When provoked, what will you do?

You wake up and what you will see on CNN are breaking news on the Israeli attacks of Gaza. Horrible pictures of collateral damage, especially Palestinians. A good analysis of the current situation can be had from The Economist.

“On proportionality, the numbers speak for themselves—up to a point. After the first three days, some 350 Palestinians had been killed and only four Israelis. Neither common sense nor the laws of war require Israel to deviate from the usual rule, which is to kill as many enemies as you can and avoid casualties on your own side. Hamas was foolish to pick this uneven fight. But of the Palestinian dead, several score were civilians, and many others were policemen rather than combatants. Although both Western armies and their foes have killed far more civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, Israel’s interest should be to minimise the killing. The Palestinians it is bombing today will be its neighbours for ever.

This last point speaks to the test of effectiveness. Israel said at first that, much as it would like to topple Hamas, its present operation has the more limited aim of “changing reality” so that Hamas stops firing across the border. But as Israel learnt in Lebanon in 2006, this is far from easy. As with Hizbullah, Hamas’s “resistance” to Israel has made it popular and delivered it to power. It is most unlikely to bend the knee. Like Hizbullah, it will probably prefer to keep on firing no matter how hard it is hit, daring Israel to send its ground forces into a messy street fight in Gaza’s congested cities and refugee camps.”

Do you know what is happening?

The financial meltdown this week of investment banks in the US, and its sneezing effect all over the world has caught headlines from all dailies worldwide. But do you understand what is the problem, its root/cause? Its effect? Economists and bankers only talk to themselves. Can the ordinary people know what’s going on?

“Regulation is necessary, and much must now be done to improve the laws of finance. But it must be the right regulation: an end to America’s fragmented system of oversight; more transparency; capital requirements that lean against booms and flex with busts; supervision of giants, like AIG, that are too big and too interconnected to fail; accounting that values risks better and that everyone accepts; clearing houses and exchanges to make derivatives safer and less opaque…This is a black week. Those of us who have supported financial capitalism are open to the charge that the system we championed has merely enabled a few spivs to get rich. But it helped produce healthy economic growth and low inflation for a generation. It would take a very big recession indeed to wipe out those gains. Do not forget that in the debate ahead.” An analysis of the financial crisis in the US.

A breakthrough in cancer study.

“Like natural selection and germs, the discovery of cancer stem cells illustrates how the most fruitful scientific findings are often not those of individual experiments, however intriguing, but those that organise knowledge into theory. The chemical industry took off within a decade or so of Dmitri Mendeleev’s arrangement of the chemical elements into the periodic table, just as radio communications followed James Clerk Maxwell’s mathematical unification of electricity and magnetism, and antibiotics came after Pasteur and Koch.”

The complete new findings on cancer and its relation to stem cells.