say we have an elected government? There are several more questions that we don't have the answers for – the stupidity, of course, makes us a hardcore Manipuri.

One of the insurgent groups even criticised that 'the killer pack of police commandos the chief minister is raising is beyond counting.' We can hardly expect anything from this dimwitted commandos, who were formerly raised as the Quick Striking Force (QSF) in the late Seventies. They are blood-thirsty and barks when their masters order. But, at least, we expect some panacea from the top brass if – yes, if they are aware they are responsible for the security of the man on the street.

In history, we have seen revolution giving birth to nations whose power and autonomy have markedly surpassed their own pre-revolutionary pasts. France became a conquering power, the Russian rose to an industrial and military superpower. Mexico gained political strength and the country is least prone to military coup in Latin America. The culmination of a revolutionary process reunited and transformed a shattered China. Likewise, decolonising and neocolonial countries, such as, Cuba and Vietnam have broken the chains of extreme dependency. We have also seen the lofty ideals of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality firing imaginations in the quest of social and national liberation.

It might be superficial to compare these enhanced national powers to a region like ours. But the resistance is completing five decades and it is worrying, the label of being a failed state is going to be attached for ever. It is an open secret how these insurgents are operating with mass extortion, and how armed movement has been devalued shamelessly as a business enterprise. What is to become of Manipur?

Ted Gurr elaborated in 'Why Men Rebel' that political violence occurs when many people in society become angry. And people become angry when there occurs a gap between the valued things and opportunities they feel entitled to and the things and opportunities they actually get – a condition known as relative deprivation.

But there are basic counter-arguments, which are convincing and easily specified. No matter how discontented an aggregate of people may become, they cannot engage in political action, including violence, unless they are part of organised groups with access to resources.

Is it only politics that is affecting the Manipuri landscape and the North-East as a whole? Not necessarily, as this aspect is also closely related to a regretful history, a complex geography and an inefficient economics, so as to say, that is spoiling every generation. In our homeland, we have so many beautiful places to die for, and vast natural resources to kill for. However we are caught in a time warp, unable to break free from the chains that tie us to our tribal instincts. We have been exploited... we have been humiliated... we have been cheated... but this is not just done. A gun is not at all enough to bring us salvation – we need thought and discipline and reason and commitment and planning and what not.

In 'Revolutionary Change,' Chalmers Johnson described revolutions on the basis of a value-orientated social system model. A crisis comes into existence, according to Johnson, whenever values and environment become seriously dis-synchronised, due to either internal and external intrusions. Then, people become disoriented, and hence open to conversion to the alternative values proposed by a revolutionary movement. The existing authorities lose their legitimacy and have to rely more and more upon coercion to maintain order. Johnson continued if the authorities are "smart, flexible, and skillful," they will implement reforms to "re-synchronised" values and environment. But if the authorities are stubbornly "intransigent," then revolution will instead accomplish systemic change violently.

But there are doubts about the prevailing armed rebellion, blamed for ideological bankruptcy and focussing more on extortion and government contracts, will be able to re-synchronise the social system's values and environment. Or rather, to create an organised and self-conscious "class-for-itself," as expounded by Marxism.

We rise to every dissension and sink to any depth of social-economical and political tragedy. We are resilient to this experience would mean but to be preoccupied with a defeatist's psychology.

Getting to the basics, the Manipur State Development Report in 2006 surveyed we have a meagre 6.73% of the gross geographical area of the state, which is classified as agricultural land. An inefficient centralised planning, with an acute infrastructural scarcity and lack of resource mobilisation, has been cited as the foundation of the present economic doldrums. No wonder, the successive governments are resorting to overdrafts to pay the employees in various departments.

Throw garbage politics into the dust-bin. A couple of years ago, in an opinion poll conducted by the All India Radio, nearly 90% of the 750 respondents answered corruption is a bigger issue than HIV/AIDS though the state has the highest number of the HIV-infected people in India in terms of population ratio.

Corruption is unbridled where there are low public-sector salaries, delayed salary payments, weak performance evaluation and disciplinary procedures, extra-budgetary funding mechanisms, and lack of complaint mechanisms leading to disciplinary action. It does not take a rocket scientist to identify the complication. While culpability might be a debatable issue, what causes corruption to spread its tentacles in society is not. It can be minimized only if political leaders are willing to impartially implement effective anti-corruption strategies and augment the probability of detecting and punishing corrupt individuals.

But then this crookedness has eaten up the entrails of our society. It would be wrong to blame the system because all of us are equally responsible for creating a dishonest and corrupted society.

We are caught in a web of decadence and, unfortunately, everything is inter-related in the establishment – we cannot expect any positive upshot out of this mess. Do you see any probability of curtailing the drug menace in the state? Is there any chance to resolve the crises bogging down the region in the near future? Not at all, and the answer is simple as that.

The diagnoses do not mean to doctrinaire the multi-faceted disorder, like once the mainland politicians and policy-makers had done for the sake of expanding the region. These are rather the quest for a development paradigm that is conditional on improving the people's subjective well-being in an environment of peace. An air of pessimism is lingering, and is making us more frustrated. No redemption song can free our mind. This pen is all that I have and I doubt, it can write further.

The dream of a peaceful and just society has remained as elusive as ever. We are a violent society, trying to seek recourse to violence to address the issues. Still, we believe a day will come when man will be equal to man and blood is shed no more. We want to leave behind a vision that would survive this turmoil. And nothing else.

© Kapil Arambam's Private Investigations – Through the looking glass with a packet of Gold Flake :D