Hard gluon damping in hot QCD

The gluon collisional width in hot QCD plasmas is discussed with 
emphasis on temperatures near $T_c$, where the coupling is large.
Considering its effect on the entropy, which is known from lattice 
calculations, it is argued that the width, which in the perturbative 
limit is given by $\gamma \sim g^2 \ln(1/g)\, T$, should be sizeable at 
intermediate temperatures but has to be small close to $T_c$.
Implications of these results for several phenomenologically relevant 
quantities, such as the energy loss of hard jets, are pointed out.