West Virginia is now desperate. With a stunning 46 percent of fifth-graders tested in the state’s coronary artery risk project over six years turning out to be overweight or obese, West Virginia is willing to do just about anything to slim down the state’s chubby little children and the attendant health risks they suffer. The solution? Dance Dance Revolution!

Rolling in Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution — a video game in which the participant mimics the foot movements on a footpad to correspond with those shown on the screen — from the arcade into the public school system, West Virginia will allow ten- to fourteen-year-old students (almost 280,000 of them) to opt for the video game in lieu of participating in other sports.  

The theory behind the Dance Dance Revolution project is that the children who dislike certain sports will enjoy and turn to the game for fitness instead of forgoing fitness altogether. And this, while somewhat odd, is preferable to allowing the children to do nothing. However, to allow young children to opt for a video game in lieu of more serious physical education and participation misses the point; students need to enjoy sport, but they also need to develop an understanding of fitness and a sense of physical versatility. And Dance Dance Revolution, while fun, can hardly provide all of that.

West Virginia’s situation is certainly desperately unhealthy — within the U.S., it has the highest blood pressure rate, is within the top three for obesity, and is the fourth highest for diabetes — and hopefully this desperate measure will begin to make a dent in the state’s collective and lethargic consciousness.  

Mimi Hanaoka

“I am appealing to those who kidnapped the American journalist Jill Carroll…I am appealing to you in the name of God, in the name of anything holy, to let her go. She came to the General Conference of the Iraqi People headquarters to interview me. I am Dr. Adnan Dulaimi. I am the one who has been defending Iraqi unity and Iraqi independence. I’m the one who has been committed to the rebuilding of Iraq… I am asking you to release this woman. By kidnapping her, you are insulting me…I’m appealing to you, the ones who are holding this woman, to let her go, to free her, for the sake of our country and in the name of our honor and principles, in the name of the Iraqi people…”

— Adnan al-Dulaimi, of the Iraqi Accordance Front, joining the chorus of citizens and luminaries who are calling for the release Jill Carroll, the female American journalist who was kidnapped on January 7th while reporting in Baghdad.    

There have been a torrent of calls for Jill Carroll’s release, praising her professionalism and her concern for the Iraqi people, from myriad sources, including: the Palestinian Islamic resistance movement Hamas; the Iraqi Accordance Front; Montasser al-Zayat, head of the Liberties Committee at the Egyptian Lawyers’ Syndicate and former member of Gamaa Islamiya, the militant Egyptian Islamist organization; the Iraqi Islamic Party; Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brothers Mohamed Mahdi Akef; the Muslim Brotherhood Association, and a slew of others. Jill Carroll is a frequent contributor from Iraq to The Christian Science Monitor. Her captors released a video of her on January 17th in which they threatened that they would kill her unless all of the female prisoners in Iraq were freed within 72 hours. Jill Carroll’s family, various dignitaries, and numerous organizations continue to lobby for her release.

Mimi Hanaoka

Reporters Without Borders reports that 2005 was a brutal year for journalists; 63 journalists and five media assistants were killed, while 1,308 were assaulted or threatened. Iraq, where 24 journalists and five media assistants were killed, was the most treacherous location for journalists, having claimed the lives of 76 journalists and media assistants since the beginning of the conflict there in March of 2003.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Pennsylvania residents earlier voted out all of the school board members who supported the decision that public schools be forced to present “intelligent design” as an alternative to evolution. Yesterday the new Dover Area School Board, bolstered by U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III’s decision that intelligent design is a religious — and not a scientific — concept, threw out the policy to introduce intelligent design in science classrooms.

Intelligent design, in its simplest terms, is a theory that questions the legitimacy of evolution and suggests the universe has been formulated, in all its complexity, by a higher power.  U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled that the previous school board desired “to promote religion in the public school classroom,” in clear violation of the principle of the separation of church and state.

Mimi Hanaoka

There will be no more Playboy. Or at least no more Playboy as we know it, sort of; the magazine is now concocting plans to launch an Indian edition, complete with models and pin ups who will be clothed to suit Indian norms and laws.

