Exposed

Medical Journalism Suspect

Doctors and researchers are beginning to question the outlandish claims being made by the media in response to alleged breakthroughs in cancer research. In an editorial published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI), several doctors expressed concern that news pieces fail to accurately reflect the truth concerning drugs and scientific studies.

Drs. Lisa Schwartz and Steven Woloshin from the Center for Medicine and the Media at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice in New Hampshire, along with Dr. Barnett Kramer from JNCI, examined media claims about a new anti-cancer drug called olaparib that was reported on in the acclaimed New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Though the study was uncontrolled and preliminary, some sources were claiming it as the most important cancer breakthrough in ten years.

Another report exaggerated study findings concerning alcohol and cancer risk. In response to a study that showed a two-percent increase in breast cancer risk from drinking one alcoholic beverage a day versus not drinking at all, one media source produced a headline that said, "A drink a day raises a women's risk of cancer", with no mention of the important details in the article. Perhaps a simple oversight, the coverage failed to accurately assess the truth and may have needlessly scared readers concerning alcohol consumption.

Coverage concerning pharmaceutical drugs is often the most inaccurate. Aside from the fact that many drug studies are corrupted from the start because of who is bankrolling them, negative findings are often omitted from the results while miniscule benefits are highlighted as breakthroughs. The intensity and rate of severe negative side effects from pharmaceutical drugs is routinely left out of mainstream reports concerning drug study results.

Some of the most common drugs for which exaggerated and inaccurate claims are made include antidepressant medications, statin drugs, and vaccines. Not only are they typically ineffective at performing the task for which they are prescribed, they are highly dangerous and come with significant side effects.

Since many medical journals themselves omit important study details, it is no wonder that coverage problems are occurring. Editorialists at JNCI are encouraging editors of medical journals and journalists to utilize a tip sheet they created that will assist in gathering accurate, thorough information concerning study findings. It offers assistance in knowing what questions to ask, interpreting data and statistics, and indicating the existence of study flaws and limitations in reports. They hope that improvements in the way journalists research information will lead to more accurate reporting.

Source - Natural News

My Way

Mexico's Upcoming Collapse?

I’ve been predicting the collapse of the Mexican Nation-State since 2006. It turns out that was a bit premature. But with violence flaring, the potential for collapse in Mexico is once again in the headlines. Oil production continues to fall, border violence is up, and the government is preparing for a showdown with the drug cartels. I’ll argue below that the government will keep the wheels on through 2009, but that the Mexican state will collapse shortly thereafter, ushering in the beginning of the end of the Nation-State.

It’s been difficult to read a paper or watch the news recently without hearing about the growing troubles in Mexico. The US military’s Joint Forces Command issued their Joint Operating Environment 2008 report recently that listed Mexico and Pakistan as the most likely states to collapse in the immediate future (PDF, see p.35 for analysis of Mexico). Even 60 minutes ran a segment about the rising drug violence.

Of course, readers are probably already aware that a root cause of the problems in Mexico is the precipitous decline of Mexican oil production and an even faster decline in the level of oil exports. Add to that declining remittance incomes being sent home by migrant workers in America, declining tourist revenues, and lower revenue per barrel of oil exported, and the Mexican state is experiencing a severe financial crunch.

While the fiscal stability of the Mexican state is impacted by continually declining oil production and oil exports that are declining even faster, this impact is mitigated to some extent because PEMEX hedged the majority of its oil production through 2009 at roughly $70/barrel. Depending on the price of oil in 2010, Mexican oil revenues stand to drop off a cliff as PEMEX loses hedge coverage.

Does this mean the Mexican state is finished? The current crack-down by the Mexican military and federal police is, I think, best seen as a last-ditch effort to save the state. But it is also evidence that, by the very existence of this pitched battle, the state retains enough viability to pose a threat, and therefore to be targeted.

In military theory, pitched battles are only consciously joined by both sides when both have an incentive to risk the main body of their force—-either because they think they can win a decisive victory or because they are running out of the political, logistical, or economic ability to sustain their army in the field and must seek a decisive action while they can.

Clearly the drug cartels smell blood—-and tactics like forcing the resignation of the Juarez police chief by killing one or more police officers every 48 hours demonstrate their desire for a decisive engagement. Additionally, the motivation behind a recent truce among rival drug cartels may be to facilitate a joint offensive against the government.

