This is sad tidings.  When I returned from the Serengeti, I learned that on Friday, June 22, Dennis Turner, my friend of over 40 years and author of TTP's Dennis The Wizard column, passed away.

Dennis had been in horrible pain and suffering for so long that his passing was likely a blessing.  He never mentioned it in his columns, and how he wrote them in spite of it was heroic. 

Some years ago, he contracted an infection in his spine which caused a progressive deterioration of his spinal nerves.  He lost the use of his legs, and then all the functions of his digestive system. 

Few of us can even imagine what it is to try and continue living like that.  Yet Dennis did.  He persevered, maintaining a wide range of interests and a dense network of friends.  He never lost his intense intellectual curiosity and passion for life.
 
His was a mind apart.  Not surprising -- for he was a six-foot-two, 280-pound Mongolian Jew with an IQ of 180. 

There is an "intelligence website" emanating from Israel called Debka.  This Monday (September 24), it breathlessly blared Iran and Turkey Prepare for War in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Debka's "exclusive military sources in Iraq" have revealed just to the website alone that "Turkish and Iranian air units as well as armored, paratroop, special operations and artillery forces are poised for an imminent coordinated invasion of the northern Iraqi autonomous province of Kurdistan."

Since I am in Iraqi Kurdistan meeting with Kurdish resistance movements operating in Iran, I showed them the story.  They laughed their heads off.

It isn't often that an entire field of medical science gets turned on its head. But it is becoming clear that immunology is undergoing a big rethink thanks to the discovery that antibodies, which combat viruses, work not just outside cells but inside them as well. The star of this new view is a protein molecule called TRIM21.

Until recently, the conventional wisdom was that the body fights off infection in two separate ways. First is the adaptive immune system, which works outside the cell. It generates antibodies to intercept specific invaders, locking onto them like a tracking missile and preventing them from entering the cell. A second line of defense, the innate immune system, operates within the cell; it is like an expansive air-defense network, blasting away at all invaders.

Three years ago work by Leo James, William McEwan and their colleagues at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge revealed that this understanding was incomplete. They found that the neutralization of adenoviruses (common viruses causing colds and other infections) by antibodies was happening mainly inside the cell, not outside, and by an unexpected mechanism.

This mechanism opens a whole new path to curing viral infections, and autoimmune diseases like lupus.

This was written the day of the passing of President Ronald Reagan on June 5, 2004.  We run it every year in honor of the greatest American of the 20^th century.

In October of 1965, Ronald Reagan came to speak at UCLA. I was a senior, and it was a depressing time to be a College Republican. Barry Goldwater had been thrashed the previous year, and my professors were so left-wing that I took one to court because of her biased grading.

The UCLA Student Union was packed, SRO. There was a buzz that Reagan was considering running for governor against the entrenched Democrat, Pat Brown. My buddy and fellow CR Bill Anthony and I sat expectantly in the audience. As Reagan began to speak, he filled the room with an energy that was both exciting and soothing, and the thousand-plus students were entranced.

Then he caught us by surprise.

Here I am in Ireland and the last thing in the world I am looking forward to is flying through London Heathrow to get back home. 

British intel was tipped off by some good guys inserted by Parvez Musharaff into ISI (Pakistan intel) about a Moslem terrorist plot to blow up airliners flying out of Heathrow to America.  So the security is a nightmare - for everyone, not just Moslems.

Thus I was thrilled to hear about The Heroes of Malaga - British passengers on a Monarch Airlines flight from Malaga, Spain to Manchester, England on August 16 who refused to fly until two Moslems were taken off the plane.

The liberal British media was horrified.  The London Daily Mail ran a story entitled Asian students' shock at ejection from jet by passenger mutiny.  It is forbidden, you see, to refer to Moslems as such in the British media.  The accepted code word is "Asian" - as if they were Chinese or Japanese, anything but Moslem.

The "Asians" complained bitterly they were "humiliated."  So I have a modest proposal to end their humiliation, and increase airport security as well.