by Mary Pitt

"They came in their thousands, queuing through the night to secure one of the coveted wristbands offering entry into a strange parallel universe where medical care is a free and basic right and not an expensive luxury. Some of these Americans had walked miles simply to have their blood pressure checked, some had slept in their cars in the hope of getting an eye-test or a mammogram, others brought their children for immunisations that could end up saving their life." - The brutal truth about America’s healthcare

While our president is involved in dealing with the many emergencies in which our nation is now foundering, he fails to see the most urgent one.

The dead numbered 137,000 per year through the years of 2000 to 2006, according to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science and, as the depression continues to worsen, the numers will climb even higher on an annual basis. The problem? Simply a lack of health insurance and the inabilty to obtain the needed care on an individual basis!

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Stuart Littlewood

“The suicide bomber wrote that he began to live the day he came to know he was to die. Where did he get this passion to kill?”
- Mahesh Bhatt

Here in the civilised West we hate suicide bombers with a passion.

We’re taught that the proper way to blow fellow humans to smithereens is to do it from 40,000 feet.

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Michael Collins

(March 10) Wall Streets is headed toward international pariah status thanks to two recent actions by the European Union (EU).

On Tuesday, the EU announced that it was banning Wall Street banks from the lucrative government bond business in Europe. They didn't express official concern or fire off a warning shot. They simply banned Wall Street from financing government bond deals like the one Goldman Sachs sold to Greece. The Guardian pointed out that Wall Street bond business from European governments has gone down over the last two years. Now the business is gone period. In effect, the EU has labeled Wall Streets business tactics as too dangerous for their governments to handle.

Then on Wednesday, the President of the European Commission said that the EU was considering a ban on government debt speculation through Credit Default Swaps (CDS) President José Manuel Barroso announced that, "the Commission will examine closely the relevance of banning purely speculative naked sales on Credit Default Swaps of sovereign debt." While not an outright ban, the threat of banning CDS on national debt would be a major loss for the world's financial speculators, particularly those in the United States and Great Britain.

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