In my opinion, the Mexican government is seeking a pitched battle for the second reason—with their oil hedges only in place through 2009, and with oil production, remittance income, and tourism dollars poised to continue a sharp decline, the state may not have much more than a year of financial viability in which to cripple the drug cartels.

While a pitched battle may be politically expedient for the state, I think the cartels are too widespread and deeply ingrained to be defeated militarily. Salvation for the Mexican state will require regaining the long-term ability to compete with the cartels as a provider of social order and economic activity—-something that cannot be gained on the battlefield. At a minimum, in order to finance its ongoing viability, the state needs significantly higher oil prices to increase export revenue or a rapid recovery in the US to generate an increase in remittance income. Given the current economic climate, the occurrence of both of these seems highly unlikely—-there is simply no way of knowing where the tipping point lies, whether either one of these factors, or both, can save the Mexican state from eventual collapse. And without a renewed fiscal foundation, the eventual collapse of the Mexican state seems inevitable…

Impacts of Increasing Instability in Mexico

First, the increasing instability in Mexico will have a significant impact on PEMEX’s ability to maintain the necessary levels of investment to minimize production declines. This creates a positive feedback-loop: faster declines mean more financial difficulties, more instability, and less investment, precipitating even faster declines. In 2009, PEMEX plans capital expenditures of roughly $20 Billion. Traditionally, due to laws that prevent foreign ownership of many categories of natural resources, PEMEX has relied on debt to finance capital expenditures. More recently, PEMEX has also been pushing for a reform to the Mexican oil law that would allow foreign companies an ownership stake in Mexican projects in exchange for investment. Regardless of whether PEMEX pursues debt or equity financing, instability in Mexico’s property rights regime—-certainly including the potential for governmental collapse—-will seriously hamper these efforts.

Certainly the impact of disintegration in Mexico will have an impact north of the border. There is already a clear spill-over in criminal activity in border states. At some point, the national security threat to the United States will bring calls for intervention—but are there any effective options? The sprawling yet dense cities and mountainous rural terrain of Northern Mexico should give any military planners pause, especially in light of recent American experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some commentators have even suggested that Mexico, not Iraq or Russia or Afghanistan, will be the defining national security challenge of the Obama administration.

The potential impact on Mexican oil production seems clear. More superficially, the situation in Mexico gives commentators of all stripes something to worry about. The spill-over of drug violence seems to preoccupy most mainstream talking-heads, but a few commentators have traced these problems back to their roots—and see a much more troubling threat. Specifically, the troubles in Mexico are an early sign of the failure of the Nation-State model. I’ve written about this extensively, and my intent here is not to re-hash my critique of the Nation-State system: if you’re interested, here’s an academic paper on the topic. The key is that the trends pulling Mexico apart at the seams are ubiquitous—-Mexico is merely facing this perfect storm first. As the Nation-State dominos begin to tumble next--Pakistan perhaps, then Iraq, then Russia, then Italy, then China, then Indonesia, etc.—-the pressure on the rest will grow. And many of the most threatened states are also the most critical to global oil exports.

While I don’t think Mexico—in its current form—has many years left, I hope I’m wrong. It’s a beautiful country (especially if you can get outside the Americanized hotel zones), with a vibrant culture. It may even prosper in a post-peak world under some different form of social and political organization. And a token state-shell may last for decades (another global trend, I suspect)—after all, the cartels will probably be happy to delegate parts of the social contract to the “sovereign.” But, for all practical purposes, the Mexican state won’t survive to see 2012.

Source - Jeff Vail

Poised

Film Review - "L'Esquive"

L'Esquive (Games of Love and Chance) shocked audiences when it won the César for Best Film, but what were people reacting to exactly: the fact that Abdellatif Kechiche had made a better film than Les Choristes and A Very Long Engagement, or that L'Esquive was earning comparisons to a certain Larry Clark provocation? The teens in the film—most of whom are North African and Muslim—live somewhere in the slums of Paris and their parents are conspicuous by their absence, which means they're allowed to do just about anything they want with very little interference, and though the worst thing a kid does here is steal someone's cell phone, L'Esquive scarcely starves for intensity.

Krimo (Osman Elkharraz) has broken up (again) with his girlfriend Magalie (Aurélie Ganito) and has set his sights on a lifelong friend, Lydia (Sara Forestier), who is playing the lead character in their high school class's adaptation of Marivaux's A Game of Love and Chance. An enigma wrapped in a riddle, Krimo bribes his friend Rachid (Rachid Hami) for his role in the play, just so he can act alongside Lydia, which perpetuates all sorts of melodramas, not least of which is the boy's embarrassment in front of his classmates during a rehearsal.

