Though prospects for any decent response appear slim given the indecency of the international community, it’s still important to monitor government and UN responses to the crimes against humanity taking place in Darfur. (Though a while ago someone at Crooked Timber did ask whether we–private citizens–had good reasons not to pool money, hire mercenaries, and intervene if we believed that there are morally compelling reasons for intervention and if governments and international security organizations were unwilling to do so.) Here’s the latest Security Council Report update on the Council’s March agenda on and prospects for Darfur.

The Council will renew the mandate of the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS). But the major focus of attention will be the transition from the AU operation in Darfur (AMIS) to a new UN operation.

If the AU Peace and Security Council (PSC) ministerial meeting on 3 March endorses the transition, this will open the way for the Council to work on the details of the mandate for the UN operation in March.

At the time of writing, it seems possible that Council members will adopt an interim resolution or presidential statement before the end of February reinforcing the momentum in favour of a transition.

The sanctions regime and the Panel of Experts mandate, which expire on 29 March, will be renewed. But sanctions issues are likely to become controversial and it is unclear whether the focus on the transition issue will lead to delays on listing violators…

There is also US interest in an increased NATO role in providing extended logistical support, perhaps also enforcing a no-fly zone in Darfur. While there is strong opposition, particularly within the AU, to NATO-commanded troops on the ground in Darfur, it may be that an enhanced support (and perhaps a ready reaction reserve role outside Sudan) for NATO could be viewed more favourably.

The sanctions issue is likely to become a controversial element.

During the Cold War the major political players tried to trump each other with space technology. Most notably, the Soviet space station Mir and the US space shuttle programme attempted to assert their respective country’s invulnerability and dominance. The photographs from the archive of the German news magazine Der Spiegel that lined the way into ‘Rückkehr ins All’ (Return to Space) provided the historical backdrop to the space race, which persisted until 1989. Yet this multi-layered exhibition focused on contemporary artistic production, from painting to internet art, taking history only as a tentative cue.

With the immediacy of the Soviet–American confrontation gone, artists have taken a more ‘relaxed’ point of view – such was the curatorial premise of this exhibition. After their excitement about space in the 1960s and subsequent disillusionment from the 1970s onwards, artists’ interests came to be dominated by historical and cultural references. Tom Sachs’ The Crawler (2003), a large-scale model of the space shuttle Challenger, which broke apart shortly after take-off in 1986, was a memorial to technology that NASA is about to abandon. Similarly the video Dreamtime (2001), by Jane and Louise Wilson, documented a relic of space travel – the former Soviet rocket launch station in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Both works figured as direct and literal memories of the techno-political ambitions to which the Soviet Union and USA once clung.

more from Frieze here.

Twenty-five years ago, Howard Brenton set out to shock the bourgeoisie with his play, The Romans in Britain, at the National’s Olivier Theatre. It contained everything that the theatre of that age loved to use for this purpose – foul language, male nudity, simulated sex acts on stage, sympathy for the downtrodden Irish – all combined in a timeless and formless disunity. From this point of view, the play was a huge success. “FURY OVER NUDE PLAY SHOCKER”, was the London Evening Standard’s front-page headline; “A disgrace . . . disgusting . . . GLC chief Cutler threatens grant cut over new NT drama”, it continued. Sir Peter Hall, absent in New York, was telephoned, and replied with typical bluster:

“It is in my view an ambitious and remarkable piece of dramatic writing. . . . Caesar’s Roman army was noted for its brutality and sexual licence. This is apparent in one scene in the play. The director and author feel it is a context that could not be side-stepped or ignored. If I thought it was meretricious and encouraging what it is supposed to be deploring then I would not put it on.”

The theatrical establishment was having great fun.

more from the TLS here.

The most startling moment in “My Year in Iraq,” L. Paul Bremer III’s memoir from his days as the head of the American occupation, comes near the end, when violent uprisings were sweeping most of the central and southern parts of the country in May 2004. With the whole American enterprise verging on collapse, Bremer decided to secretly ask the Pentagon for tens of thousands of additional American troops — a request that, as the rest of his book makes clear, was taboo in the White House and Pentagon.

Bremer turned to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top American commander in Iraq, and asked him what he would do with two more divisions, as many as 40,000 more troops. General Sanchez did not hesitate to answer. “I’d control Baghdad,” he said. Bremer then mentioned some other uses for the soldiers, like securing Iraq’s borders and protecting its infrastructure, to which General Sanchez replied: “Got those spare troops handy, sir?”

