BLANTYRE, Dec 14 (IPS) - An experience which Belita Simpokolwe went through in December last year remains deeply etched in her memory. "Sometimes I fail to concentrate in class when these things come back to my mind," laments 13-year-old Simpokolwe, a grade six pupil at Kawale Primary School, in the northern Malawi district of Chitipa.

She says what pains her most is that she was victimised by the very people she believed would protect her from any danger that would ruin her future.

But her teacher says it is encouraging that Simpolokwe still performs well in class, and is likely to fulfil her dream of becoming a nurse.

The fourth of five children, Simpokolwe was one of the many victims of kupimbira - a cultural practice in which parents arrange marriages between young girls and older men to get money from a dowry - without the knowledge of the girl.

Sometimes parents offer their girls to men as payment for debt. Kupimbira is an ancient tradition practised by many tribes in northern Malawi.

Belita's story is a tale of horror. "My stepfather ordered me to quit school and get married to a 77-year-old man because he said I was too old for standard four. I refused, and told him I wanted to continue with my education," she says.

They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. But it does: the roaring rage of injured male pride. This was amply demonstrated in Egypt when a female Saudi journalist had the audacity to apply logic and consistency to challenge an area of traditional male privilege.

In an article provocatively entitled "My Four Husbands and I", Nadine al-Bedair quite sensibly posed the logical question: if Muslim men are entitled to marry up to four wives, why can't women, in the spirit of equality between believers, have four husbands?

"I have long questioned why it is men have a monopoly on this right. No one has been able to explain to me convincingly why it is I'm deprived of the right to polyandry," she complains.

The outspoken Saudi then goes on to deconstruct and question the traditional justifications for polygamy, including that, in a traditional patriarchal society, it is a shelter for widows, divorcees and women who can't find a spouse; that men have greater sexual appetites than women and get easily bored; that women can't handle more than one man; and that, if women could have multiple husbands, determining paternity would not be possible (an excuse made obsolete by modern science).

"If you are doing business here, you should follow the local law, the sentiments of the people, the culture of the country," says Gulshan Rai, an official in the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, who is overseeing implementation of the new law. "If somebody starts abusing Lord Rama on a Web site, that could start riots," he said.

Iqbal Chagla, a leading Indian attorney on civil liberties and public interest litigation, says fears of public rioting sparked by Web content -- or incendiary content in any medium -- are overstated. "Communal tensions become largely an excuse for denial of civil liberties and denial of freedom of speech," Mr. Chagla said. "It's a very thin line that's being tread."

Still, Google has learned to be wary of material that could ignite unrest, from incendiary comments about politicians such as Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi to user groups bashing revered historical or religious figures.

"In those gray areas it is really hard," says Nicole Wong, Google's deputy general counsel, who oversees the legal aspects of new Google product launches. "On the one hand, we believe very strongly in political speech and, on the other hand, in India they do riot and they blow up buses."

Music has been shown to be beneficial in many areas of health, from stroke recovery to lung condition management.

Ian Noonan, a lecturer in mental health at the Florence Nightingale, said Mr Browne's music would bring another dimension to nursing.

"Music is essential in life. People need creativity and quite often in life when they are in hospital that is lost.

"Everything has to be done in a standardised way and people can be very frightened if they are very unwell.

'Power to soothe'

"But the importance of music goes back to the time of Florence Nightingale.

"She pointed out that it is important that nurses are quiet at night and don't disturb anyone, but she also talks about how familiar songs and things like Home Sweet Home or an Italian aria can sensitively soothe the sick and have the power to restore the soul.

"It is about trying to find a different way rather than looking solely at the Nice (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) guidelines or Department of Health guidance, and about getting students to think in a more narrative way.

amen

~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~

The Daily Mail is really, really horrible.

But we already knew this.

But as casual misogyny and general nastiness goes, the following headline is something of a paradigm example: "Stripper jailed for lacing lover's Angel Delight with poison" - screams the Dail Mail.

FIRST it was planes, trains and automobiles that benefited from computer-aided design technology. Now, as synthetic biologists attempt to build artificial life forms, a CAD system has been developed to allow them to redesign the stuff of life much faster and more easily.

Deepak Chandran and colleagues at the University of Washington in Seattle developed Tinkercell to allow biologists to meddle with the components of, say, a bacterium, and simulate the effect the change has (Journal of Biomedical Engineering, vol 3, p 19).

The package has a library of the components of life, from which users can pick different cells, membrane proteins, fluorescent proteins, enzymes and genes to create their organism. Tinkercell can then simulate the life form to see if it functions as expected.

Figure 2. The TinkerCell Core API. Shown here is the basic structure provided by the Core library. The Core library defines data structures and functions for drawing nodes and connections. Each node and connection can contain "data" associated with that node or connection. This data can include information such as parameters, equations, DNA sequence, or database IDs. Plug-ins, both C and C++, and Python scripts are responsible for populating the data inside each node and connection. For example, a C++ plug-in is responsible for adding the a table of parameter values to each node and connection; another plug-in is responsible for adding reaction rates to all the connections. Another small plug-in stores and updates the spacial co-ordinates of all cells in the model, allowing a modeler to use cell position information inside the model. C and Python programs utilize all this information to perform various analyses, including simulations. Plug-ins also provide the graphical interface for viewing and editing the information stored inside the items.