globeandmail.com: Paul Newman, 83. rest in peace cool hand luke.

BBC NEWS | Russian jets attack Georgian town. i’ve absolutely never heard of the “breakaway province of South Ossetia” but i suspect this all has to do with oil, an oil port, or an oil pipeline.

Comic actor Bernie Mac dies - CNN.com. he was 50 and died of pneumonia. damn.

An Enduring Legacy - Randy Pausch, The “Last Lecture Professor”, died at age 47. if you haven’t watched that lecture yet, you really really should.

Earth Hour crashes to Earth | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog “But here’s the awareness it should raise: how difficult it is to get even a tiny cut in just electricity use for one lousy hour, in a country responsible for just 1.5 per cent of the world’s emissions.”

Actor Heath Ledger dies at 28 - CNN.com. seems he overdosed. i wonder if they finished shooting on the new batman movie?

Chess Master Bobby Fischer Dead at 64. man, even tom cruise would say this guy is nuts.

CNN Election Center 2008. i’m not a big fan of CNN but their election website is both well designed, well organized, and has useful data.

Sir Edmund Hillary, first man to the top of the world, dies at 88 | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited. “Well George, we knocked the bastard off.”

The Assassination of Benazir Bhutto | The New York Times. i find it odd that there’s people who stand and take photos (instead of running) while bombs go off.

BBC NEWS | Africa | Kenyans burned to death in church. things are not good in kenya after a contentious election.

The Informed Reader - WSJ.com. I just started reading this blog and all the posts are really quite interesting. mix of world politics, business, culture, etc.

Foreign Policy: The Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2007. 70,000 Cubans on rafts in under 2 years. that’s nuts.

Bob Simon tells the story of the Iraqi defector known as “Curve Ball,” whose fabricated story of mobile biological weapons drove the U.S. argument for invading Iraq.. Bob Simon details the single source behind Colin Powell’s “slam dunk” UN presentation. I don’t think I’ll ever believe anything that an “intelligence” agency says again.

Bush’s former press secretary, Scott McClellan, has a book coming out where he’s basically claiming that Bush, Cheney, and Rove all knowingly lied about the Valerie Plame leak. surprised, not at all.

confronting malaria

The Seattle Times has special section called Confronting Malaria where it talks about the disease and what the Gates Foundation is trying to do to address such a massive problem. The section includes a really interesting interview with Gates (transcript and audio) where he points out the huge implications of malaria. Annually there are 200 million cases of malaria and 1 million related deaths (90% of which are children in Africa).

What caught my ear in the Gates interview concerns how malaria creates a huge socioeconomic burden. First, the rate of malaria infections has a direct relation on the number of children in each family (in order to get a child to adulthood) which creates a horrible cycle of poverty. Second, the cost of trying to save a child infected with malaria essentially bankrupts a family. A viable vaccine would not only prevent a million deaths a year but would also create a huge win against global poverty.

The other thing which caught my ear was on the topic of “making people care”. The reporter mentioned how in the last five years malaria has gone from “forgotten” to being a fund raiser on American Idol. But Gates makes an interesting statement about the current state of affairs:

If we re-sorted the world and your neighbors were dying of malaria — that a kid you’d met and had a human connection with — the amount of urgency, resources going into this would be a hundred times what it is even now. I mean it would be viewed as a total crisis.

What interested me about that statement, of reshuffling your neighbors, is that it isn’t just an issue of gaining global perspective. It’s something that happens on a national and local level too. Just think about how AIDS in America was totally trivialized until it significantly affected groups other than homosexuals. Just think about how a shooting is addressed in your city when it happens in a “good part of town” versus a “bad part of town”.

The War as We Saw It - New York Times. Two of the 7 NCOs who wrote this op-ed died in Iraq on Monday. A third survived a gun shot to the head.

Bridge collapse in Minneapolis - IHT. the photos are nuts and the personal accounts are insane.

The Raw Story | New documents link Kissinger to two 1970s coups. as ram said, only two?

Web Abuzz on Bee Weirdness - New York Times. what an odd story.