These hysterically fickle teens seem to speak their own language (they're always threatening to "waste" their "homies" and use weird clicking sounds as punctuation), and sometimes it's difficult to tell when they're acting out or simply acting. Epic stretches of the film are devoted to characters going at each other's throats, and as tedious and irritating as this may sound (and often is), it's never less than compelling in its genuineness: These kids are insufferable and they're more than happy to make everyone around them feel their wrath. Not only is the play the thing here, so are the rituals of adolescent behavior, with the world, naturally, as their stage. Kechiche even parallels the theatricality of Marivaux's play with the artifice of the teenage experience, but as for a social context, the events and themes from Marivaux's play more subtly and cunningly address issues of class than the characters in the film sometimes do, like when the teacher in charge of the Marivaux production discusses how behavior is inextricably bound to social status.

Like Tim Blake Nelson's O, the film plays out like a teen version of a Shakespeare play (it isn't, but it's almost best to enjoy it as such), you half expect the constant swirl of shifting alliances, betrayals, and chance run-ins to be capped with a bloodbath of some kind. Kechiche seems to understand this level of expectation, and it's something he toys with, which is probably why the film's coda is at once refreshing and frustrating. L'Esquive consistently teeters on the brink of tragedy (a confrontation between the kids and a group of thuggish cops is chilling) but dares to end on a chipper note, a slap in the face to viewers who aren't content with the tragedy inherent in the bad behavior of these children: They love and hate like Romeo and Juliet, even if they don't die like them. Why shouldn't that be enough?

Source - Slant Magazine

Rising

Dubai Sinks

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has total debt amounting to $184 billion at the end of 2009, according to estimates by Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, which said the region faces a heavy redemption schedule until 2013. Dubai's shock announcement this week that it is seeking to suspend payments on debt of its state-owned conglomerate Dubai World and property subsidiary Nakheel has roiled global markets, raising fears that the emirate which funded a spectacular building boom on a mountain of debt could default.

BofA-Merrill Lynch said in a report that the restructuring undertaken by Dubai would be a serious blow to the Gulf region's economic recovery prospects, adding that the scale of the region's debt was now the issue.

"The lack of official debt data may add up to uncertainty and cause higher risk premiums," it said.

Of the $184 billion UAE debt, Dubai holds $88 billion while Abu Dhabi accounts for $90 billion. BofA-Merrill Lynch said the debt servicing cost will be higher than these estimates as their numbers only include the principal payments.

The bank said Dubai faces almost $50 billion of debt amortization in the next three years: $12 billion in 2010, $19 billion in 2011 and $18 billion in 2012.

"We estimate the total debt for Dubai World as $26.5 billion, 80 percent of which needs to be paid back in the next three years," added BofA-Merrill.

Source - Reuters

Bejewelled

Green Tea Stress Management

Green tea has an impressive of list of health benefits. Studies have reported that green tea can help prevent Alzheimer's, certain cancers, and improve cardiovascular health. Some health experts have asserted that green tea can help alleviate stress as well.

But until recently there has not been a large scale study on stress reduction with green tea. A large scale study in Japan linking green tea with stress reduction was recently published online in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

The research team from the Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine was led by Atsushi Hosawa. The study included 42,093 Japanese individuals. Just under seven percent of the study population, 2,774, suffered from psychological stress. The research team determined that consuming sufficient quantities of green tea improved their psychological well-being.

Those who drank five cups of green tea per day showed considerably less psychological distress than those who drank less than a cup a day. These results were calculated after making adjustments for variables such as age, diet, cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, and disease histories.

The benefits of polyphenols

Because this was strictly an epidemiological study, no effort was made to determine the bioactive components that achieved the observed results. Green tea leaves contain polyphenols. Polyphenols are a type of antioxidant that combats the oxidative stress associated with neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases.

The four primary polyphenols found in fresh green tea leaves are: epigallocatechin (EGC), epicatechin gallate (ECG), epicatechin (EC), and epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG).

An earlier Japanese animal model study uncovered a link between EGCG and recovery from stress-induced fatigue. The researchers subjected rats to physical stress trials. They administered EGCG orally to the rats and discovered a significant reduction of liver oxidative damage, which stress and fatigue create. The research results were published in the journal Nutrition.

