March 23, 2005 WTO orders the murder of 10 million civilians
..India, a source of inexpensive drugs for AIDS patients in many poor countries, passed a patent law today that critics said would eventually choke off that supply.

..a condition of India's admission to the World Trade Organization.
....prices for newly invented drugs would be much higher..exports by Indian companies, especially Cipla and Ranbaxy.. helped drive the annual price of antiretroviral treatment down from $15,000 a decade ago to about $200..
Cipla's chairman, Dr. Yusuf Hamied, called the new law "a very sad day for India."
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2004 USA harvest..a record year
Never before have corn, soybeans, sorghum, and alfalfa hay all achieved record yields in the same year..
Corn 10T/ha
summer 2004 conditions were unlike any experienced during the past 117 years
..these conditions and their crop impacts are not considered indicative of those expected with a change in climate due to global warming..
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flickrgraph
marumushi some interesting graphics, suggestive of force fields .. something like this might teach Tensors and metrics...s
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JoeV
"Federal Government mounts covert 'Proof of Concept' biochem attack on unsuspecting airline staff and passengers. So where and when will the live 'Terrorist' gas attack be launched?"
Never let it be said that JoeV doesnt have a theory. That said its an odd story from Melbourne airport. (nb organophosphates are 'chemical' not 'biochemical')
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Iraq resistance getting bigger and bolder...
fewer attacks on USA troops, but larger groupings.
(USA patrols were 3 hours then 1 hour, maybe they're 10 minutes now, might explain the reduction in deaths)
NYT: March 23 - "Iraqi and American forces killed at least 80 insurgents during a Tuesday" ..raid on.. be the biggest guerrilla training camp ..Lake Tharthar
..tents and small buildings in a marshy lakeside encampment 50 miles northwest of the capital......the bodies of Filipino and Arab men
..a popular tourist spot
................
But, the next day... they're back...
AlJazeera: Thursday 24 March 2005
.."30 to 40 fighters were seen Wednesday at the lakeside training camp attacked by US and Iraqi forces a day before and claimed they had never left"..
..Muhammad Amer..said only 11 of his comrades perished in airstrikes

And this:
.."On Sunday, an American convoy fended off an ambush by a band of 40 to 50 insurgents in Salman Pak".,
..looks like the resistance is preparing for life after USA patrols.
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23/03/2005
Iran nearly completed heavy-water plant, to go ahead with Plutonium reactor.
Condi will be cross. Too bad the USA has resiled from the Vienna convention, The Geneva convention, International law, habeas corpus, and indeed common decency.
Makes it hard for Condi's growls to be considered seriously.

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"You bet we might have." - John Kerry 2004
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Mike Whitney: 'Wolfowitz and the coming wars'
"The World Bank has never operated according to its mandate, (to reduce poverty in the developing countries through financial assistance) so it's better to have someone like Wolfowitz at the top-spot where the activities of the bank draw greater public scrutiny. His appointment will serve the same purpose as a warning label on medicine vial; cautioning needy third world states that overuse could be hazardous."
...the way it works:
Give a big loan to "a country" - actually to corporations, on a project basis
.. may involve booting thousands of people off their land
A Bunch of "consultants" from the rich class skim off huge "fees"
To pay back the loan, when the dam or nuclear generator or whatever has failed, take the money from govt programs for health and education....
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Free Software favourites:
Mozilla Firefox... dont even think about using another browser
Metaproducts Download Express... opens 6 threads, by far the fastest downloader.. plugs into Firefox
on our "1MBit" broadband I often get 120,000 chars/second...
Ad-Aware & Spybot ..you need these (they have grumpy comments about each other, use both..)
Audiograbber .. grab those streams that RealAudio dont want you to.
Picasa.. organise all your Images
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Tech notes
Sadly, I have abandoned "Sun Java Creator" as a tool for web based.
Downloaded a bunch of exIBM stuff Apache-Tomcat, Eclipse,
There is such a plethora of technologies JSP JSF JDO Struts etc etc
I would love something like Creator that actually worked.
- the last straw was the atrocious performance of Sun's AppServer8.
Now its possible that Server8 can be tweaked so as to work, or that Suns 'real' servers may work. But at the moment the pro-Java-anti-microsoft world is looking shaky in the face of .NET Word is that Novell have a multi-platform-native version of .NET.
Sun had better sharpen up their act.