This is a jaw-dropping scene, and probably in ways that Bremer did not intend.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

From The New York Times:

A team of scientists in Cleveland and San Francisco said yesterday that they had discovered a new virus in patients who had a rare form of prostate cancer. The patients all had a particular genetic mutation. The virus, called XMRV, could prove to be harmless. Other viruses cause certain cancers of the liver and the cervix. Prostate cancer causes 30,000 deaths a year in this country, making it the second-leading cause of cancer deaths in men, behind lung cancer.

The discovery came from a collaboration between scientists in different fields: genetics in Cleveland and virology in San Francisco. About 10 years ago, in Cleveland, Dr. Robert H. Silverman discovered a gene called RNAsel that is present in all people and that helps fight viruses. But men with the mutation are at greater risk for prostate cancer. Two years ago, in San Francisco, Dr. Don Ganem and Dr. Joe DeRisi created a virus chip with the goal of discovering unknown viruses that might cause human disease. The scientists began their collaboration after Dr. Silverman read about the virus chip. Using the chip, the researchers in California tested tissue removed at surgery from 86 prostate cancer patients. Among the 20 prostate tumor samples from men with mutations in both copies of the RNAsel viral defense gene, eight — or 40 percent — had the virus. This compared with only 1 of 66 (1.5 percent) tumors from men with at least one normal copy of the gene. Tests showed that the viruses in the patients were the same, even though there was no relationship between any of the patients.

More here.

From MSNBC:

A population milestone is about to be set on this jam-packed planet. On Saturday, Feb. 25, at 7:16 p.m. ET, the population here on this good Earth is projected to hit 6.5 billion people. Along with this forecast, an analysis by the International Programs Center at the U.S. Census Bureau points to another factoid, Robert Bernstein of the Bureau’s Public Information Center advised LiveScience. Mark this on your calendar: Some six years from now, on Oct. 18, 2012 at 4:36 p.m. ET, the Earth will be home to 7 billion folks.

Even more striking is that the time required for the global population to grow from 5 billion to 6 billion — just a dozen years — was shorter than the interval between any of the previous billions.

On average, 4.4 people are born every second.

More here.

From Electronic Intifada:

Made in Palestine is the first museum-quality exhibition devoted to the contemporary art of Palestine to be held in the United States. It is a survey of work spanning three generations of Palestinian artists who live in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, parts of Israel, Syria, Jordan, and the United States.

The exhibition was curated by James Harithas during a month long stay in the Middle East, aided in his mission by Palestinian artist Samia Halaby. Made in Palestine premiered at The Station Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston, Texas and in 2005 traveled to San Francisco, CA, and Montpelier, VT.

More here.

[Photo by Michael Stravato shows Mary Tuma’s “Homes for the Disembodied”, 2000. Media: 50 continuous yards of silk. Thanks to Moshe Behar.]

Antonio Lazcano in Natural History Magazine:

Twenty-five years ago, Francis Crick, who co–discovered the structure of DNA, published a provocative book titled Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature. Crick speculated that early in Earth’s history a civilization from a distant planet had sent a spaceship to Earth bearing the seeds of life. Whether or not Crick was serious about his proposal, it dramatized the difficulties then plaguing the theory that life originated from chemical reactions on Earth. Crick noted two major questions for the theory. The first one—seemingly unanswerable at the time—was how genetic polymers such as RNA came to direct protein synthesis, a process fundamental to life. After all, in contemporary life-forms, RNA translates genetic information encoded by DNA into instructions for making proteins.

The second question was, What was the composition of Earth’s early atmosphere? Many planetary scientists at the time viewed Earth’s earliest atmosphere as rich in carbon dioxide. More important, they were also skeptical about a key assumption made by many chemists who were investigating life’s origin—namely that Earth’s early atmosphere was highly “reducing,” or rich in methane, ammonia, and possibly even free hydrogen. In a widely publicized experiment done in 1953, the chemists Stanley L. Miller of the University of California, San Diego, and Harold C. Urey had demonstrated that in such an atmosphere, organic, or carbon-based, compounds could readily form and accumulate in a “prebiotic soup.” But if a highly reducing atmosphere was destined for the scientific dustbin, so was the origin-of-life scenario to which it gave rise.

In Crick’s mind, the most inventive way to solve both problems was to assume that life had not evolved on Earth, but had come here from some other location—a view that still begs the question of how life evolved elsewhere.

