NEW YORK —

Former President Clinton’s foundation has signed pricing agreements with several suppliers involved in making a malaria-fighting drug in an effort to stabilize the medication’s fluctuating costs and ensure more dependable availability.

The former president in 2002 established an HIV/AIDS initiative that sought to negotiate lower prices for antiretroviral treatments, and he since has expanded his focus to include malaria treatments such as artemisinin-based combination therapies, or ACTs.

Artemisinin is an extract of the plant known as wormwood or sagewort. One of the factors making the price of artemisinin so volatile - fluctuating from $155 to $1,100 per kilogram in recent years - has been a wildly erratic cycle of shortage and excess of the extract, Clinton said Thursday at a news conference.

“Today the supply as well as the demand have led to these dramatic fluctuations in prices,” Clinton said, holding up a green clipping of the plant. “Our goal, among other things, is to make sure that this little plant is available in sufficient supply, and that over time we can rationalize the prices.”

The drug makers and the United Nations Special Envoy on Malaria joined Clinton for the announcement at his foundation’s Manhattan headquarters.

Clinton said he has negotiated with six suppliers involved in producing ACTs that have agreed to certain price ceilings that the foundation says will help keep prices constant and not so dependent on the fluctuating cycles.

The agreements are with two suppliers at three levels of the supply chain - raw material, processing and final formulation - and the foundation hopes to add more suppliers.

“There’s no question that we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of lives being saved by making these drugs affordable,” said malaria expert Dr. Christopher Plowe, a professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who is not affiliated with the groups involved in the agreement.

About 500 million people are sickened each year by malaria, and more than 1 million die from the infectious disease, which is spread by mosquito bites. Symptoms include fever, chills, nausea and shortness of breath.

Besides benefiting from a more stable market, the suppliers that join the Clinton effort also get business and marketing assistance from the foundation.

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On the Net:

http://www.clintonfoundation.org

15th January Events
1535: King Henry VIII of England begins using the title ‘Supreme Head of the Church on Earth’.
1559: Elizabeth I crowned Queen of England.
1579: The Union of Utrecht melds numerous Dutch provinces into a single military unit to repel Spain, forming the basis for the United Provinces of the Netherlands.
1582: Treaty of Yam-Zapolski between Russia and Poland ends the Livonian War in Poland’s favour.
1759: The British Museum first opens to the general public.
1880: The first telephone directory for the UK published; it is six pages long.
1919: Jan Paderewski becomes the first prime minister of the new Polish Republic.

Births
1622: Moliere, French writer.
1675: Louis duc de St. Simon, French memoirist.
1754: Jacques-Pierre Brissot, French leader of the Girondins, a revolutionary group.
1791: Franz Grillparzer, Austrian playwright.
1810: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, French socialist.

Deaths
69: Roman Emperor Servius Sulpicius Galba, assassinated.
1597: Juan de Herrera, Spanish architect.
1815: Lady Emma Hamilton, Nelson’s mistress.
1919: Rosa Luxemburg, Polish/German radical.

From: europeanhistory.about.com

A book review is not a summary, and it’s not merely a Siskel and Ebert thumbs-up or thumbs-down personal appraisal of the book. The purpose of the book review is to present your readers with a critical evaluation of the book. It’s subjective – yes — but it needs to take into consideration the work’s literary merits in order to arrive at the personal assessment.

The book review is usually composed of the following components:

Overview of the Book

Usually present in the first paragraph of the review and brief, the overview can consider the author’s purpose and the theme of the book and give the reader of the review an idea at how well the book fulfilled its purpose or conveyed its theme.

Was the book intended to entertain? Did it? What is a central theme or important idea of the book and how did the author convey it? Were characters used to convey theme? Are there recurrent images that help to illustrate it? What events take place that serve this purpose? And was it effective?

Assessing the Book’s Strength and Weaknesses

Pay attention to the book’s narrative voice. Who is the narrator? Is (s)he appropriate and effective? Are the characters believable and fully created? Are they sympathetic? Is the use of language and wording appropriate to the book’s genre, and does it support the purpose of the book?

Questions such as these and others (readability, style, scope, etc…) can help you decide how the book compares to other books in the same genre. This will inform your final opinion of the book.

