Polyamory, the revolting shareholders, and today's articles from Maria

All Things Beautiful ponders "Big Love" and polyamory.

Philomathean posts on the NYT Shareholders Revolt. The readers have been voting for a while now.

Today's articles from Maria
Mark Steyn, a man after my heart: Nothing to fear but the climate change alarmists

'Nobel' lies on campus, as Rigoberta Menchu's scheduled to visit Oregon State University

In the late 1990’s, the story that informed Rigoberta’s secular sainthood came apart. Anthropologist David Stoll, in research confirmed by the New York Times, revealed that she had been lying all along. She wasn’t illiterate, but had been educated in a prestigious Catholic boarding school. The land dispute central to formulating her Marxism beliefs didn’t pit her family against wealthy landowners, but against their own relatives. Her brother Nicolas didn’t die of starvation, but was alive and well in Guatemala.

Read it all.

Three articles on the Holocaust: The Road To Neumburg, The Death March, and Does the Holocaust Still Matter?

One rule of thumb by which to measure the significance of the Holocaust is that it clearly matters to the enemies of the Jewish people - so much so that many would like to blot out its memory entirely.

Members of a New York City Islamist society who protested outside the Israeli consulate in Manhattan on Friday chanted threats about a second Holocaust and warned that Israel will be attacked with nuclear weapons. New Bin Laden Tape Says This Is A Crusader-Zionist War.

The UK's Telegraph looks at Hu

Europe squanders billions in aid for former Soviet states

Russia Warns Against Pressuring Iran. The other day I was wondering if nature will be doing the pressuring. At the Economist, Kremlin watchers wonder what Vladimir Putin is up to with Hamas and Iran

On the face of it, Russia's dalliance with Hamas, and patience with Iran, look odd, given Russia's own experience of Islamist terrorism, Iran's proximity to Russia's volatile north Caucasus, and the valuable role Russia enjoys as the region's sole official nuclear power. Dmitri Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, insists that Russia's sensitivity on Iran is equal to America's.

But look closely, and their interests arguably differ. To the Kremlin, Iran has been a well-behaved neighbour, which has kept out of Chechnya, and the Russians want to keep it that way. Russia is less anxious than America about Israel's security. Dimitri Simes, of the Nixon Center in Washington, says a nuclear Pakistan, which America regards as an ally, is a bigger worry in Moscow than is Iran. Cash is also at stake: Russia is helping to build a nuclear plant for the Iranians. Last year it promised them a batch of ground-to-air missiles—though they have yet to be delivered, and won't be, if the Americans get their way.

More important than these concerns, however, may be another, uniquely Russian kind of interest. Dmitri Trenin, of the Moscow Carnegie Centre, says the Kremlin's aim in the Middle East is to show that "Russia is not a piece of furniture." Or, as one American administration official puts it, the message is, "We're back." Oil at $70 a barrel, he says, has inculcated "a self-confidence [in Moscow] that we haven't seen since the break-up of the Soviet Union". To prove it is not a piece of furniture, Russia needs to do something visibly different from America. And as Georgy Mirsky, a Moscow-based analyst, argues, for one reason or another the Middle East is the best place for Russia to do it.

Investment-wise, RICH AMERICANS SENDING
THEIR $ TO JAPAN, INDIA, which have growing investment markets.

The path to self-defeat

Africa Malaria Day: Action or bombast?:

malaria deaths since the 1972 DDT ban may exceed the entire World War II death toll. It is a travesty worse than colonialism ever was, a human rights violation of monstrous proportions.

Also visit Africa Fighting Malaria

Update: One more time: Communism.Doesn't.Work.

On a lighter mode,
Arrivederci, Roma? Berlusconi bows out singing

Milk them wallabys! New penicillin found in wallaby milk. I wonder what Rocco would say to that.

Book corner:
Recommended by Maria


On the cover of the NYT Book Review:

Ms Gardner was a beautiful woman that used to visit the resort where my father worked.

From the WSJ, an FDR reader:



And don't forget
Carnival of New Jersey Bloggers #49




(technorati tags Iran, Russia, China, malaria, books)