Stress and workaholic fatigue have been increasing worldwide. Consuming more green tea daily may offer a low-cost solution for stress management.

Source - Natural News

Honest

Taxation & Globalization

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which got $10 billion and debt guarantees from the U.S. government in October, expects to pay $14 million in taxes worldwide for 2008 compared with $6 billion in 2007.

The company’s effective income tax rate dropped to 1 percent from 34.1 percent, New York-based Goldman Sachs said today in a statement. The firm reported a $2.3 billion profit for the year after paying $10.9 billion in employee compensation and benefits.

Goldman Sachs, which today reported its first quarterly loss since going public in 1999, lowered its rate with more tax credits as a percentage of earnings and because of “changes in geographic earnings mix,” the company said.

The rate decline looks “a little extreme,” said Robert Willens, president and chief executive officer of tax and accounting advisory firm Robert Willens LLC.

“I was definitely taken aback,” Willens said. “Clearly they have taken steps to ensure that a lot of their income is earned in lower-tax jurisdictions.”

U.S. Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat who serves on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said steps by Goldman Sachs and other banks shifting income to countries with lower taxes is cause for concern.

“This problem is larger than Goldman Sachs,” Doggett said. “With the right hand out begging for bailout money, the left is hiding it offshore.”

In the first nine months of the fiscal year, Goldman had planned to pay taxes at a 25.1 percent rate, the company said today. A fourth-quarter tax credit of $1.48 billion was 41 percent of the company’s pretax loss in the period, higher than many analysts expected. David Trone, an analyst at Fox-Pitt Kelton Cochran Caronia Waller, expected the fourth-quarter tax credit to be 28 percent.

The tax-rate decline may raise some eyebrows because of the support the U.S. government has provided to Goldman Sachs and other companies this year, Willens said.

“It’s not very good public relations,” he said.

Source - Bloomberg

Cosmetics

The Cosmetics Industry Targets Women

Women and beauty products - it's a love affair that's been going on for centuries. And no wonder. There's nothing like a new lipstick or favourite perfume to make us look and feel good. Or so we thought...

In fact, according to a new report, most of our favourite cosmetics are cocktails of industrially produced and potentially dangerous chemicals that could damage our health and, in some cases, rather than delivering on their potent 'anti-ageing' promise, are causing us to age faster.

Research by Bionsen, a natural deodorant company, found that the average woman's daily grooming and make-up routine means she 'hosts' a staggering 515 different synthetic chemicals on her body every single day.

Many of those are also used in products such as household cleaners, and have been linked to a number of health problems from allergies and skin sensitivity to more serious hormonal disturbances, fertility problems and even cancer.

Parabens, for example, which are designed to preserve the shelf-life of your cosmetics, are one of the most widely used preservatives in the world, and are found in shampoos, hair gels, shaving gels and body lotions. But their use is becoming increasingly controversial - a range of different studies has linked them to serious health problems including breast cancer, as well as fertility issues in men.

Research from the Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine suggests that some parabens we had previously presumed to be safe, such as Methylparaben, may mutate and become toxic when exposed to sunlight, causing premature skin ageing and an increased risk of skin cancer.

Methylparabens are found in more than 16,000 products, including moisturisers and toothpastes. Cosmetic producers have always defended their use of parabens on the grounds that they can't be absorbed into the body.

But many leading researchers disagree, including Dr Barbara Olioso, an independent professional chemist, who says: 'Research shows that between 20 and 60 per cent of parabens may be absorbed into the body.'

There are a number of laws designed to protect us from dangerous chemicals in cosmetics, but researchers worry that they don't go far enough. For example, cosmetic manufacturers are required to list their ingredients, but they don't have to tell us about any impurities found in the raw materials or used in the manufacturing process, so long as they don't end up in the finished product.

The industry insists that our cosmetics are safe. The Cosmetic Toiletries and Perfumery Association said last night: 'Stringent laws require all cosmetics to be safe, and each product undergoes a rigorous safety assessment. The number of ingredients in a product, or whether it is natural or man-made, has no bearing on how safe it is.'

They also say that any chemicals are present in safe doses that can't harm us. While that may be true, there is some disagreement over what constitutes a 'safe' level - for young people and children, or sensitive adults, these levels may not be so safe at all.

And even if the relatively small amounts in individual products don't hurt us, there is growing concern over the number of products women use daily, and the cumulative effect of so many chemicals being used all over our bodies every day, for many years.

