March 2010

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Doctor's Orders: Don't Stay Alone in a Hospital

Atul Gawande, a New York based surgeon, argues that making the (medical) system work well is something that doctors are only starting to grapple with. Medicine has tended to about isolated parts. About having a "great drug" or a "great doctor." Only in the last few years has it become about making it all fit together for optimum results.  According to Gawande, doctors are not very good at knitting things together. Often patients see different...

Women in the World

"At this point, men have impoverished the world, set…many nations at war with each other and set us on a pollution path to the destruction of the planet. Do you think it might be time for women to have their say?" asks GRITtv presenter Laura Flanders, reporting on a conference that brought together prominent women from all over world to talk about their successes and the myriad challenges still faced by women in a male dominated world. The conference convened by American...

Eskom: Plunging Us into Darkness

Picture: sankarshan Glenn Ashton - Those responsible for formulating the policies required to solve our national energy crisis are clearly floundering, all at sea, while the great white sharks of international capital circle for the kill. Our national energy policies are a mess. We have signally failed to formulate a comprehensive long-term energy policy since democracy in 1994, instead relying on ad hoc responses by both Eskom and politicians. The incestuous Tweedledum and Tweedledee relationship between Eskom and the state...

Military Brass' Warning: Israel's Intransigence Jeopardizing US Security Interests in Middle East

Picture: US State Department Democracy Now - Veteran military and foreign affairs analyst and author Mark Perry reports that CENTCOM commander General David Petraeus dispatched a team of senior military officers in January to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Perry reports that the briefers told Mullen that “Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing US standing in the region.”  Democracy Now's Amy Goodman and Anjali Kamat...

Hilary Clinton's Latin American Tour

Hilary Clinton recently went on a tour of Latin America in an attempt to repair Washington's relations with the region, especially after the events in Honduras, reports The Real News Network (TRNN). Many Latin American presidents still refuse to recognize the new president of Honduras, as the election that brought him into power was the result of an illegal coup. In contrast, Clinton says that the situation in Honduras was well managed and non-violent. Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the...

Interview: Noam Chomsky on Haiti

Picture: Andre Garcia & CIA maps Keane Bhatt - Aid Should Go to Haitian Popular Organizations, Not to Contractors or NGOs For decades, Noam Chomsky has been an analyst and activist working in support of the Haitian people. In addition to his revolutionary linguistics career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he has written, lectured and protested against injustice for 40 years. He is co-author, along with Paul Farmer and Amy Goodman of Getting Haiti Right This Time: The U.S. and the Coup. His analysis "The...