September 25th, 2006

Chris Keeley

Works for sale! Works for sale

Nearly 33,000 residents of New Jersey have AIDS, according to state health officials, and, in a statement, Ms. Gill noted that almost as many — about 30,000 — have died of the disease. 

Maria Lugo, a drug user in Camden, N.J., received a syringe-sterilizing kit on Thursday in a van operated by the Camden Area Health Education Center.

Richard Perry/The New York Times

The Last Holdout Reconsiders a Program to Curb H.I.V.
By RICHARD G. JONES

CAMDEN, N.J., Sept. 21 — On most days, the fringe workers in this city’s stunningly vibrant drug trade shout and gesticulate from street corners like hot dog vendors at a ballpark, hawking hypodermic needles they claim are clean.

“Works for sale! Works for sale!”

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Chris Keeley

Sullivan was born with ambiguous genitals

genitals that looked “like a little parkerhouse roll with a cleft in the middle and a little nubbin forward.” Sullivan lived as a boy for 18 months, until doctors at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan performed exploratory surgery, found a uterus and ovotestes (gonads containing both ovarian and testicular tissue) and told the Sullivans they’d made a mistake: Brian, a true hermaphrodite in the medical terminology of the day, was actually a girl

What if It’s (Sort of) a Boy and (Sort of) a Girl?
By ELIZABETH WEIL
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Chris Keeley

Under Egypt's Volcano

PHOTOGRAPH BY PAOLO PELLEGRIN/MAGNUM PHOTOS

http://www.vanityfair.com/features/photoessay/060925feph

 

The pyramid in Saqqara

 

 

Partially unveiled women inside a home in the countryside, near al-'Arish, in Sinai.

Egypt, the most populous nation in the Arab world, is the birthplace of nearly every major political and religious force to spread through the region in the past century. Islamic jihad has its roots there. Osama bin Laden took his disgruntled worldview global after his tutelage by an Egyptian spiritual mentor. One of the masterminds behind the first World Trade Center bombing was Egyptian, as was one of the ringleaders of 9/11. And yet Egypt’s government and its Western friends would have us believe that this is a place of progress, a placid land of pharaohs and sphinxes eager to welcome well-heeled tourists. Writer Scott Anderson and photographer Paolo Pellegrin visited Egypt for the October issue of Vanity Fair and found a country sowing the seeds of fundamentalism. Pellegrin’s images of sullen faces and shrouded cityscapes reveal a place burdened by the past, and a poverty-stricken people, many seething with resentment. —

VIEW THE PHOTO ESSAY
READ SCOTT ANDERSON ON EGYPT
LAST WEEK'S SLIDE SHOW

http://www.vanityfair.com/features/photoessay/060925feph
Chris Keeley

U.S. Spy Agencies: Iraq War Worsened Terrorist Threat

U.S. Spy Agencies: Iraq War Worsened Terrorist Threat
The country’s intelligence agencies have concluded that the U.S. invasion of Iraq has increased the overall terrorist threat by spawning a new generation of Islamic radicalism. This conclusion appears in a still classified National Intelligence Estimate that was completed in April. One intelligence official told the New York Times that the report concluded the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse despite contradicting claims made by the White House. The report represents a consensus view of the 16 spy services inside the government. The NIE report is the first formal assessment of global terrorism by US intelligence agencies since the invasion of Iraq.
Chris Keeley

Boondocks

ByeBye Boondocks

'Boondocks'

 This handout image provided by Universal Press Syndicate shows an example of "The Boondocks," the black comic-strip family living in white suburbia. Aaron McGruder's satirical comic strip is moving out of newspapers after a six-month hiatus.
(Associated Press)
September 25, 2006
Chris Keeley

James Carroll on the Papal Provocation

TO: Distinguished Recipients
FM: John Whitbeck

Transmitted below is another worthy commentary on the papal provocation,
published in the /Boston Globe/ and the /International Herald Tribune/.

I have been watching on TV this evening scenes from this pope's highly
touted effort at "dialogue" with the Muslim world. Twenty-one envoys
from predominantly Muslim states were invited to the papal summer palace
at Castel Gandolfo to listen as the pope read a five-minute-long
statement (apparently not his own creation) and were then permitted to
shake the papal hand. No questions were permitted, and there was no
discussion.

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