Crick was neither the first nor the last to try to explain life’s origin with creative speculation. Given so many difficult and unanswered questions about life’s earthly origin, one can easily understand why so many investigators become frustrated and give in to speculative fantasies. But even the most sober attempts to reconstruct how life evolved on Earth is a scientific exercise fraught with guesswork. The evidence required to understand our planet’s prebiotic environment, and the events that led to the first living systems, is scant and hard to decipher. Few geological traces of Earth’s conditions at the time of life’s origin remain today. Nor is there any fossil record of the evolutionary processes preceding the first cells. Yet, despite such seemingly insurmountable obstacles, heated debates persist over how life emerged. The inventory of current views on life’s origin reveals a broad assortment of opposing positions. They range from the suggestion that life originated on Mars and came to Earth aboard meteorites, to the idea that life emerged from “metabolic” molecular networks, fueled by hydrogen released during the formation of minerals in hot volcanic settings.

This flurry of popular ideas has often distracted attention from what is still the most scientifically plausible theory of life’s origin, the “heterotrophic” theory.

More here.

Maria DiBattista in the Los Angeles Times:

Movies can envision the need for social change, but it is unclear that they can help bring it about. They are better at pointing the way to a different, happier, more fulfilling life. Not the least interesting thing about the hopeless love dramatized in “Brokeback Mountain,” which garnered eight Oscar nominations last week, is how many social hopes it has inspired. Ang Lee, after winning the award as best director at the Golden Globes, hailed “the power of movies to change the way we’re thinking,” although he later thought it advisable to wait to “see how it plays out.”

So far, “Brokeback Mountain” plays out as a love story that has ignited the cultural equivalent of a range war. Typical of conservative salvos is Don Feder’s denunciation of the film as one of Hollywood’s “agitprop epics” that he lambastes for being “anti-American … religion adverse and into moral relevancy.” Frank Rich pronounced the film “a landmark in the troubled history of America’s relationship to homosexuality,” and he exuberantly declared that it “is not leading a revolution but ratifying one, fleshing out — quite literally — what most Americans now believe.”

More here.

Thomas Stuttaford in the London Times:

Cupid, the son of Venus, sharpened his arrows, too — in a similar way to that employed at the Fleggburgh surgery, though he used blood rather than oil on his grindstone. There is a legend, followed up by Shakespeare, that Cupid had two types of arrow: one gave rise to long-lasting, committed, so-called virtuous love, the other to lust. The arrows that led to lasting love were gold, which would have needed careful sharpening to penetrate and stay embedded.

The lovestruck person hit by a golden arrow would pass through the three stages leading to lasting commitment — lust, acceptance and attachment, and deep friendship. What could be more virtuous? Cupid’s other arrows were leaden: although they might strike their victim, they were unlikely to penetrate, let alone to remain embedded. Cupid’s leaden arrow gave rise to short-lived, lustful, sensual passion.

That there are different types of love, the virtuous and the lustful, the one lasting and the other transient, is accepted by neurophysiologists and psychologists. The brain and the hormonal endocrine system have been studied, as has the biochemical and radiological effect of the two types of arrow. Cupid’s arrows now are made neither of gold nor of lead, but by visual images and, above all, by a whiff of pheromones or scent.

More here.

Zia Mian and Pervez Hoodbhoy in openDemocracy:

In unabashedly imperial language, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who initiated the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, writes in his book The Grand Chessboard that the US should seek to “prevent collusion and maintain dependence among the vassals, keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together”.

To keep the “barbarians” at bay, Pentagon planners have been charged with the task of assuring American control over every part of the planet…

But there is a downside to this. And the long-term consequences will not be to the advantage of the U.S. because the nuclear monopoly has broken down. There are others who would be nuclear warriors…

The danger of a nuclear conflict with the United States, and the west more broadly, comes not from Muslim states, but from radicalised individuals within these states. After 9/11, Pakistan’s military government insisted that there was no danger of any of its nuclear weapons being taken for a ride by some radical Islamic group, but it didn’t take any chances. Several weapons were reportedly airlifted to various safer, isolated, locations within the country, including the northern mountainous area of Gilgit.

This nervousness was not unjustified — two strongly Islamist generals of the Pakistan army, close associates of General Musharraf, had just been removed. Dissatisfaction within the army on Pakistan’s betrayal of the Taliban was (and is) deep; almost overnight, under intense American pressure, the Pakistan government had disowned its progeny and agreed to wage a war of annihilation against it.

