Month: June 2009

[Cha-Cha means Charter Changer]

Perhaps the regime figured that enabling Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to extend her immunity by allowing her to run as representative of her district and then become prime minister is less costly politically — with less chances as well of inviting an upheaval — than postponing the 2010 elections or declaring martial law, without completely closing its doors on these options.

By BENJIE OLIVEROS (Bulatlat)

MANILA – After months of playing coy and testing the water, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s minions in the House of Representatives led by House Speaker (read: Stooge) Prospero Nograles have finally rammed through House Resolution 1109 providing for the convening of Congress as a constituent assembly to amend the 1987 Constitution with both houses of Congress voting as one.

The penultimate drama, perhaps played to lure the public into complacency, was the withdrawal last month of sponsorship of the resolution by Rep. Luis Villafuerte of Camarines Sur. The drama reached its climax with the midnight passage of the resolution on Tuesday, June 2, perfectly timed on the last week of the Congress’s session.

The administration party, which has recently emerged from a merger of Lakas and Kampi, explained the railroading of the charter change (cha-cha) resolution with the inane excuse that it just wants the Supreme Court to rule with finality on the supposed constitutional gray area of whether, in a constituent assembly, both houses should vote as one or separately. They probably thought the Filipino people are so stupid that we would accept such an silly excuse. It is no different from a criminal who fires a gun at a person and explains in court that he never intended to kill or injure the victim — he just wanted to see if the victim would die after being hit.

In the first place, the Supreme Court could not act on the matter if the Senate sits on the resolution and if nobody files a petition before the High Court. Well, of course, the Arroyo government has erstwhile Marcos loyalist Oliver Lozano who immediately filed, on cue, a petition before the Supreme Court to declare House Resolution 1109 as unconstitutional. In effect, this pulled the rug from under the Senate, which was planning to block the House resolution through its inaction.

It can be recalled that it was also Lozano who filed the weak impeachment complaints against President Arroyo in 2005 and 2006 to preempt the filing of the stronger complaints. Lozano’s action enabled the administration’s underlings in the Lower House to dispatch of these with ease.

Bulatlat for more

What is the purpose of publications? (…) The purpose of data is to support, directly or indirectly, the marketing of our product.” [1, 2]

BY JAQUELINE (Laika’s MediLibLog)

It is well known that studies with significant positive results are easier to find than those with ‘negative’ results. This so called publication bias can arise from the tendency to submit or accept manuscripts that have a positive rather than a negative or neutral result. It can also be the consequence of deliberately overemphasizing positive results or even worse: the results can be “embellished”, (partly) faked or negative results can be “hidden.”

In fact, pharma-sponsored trials rarely produce results that are unfavorable to the companies’ products [3, 4, 5]. For instance, none of the published 56 trials of NSAIDs in arthritis identified by Rochon et al in 1994 [3] had outcomes that were unfavorable to the company that sponsored the trials. Another study showed that studies funded by a company were four times more likely to have results favorable to the company than studies funded from other sources [1, 4]

Ghostwriters, who write articles that are officially credited to another person, are part of the tactics. Ghostwriters may be hired by companies to write articles for medical journals that appear under the names of scientists who didn’t substantially contribute to the paper. In extreme cases pharmaceutical companies and their agents control or shape multiple steps in the research, analysis, writing, and publication of articles. This so called ghost management can be outsourced to MECC’s, medical education and communication companies.

All the above approaches, -and more- are said to have been used by Merck to sell their Vioxx (rofecoxib) pills, the blockbusting painkiller, that could cause heart attacks and strokes [6]. Merck knew, but didn’t disclose (all) these adverse effects*. Later it appeared that many Vioxx- manuscripts were prepared by sponsor employees (ghost writers), but attributed to academic investigators who did not always disclose industry financial support. Distancing himself from one such article, first author Jeffrey Lisse said in an interview that:
“Merck designed the trial, paid for the trial, ran the trial…Merck came to me after the study was completed and said, ‘We want your help to work on the paper.’ The initial paper was written at Merck, and then it was sent to me for editing” [NY-times -[2005].

And although Merck has “voluntarily” withdrawn Vioxx from the market in 2004 and has agreed to pay billions to settle lawsuits in the US, the Vioxx-ghost keeps hunting Merck (and us).

In a few weeks 3 news-items have crossed my eyes.

A. The Guardian ( May 4) http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/may/04/merck-vioxx-campaign-parliament mentioned that Merck refused to compensate hundreds of Britons who have suffered serious cardiovascular problems while on Vioxx. Ministers apparently backed down from supporting these people after lobbying by the company.

B. May 1st NewsInferno reported that Merck was accused of hiring a ghostwriter for a Circulation paper (2001) to minimize issues linked to Vioxx’s safety, while the well known cardiologist Dr. Marvin Konstam agreed to act as lead author. This was revealed by Prof. Jelinek during an Australian lawsuit against Merck.

C. The above news story was covered by Australian Newspapers including “the Australian” . In its article on the lawsuit, the Australian also devotes one sentence to a fake Elsevier/Merck journal. It says:

“The drug company also allegedly produced an entire journal — called The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine — and passed it off as an independent peer review publication.”

It is this sentence that has caused a tsunami, starting with the Scientist, via blog.bioethics.net to many other blogs of researchers, publishers, librarians and to newspapers. “Everybody” was alarmed.

What were the allegations? Are they all true? Who is to blame? Merck or Elsevier? Most importantly: is it an isolated incidence, something completely new and what is its impact?

Laika’s MediLibLog for more

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