Hizbullah secretary-general al-Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah

Hizbullah, the Lebanese Shi'i political party and social movement also known as Hezbollah, has issued a condemnation of two recent attacks on Twelver Shi'i Muslim pilgrims in Karbala, Iraq, that killed 23 and injured at least 120 more. Thousands of pilgrims are in Karbala for Arba'in, the "40 day" commemoration of the martyrdom of Husayn bin 'Ali, the third Shi'i Imam, and dozens of his male friends and relatives in Karbala.

Hizbullah ultimately places blame for the attacks at the feet of the occupying forces, namely the United States. The statement makes no mention by name of the probable perpetrators of the attacks, the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), an umbrella for several of the most violent jihadi-takfiri insurgent groups operating in the country, chief among them Al-Qa'ida in the Land of the Two Rivers/Iraq (AQI). Based on the ISI's recent history, I expect a statement from the ISI in the near future claiming both attacks.

Researchers from Imperial College in London and Harvard University in Boston have grown a crystal that shows the structure of the integrase enzyme. The HIV virus uses integrase to copy itself into an infected person’s DNA, paving the way for the virus to spread.

Now that there is a model of the integrase structure available to researchers, it is now possible to understand how existing integrase blocking medications work, how to improve such medications, and how to stop the virus from resisting the medication.

The crystal was made public in a study published January 30 in the journal Nature. This has been hailed as a major step in the fight against HIV. Scientists have attempted numerous times over the last 20 years to understand integrase and how related medications work.

Credit: Next Generation Consulting

No one gets promoted for the number of emails they send. In the “time waster” category, email earns top honors. (Facebook is close behind.) Engineers at Intel studied the impact of email interruptions and found they cost over a billion dollars a year.

It’s time to show your email who’s boss:
•    In your email preferences, disable notifications that bounce or chirp. Here’s how to do it in Outlook and Windows Vista. The rest of y’all can google “Disable email notifications in (insert name of email client here.)”
•    When you need to really kick butt and focus, create a clever autoresponder to let folks know you’re in the zone. Before the holidays, I put up an autoresponder that said, “There’s a four inch stack of papers on my desk blinking at me expectantly. If I don’t deal with them, my holidays will not be merry. Thanks for your patience.” One of my colleagues emailed back, “Use them as wrapping paper and kill two birds with one stone.” My point is: when you need to focus, you need to manage people’s expectations, and they’ll respect it.
•    Here are a few more ideas on how to lasso your email, from my personal blog.

Hack #2: Minimize drop-ins.

Drop-ins are email with pants.  It takes 4 to 15 minutes to refocus after an interruption. I don’t care how “cool” of a boss you are, open door policies are for people who don’t have real work to do. Read on to learn how to stop drop-ins:

Haiti's presidential palace after the January 12 earthquake. (Logan Abassi/UNDP Global)

1. It's not serious enough to give undocumented Haitians a full amnesty. Yes, it was serious enough to give them Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which they'd been asking for for years, so that they can send back money legally and so they're not in danger of being deported back to their re-devastated country. But they still have to pay $470 for registering (every dollar of which could have gone to Haiti – which adds up to millions of dollars if more than a few thousand register and pay the fee), and after their 18-month grace period ends they will be in the system and easier to deport than they were before registering.

2. It's not serious enough for public money. 200,000 people dead and millions homeless is a tragedy, but one approximately 30,000 times less serious than the Iraq war ($100 million for earthquake relief, $3 trillion for the Iraq war) and 40,000 less serious than the $4 trillion bank bailout. For those crises, the treasury magically opens, the money magically appears in the accounts, the public debt grows, and the taxpayers can pay later. For an earthquake or a tsunami, we rely on people's generosity, and put together star teams to beg for money on behalf of the victims.