Via Crooked Timber, which in turn via boingboing, comes this:

By combining quantum computation and quantum interrogation, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found an exotic way of determining an answer to an algorithm – without ever running the algorithm.

Using an optical-based quantum computer, a research team led by physicist Paul Kwiat has presented the first demonstration of “counterfactual computation,” inferring information about an answer, even though the computer did not run. The researchers report their work in the Feb. 23 issue of Nature.

Quantum computers have the potential for solving certain types of problems much faster than classical computers. Speed and efficiency are gained because quantum bits can be placed in superpositions of one and zero, as opposed to classical bits, which are either one or zero. Moreover, the logic behind the coherent nature of quantum information processing often deviates from intuitive reasoning, leading to some surprising effects.

“It seems absolutely bizarre that counterfactual computation – using information that is counter to what must have actually happened – could find an answer without running the entire quantum computer,” said Kwiat, a John Bardeen Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at Illinois. “But the nature of quantum interrogation makes this amazing feat possible.”

RB: You say that the world that Melville came into was close to a medieval world and the world that he left was a world that more closely resembled a modern world.

AD: That’s a fast and loose use of the world “medieval.” But the huge changes he lived through did strike me, as I was rummaging around about Melville’s world, [that] he was born in 1819 in New York City. It was a place then where there were no mechanical form of transportation, no suspension bridges, no tall buildings. But by the time Melville died in New York 72 years later the place had come to feel like the New York that we love and love to hate today. And the way I tried to express this was to say that when Melville was born, the fastest way you could send a message more complicated than could be sent via drum beat or smoke signals or semaphore was to write it down and send it by a messenger on a horse. And that has been the case throughout human history. But by the time Melville was 25 we had the telegraph and then the transatlantic cable, and before the end of Melville’s life, the telephone and electricity, and the Brooklyn Bridge. So the way I tried to represent this, I had one map from 1817, a year or so before Melville was born, and it has all these empty streets, and New York City consisted mainly of the tip of Manhattan. Another map of New York from 1890, a year before he died, and that map is so crabbed and crowded. I put the two maps side by side at the beginning of the book, and they tell the story, I think.

more from The Morning News here.

“Painting in Tongues,” MOCA’s new international survey of young practitioners of the world’s second-oldest profession, claims a distinguished pedigree from among the more subversive, idiosyncratic and visually gifted artists of the modern era. My desert island list of 20th-century painters would also probably include Francis Picabia, Sigmar Polke, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and Jim Shaw. Gerhard Richter I can take or leave — his work’s pretty and clever enough, but for all his genre-busting, his ideas seem narrow and authoritarian. Still, I wouldn’t kick him out of my art-bed. And as part of a lineup of standards against which to frame a cluster of international emergy painters, he, like the rest, cuts a pretty formidable figure.

I doubt if any of the seven “Tongue” painters would choose to be assessed in such company, though a couple of them could plausibly ascend to the same league given time. Pieced together from an assortment of fashionable hometown, British and German approaches to contemporary painting issues, the exhibition succeeds foremost as a showcase of distinct individual practices, ranging from the washy convention-fetishizing belle-époque slacker doodles of Kai Althoff to the alarming twin monkey tower sculpture by Rodney McMillian, which could only be included in a painting show whose premise is militant heterogeneity within individual painters’ oeuvres.

more from the LA Weekly here.

From The National Geographic:

It looks a lot like a beaver—hairy body, flat tail, limbs and webbed feet adapted for swimming—but it lived 164 million years ago. A well-preserved fossil mammal discovered in northeastern China has pushed the history of aquatic mammals back a hundred million years, a new study says. It is the oldest swimming mammal ever found and the oldest known animal preserved with fur, the researchers say in their report, which will be published in tomorrow’s issue of the journal Science.

“The origin of fur predates the origin of modern mammals,” said study co-author Zhe-Xi Luo, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “This discovery has pushed fur-bearing nearly 40 million years further into the past,” Luo said.

More here.

From despardes.com:

Bare-footed artist Husain pulled his painting depicting “Mother India” as a naked woman from an auction after protests by rightwing Hindu nationalists. “Anyone who kills Husain for making obscene paintings of goddess Sarswati and Bharat Mata (Mother India), (and) the Danish cartoonist will be given 51 crore rupees ($11.5 million) in cash,” the board said in a statement.