As Charlotte Smith, spokesperson for Bionsen, says: 'Women have never been more image-conscious and their beauty regimes have changed over the years, from a simple "wash & go" attitude, to daily fake-tan applications, regular manicures, false lashes and hair extensions.

'Lots of the high-tech, new generation cosmetics and beauty "wonder" treatments naturally contain more chemicals to achieve even better results, which, of course, means women apply more chemicals than ever before.'

If you want to protect yourself from chemical overload, reduce your overall cosmetics usage; switch to natural or organic products, and read the labels on your beauty and grooming products with care.

* The Women's Environmental network has more detailed information and advice about ingredients contained in beauty products: www.wen.org. uk; The Cosmetics Database, a website which gives a 'hazard rating' for products: cosmeticsdatabase.com. Or read Skin Deep: The Essential Guide To What's In The Toiletries And Cosmetics You Use (Rodale), by Pat Thomas.

Source - Daily Mail

Paris

Eugene Atget [1857-1927]

Eugène Atget (February 12, 1857 – August 4, 1927) was a French photographer noted for his photographs documenting the architecture and street scenes of Paris.

Personal life

Born outside the French city of Bordeaux, he was orphaned at seven and raised by his uncle. In the 1870s, after finishing his education, Atget briefly became a sailor and cabin boy on liners in the Transatlantic. After shipping on several voyages, Atget became an actor, more specifically, a bit player, for a second-rate repertory company, but without much success. He met and eventually married Valentine DeLafosse, an actress, with whom he spent the rest of his life.

He retained his bohemian affection for the working person and worried about the petty tradespeople and merchants threatened by modernization and the rise of big Paris department stores. He was said to be short-tempered and eccentric and in his 50s stopped eating anything except bread, milk and sugar. He and his wife associated with some of Paris' leading dramatists—though he left behind no known portraits of friends or associates.

His death went largely unnoticed at the time outside the circle of curators who had bought his albums and kept them interred, mostly unseen. Atget would likely have been indifferent to his relative obscurity, given his preference for work over fame. "This enormous artistic and documentary collection is now finished," he wrote of his life's work in 1920, though he kept on shooting photographs for years after.
[edit] Photography career

Atget finally settled in Paris in the 1890s. Despite his limited background in the visual arts, he saw photography as a source of income, selling his photographs to artists in the nearby town of Montparnasse. He advertised his photographs as "documents for artists." It was common practice at the time for painters to paint scenes from photographs. By the mid-1890s, Atget bought his first camera and began to photograph more than 10,000 images of the people and sights of the French capital. By 1899, he had moved to Montparnasse, where he lived and earned a modest income until his death in 1927.

Atget photographed Paris with a large-format wooden bellows camera with a rapid rectilinear lens. The images were exposed and developed as 18x24cm glass dry plates. Besides supplying fellow artists, architects, publishers and interior decorators with his photographs of a dream-like Paris, he was also commissioned by city Bureaus and the Carnavalet Museum to preserve and record landmarks in France's capital city.

Between 1897 and 1927 Atget captured the old Paris in his pictures. His photographs show the city in its various facets: narrow lanes and courtyards in the historic city center with its old buildings, of which some were soon to be demolished, magnificent palaces from the period before the French Revolution, bridges and quays on the banks of the Seine, and shops with their window displays. He photographed stairwells and architectural details on the façades and took pictures of the interiors of apartments. His interest also extended to the environs of Paris.

He produced timeless views of the parks of Versailles, Saint-Cloud and Sceaux. In addition to architecture and the urban environment, he also photographed street-hawkers, small tradesmen, rag collectors and prostitutes, as well as fairs and popular amusements in the various districts. The outlying districts and peripheral areas, in which the poor and homeless sought shelter, also furnished him with pictorial subjects.

Distinguishing characteristics of Atget's photography include a wispy, drawn-out sense of light due to his long exposures, a fairly wide view that suggested space and ambiance more than surface detail, and an intentionally limited range of scenes avoiding the bustling modern Paris that was often around the corner from the nostalgia-steeped nooks he preferred. The emptiness of most of his streets and the sometimes blurred figures in those with people are partly due to his already antiquated technique, including extended exposure times which required that many of his images be made in the early morning hours before pedestrians and traffic appeared.

