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By ROB EVANS and SARAH BOSELEY (Guardian)

Private lobbying by an American pharmaceutical company saw government ministers back down from supporting British people who claim one of its failed drugs caused them heart attacks and strokes.
A minister promised in parliament that the government would back their campaign against Merck, one of the world’s largest drugs firms. But Whitehall documents obtained by the Guardian reveal Merck immediately put pressure on the minister and helped persuade the government to withdraw its support.

Merck is refusing to compensate hundreds of Britons who say their health was damaged even though the multinational has paid out more than £2bn to 44,000 people in America.

Merck had to stop selling its profitable pain relief drug, Vioxx, in 2004 after scientific data showed the increased risk of heart attacks and strokes with high-dosage use. The Lancet magazine accused Merck of knowing about the risks four years earlier, but ignoring them “out of ruthless, short-sighted and irresponsible self-interest” – a claim denied by the drugmaker.

The US claimants went to court and, in 2007, Merck agreed to pay them compensation. But the British claimants have been unable to launch a lawsuit because their legal aid application was rejected. They fear they will be bankrupted if they lose the court case and have to pay millions of pounds to Merck for their legal costs.

The Department of Health documents released under freedom of information legislation show how ministers retreated from backing the Britons. On 17 June last year health minister Ivan Lewis came out in support. He told parliament he would tell Merck “to ensure that it fulfils its responsibilities to people who have been affected in the UK in the same way as it is now compensating people in the US”.
Within hours, Merck launched a campaign to head off government support for the alleged victims, with the help of a lobbying firm, APCO, according to official briefing notes.

At a meeting on 10 July, Chris Round, Merck’s UK managing director, and an American executive told Lewis that the US payouts were “not an admission of fault or causation; on the contrary, we continue to believe that we acted appropriately”.

Guardian for more

“This is a vintage recording of Dr. Francisco Santiago’s 1916 Kundiman “Cancion Filipina” (Anak Dalita) as interpreted by Arrigo Pola in 1956.

”Arrigo Pola (b.1908) born in Modena, Italy, Pola is one of the most acclaimed tenors in the world. A distinguished music teacher, he was voice teacher of Luciano Pavarotti starting in 1954. In 1956, Pola toured Asia for singing engagements.

”He arrived in the Philippines that same year and became instantly popular with the Filipino audience. In a short period of time in the Philippines, Pola mastered tagalog Kundiman songs to the delight of the Filipinos.”

Pola for more

By CARL ZIMMER (New York Times)

It’s easy to imagine the cells in our bodies like bricks in a house, all cemented into place. But we are actually seething with cells that creep, crawl, and squirm. They start wandering soon after conception, and, throughout our lives, our bodies continue to hum with cellular traffic.

Some cells burrow into old bone so that new bone can be laid down in their wake. The tips of new blood vessels snake forward, dragging the cells behind along with them. White blood cells race along on flickering lobes to chase down bacteria before they can make us sick.
The fact that cells can move is old news. How they move is just now being understood. In the mid-1600s, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek built one of the first microscopes and observed single-cell organisms making what he called “pleasing and nimble” movements. But he had no idea what was going on inside those cells, and three centuries later, scientists were still baffled.

Thomas Pollard, a biochemist at Yale, started studying crawling cells in the 1960s, when, he said, “Exactly zero was known.” Today Dr. Pollard and his colleagues have identified many of the key proteins that work together to let cells navigate through our bodies. Scientists can even see some of these proteins at work in living cells and measure their forces.

“My dream was always to be a little gremlin, to get inside the cell and watch all this stuff,” Dr. Pollard said. “This is almost like being a little gremlin.

“We’ve gone from a black box to chemistry and physics.”
One of the chief reasons for these advances is the technology that scientists can now use to watch cells in motion. When developmental biologists first began to study how embryos grow, for example, they could only look at different stages under a microscope.

Today, they make high-resolution videos of embryos and track the movement of thousands of cells — videos that overturn some traditional ideas.

“There’s tremendously more migration than we thought,” said Scott Fraser, the director of the Biological Imaging Institute at Caltech.
To undertake the migrations that form an organism from an embryo, cells need to know where to go. An embryo is awash in signals that can guide them. Different kinds of cells respond to different signals. Cells that will give rise to skin, blood vessel walls and other linings of the body — epithelial cells — are attracted to a signaling protein called epidermal growth factor. Released by white blood cells in the embryo, this protein draws the cells crawling toward their source.

New York Times for more

Which way forward for the Black Left? The path leads in the same direction it always has: agitation, organization, and confrontation with Power. Cynthia McKinney chose a Harlem church to announce formation of DIGNITY, to bring the Black body politic back from its current comatose state. “Dignity is attempting to show real change is possible” – if people fight for it. “We want to organize networks so that we can relay information quickly to a large number of people.”