Board president Ashok Pandey said that the amount would be doubled if the task was carried out by Yaqoob Qureshi, the state minister who announced a similar reward for the heads of the cartoonists. We do not distinguish between Islam and Hinduism,” Pandey said.

More here.

David Leonhardt in the New York Times:

With all the tools available to modern medicine — the blood tests and M.R.I.’s and endoscopes — you might think that misdiagnosis has become a rare thing. But you would be wrong. Studies of autopsies have shown that doctors seriously misdiagnose fatal illnesses about 20 percent of the time. So millions of patients are being treated for the wrong disease.

As shocking as that is, the more astonishing fact may be that the rate has not really changed since the 1930’s. “No improvement!” was how an article in the normally exclamation-free Journal of the American Medical Association summarized the situation.

This is the richest country in the world — one where one-seventh of the economy is devoted to health care — and yet misdiagnosis is killing thousands of Americans every year.

How can this be happening? And how is it not a source of national outrage?

A BIG part of the answer is that all of the other medical progress we have made has distracted us from the misdiagnosis crisis.

More here.

In The Nation:

The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.

Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets–corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers–would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out.

Under the plans they are considering, all of us–from content providers to individual users–would pay more to surf online, stream videos or even send e-mail. Industry planners are mulling new subscription plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing “platinum,” “gold” and “silver” levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received.

Meera Nanda in Economic and Political Weekly:

Rather than bring religion under the limits of scientific reason, India has witnessed a steady co-option of science into the spirit-based cosmology and epistemology of “the Vedas.” …That “the Vedas” are conflated with science as we know it today will hardly come as news to anyone who knows anything about India. This is routine business and has been going on since the very introduction of modern science and technology in India, dating back to the 18th century. (Indian rationalists, in comparison, have never enjoyed the same degree of cultural hegemony. The marginalisation of rationalism in India’s cultural politics is a topic for another day and another essay.)

Most Indians pause to think about this streak of scientism in modern Hinduism, just about as much as fish pause to reflect upon the water they live in – which is not much at all. It has become a part of the commonsense of modern, science-educated, English-speaking Indians to treat the teachings of popular gurus, yogis and swamis as vaguely “scientific,” and therefore modern. Indian scientists, for the most part, have not challenged the religious uses of science: they tend to keep their laboratory lives and their personal lives in separate water-tight compartments. Our public intellectuals and social critics, meanwhile, have been more exercised about the real and imagined scientism of the modern Indian state, than about the scientism that pervades modern Hinduism.

I believe that we need to pay closer attention to Hindu scientism because it is a symptom of the deeper cultural contradictions that afflict India’s modernity.

In The Harvard Human Rights Journal, Chi Mgbako examines a creative but perhaps flawed way of fostering reconciliation in post-genocide Rwanda and stresses the importance of open discussion and criticism.

In the immediate aftermath of the genocide, the infrastructure and social fabric of Rwanda lay in complete ruin. Although the government, remarkably, has restored the physical infrastructure of the country, post-genocide Rwanda continues to grapple with a desperate need for reconciliation. Reconciliation mechanisms designed to respond to atrocities such as genocide, however bold, are inevitably inadequate. Nevertheless, despite these limitations, societies need to establish such mechanisms to come to terms with the legacies of mass atrocity. The RPF-dominated government has employed ingando, or solidarity camps, both to plant the seeds of reconciliation, and to disseminate pro-RPF ideology through political indoctrination. The government encourages or requires Rwandan citizens from diverse walks of life—students, politicians, church leaders, prostitutes, ex-soldiers, ex-combatants, genocidaires, gacaca judges, and others—to attend ingando for periods ranging from days to several months, to study government programs, Rwandan history, and unity and reconciliation.

This Note, based primarily on interviews with ingando participants, government officials, journalists, and genocide survivors conducted in Rwanda in January 2004, evaluates the merits and limits of ingando as a means of fostering reconciliation in the complicated social landscape of post-genocide Rwanda. Focusing on ingando for ex-combatants, ex-soldiers, students, and released genocidaires, this Note argues that much of the ingando project is focused on the dissemination of pro-RPF ideology, a dangerous undertaking in a country in which political indoctrination and government-controlled information were essential in sparking and sustaining the genocide. Furthermore, a successful reconciliation program must take place in a society that values human rights; therefore, we cannot evaluate ingando in isolation from human rights developments in Rwanda. This Note argues that ingando will fail as a reconciliation mechanism so long as the Rwandan government continues to attack public spheres of independent thought and criticism.