Author Information

Some biographical information about the author may be of interest. Ist the book a novel of place? If so where is the author from or where does (s)he live? What are the author’s previous works? How does his or her life experience feed the writing of this book?

Your Personal Perspective

Perhaps in combination with author information, your personal take on the work is often used to sum up your earlier critical analysis. Avoid overusing “I” statements to mitigate your views. A reader approaches the book review knowing that it is subjective. Also, go easy on the superlatives (Best book ever! Greatest characters!).

Remember, the review is a tool for your readers, not a showcase for the breadth of your literary acumen. Consider your audience and go easy on the jargon. I try to approach each review as a form of personal essay that illuminates my response and relationship to the work being reviewed. This affords me a measure of creativity that makes the book review a lot more fun to write… and to read.

From: contemporarylit.about.com

Definition:

n. The range or ’spectrum’ of environmental conditions and habitat characteristics that support the normal activity of an organism. (Source: Rickleffs)

Navigate Glossary: Glossary Index > A

From: animals.about.com

There’s nothing remotely subtle about the movie version of the ABBA musical “Mamma Mia!” and people’s reactions to it won’t be subtle either: You will hate this movie or you will love it. Or you might experience both extremes, as I did, sometimes at the same time. Hearing Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan warble “S.O.S.,” with Brosnan’s “singing” so excruciating you wonder if somebody’s pinching his big toe off-camera, is not an experience to be lukewarm about. (Actually, it’s kind of endearing that the former James Bond can’t sing. You don’t hear about Daniel Craig doing karaoke, do you?)

Clunkily directed (by the show’s original stage director, Phyllida Lloyd), awkwardly written (by Catherine Johnson, who wrote the stage play) and indifferently photographed, “Mamma Mia!” is nonetheless irresistible. ABBA songs, as even those who love them will admit, are the musical equivalent of a handful of sequins: insubstantial, synthetic, simplistic — but oh, how they catch the light. Put a bunch of them together and you’ve got a mountain of sequins, which is as good a description as any for “Mamma Mia!” (It’s also a pretty good description for an ABBA concert. Full disclosure: I went to one, as a sparkly eyed teenager, and remember a great deal of Spandex involved, not to mention a lot of fun.)

The movie’s plot, like that of the stage show, ties a goodly number of ABBA songs together, sometimes with tenuous thread — you’ll laugh out loud at how, for example, “Fernando” gets wedged in. Since most of the songs aren’t really about anything, they’re just thrown in wherever they sort of work.

Sophie (sweet-voiced Amanda Seyfried), opening the movie, sings “Honey, Honey” to her two sidekicks while explaining that she’s invited all three of the men who just might be her father to her upcoming wedding, even though her mother, Donna (Streep), doesn’t know. (Feel free to hum “Does Your Mother Know” right here — it makes about as much sense.) Meanwhile, Donna’s two best friends and former backup singers (Christine Baranski, Julie Walters) have shown up at Donna’s rustic hotel on a remote Greek island, populated entirely by cheerful folk who like to sing and dance.

The potential dads (Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgård) arrive for the wedding soon afterward, and thus ensues a lot of sun-drenched frolicking, a little angst, more than a few plot holes (what, there’s no such thing as DNA testing in Greece?) and every ABBA song you can possibly imagine. It’s very, very silly but undeniably sparkly, and those with a fondness for “Voulez-Vous” and its ilk will be won over. And the cast, all of whom seem to be having a glorious time (though Firth at times looks a tad befuddled, like he’s not quite sure what landed him here), pitch their performances to the back row and revel in the goofiness of it all.

None of this would matter much if this movie wasn’t anchored by a star turn, and Streep delivers yet another in a career full of them. In interviews, the Greatest Actress of a Generation often sounds like she’d be a lot of fun to hang out with; there’s a wry, clowny side to her that bubbles up in conversation. Playing Donna seems to channel her inner silliness; hitting every note effortlessly, with an appealingly light pop voice, she prances through the movie as if ever-so-slightly tipsy (a fine state of mind, now that I think of it, for watching this movie). She twists her lines into appealing little knots, and does a bit of comic business involving a cordless drill that’s almost a movie in itself.

Amid this movie’s sequined pleasures, Streep’s a genuine diamond.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com