No one could ever have predicted! From the NYT :

Drug Makers Raising Prices Before Reform

In the last year, the industry has raised the wholesale prices of brand-name prescription drugs by about 9 percent, according to industry analysts. That will add more than $10 billion to the nation’s drug bill, which is on track to exceed $300 billion this year. By at least one analysis, it is the highest annual rate of inflation for drug prices since 1992.

And I sure will have a lot of trouble paying for those drugs on my credit card that--thanks to the convenient lag in implementing credit "reform"--now has 29 % interest!

From the U.S. based Iranian scholar Behzad Yahgmaian, some optimistic updates:

The presidential election of June 12, which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared to have won, gave birth to a grassroots movement that has been evolving politically, embracing broader segments of the population, discovering new methods of struggle, and refusing to die despite widespread government violence.

It has bewildered the conservatives, surpassed the political limits of the reformists, and become a wildcard with a potential to change Iran in profound ways.

The Swiss arrest of Roman Polanski on his outstanding California sex charge is most curious. Why now, after 32 years? Presumably Polanski, who's been living in France all this time, has been to Switzerland many times before this. I'm not saying that Polanski deserves to get a pass on his bad behavior. But there are far bigger scoundrels and criminals loose in the world (hello Dick! Donald! Wolfie!).

So I'm suspicious. And wondering what the international politics of this are. Perhaps the Swiss are suddenly going all law-and-order on things related to the U.S. because of the recent UBS investigations.

Theories?

I'm headed back to Hong Kong next week. I just missed Sarah Palin's foreign policy debut, but I'll be getting back in time to catch the "celebrations" for the 60th anniversary of the Chinese revolution. HK should be low key, but in China they are literally moving heaven and earth to make everything perfect.
A friend sent me this music video from a local Hong Kong band called "My Little Airport." They've written a pretty cool birthday song for China:

There's a revival of West Side Story playing on Broadway now. To add a more authentic feel to the Leonard Bernstein/Steven Sondheim classic, the producers had some of the songs translated into Spanish. But now they've decided to put some back into English:

The producers never formally asked audience members about the Spanish lyrics, let alone held a focus group, Mr. Seller and Mr. Laurents said. But Mr. Seller noted that, in postperformance conversations with friends and audience members, he was surprised by how many people had never seen “West Side Story,” with music by Leonard Bernstein, onstage or its film version and lacked a strong grasp of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” which was the basis for the plot.

This depresses me on so many levels I almost don't know where to begin. But let me try.

Actually, not so happy--Basque journalist Karlos Zurutuza explains why in his newest dispatch from the stormy province in western Pakistan.

Zurutuza had to sneak into Balochistan, because Pakistan does not allow journalists in there without a permit.

One of the reasons they don't want journalists poking around is that they might investigate what's happened to the Baloch who live in and around the mountain where Pakistan's been testing its nuclear arsenal:

My friend Rebecca MacKinnon has a great post up now on her blog about the Chinese government's persecution and silencing of the liberal lawyers at Gongmeng (China's ACLU). Much linky goodness. A must read for anyone interested in current Chinese affairs. Which, since China kind of owns our #$ss, should be all of us, right?

This very informative article does a nice job of connecting the dots.

WASHINGTON - Despite evidence implicating current Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Pervez Kiani in a major military assistance program for Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan over the past few years, senior officials of the Barack Obama administration persuaded the US Congress to extend military assistance to Pakistan for five years without any assurance that the Pakistani assistance to the Taliban had ended.

Follow the easy flow chart:

Last Wednesday morning around 5am, Xu Zhiyong, a Chinese lawyer, legal scholar, legislator and human rights activist was grabbed by public security police at his Beijing apartment and hustled away. He has not been seen or heard from since. His blog's gone silent.

Yesterday, around 20,000 protesters jammed the streets of Kuala Lumpur to protest Malaysia's Internal Security Act, which allows the government to detain people without trial.

Such a public gathering is rare in Malaysia where permits are needed for meetings involving four or more people, reports the BBC's Robin Brant in Kuala Lumpur.

The Iranian underground rock band, Kiosk. The featured singer--that's the guy with the huge grey 'fro--is Mohsen Namjoo, recently sentenced (in absentia) to 5 years in prison for “an insulting, sneering performance of Koranic verses with musical instruments.” . Fortunately, he and all the other musicians on this track now live outside Iran.

The Baloch people are smack in the middle of everything: Iran's turmoil, Pakistan's breakdown, Afghanistan's ongoing tribal wars.
From The Guardian:

President Ahmadinejad is intensifying his repression of the Baluch minority, with 19 campaigners executed since last month

  Read more…

I just checked in on the latest news from China, and realized I'd completely missedthe election race for Chief Executive of Macau--the "Las Vegas of China"....

from RTHK in Hong Kong:

Macau will confirm its next Chief Executive today. The lone candidate on the ballot, Fernando Chui, will face a vote by a 300-member committee. He will need half the votes to seal his claim to the top job. Few surprises are expected as Mr Chui was nominated by 286 members, or over 95-percent, of the Election Committee. The same 300-member committee will cast their ballots this morning.

