In the News

Does anybody else pay attention to the things going on in the world? I know having acces to the New York Times is not available to everyone without a little doing [like reading on the Internet] but there's other news sources, inferior though they may be. Yesterday's news is still resonnating in my head, front: Castro's resignation! After running a country, in peace although his big neighbor to the north refusd to make it easy, for 50 years. What other world leader has managed that?

Then there was an incredible note about Russians who dove to the seafloor under the North Pole and planted a Russian flag. Think about the weirdness of that! They can now claim, whether anyone takes them seriously or not, that the North Pole is part of Russia. It blows my brain, really!

And then there was the article about the increase in suicides among the 45-55 year old age group in the US -- a huge increase in the last few years. Why? The conjuecture is that not only are these people feeling lots of sress, they're on lots of medications and that may be unhinging them. This is far from implausible. We just had another horrible university shooting by a "nice guy with a sweet smile," said to have gone off his Prozac lately with the suggestion that made him flip out. Meanwhile, the FDA and other watchdog agencies admit that when they were watching the ingredients that went into heparin, a very widely used blood thinner, they got the names of two Chinese companies confused and didn't check up on the one making an ingredient of the heparin so at least three people died. The thinga bout heparin that gives me the willies is that it's trade name is Warfarin. A name I remember as that of the rat poison my used in the corn crib when I was a kid.

Is this a crazy world or what? What do we do with this kind of information? I find it far more intersting than the constant analysis of how many delegates are lined up for Hillary or Barak or McCain. I did my part and voted in the primary and now it's in the hands of a flawed system no one seems to want to fix. So I'll just hold my breath and watch the boys with the weapons prove their prowess to the watching world when they shoot down a faulty satelline, mainly to prove they can - that is if they actally CAN. So much for a small, small percentage of the world news so far this week.