The HIV/AIDS epidemic rages in Ukraine like it does in few other places on the planet. But as the rate of people infected goes frighteningly through the roof, the government and civil society alike have been slow to come to terms with what’s been happening.

Action, Drama, Thriller, USA, 2008
Directed by Ridley Scott
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong
Body of Lies is based on the novel of the same name by David Ignatius about a CIA operative who goes to Jordan to track a high-ranking terrorist. Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a covert CIA operative working in Jordan searching for terrorists who have been bombing civilian targets.

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Change! Hope! That’s what US President-Elect Obama’s constituency expects from him. Ukrainians, at least as far as we can tell anecdotally, preferred Obama to his opponent John McCain, but they’re probably too realistic to believe that an Obama administration will usher in a radical change in terms of US policy toward this part of the world. Said Obama after he was elected, “And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores… our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.” That sort of soaring American rhetoric doesn’t play so well overseas, much less in Eastern Europe, so it was no surprise when, a few days later, local boy Borys Tarasyuk, Ukraine’s former foreign minister, responded: “If you ask any serious Ukrainian politician whether a Democrat or a Republican US president is better for Ukraine, he or she will reply that ultimately there is really no great difference. And this is the truth.”

Reports in the media have it that those upstanding gentlemen in the State Auto-Inspection – Ukraine’s traffic cops – will soon be cracking down on drivers who talk on the cellphone while tooling down the city streets, or down sidewalks, or across parks, or through children’s playgrounds. In an interview with Gazeta 24 TV news, a certain traffic policeman named Serhiy Budnik said, “This is one of the worst traffic-related problems we have these days. Mobile phone conversations used to be exotic, but now they’re one of the leading causes of accidents.” One in four traffic accidents in Ukraine are the result of someone talking on a cellie behind the wheel.

The weekends at the country’s ZAGS facilities have been busy this year. According to the Justice Ministry, over 106,000 couples were married between July and September of this year, more than double the number married in the same months last year. Those figures came on the heels of a busy April to June, when 48,000 people were married - good news indeed, in a part of the world with a falling population. You might have noticed such a trend yourself, if you spend anytime up there on the Uzviz, watching the couples shift impatiently while they eye the steep stairs up to Andriyivsky Church, then later descend in a rush of black and bridal white, climb into the sleek rental, and speed off to the reception, the dancing and the booze.

So now a ride on the city’s dependable (if dilapidated) transit lines, including its trusty (if crowded) metro, will set you back two hryvnia, or quadruple what it cost before last Tuesday. The government had been mumbling about the increase for a while, so it wasn’t surprising. But it was abrupt. One day you’re sliding your gummy 50-kopeck piece over to the nice women behind the kasa glass, and the next you have to dig in your wallet for a wrinkled pink-orange two-hryvnia bill. Presumably the financial crisis and rising energy prices led to the decision, but you’d think a fiscal crunch that’s hitting citizens as hard as the government would militate against so sudden and drastic a hike.

Chalk them up as another casualty of the financial crisis: Kyiv’s money exchange points. Those ubiquitous features of the city will disappear with the new year according to National Bank Decree Number 353, an apparent attempt to gain control over and rationalise a monetary system that’s teetering on the brink. The decree also obliges banks to sell currency at the official National Bank rate, and to buy it at a rate no cheaper than three percent less of the sale price.

I know something about politicians who run their countries into the ground, but what’s going on in official Kyiv strains belief. Consider this. In order to qualify for the $16.4 billion International Monetary Fund loan that just might prop up Ukraine’s economy, the Rada had to pass preparatory legislation. Of course it finally did pass it, and the IMF loan is coming, but one reason the legislation took so long is that President Yushchenko’s party tried to slip a campaign finance loan into the bill. That is, it tried to use this crucial bill to help forward the President’s kooky project to hold December elections. Those elections, of course, represent Yushchenko’s latest attempt to destroy Prime Minister Tymoshenko, with whom the President is obsessed in that creepy way in which a frustrated 15-year-old boy might be obsessed with the good-looking, catty girl at school.

Kyiv’s a great city for high definition flat-screen televisions. Been in a restaurant or marshrutka lately? The latest high-definition television to hit the local market is the Samsung Series 8, and What’s On convened its expert panel – our anonymous blonde, bricklayer and businessman - to give it a test-drive.

The Important Stuff:
-   At 1.9 inches, this TV is thinner than its remote, but you can’t wall-mount it if you want to use the back inputs; however, there are a couple inputs on the side, too
-   Features four High-Definition Multiple Interfaces
-   120 hertz refresh rate (twice that of a typical computer monitor)
-   When rapid motion’s being shown on the screen, this TV cuts down on ‘judder’, or artifacts left over from when film is transferred to video
-   70,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio
-   6 millisecond response time

Fleur in concert, Officers’ House (30/1 Hrushevskoho), 1 November at 18.00
Fleur, a band founded in Odessa in February 2000, are difficult to pin down, their style drifting between dreamy pop and gothic music. The founding members were Olha Pulatova (piano, vocals) and Elena Vozhnarovska (guitar, vocals), but their ranks have since swollen to eight members, including a flutist, a violinist and a cellist. Since their inception, the band has gained a sizeable following in Ukraine.

Tommie Sunshine, DJ Move, Xlib club (12 Frunze), 8 November at 23.00
Get ready for another banging Moverec night at Xlib club with DJ Move and his special invited guest Tommie Sunshine. Influenced equally by New Wave, rock ‘n’ roll and house music, American rave legend and Brooklyn resident Tommie Sunshine is the real thing. An established remixer, Tommie has retouched work by a diverse cross-section of artists, including the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, Good Charlotte, the Scissor Sisters, the Gossip, Fallout Boy, the Killers, Junkie XL, Panic! At The Disco, Shiny Toy Guns and Avril Lavigne.

Potap and Nastya Kamenskykh, Palace Sport (1 Sportyvna Pl.), 7 November at 19.00
Nastya Kamenskykh, winner of the UBN awards, and Potap, Ukraine’s biggest rap star, join forces for a concert next month at Palace Sport. The two have been hard at work crafting R&B-style songs with a humorous twist. Probably their best-known work was an unofficial soundtrack to the movie ‘Die Hard 4’, one song from which, ‘Krepkie Oreshki’, or ‘Strong Nuts’, seemed to hang around on the city’s radio waves for a while.

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Noze, Xlib club (12 Frunze), 28 November at 23.00
Noze calls itself a band made up of two friends for the benefit of their other friends. Nice, no? The two Parisian DJs are, you might say, lovers of life: at the end of their sets, they’ve been known to strip. This year saw the release of their third album with the label Get Physical. They’ve also managed to tour the world in the last 11 months, visiting Berlin, Montreal, Mexico, Barcelona, Moscow, Sao Paulo, Corsica, Frankfurt and Miami. And now they’re coming to Kyiv. Maybe they’ll strip. For more information call 417-3233.