Apparently nobody reads Playboy for the articles anymore, and few Americans even read the magazine at all; in 2004 magazine sales shrank one percent domestically, while sales rose by 13 percent abroad. The magazine’s parent company’s primary sources of revenue are extra-literary — video games, porn, DVDs, television, and the like. The answer, then, is to sell overseas, and with approximately 200 million people reading magazines, India should be a prime target. Except that India bans having or peddling goods of “lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest,” barring material that can be redeemed by virtue of its value as art, literature, or religious content. And Playboy, as we know it, certainly fails all three of those criteria.

So what will Playboy look like without its signature nude playmates? Playboy Enterprises’ Chief Executive Christie Hefner stated that the Indian magazine, which may not even be called Playboy, “would be an extension of Playboy that would be focused around the lifestyle, pop culture, celebrity, fashion, sports and interview elements of Playboy.”

The idea is, apparently, that sex doesn’t haven’t to be American, or even western, to sell. Good luck, Playboy.

Mimi Hanaoka

U.S. government tallied 844 American servicemen and women killed in Iraq in 2005, upping the total killed in since the conflict officially erupted in March of 2003 to 2,178.  The number of Americans wounded during the same period is 15,955. Iraq Body Count puts the number of Iraqi deaths at about 30,000 since the war began in 2003.

Mimi Hanaoka

Since the kids won’t touch each other properly, don’t let them touch at all. Culver City Middle School acknowledges that its “no contact” policy, in which students are banned from any physical contact with one another, is written nowhere in the school’s documents but is nevertheless enforced. In an attempt to prevent bullying, brawls, and harassment among the school’s 1,739 students, the school forbids hugging, hand holding, and kissing on its premises. Is the program working?  Maybe. And sort of. Students complain about uneven enforcement of the rule, and as Paul Chung, UCLA assistant professor of pediatrics and staffer at the UCLA/Rand Center for Adolescent Health Promotion, states: “When you’re trying to extinguish a behavior, the trick is to be absolutely consistent so that every time the behavior is experienced, they get knocked down…. They know they’re never going to get away with it.”

It would be a boon if the unofficial “no touch” prescription eliminated harassment and bullying, but it seems to be coming at a sinister, in addition to somewhat inconsistent, price.  

Mimi Hanaoka

“This is a very dangerous signal from the government — that the secular opposition doesn’t have the same opportunity to exist or grow as the Islamist movements… In spite of the government talking about reform, secular leaders are in a very bad situation.”

— Hafez abu Saeda, president of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, decrying the recent arrest and conviction of Egyptian opposition candidate Ayman Nour.

Nour, 41, was charged and sentenced yesterday to five years imprisonment on charges of forgery when he allegedly faked signatures when founding his party, the opposition Tomorrow (Ghad) Party. Although Mubarak recently won Egypt’s first contested elections in a landslide — with accusations of voter intimidation, cheating, and outright forgery rampant — Nour and his Ghad party (whose base is largely secular and better educated, and would therefore likely be more appealing to Western governments in comparison to its Islamist counterparts), along with the Islamist opposition, were widely popular.  The December 24th conviction on charges of forgery will put Nour forever out of the presidential elections, since those with any criminal record are barred from running for the office.  Nour, jailed in January on the forgery charges, has recently been on a hunger strike as a demonstration against his treatment while incarcerated.  Nour, a diabetic, has been hospitalized as a result of his hunger strike.  

Mimi Hanaoka

“As tomorrow’s novelists prepare to narrate the private lives of the new élites, they are no doubt expecting the West to criticize the limits that their states place on freedom of expression. But these days the lies about the war in Iraq and the reports of secret C.I.A. prisons have so damaged the West’s credibility in Turkey and in other nations that it is more and more difficult for people like me to make the case for true Western democracy in my part of the world,” writes Orhan Pamuk, commenting on the international furore over his recent statements about the contested Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks and Turkey’s subsequent arraignment of Pamuk on charges of having “publicly denigrated Turkish identity.”

