Stuart Littlewood

[Stuart Littlewood welcomes Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams's belated decision to visit the Gaza Strip – more than what “that expensively frocked individual”, the Pope, is prepared to contemplate – but wonders what steps the archbishop will take when he returns to publicize the plight of the besieged Gazans.]

”When Archbishop Rowan gets home from his historic visit, what will he do? He and 25 of his colleagues sit in the British parliament's House of Lords. They have clout. But in a quick search through theyworkforyou.com I could find no recent record of these ‘super-clerics’ raising questions about Israel's murderous onslaught, the unending persecution of the Christian and Muslim communities and the unlawful restrictions imposed on the Holy Land generally. No criticism of the British government’s inaction either.”

Dignitaries, emissaries, human rights delegations, fact-finding trippers – they come and go, but Gaza's suffering continues and day by day gets worse, thanks to the corrupted leadership of the international community who are the scandal of our age.

But here's a spot of Christmas cheer for the starving, desolated Palestinians imprisoned in the tiny coastal enclave.

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S. Frederick Starr

It was once the “land of a thousand cities” and home to some of the world’s most renowned scientists, poets, and philosophers. Today it is seen mostly as a harsh backwater. To imagine Central Asia’s future, we must journey into its remarkable past.

In AD 998, two young men living nearly 200 miles apart, in present-day Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, entered into a correspondence. With verbal jousting that would not sound out of place in a 21st-century laboratory, they debated 18 questions, several of which resonate strongly even today.

Are there other solar systems out among the stars, they asked, or are we alone in the universe? In Europe, this question was to remain open for another 500 years, but to these two men it seemed clear that we are not alone. They also asked if the earth had been created whole and complete, or if it had evolved over time. Time, they agreed, is a continuum with no beginning or end. In other words, they rejected creationism and anticipated evolutionary geology and even Darwinism by nearly a millennium. This was all as heretical to the Muslim faith they professed as it was to medieval Christianity.

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Ellen Brown

Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, is quoted as warning two centuries ago:

“Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an underground dictatorship. . . . The Constitution of this republic should make special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom."

That time seems to have come, but the dictatorship we are facing is not the sort that Dr. Rush was apparently envisioning. It is not a dictatorship by medical doctors, who are as distressed by the proposed legislation as the squeezed middle class is. (For a withering analysis by an outraged M.D. of the nearly 2000 - page House bill, see here.) The new dictatorship is not by doctors but by Wall Street -- the FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) sector that now claims 40% of corporate profits.

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Aleksandr Shustov

The launch of a new gas pipe on December 14 to connect Turkmenistan and China became one of the key moments in a geopolitical game aimed to win new routes of exporting Central Asian oil and gas resources. The launching ceremony for the gas pipe took place at the Samandep field in Turkmenistan and was attended by Presidents Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, Islam Karimov (Uzbekistan) and Nursultan Nazarbayev (Kazakhstan). The new gas pipe will be the first route to deliver the Turkmen gas (up to 40 bln cubic meters per year) to external markets bypassing Russia. Until recently Russia has purchased the lion's share of Turkmen gas but now it plans to buy four times less.

The new pipe is expected to supply to China 150 million cubic meters of gas, but it will reach full capacity by 2012. It will pump gas mainly from the gas fields located on the left bank of the Amu Darya River, while the lacking amounts of gas will be taken from the Bagtyyarlyk gas-rich territory on contract basis. The pipeline is about 7 km long, with 184,5 km being on the Turkmen soil, and 490 km, 1300 km and 4500 km in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and China respectively.

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Nicole Belle

That beautiful, sunny, smiling face belongs to Jessica Bucher, a twelve year old middle school student in Northern California.

At a time when most parents are worried about their twelve year old's grades, or first forays with the opposite sex, or cell phone usage, Jessica's parents have a much more urgent goal: keeping Jessica alive and pain-free.

Jessica Bucher was diagnosed with a rare disease that is almost always fatal: juvenile onset Sandhoff Disease. Thankfully, Jessica has responded well to an experimental umbillical cord stem cell treatment, but not without saddling her parents with astronomic health care bills. Those bills are now threatening their home to foreclosure. It's every parent's Faustian nightmare: save your child and lose your home or save your home and watch your child die. Jessica's classmates have opted to run regular fundraisers to help offset these medical costs because we as a country offer no such safety net to the Buchers.

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