By Editors of Black Agenda Report

Former congresswoman (D-GA) and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney addressed a packed house at St. Mary’s Church, in Harlem, on Sunday, May 31. Also sharing the podium were Glen Ford and Margaret Kimberley, of Black Agenda Report, Nellie Bailey, Harlem Tenants Council, Prof. Anthony Monteiro, of the African American Studies Department, Temple University, and writer/activist Mae Jackson. The event was titled, “Which Way Forward for the Black Left?”

”We agreed to found an action organization and to call it Dignity.”

Thank you all for being here.

On Thursday, General Taguba spoke to journalists and said that the photos currently being withheld by President Obama show rape. On Friday, he went even further and said that he saw video of U.S. soldiers raping and sodomizing detainees. From the first batch of photos that were released, we know that detainees were also murdered. In your name and mine.

But some of us here in the U.S. are not shocked or surprised that this kind of behavior could occur. For those of us who have our eyes open, the gritty streets of America are filled with the experience of unarmed black and brown men being beaten, raped, sodomized, and even murdered by terroristic agents of the state.

We remember the Black Panther Party, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Kwame Touré. We remember George Jackson, Soledad and Attica. We remember the American Indian Movement, the Puerto Rican Independistas, the Chicano Movement, and we remember the FBI. We know about Area A in Chicago and we’ve heard the San Francisco 8 recount for us their experiences of torture at the hands of law enforcement. We’ve heard them tell how 30 years later, the very same people who tortured them showed up on their doorsteps to re-arrest them for crimes they did not commit.

So when General Taguba verifies that torture, rape, and murder were used by U.S. service men and women, we cannot be surprised.
When we see Dick Cheney say that torture worked, we in this audience, are not surprised.

The gritty streets of America are filled with the experience of unarmed black and brown men being beaten, raped, sodomized, and even murdered by terroristic agents of the state.”

When we hear that Democratic Attorney General Jerry Brown who allowed the San Francisco 8 prosecution to move forward is rumored to want to be the Governor of California, and expects our votes to win, we are not surprised.

Black Agenda Report for more

Videoreport by SUNDAY KABAYE (Africa News)

The Millennium Villages project aims at implementing the millennium development goals, at a village level. Mbola village, Tanzania, is one of the sites among fourteen sites in Africa. Mbola is a model village to improve peoples lives. It was established two years ago in Uyui district. The nearest city center is Tabora which is located 36 km away.

Located on low, hilly terrain, the six villages in the Tanzania cluster are spread out over an expansive area, making travel between them difficult while also suppressing the development of local markets. Subsistence farming is the main economic activity, consisting mainly of rain-fed agriculture and the production of local livestock breeds. Persistent drought and difficult planting conditions, including sandy soil that results in decreased water and nutrient retention, have hampered agricultural productivity.

The main development challenges in Mbola include the high rate of environmental degradation resulting from poor crop management practices, declining agricultural production and destruction of the Miombo woodlands for fuel wood used in the tobacco industry. Overgrazing and expansion of agricultural land have also contributed to the decline of land productivity. In addition, roads are in a poor state, thus limiting easy access to markets. There is a general lack of basic infrastructure for health and education.

Watch video

“Tanvir Ka Safarnama is the enthralling theatrical journey that happens when a pipe-smoking urban sophisticate like Habib Tanvir travels via Europe to return to his homeland – in Chhattisgarh – to create an essentially Indian theatre. Working with unschooled, uneducated villagers, living together as a family over 50 years, Tanvir has ploughed a lonely furrow to produce theatrical masterpieces. His adaptations of Shakespeare,Brecht and Indian Sanskrit classics have regaled audiences around the world with humour and humanism.

”This film joins the joys,trials and tribulations of Habib Tanvir and Naya Theatre on the road over two years…

”This is a 5 minute trailer for the feature length version which is 79 minutes in duration.”

By Rasheed Kidwai (The Telegraph)

Zehra Mustafawi Khomeini in India on Sunday. (PTI)

When a woman in burqa rose to speak in Bhopal’s Rabindra Bhavan today and asked men and women to follow Mahatma Gandhi in their everyday struggles, the audience burst into applause.

The Gandhian reference had come from Zehra Mustafawi Khomeini, daughter of the late Iranian spiritual leader, Ayatollah Rohollah Khomeini.

Zehra, 59, who teaches philosophy at Tehran University, spoke for over half an hour in Farsi while an interpreter translated her words into a mix of Hindi and Urdu. The soft-spoken daughter of the revolutionary leader did not make a single reference to violence or the need to take up arms against injustice.