Pamuk sparked the controversy with his comment to a Swiss newspaper in which he claimed that “30,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it,” referring to the Turkish killings of Armenians in 1915 during their forced march out of Anatolia.  Pamuk faces trial and up to three years in prison for his statement. Pamuk’s trial was suspending minutes after it was convened on last Friday, on the basis that the Justice Ministry must approve the case before it proceeds further.

Turkish and Armenian historians differ in their accounts of what happened in 1915. It is a fact that Armenians were driven out of eastern Anatolia, their ancestral homeland. It is also a fact that many Armenians died during this forced march out of Anatolia. The unresolved question is whether this incident — what amounted to a death march for the Armenians — was planned and orchestrated by the Ottoman government. The traditional Turkish answer to the Armenian accusations of state-sponsored massacre has been that the Armenians, with the backing of czarist Russia, rebelled against Ottoman rule. The deaths that resulted from the resultant conflict in 1915 must be placed in their appropriate historical context of World War I and the twilight years of the soon-to-be-abolished Ottoman Empire.

Cemil Cicek, Turkey’s Justice Minister, is responding tetchily to the disapprovingly watchful eye of the EU, but he must surely know that there is no faster way to ruin Turkey’s bid to join the European club than imprisoning an internationally acclaimed author for what the EU considers and exercise of his freedom of speech in order to address the issue of state-ordered genocide.

Mimi Hanaoka

“I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road… Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be, but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self-love… The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them… You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

— Harold Pinter, accepting his Nobel Prize for literature last week. The playwright, 75, in a wheelchair and ailing from cancer of the esophagus, delivered his acceptance speech by video, during which he lambasted American foreign policy.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Kansas, and largely its state board of education, has been waging something of a bureaucratic crusade in the name of intelligent design, and this week a professor became one the first physical victims in the state squabble over the theory.

Intelligent design, in its simplest terms, is a theory that questions the legitimacy of evolution and suggests the universe has been formulated, in all its complexity, by a higher power.  Last month the Kansas Board of Education voted 6-4 in favor of new educational standards in state schools that challenge the legitimacy of evolution; teachers will now be obligated to adhere to these criticisms in science classes.  The board’s chairman, Steve Abrams, gloated, “This is a great day for education.” While Pennsylvania’s Board of Education recently voted to approve similar changes, outraged Pennsylvania voters replaced all of the board members who endorsed the changes.

As a retort to the recent challenges to evolution in the name of intelligent design, University of Kansas religious studies professor Paul Mirecki proposed to offer a new course this coming spring, titled “Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies.”

It seems that Mirecki is not, unfortunately, a tactful man.  He allegedly sent an email to a student organization on the university’s campus in which he disparaged religious conservatives as “fundies” and asserted that categorizing intelligent design as mythology in his upcoming course would serve as a “nice slap in their big fat face.”

Mirecki is doubtless undiplomatic, but his beating, apparently a result of his proposed course and the email, is a lamentable throwback to outright primitivism.  Battered by two men who he says referred to his proposed course during their attack, Mirecki has since driven himself to the hospital, withdrawn his proposal to teach his course, and apologized for the scornful email.  

The challenge for both Mirecki and his assailants is now to haul the debate about intelligent design out of the ring of tactless mudslinging and vigilante justice and back into the at least civil, and ideally academic, sphere.  

Mimi Hanaoka

“Civil partnership” may sound more bureaucratically clinical than “marriage,” but for homosexual couples in Britain this month, it will amount to almost the same thing, complete with divorces as well as unions.

Although Britain lags behind Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Canada in actually permitting gay marriages, the Civil Partnerships Act (which will come into effect in Northern Ireland on December 19th, in Scotland on the 20th,  and England and Wales on the 21th) will confer essentially the same legal rights as marriage. Under the act, gay partners will be each other’s financial beneficiaries without a will and will be permitted to inherit, be exempt from inheritance tax, benefit from their partner’s national insurance payments, enjoy the same pension privileges as their married counterparts, be considered married in terms of immigration, and be obligated to financially support each other.  The British government expects up to 22,000 such unions by 2010.

Like married couples, gay couples will now have the legal privilege of the agony of divorce, complete with the same financial wrangling.  Like married couples, those in civil partnerships will have to wait one year before filing for the dissolution of their partnerships.  

Mimi Hanaoka