The mechanical vignetting often seen at some corners of his photographs is due to his having repositioned the lens relative to the plate on the camera—exploiting one of the features of bellows view cameras as a way to correct perspective and control the image. Under the dark cloth, Atget surely knew the effect of these corners and accepted or preferred them. In fact, one of the key qualities of Atget's work compared to that of many other similar documentary photographers of that city, is his savvy avoidance of perfection, that cold symmetry and clear stasis that photography is so naturally good at. He approaches his subjects with a humanism that is palpable once noticed, and you become an observer and appreciator with him in his meanderings. He often said, "I have done little justice to the Great City of Paris," as a comment on his career.

Atget's photographs attracted the attention of well-known painters such as Man Ray, Andre Derain, Henri Matisse and Picasso in the 1920s.

Berenice Abbott was the key that unlocked Atget's Paris for the rest of the world. She got to know him in the 1920s, when she was an assistant to Atget's Montparnasse neighbor Man Ray. She attempted to help Atget achieve greater recognition during his lifetime by sending friends to purchase his work and by making a celebrity-style photographic portrait of him. After Atget's death in 1927, she acquired a large part of his archive and exhibited, printed and wrote about his work, as well as assembled a substantial archive of writings about his portfolio by herself and others. In 1968, Abbott arranged for New York's Museum of Modern Art to buy this archive, and through a series of MoMA exhibitions and publications Atget finally entered the pantheon of "Masters" of photography.

Abbott, as a result of all this, is given much credit for the recognition that Atget's photographs have received in the contemporary photographic world. Abbott partnered with the American Julien Levy to raise the money to acquire 1,500 of Atget's negatives and 8,000 of his prints. As noted above, she spent the 40 years promoting his work in America, elevating it to recognition as art, beyond its original reputation as documentation.

Legacy

The Museum of Modern Art purchased Abbott's collection of Atget's work in 1968, and now has some 5,000 of his prints and negatives in its possession. Abbott wrote of Atget: "He was an urbanist historian, a Balzac of the camera, from whose work we can weave a large tapestry of French civilization." In 1981, MoMA completed publication of a four-volume series of books based on its four successive exhibitions about Atget's life and work.

'Atget, a Retrospective' was presented at the Bibliotheque Nationale in 2007.

Source - Wikipedia

Lace

Ecuador Sues Chevron

Tens of thousands of Amazonians are suing Chevron, the American oil company, for poisoning their waterways in what is billed as one of the biggest environmental cases in history.

The Ecuadorean claimants said the company illegally dumped toxic waste from its oil production, which filtered into the lakes used by thousands of people for washing and drinking.

The result, they claimed, was one of the worst environmental disasters in history, which led to a public health crisis with rising levels of cancer, birth defects and miscarriages.

Some 30,000 Amazonians are behind a case to be heard by an Ecuadorean judge. Experts said the company might have to pay damages of up to $US27 billion.

The company said there was no proof that any illnesses were caused by its operations. It said the responsibility for cleaning the area lay with the Ecuadorean government and Petroecuador, the state oil company.

The court case is the result of the exploitation of the indigenous population by US trial lawyers and a corrupt government, according to Chevron.

The Amazon campaign has attracted high-profile supporters including actor Daryl Hannah. Chevron's reputation for corporate social responsibility has already taken a blow.

The issue is the subject of Crude, a critically acclaimed documentary. The rags-to-riches tale of the most senior Ecuadorean lawyer fighting the case has earnt it a place on the front cover of Vanity Fair.

Texaco, which is owned by Chevron, started operating in Sucumbios, Ecuador, in 1964. Over 26 years it made more than $500 million, producing 1.7 billion barrels of oil. As the operator of a consortium with Petroecuador, it drilled hundreds of wells.

Pits were created for each well in which to put the water produced as a byproduct of the oil. Those fighting Chevron claimed that the 68 billion litres of water in the pits were toxic and were allowed to overflow into nearby rivers. They also claimed that Texaco spilt an additional 64 million litres of crude oil.

The contamination allegedly increased cancer rates in the area threefold, and led directly to 1400 deaths.

"Texaco treated Ecuador's Amazon like a garbage dump," said Douglas Beltman, a former official at the US Environmental Protection Agency who is a scientific consultant to the indigenous groups.

Source - Telegraph

Eden

USA; Bringing Freedom To The Afghans

Journalists have been allowed to inspect refurbished facilities at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, the largest US military hub in the region and home to a controversial prison.

