News In Brief

A lot of news and commentary items have caught my eye today, and I don't have the time to do any of them full justice. So this is a brief mention for all of them, in no particular order. Read the articles in full at your leisure.

Frankincense and cancer:

This article from UPI yesterday describes the apparent effectiveness researchers have found in using frankincense to treat malignant melanoma, the aggressive form of skin cancer.

During a recent presentation before a regional meeting of the American Cancer Society in Roanoke, Va., Robertson -- director of the college's Center for Comparative Oncology -- said he's found the oil has fairly selective anti-tumor activity and doesn't appear to disrupt normal cells.

Zimbabwe's crops fail again:

Today's London Telegraph reports that Zimbabwe's crops this year are expected to produce only half of what's needed to feed its people. In the past, Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe has blamed poor harvests on bad weather, but this year, the weather provided perfect crop-growing rains. No more excuses for Mugabe. And not a lot of hope for Zimbabweans.

New Internet Worm to Attack Friday:

CBS News reported today that a new destructive worm is making its way around the internet via email--and not just Microsoft Outlook this time. The experts are calling it cyber-vandalism, rather than cyber-crime, and it's set to do damage on February 3, 2006.

It's not spyware, it doesn't send out spam, but it can delete document files such as those created by Word, Excel and other applications as well as MP3 music files. The worm will also try to disable your anti-virus software and, once your machine is infected, it harvests e-mail address from your PC and tries to infect people you know.

The Nature of Israel's Struggle is Religious:

This is the premise of a well-written opinion column in yesterday's Jerusalem Post, by Rabbi Berel Wein. He discusses the motivations of both sides in the Arab-Israeli struggle, and describes some of the fallacies that permeate secular Israel's thinking. Here's a taste:

If we care nothing about our religion, the Jewish leadership seemed to say, then it should be true that they - the Arabs - must also not allow religion to play a decisive role in reconciling our differences.

Ken Blackwell Running for Governor of Ohio:

Stephen Malanga has a profile of Ken Blackwell in The City Journal (I couldn't find a publication date). Blackwell is currently the front-runner in the gubernatorial race, in spite of being a Republican in a state where scandals have shredded the GOP.

The profile traces Blackwell's roots as well as his transformation from college radical to conservative Republican. One comment concerns me, for what it says about party politics (emphasis added):

Blackwell has built his early lead not by tacking toward the center of this swing state but by running on an uncompromisingly conservative platform that’s won him grassroots support from both Christian groups and taxpayer organizations—a novel coalition that makes the old-boy network in his own Ohio GOP as uneasy as it makes the state’s Democrats, who have begun a “stop Blackwell” campaign.