Along with having just about everything else wrong with the country, Zimbabwe now has the world's highest percentage of children orphaned by AIDS, according to UNICEF.

Almost one in every four children ... 1.6 million ... has lost at lease one parent to the virus, not surprising when you learn that 3,000 people are dying of AIDS every week.

UNICEF said it had received $6 million from Sweden, which would be used to increase school enrolment of orphans and vulnerable children, boost school nutrition programmes and reduce the number of children living outside families.

Zimbabwe continued to lead in the care of the orphans and vulnerable children despite a severe economic crisis, with 90 percent of the country's orphans having been absorbed by the extended family, UNICEF said.

You know? I doubt that. And I doubt that 'being absorbed' has been a real solution for most of these children. Information coming out of Zimbabwe is notoriously and intentionally warped to cast a glow over Mugabe and his government, and UNICEF would not be above going with the glow flow to keep their fingers in the pie.

Here's a report out of Haiti that glows on it's own, though ...

An American-based organization called Friends of the Orphans has opened a 200-bed hospital for children in Port-au-Prince.

John C. Smith, interim chief executive of Friends of the Orphans, called the hospital in Port-au-Prince's Tabarre neighborhood "one more step toward helping the people of Haiti end the cycle of poverty in which they find themselves."

Now THAT'S doing something!

Unlike the Malaysian government that is calling for a new law that will make whipping the punishment for prostitution. Not for the clients of prostitutes, of course ... just the people living in such desperate circumstances that leaving their home country to turn tricks in Kuala Lumpur seems like a step up in life.

Deputy internal security minister Johari Baharum has said that over 15 500 foreign women were arrested for prostitution from 2004 to July 2006, including more than 6 000 from China, 4 596 from Indonesia, 2 613 from Thailand and 1 316 from the Philippines.

Women from Vietnam, Cambodia, Uzbekistan, India, Myanmar, Russia, Laos and Cambodia also come to Malaysia to engage in the sex trade, he said.

Prostitution is illegal in the predominantly Muslim nation.

Prostitution is one of those crimes that can not happen without clients, so holding only one side of the equation responsible seems more than a little backwards. Think it has anything to do with which sex has power?

And I'm dropping this from the Jerusalem post in simply because I find it so interesting.

It's the story of a Chinese woman with a Russian-Jewish grandfather, separated by the Japanese invasion of China, and eventually ending up in Israel. Fascinating.