Al Jazeera's correspondent James Bays, who was among those who inspected the facilities on Sunday, said Bagram, unlike its Guantanamo counterpart, was clearly not going to be shut down soon.

"The new prison wing cost some $60 million to build ... and is meant to be part of a new era of openness and transparency," Bays said.

"But we were not shown the detainees. Human-rights lawyers say that, while the environment for the prisoners may be changing, their legal situation is not ... not having been charged. Nor has any civilian lawyer ever been allowed inside."

Bays said the extended prison could hold up to 1,000 detainees, but was at present holding around 700 inmates, including 30 foreign prisoners.

Detainees 'beaten'

Omar Dighayes, a former detainee at Bagram and Guantanamo Bay, said the Bagram prison resembled a concentration camp.

"People were beaten, dragged, tortured in it. There were high places where guards stood with guns. It was a hard, difficult place," he told Al Jazeera.

But he said he doubts the newly refurbished Bagram prison will improve conditions for its detainees, one of which includes his brother-in-law, whom Dighayes says was recently "badly beaten" inside Bagram.

"I don't think it's the facilities which make the difference, it's the treatment of people inside.

"Everybody who worked in Bagram - from the American side - will tell you that the things I'm describing did happen. People from the military intelligence [and] people from the FBI have spoken about the barbaric treatment at this facility."

But General Mark Martins, who runs detention operations at the airbase, said the US military was improving its treatment of detainees and had learnt many lessons since occupying the country in 2001.

"Detention, if not done properly, can actually harm the effort. We are a learning organisation ... we believe transparency is certainly going to help the effort, and increase the credibility of the whole process," Martins said.

'Guantanamo's evil twin'

However, Clara Gutteridge, an investigator of secret prisons and renditions from the human rights organisation, Reprieve, said Bagram is seen as "Guantanamo's lesser-known evil twin".

"All this talk about transparency, and the US government still won't release a simple list of names of prisoners who are in Bagram," she told Al Jazeera.

"None of them have had access to a lawyer ... and that just seems very unfair.

"We at Reprieve see this as the next big fight after Guantanamo Bay.

"But one thing that the US government is saying is that Afghan prisoners in Afghanistan have less rights than any other prisoner which just seems absurd."

Bagram Air Field is the largest US military hub in Afghanistan and is home to about 24,000 military personnel and civilian contractors.

Tens of millions of dollars continue to be spent on expanding and upgrading facilities - turning Bagram into a town spread over about 5,000 acres.

Base expansion

The air field part of the complex is already handling 400 tonnes of cargo and 1,000 passengers daily, according to Air Force spokesman Captain David Faggard.

It is continuing to grow to keep up with the requirements of an escalating war and troop increases.

Among new options being considered in Washington is regional commander General Stanley McChrystal's request to bring an additional 40,000 troops to Afghanistan.

But even with current troop levels - 65,000 US troops and about 40,000 from allied countries - Bagram already is bursting at the seams, our correspondent reported.

Plans are under way to build a new, $22m passenger terminal and a cargo yard costing $9m. To increase cargo capacity, a parking ramp supporting the world's largest aircraft is to be completed in early 2010.

Bagram was previously a major Soviet base during Moscow's 1979-89 occupation of Afghanistan, providing air support to Soviet and Afghan forces fighting the mujahidin.

Bagram lies in Parwan, a relatively quiet province. The Taliban is not believed to have a significant presence in the province.

But the base is susceptible to rocket and mortar attacks. In 2009, the Taliban launched more than a dozen attacks on the base, killing four and wounding at least 12, according to Colonel Mike Brady, a military spokesman.

Source - Al Jazeera

Reaching

American Democracy At Work

In the official record of the historic House debate on overhauling health care, the speeches of many lawmakers echo with similarities. Often, that was no accident.

Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies.

E-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that the lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans.

The lobbyists, employed by Genentech and by two Washington law firms, were remarkably successful in getting the statements printed in the Congressional Record under the names of different members of Congress.

Genentech, a subsidiary of the Swiss drug giant Roche, estimates that 42 House members picked up some of its talking points — 22 Republicans and 20 Democrats, an unusual bipartisan coup for lobbyists.

In an interview, Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, said: “I regret that the language was the same. I did not know it was.” He said he got his statement from his staff and “did not know where they got the information from.”

Members of Congress submit statements for publication in the Congressional Record all the time, often with a decorous request to “revise and extend my remarks.” It is unusual for so many revisions and extensions to match up word for word. It is even more unusual to find clear evidence that the statements originated with lobbyists.