Yes, the system works!

is this.

Seriously, I am very excited to see the idea of a fruit/veggie dominant diet gaining traction in American culture. Yeah, I know, I know, it's the New York Times. But still...

It's driving me crazy that the U.S. left--and right-- is still completely missing the point of what's going on in Honduras. I've been waiting for everyone to move on from parsing the fine points of Honduras's constitution, debating whether or not the coup was "legal".

I've been wondering when the analysts will quit framing the coup as a good-evil battle between "the poor exploited Honduran people"--as represented by Zelaya and his patron, Hugo Chavez, and "the creepy US sponsored oligarchs." When they will finally get that what is really going on is a inner power struggle between two of Honduras' richest cabals, with Zelaya as the proxy for tycoon Jaime Rosenthal Oliva, and Micheletti as proxy for the Arab-Honduran cabal of oligarchs (Canahuati, Facusse).

Let me repeat what I've been saying from the beginning of the coup:

It's all about money.
It's all about power.
It's not all about US.

This is bad news:

BEIJING — Government officials on Friday shut down the office of a prominent lawyers’ group known for taking on cases involving human rights and corruption. It was the latest attempt by the government to clamp down on lawyers willing to challenge officials and other powerful figures in court.

Most Americans have no idea where or what Balochistan is. And the news that 14 Baloch activists were hanged by the Iranian government on July 14th after a monkey court trial for alleged terrorism has largely escaped the notice of the U.S. media.

It would have escaped my notice, too, but I have a personal connection to the Baloch, whose ancestral territory overlaps the borders of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. In 2006, I travelled with friends to Quetta, Pakistan.

"Honduras Behind the Crisis"

Go, read.

And when you finish, read Fr. Ismael Moreno's other terrific article about why President Zelaya allied with Chavez.

Cuts through the silly white noise narratives of the MSM and the Chavez cheerleaders with a detailed, on-the-ground local analysis.

Fr. Moreno, a Jesuit human rights worker, is the Honduran correspondent for Nicaragua's (left-wing) revolutionary magazine, Revista Envio. Which makes his clear-eyed assessment of the Mel-Hugo relationship even more credible, in my book. (More on the jump)

The BBC and the NYT are reporting that cyber-attacks hit the systems of several U.S. federal departments in the last few days, beginning the 4th of July.

There are two competing narratives out there about the Honduras coup, and everything I have ever learned about Latin America tells me that both of them are unbelievable.

Annals of American health care, up close and personal edition, Part 1

My Aunt Betty died last week. It was no surprise to us. She was 87, and her body had been breaking down for some years now. The last three months were the worst. Her legs gave out and bloated with edema (she'd worked on her feet for 40 years behind a cosmetics counter at Scranton's only swish department store, The Globe). She had colon cancer, and it had spread everywhere.

My mother took care of Aunt Betty at home way past the point she should have. They lived together in my grandfather's house. He was a coal miner, and bought this two-story house on credit during the Depression--the 20th Century one, that is.

Whoa.

CAIRO — The most important group of religious leaders in Iran has called the disputed presidential election and the new government illegitimate, an act of defiance against the country’s supreme leader and the most public sign of a major split in the country’s clerical establishment.

[...]

“This crack in the clerical establishment and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. “Remember they are going against an election verified and sanctified by Khamenei.”

I've been obsessively reading as much as I can about the coup that cannot yet be called a coup* in Honduras, trying to sort out the good guys from the bad. On one hand, you have a thuggish military headed by a general trained in the American Academy of Advanced Torture (the "School of the Americas"). A middle of the night kidnapping of a duly elected president, followed by tanks in the streets, curfew, blackout of electricity and press. Bad.

Manuel Zelaya Rosales, President of Honduras, was pulled out of his official residence at 3am this morning by the Honduran military. Tanks are in the streets of Tegucigalpa. Zelaya is said to have been shuffled off to Costa Rica, where he will ask for asylum.

It's a strange situation. Zelaya is a leftist, a Chavez-style populist (the Venezuela president is a big ally). He was at the end of his term, and like Chavez, was about to hold a referendum (today, Sunday) to change the Constitution to allow him to run for another term.

Last week, amid much hoopla, self-congratulation and fanfare, Congress passed H.R. 2454, the Clean Energy and Security act of 2009.

Dennis Kuchinch voted against it:

“Today’s bill is a fragile compromise, which leads some to claim that we cannot do better. I respectfully submit that not only can we do better; we have no choice but to do better. Indeed, if we pass a bill that only creates the illusion of addressing the problem, we walk away with only an illusion. The price for that illusion is the opportunity to take substantive action."

I'm cutting and pasting that and putting in into my script for the next streetcorner encounter I have with the healthcare Hare Krishnas from the OFA....