What Caught My Eye Today

Georgia - Not that this comes as much of a surprise, but I kind of thought it would take a bit longer than this to shake down... Georgian troops retreated from the breakaway province of South Ossetia and their government pressed for a truce, overwhelmed by Russian firepower as the conflict threatened to set off a wider war. Russia has demanded that Georgia pull out its troops from South Ossetia as a condition to negotiate a cease-fire. It also urged Georgia to sign a pledge not to use force against South Ossetia as another condition for ending hostilities.Georgia borders the Black Sea between Turkey and Russia and was ruled by Moscow for most of the two centuries preceding the breakup of the Soviet Union. Russia has approximately 30 times more people than Georgia and 240 times the area. Not exactly a fair fight based on those statistics, wouldn't you say? Russian military commanders said 15 peacekeepers have been killed and about 150 wounded in South Ossetia and Russia's deputy foreign minister said more than 2,000 people had been killed in South Ossetia since Friday. Russia laid much of the responsibility for ending the fighting on Washington, which has trained Georgian troops. Washington, in turned, blamed Russia. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if there wasn't blame enough to go around for both Russia and the U.S. One has to wonder, though, how the U.S. could conceive that the Georgians could possibly have won this fight?

Iraq - Iraq's foreign minister insisted that any security deal with the United States must contain a "very clear timeline" for the departure of U.S. troops. Fine by me. Let's bring the troops home. Iraqis are insisting that the agreement include a "very clear timeline" for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces, but refuse to talk about specific dates. Okay, look. You cannot have it both ways. Either we leave or we stay. All this pussy-footing about troop withdrawals is starting to get irritating. And from day one it has smacked of political posturing to win favor with Iraqi voters. I'm not begrudging you guys for that, per say, but you have to understand that the U.S. military is not a political tool for you to do what you want with.

Olympics - Olympic organizers vowed to tighten security in central Beijing after a U.S. tourist was killed in a stabbing attack. Police released new details of the Chinese man behind the seemingly random attack on Saturday in which the father-in-law of the U.S. men's volleyball team coach, was killed and his wife was wounded. The man committed suicide afterwards. With 500,000 overseas visitors expected in Beijing for the Olympics, the murder is an embarrassment for China which has been a pains to highlight the security steps it is taking. The crime rate is relatively low in China, where serious offences carry the death penalty and attacks on foreigners are rare. You sort of need to look at this story from the proper perspective. Obviously an attack on an American was the last thing Chinese officials wanted to have happen during the Olympics, but given the scale of this event and clear evidence that this was not a premeditated attack, you almost have to give the Chinese a pass on this one. Clearly, they haven't skimped on security, but the simple fact of the matter is that you cannot watch all people at all times (and Lord knows the Chinese have done everything in their power to do just that) to prevent a tragedy like this from happening.

AIDS - For years, the US has been underestimating the rate of new HIV infections by a whopping 40%. Seems like more than just a minor miscalculation, doesn't it? Until now, most countries, including the US, estimated the number of new cases by applying correction factors to the latest data on national HIV prevalence. The discrepancy came to light courtesy of a blood test developed by the US Centers for Disease Control. By measuring the proportion of antibodies in an individual's blood that are primed to fight HIV, it reveals when they were infected. A larger fraction indicates a more recent infection. When applied to US blood samples from 2006, the test indicates there were 56,300 infections that year, not 40,000 as assumed. So basically, the methodology used to come up with these estimates was entirely wrong and it took 10 years for someone to figure this out. That's a shame. And what does this suggest about the world wide statistics for HIV infections. If the U.S. cannot come up with reliable numbers, how much stock can we place in numbers coming out of less developed countries in places like Africa? Of course, one could argue that it's easier to estimate the number of people not infected with the HIV virus, but that's a slippery slope that I don't want to tread upon.