The e-mail messages and their attached documents indicate that the statements were based on information supplied by Genentech employees to one of its lobbyists, Matthew L. Berzok, a lawyer at Ryan, MacKinnon, Vasapoli & Berzok who is identified as the “author” of the documents. The statements were disseminated by lobbyists at a big law firm, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal.

In an e-mail message to fellow lobbyists on Nov. 5, two days before the House vote, Todd M. Weiss, senior managing director of Sonnenschein, said, “We are trying to secure as many House R’s and D’s to offer this/these statements for the record as humanly possible.”

He told the lobbyists to “conduct aggressive outreach to your contacts on the Hill to see if their bosses would offer the attached statements (or an edited version) for the record.”

In recent years, Genentech’s political action committee and lobbyists for Roche and Genentech have made campaign contributions to many House members, including some who filed statements in the Congressional Record. And company employees have been among the hosts at fund-raisers for some of those lawmakers. But Evan L. Morris, head of Genentech’s Washington office, said, “There was no connection between the contributions and the statements.”

Mr. Morris said Republicans and Democrats, concerned about the unemployment rate, were receptive to the company’s arguments about the need to keep research jobs in the United States.

The statements were not intended to change the bill, which was not open for much amendment during the debate. They were meant to show bipartisan support for certain provisions, even though the vote on passage generally followed party lines.

Democrats emphasized the bill’s potential to create jobs in health care, health information technology and clinical research on new drugs.

Republicans opposed the bill, but praised a provision that would give the Food and Drug Administration the authority to approve generic versions of expensive biotechnology drugs, along the lines favored by brand-name companies like Genentech.

Lawmakers from both parties said it was important to conduct research on such “biosimilar” products in the United States. Several took a swipe at aggressive Indian competitors.

Asked about the Congressional statements, a lobbyist close to Genentech said: “This happens all the time. There was nothing nefarious about it.”

In separate statements using language suggested by the lobbyists, Representatives Blaine Luetkemeyer of Missouri and Joe Wilson of South Carolina, both Republicans, said: “One of the reasons I have long supported the U.S. biotechnology industry is that it is a homegrown success story that has been an engine of job creation in this country. Unfortunately, many of the largest companies that would seek to enter the biosimilar market have made their money by outsourcing their research to foreign countries like India.”

In remarks on the House floor, Representative Phil Hare, Democrat of Illinois, recalled that his family had faced eviction when his father was sick and could not make payments on their home. He said the House bill would save others from such hardship.

In a written addendum in the Congressional Record, Mr. Hare said the bill would also create high-paying jobs. Timothy Schlittner, a spokesman for Mr. Hare, said: “That part of his statement was drafted for us by Roche pharmaceutical company. It is something he agrees with.”

The boilerplate in the Congressional Record included some conversational touches, as if actually delivered on the House floor.

In the standard Democratic statement, Representative Robert A. Brady of Pennsylvania said: “Let me repeat that for some of my friends on the other side of the aisle. This bill will create high-paying, high-quality jobs in health care delivery, technology and research in the United States.”

Mr. Brady’s chief of staff, Stanley V. White, said he had received the draft statement from a lobbyist for Genentech’s parent company, Roche.

“We were approached by the lobbyist, who asked if we would be willing to enter a statement in the Congressional Record,” Mr. White said. “I asked him for a draft. I tweaked a couple of words. There’s not much reason to reinvent the wheel on a Congressional Record entry.”

Some differences were just a matter of style. Representative Yvette D. Clarke, Democrat of New York, said, “I see this bill as an exciting opportunity to create the kind of jobs we so desperately need in this country, while at the same time improving the lives of all Americans.”

Representative Donald M. Payne, Democrat of New Jersey, used the same words, but said the bill would improve the lives of “ALL Americans.”

Mr. Payne and Mr. Brady said the bill would “create new opportunities and markets for our brightest technology minds.” Mr. Pascrell said the bill would “create new opportunities and markets for our brightest minds in technology.”

In nearly identical words, three Republicans — Representatives K. Michael Conaway of Texas, Lynn Jenkins of Kansas and Lee Terry of Nebraska — said they had criticized many provisions of the bill, and “rightfully so.”

But, each said, “I do believe the sections relating to the creation of a market for biosimilar products is one area of the bill that strikes the appropriate balance in providing lower cost options.”

Source - New York Times