ASMARA, Eritrea -- The "richest man in the world," Microsoft's Bill Gates, recently announced that he was making a $10 billion donation towards finding vaccines to prevent some of the world's worst diseases. Malaria is the number one killer in Africa. From what I'm hearing about $1 billion of Bill Gates donation/tax write-off is for research to find a vaccine to prevent malaria. The African country of Eritrea, where I live, has reduced malaria mortality by 85 percent in the last seven years. How? By using basic public health methods. By distributing pesticide treated mosquito nets and organizing the pesticide retreatment every three months of mosquito nets. By habitat eradication. And by community medical clinics for immediate treatment. - Thomas C. Mountain

Washington is the largest publishing center of war rhetoric and sword rattling the world has ever seen. It eclipse’s even the war rhetoric of The Soviet Union and the U.S. combined during any point in the cold war. Today’s rhetoric is more pronounced than President Kennedy’s Cuban Missile crisis. The rhetoric and threats really do not make any sense when you look at what is being said and the promises that have been broken by this President. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seems to be the mouthpiece for this verbal diarrhea when she traveled to Doha, Qatar and on to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to make slimly veiled threats and war announcements. She was asked, by reporters, if the U.S. had intentions of attacking Iran where she answered, “NO”. Since she is known for saying the opposite of what is really happening, my feeling is that they do have plans for an invasion without true negotiations and their minds are made up. Statements from The White House have indicated this also. This feeling is also due to interviews with several people, including people close to Obama, who have said that Obama needs to attack Iran to be reelected in 2012. - Michael Lancaster

The Executive Branch of our federal government has become a 500 pound tick that’s being fed by a 50 pound dog (the American people) due to presidential Executive Orders (EOs). EOs – not to be confused with Eos, the supernaturally beautiful goddess of Greek mythology – have become an ugly fact of American life, ever since our terrible conflagration known as the American Civil War. An Executive Order (EO) is an order made by a president that has the full force and effect of any laws constitutionally passed by congress, and signed by the president. - J. Speer-Williams

In the night of February 13-14, 1945, the ancient and beautiful capital of Saxony, Dresden, was attacked three times, twice by the RAF and once by the USAAF, the United States Army Air Force, in an operation involving well over 1,000 bombers. The consequences were catastrophic, as the historical city centre was incinerated and between 25,000 and 40,000 people lost their lives.[1] Dresden was not an important industrial or military centre and therefore not a target worthy of the considerable and unusual common American and British effort involved in the raid. The city was not attacked as retribution for earlier German bombing raids on cities such as Rotterdam and Coventry, either. In revenge for the destruction of these cities, bombed ruthlessly by the Luftwaffe in 1940, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and countless other German towns big and small had already paid dearly in 1942, 1943, and 1944. Furthermore, by the beginning of 1945, the Allied commanders knew perfectly well that even the most ferocious bombing raid would not succeed in “terrorizing [the Germans] into submission,”[2] so that it is not realistic to ascribe this motive to the planners of the operation. The bombing of Dresden, then, seems to have been a senseless slaughter, and looms as an even more terrible undertaking than the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is at least supposed to have led to the capitulation of Japan. - Jacques R. Pauwels

Feminists have exercised nearly unfettered control of Congress’s social policy philosophy since the creation of the Great Society. That arrangement, designed to help a few women in trouble, evolved into an industry executing the feminist goal of destroying marriage. The ever-escalating demands to entitle non-marriage and out-of-wedlock procreation never end. Welfare state expansions have eviscerated the function of marriage. Marriage naturally guarantees women the economic support and domestic assistance of their husbands. The feminist Oleanna is truly a nightmare burdening women with “doing it all”, earning a living, raising the children, doing the laundry, and everything else around the household. - David R. Usher

A lot of people are very upset about the rapidly increasing U.S. national debt these days and they are demanding a solution. What they don't realize is that there simply is not a solution under the current U.S. financial system. It is now mathematically impossible for the U.S. government to pay off the U.S. national debt. You see, the truth is that the U.S. government now owes more dollars than actually exist. If the U.S. government went out today and took every single penny from every single American bank, business and taxpayer, they still would not be able to pay off the national debt. And if they did that, obviously American society would stop functioning because nobody would have any money to buy or sell anything.

During the holidays, when Brazilians are resting and expecting a happy new year, President Lula and his gang of former leftist terrorists and bank robbers, now ministers of state, crafted and signed a law project that can very well turn Brazil into a Soviet Republic. In an excellent example of Hegelian dialects and novilingua, the project tries to institute a "Human Rights National Program", a presidential decree #7037, from 21/12/09. Human rights, in this law, means anything that the government wants it to mean, and is an excuse to review all laws, censor all media, confiscate private property and abolish the freedom of speech. In one stroke of a pen, Lula wants to implement a total Marxist revolution that he was, until now, hiding from the people. In Brazil, we had a military government that went from 1964 to 1987. The military coup prevented Brazil from falling into the hands of international Communism. Of all the military regimes in Latin America, the Brazilian one was the softer. Most people remember this period as one of peace and tranquility. Brazil develop a lot, growing more than 10% each year.

In the past, I have alluded to Panetta and the Seven Dwarfs. The reference is to CIA Director Leon Panetta and seven of his moral-dwarf predecessors — the ones who sent President Barack Obama a letter on Sept. 18 asking him to “reverse Attorney General Holder’s Aug. 24 decision to re-open the criminal investigation of CIA interrogations.” Panetta reportedly was also dead set against reopening the investigation — as he was against release of the Justice Department’s “torture memoranda” of 2002, as he has been against releasing pretty much anything at all — the President’s pledges of a new era of openness, notwithstanding. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “CIA Torturers Running Scared.”] Panetta is even older than I, and hearing is among the first faculties to fail. Perhaps he heard “error” when the President said “era.” As for the benighted seven, they are more to be pitied than scorned. No longer able to avail themselves of the services of clever Agency lawyers and wordsmiths, they put their names to a letter that reeked of self-interest — not to mention the inappropriateness of asking a President to interfere with an investigation already ordered by the Attorney General. Three of the seven — George Tenet, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden — were themselves involved, in one way or another, in planning, conducting or covering up all manner of illegal actions, including torture, assassination and illegal eavesdropping. - Ray McGovern

Who said last February that it was OK with them to produce a new currency to replace the dollar? None other than serial tax evader, our U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the guy that held his nose when the corporations to big to fail began receiving government bailouts, Federal Reserve chief, Ben Bernanke. In a speech to the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce on February 6, 2007 Bernanke warned that rising income inequality in the U.S. “has been evident for at least three decades, if not longer.” [1] Gee, I wonder what caused that? Could it be the Federal Reserve printing money out of thin air causing inflation and the income disparity? And why did the Obama administration fail to invite the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) and the Chambers to the “Jobs Summit” table held early in December? National Black Chamber of Commerce president, Harry Alford, a guest on Glenn Beck on 12/9 told how unions with big government jobs that pay prevailing wages (40% higher than non-government jobs) discriminate by ignoring minorities for these jobs but instead they bring in workers from 60-70 miles away. - Betty Freauf

The current global downturn, the worst since the Great Depression 70 years ago, pounded the last nail into the coffin of globalization. Already beleaguered by evidence that showed global poverty and inequality increasing, even as most poor countries experienced little or no economic growth, globalization has been terminally discredited in the last two years. As the much-heralded process of financial and trade interdependence went into reverse, it became the transmission belt not of prosperity but of economic crisis and collapse. - Walden Bello