“Both Gandhiji and my father led a peaceful struggle. Both represented humanism and stood for the rights of the poor and underprivileged. The revolution in Iran in 1979 took place without any bloodshed,” she said.

She described the Iranian revolution as a “perfect model of splendid, humane and divine life… for all the peoples of the world”.
While Zehra repeatedly referred to the Ayatollah in her speech, her views about Israel differed from her father’s. Khomeini had said “Israel must be wiped off the map”; his daughter took a more Gandhian view.
“The best way to beat Israel is to boycott its goods. The economic boycott will force Israel to see reason. I appeal to all those who stand by human rights, peace and justice to isolate Israel through peaceful means,” she said.

Zehra was friendly and warm, unlike her stern, aloof father who would move “through the halls of the madresehs never smiling at anybody or anything”. She looked appreciative when naats (religious poetry) were being recited in Urdu, which she is said to understand.
She may indeed have an India connection —- the Ayatollah’s paternal grandfather, Sayid Ahmad Musawi, is believed to have spent several years in Lucknow.

Zehra was in Bhopal to attend a meeting in memory of Bibi Fatima, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad and regarded by Muslims as an exemplar for all women. Fatima was married to Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and the fourth and final Rashidun (rightly guided Caliphs).

The philosophy professor, who is married to a colleague and has a son and a daughter, had arrived in India at the invitation of a few cultural-religious organisations, said the Iran embassy’s cultural counsellor, Karima Najafi, who is accompanying her.

Zehra visited Bhopal’s Iranian settlement, where some 200-300 Iranians live in mostly slum-like conditions, before leaving for Delhi where she will spend the next three days.

This was a rare public appearance by Khomeini’s daughter. Although women had participated in the 1979 Iran revolution, they have had only a token presence in the country’s public life under the three decades of rule by conservative clerics. Women hold just a handful of parliament seats and two cabinet posts.

The outside world has little clue what the wives and daughters of Iran’s premier politicians look like. Most Presidents, including the moderate Khatimi, kept their spouses out of the spotlight.

Zehra shared the dais with rebel Samajwadi Party leader Azam Khan, Madhya Pradesh governor Balram Jakhar and noted Shia cleric Kalbe Jawad. The programme was organised by poet Manzar Bhopali with help from Al Jawad Foundation of Lucknow and Bhopal-based organisation Hum Ek Hain.

The Telegraph for more

By Katha Pollitt (The Nation)

Can we please stop talking about feminism as if it is mothers and daughters fighting about clothes? Second wave: you’re going out in that? Third wave: just drink your herbal tea and leave me alone! Media commentators love to reduce everything about women to catfights about sex, so it’s not surprising that this belittling and historically inaccurate way of looking at the women’s movement–angry prudes versus drunken sluts–has recently taken on new life, including among feminists. Writing on DoubleX?.com, the new Slate spinoff for women, the redoubtable Linda Hirshman delivered a sweeping attack on younger feminists for irresponsible partying, as chronicled on Jezebel.com, a Gawker-family blog devoted to “Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for Women. Without Airbrushing.” Likewise, a silly “debate” over whether Sex and the Single Girl did more for women than The Feminine Mystique followed the release of Jennifer Scanlon’s Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown. As Naomi Wolf wrote in the Washington Post, “The stereotype of feminists as asexual, hirsute Amazons in Birkenstocks that has reigned on campus for the past two decades has been replaced by a breezy vision of hip, smart young women who will take a date to the right-on, woman-friendly sex shop Babeland.” Pick your caricature.

What’s wrong with parsing feminism along a mother/daughter divide? Everything.

First of all, it’s chronologically off. If second wavers are those who made the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s and ’70s, they are not the mothers of today’s young feminists but their grandmothers. Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Barbara Seaman and Del Martin are dead. Adrienne Rich is 80, Robin Morgan is 68. Gloria Steinem, still fabulous, celebrated her seventy-fifth birthday on March 25. The wave construct obscures the perspective of women ten or even twenty years younger, like, um, me–in 1966, when NOW was founded, I was a junior in high school–or Susan Faludi (b. 1959), bell hooks (b. 1952) or Anna Quindlen (b. 1952).

The same thing happens at the other end. “Third wave” was indeed intended to define a new generation–it was coined by Rebecca Walker, Alice Walker’s daughter–in 1992. The original third wavers, with their reclaiming of “girl culture” and their commitment to the intersectionality of race, class and gender are now touching 40; they hung up their Hello Kitty backpacks some time ago. Many, like Walker, have children: they are the mothers who, today’s “young feminists” complain, use up all the air in the room, according to Nation writer Nona Willis Aronowitz. But the term continues to be used to describe each latest crop of feminists–loosely defined as any female with more political awareness than a Bratz doll–and to portray them in terms of their rejection of second wavers, who are supposedly starchy and censorious. Like moms. Somebody’s mom, anyway.

