This is probably all over the place by now, but it certainly startled me to see Yahoo’s list of “Top News Stories” this afternoon:

— U.S. forces capture 2 ex-Iraqi officials
— U.S. plans to seek prisoners’ release
— Bush pledges role in Liberia crisis
— Microsoft to quit granting stock options
— Study: U.S. hypertension rate rose in ’90s
— Britney Spears says she’s not a virgin

Doesn’t one of those items strike you as, um , maybe not quite worthy of banner headlines? Maybe it’s me….

For you China junkies thirsting for the latest on what’s going on over in the Mainland, be sure to check out Adam’s new pinko site (you’ll see why I call it that). It’s off to a good start.

Today Adam links to yet another China news site, a bit more offbeat — make that bizarre. Check it out.

I always thought Dorothy Rabinowitz was the best of the conservative pundits, not just in terms of style (and she is unsurpassed) but in terms of getting her point across, which she does with a subtle irony that has become her signature. Still, she is a die-hard conservative — she broke the story of accusations that Clinton had raped a woman many years back –and I wondered how she would react to Ann Coulter’s book, which will no doubt soon be a best seller.

Rabinowitz’s review is priceless, practically perfect. I believe her one error (or at least a lapse in judgement) is referring to Coulter as “the Maureen Dowd of conservatives,” implying that the real Dowd is a flaming liberal, which is patently false. Bitchy, cloying, annoying, at times stupid — but no one was as vicious to Clinton during the scandal than Dowd. She’ll go after anyone, and her liberalism is no parallel to Coulter’s conservatism. The comparison also implies that Dowd writes a lot of falsehoods, which I also think is inaccurate. I know of one case where she abused a quote, but I have never heard her accused of writing outright and deliberate lies, Coulter’s trademark.

AIDS-in-China update from the BBC. Is anybody listening?

Courtesy of Gweilo Diaries, this shows us all that the post-SARS Chinese have wised up and now possess the maturity and compassion to deal with its ticking time bomb, the ballooning AIDS crisis.

Below is a cut and paste of Conrad’s entire post.

Mainland Government Infects, Robs, Attacks and Arrests AIDS Sufferers

Chinese police, accompanied by clubwielding “hired thugs”, raided the AIDS stricken village of Xiongqiao in Henan province, destroying property and beating up and arresting villagers.

Up to a million rural residents are believed to have contracted HIV after selling blood in unsanitary government-approved blood stations in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s.

The attack, which happened at 23:00on June 22, is the most extreme known case in central China’s Henan province of a police crackdown on farmers, who are devastated by an Aids outbreak and are demanding more government help.

Some farmers also refused to turn over portions of their harvest as required.

A great review of Coulter’s latest screed by a neocon, no less. Sample:

In Coulter’s world, there are two types of people: conservatives and liberals. These aren’t groups of people with competing ideas. They are the repositories of good and evil. There are no distinctions among conservatives or among liberals. To admit the complexity of political discourse would immediately require Coulter to think, explain, argue. But why bother when you can earn millions insulting?

I wasn’t able to web surf in the hospital, so I missed this post by Orcinus, the most intelligent and articulate summary you can find on the breadth and audacity of George W’s lies, documented and incontrovertible. Just read it. Why haven’t these sins been mapped out this clearly in the major media?

Alarming article in Time Asia on just how precarious Spore’s economic situation is. Especially disconcerting is the trend, still in its infancy but bound to pick up speed, of multinationals’ sidestepping Singapore and moving their headquarters straight to Shanghai.

The piece also highlights the city-state’s increasing liberalism and an easing up of the oppressive laws that for years characterized it. This is not due to any new-found enlightenment, the article says, but rather is a somewhat desperate move on the government’s part to do absolutely anything and everything it can to attract and keep foreign firms and the jobs and spending that come with them.

Speaking from the front lines, I can safely say that everything it says is true.

I expected to come home from the hospital yesterday, but the pain was just too acute. Lucky for me, while there I had this state-of-the-art morphine dispenser; whenever the pain made me want to scream, I just pushed a little button. At that point, the little machine started to make this grinding noise for about a minute — it was pumping extra morphine through a catheter in my neck. About five minutes later, my hands would go numb and soon the excruciating pain vanished, and I’d luxuriate in a gentle, weightless drowsiness.

Unfortunately, they wouldn’t let me take this gadget home with me as a souvenir. So now when the pain sets in, I have to take these opiate capsules and a bunch of other tablets and wait as long as 20 minutes for the relief to come. It’s so 20th century.

The food was good, the hospital was preternaturally clean and efficient, and all in all it wasn’t as awful as I feared. Yes, the day after the operation, as the anesthesia wore off it got pretty intense, but seriously, that morphine machine kept me content.

I did a lot of reading in the hospital. I finished a book called Grass Soup, a diary of a Cultural Revolution prisoner whose staple food for years and years is….grass soup, of course. Witty, downright funny at times (in its insanity), and utterly tragic.

I also made my way through the first 200 pages of Wild Swans, a 700-page family history of a three generations of a Chinese family, spanning from around 1910 to the Tiananmen Square massacre.

I have been spellbound by this amazingly personal account of how one of the world’s greatest nations was slowly and deliberately suffocated to the point of being altogether brain-dead. It really is as chilling, as bizarre and surreal as the worst nightmares conjured up by Asimov and Orwell…. More when I feel better.

I’m off to the hospital. Hopefully by the weekend I’ll be up to blogging (though I sincerely doubt it). Wish me luck!