The wave structure, I’m trying to say, looks historical, but actually it is used to misrepresent history by evoking ancient tropes about repressive mothers and rebellious daughters. Second wave: anti-porn; third wave: anything goes! But second wave was never all anti-porn–think of Ellen Willis, for heaven’s sake. It even gave us the propaganda term “pro-sex.” The ACLU is jampacked with feminist lawyers of a certain age. In fact, feminists in the ’70s and ’80s had the same conflicts over pornography that are playing out today among young women over raunch and sex work. You wouldn’t know it from the media, but there are plenty of young feminists who do not see pole-dancing as “empowering” and do not aspire to star in a Girls Gone Wild video. Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs sold very well on campus. These women don’t fit the wave story line, however, so nobody interviews them. The pairing up on sex issues is old/young, with the older feminist representing sour puritanical judgment.

The Nation for more

Or How to Stay Out of Sight While Profiting From the War in Iraq

By Pratap Chatterjee

The Houstonian Hotel is an elegant, secluded resort set on an 18-acre wooded oasis in the heart of downtown Houston. Two weeks ago, David Lesar, CEO of the once notorious energy services corporation Halliburton, spoke to some 100 shareholders and members of senior management gathered there at the company’s annual meeting. All was remarkably staid as they celebrated Halliburton’s $4 billion in operating profits in 2008, a striking 22% return at a time when many companies are announcing record losses. Analysts remain bullish on Halliburton’s stock, reflecting a more general view that any company in the oil business is likely to have a profitable future in store.

There were no protestors outside the meeting this year, nor the kind of national media stakeouts commonplace when Lesar addressed the same crew at the posh Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Houston in May 2004. Then, dozens of mounted police faced off against 300 protestors in the streets outside, while a San Francisco group that dubbed itself the Ronald Reagan Home for the Criminally Insane fielded activists in Bush and Cheney masks, offering fake $100 bills to passers-by in a mock protest against war profiteering. And don’t forget the 25-foot inflatable pig there to mock shareholders. Local TV crews swarmed, a national crew from NBC flew in from New York, and reporters from the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal eagerly scribbled notes.
…
“Burn & Loot”
Halliburton has been doing work in war zones since the early 1960s, when it acquired the construction company Brown & Root and was tasked by the Pentagon with building the infrastructure for the Vietnam War. Back in those days, it was vilified as “Burn & Loot.” After more than three decades in news obscurity, in March 2003, with the invasion of Iraq, it suddenly returned to national attention. After all, not only had its former CEO been beating the public drums for an invasion, but its subsidiary KBR (the old Brown & Root) had been given a vast, open-ended, multi-billion dollar contract to build and maintain the new infrastructure of bases that the U.S. military was rushing to construct in that country.

More than six years later, KBR has taken in over $31 billion for a variety of services to the U.S. military, notably in the field of logistics, and the money continues to flow in. As of April 2008, under a renewed contract, the company estimated that it had served more than 720 million meals, driven more than 400 million miles on various convoy missions, treated 12 billion gallons of potable water, and produced more than 267 million tons of ice. While these numbers may be impressive, so are the multiple claims from Pentagon investigators of Godzilla-like overcharges and waste, not to speak of spiraling claims of workplace negligence, including faulty electrical wiring that led to deaths and injuries on bases KBR built, and a failure to provide adequately clean water supplies to the troops; and then there are those allegations of war profiteering made by activist groups and politicians.

In September 2004, Lesar announced that Halliburton was considering spinning off KBR as a separate company, in part he claimed because it was bearing the brunt of a “vicious campaign” of political attacks and its employees didn’t “deserve to have their jobs threatened for political gain.” It took three years, but in April 2007 the spin-off of KBR was completed. It is now officially on its own, and the results for both companies seem little short of miraculous. No protestors even attended the three annual shareholder meetings that KBR has since held, though its activities in the war zones have hardly changed, and only five made it to Halliburton’s in 2008. This year, of course, the protesting larder was bare.

Five shareholder activists did manage to attend Halliburton’s annual meeting, including me. (I own a single share of Halliburton stock.) When I asked Lesar about the company’s links to KBR, he responded unequivocally, “First of all, let’s be very clear, KBR and Halliburton are legally separated.”

Just three months ago, however, Halliburton didn’t hesitate to pay off $382 million in fines to the U.S. Department of Justice as part of the settlement of a controversial KBR gas project in Nigeria in which the company admitted to paying a $180 million bribe to government officials.

Tom Dispatch for more