Month: March 2010

The moral courage of Israeli dissidents.

by JOHN PILGER

I phoned Rami Elhanan the other day. We had not spoken for six years and much has happened in Israel and Palestine. Rami is an Israeli graphic designer who lives with his family in Jerusalem. His father survived Auschwitz. His grandparents and six aunts and uncles perished in the Holocaust. Whenever I am asked about heroes, I say Rami and his wife, Nurit, without hesitation.

Soon after we met, Rami gave me a home videotape that was difficult to watch. It shows his daughter Smadar, aged 14, throwing her head back, laughing and playing the piano. “She loved to dance,” he said. On the afternoon of 4 September 1997, Smadar and her best friend, Sivane, had auditions for admission to a dance school. She had argued that morning with her mother, who was anxious about her going to the centre of Jerusalem. “I didn’t want to row,” said Nurit, “so I let her go.”

Rami was in his car when he turned on the radio to catch the three o’clock news. There had been a suicide bombing in Ben Yehuda shopping precinct. More than 200 people were injured and several were dead. Within minutes, his mobile phone rang. It was Nurit, crying. They searched the hospitals in vain, then the morgue; and so began, as Rami describes it, their “descent into darkness”.

Rami and Nurit are two of the founders of the Parents Circle, or Bereaved Families Forum, which brings together Israelis and Palestinians who have lost loved ones. “It’s painful to acknowledge,” he said, “but there is no basic moral difference between the [Israeli] soldier at the checkpoint who prevents a woman who is having a baby from going through, causing her to lose the baby, and the man who killed my daughter. And just as my daughter was a victim [of the occupation], so was he.” Rami describes the Israeli occupation and the dispossession of Palestinians as a “cancer in our heart”. Nothing changes, he says, until the occupation ends.

New Statesman for more

by TOM FOWLER

The e-mail read like something sent by your quasi-Internet-literate uncle with a hearing aid and conspiracy theory streak:

IN ORLANDO LAST WEEK, AT A CITGO STATION, REGULAR GAS WAS PRICED AT $2.82 PER GALLON, AND NO CUSTOMERS…

HOWEVER, ACROSS THE STREET FUEL WAS SELLING FOR$2.85 PER GALLON AND ALL PUMPS THERE HAD CARS WAITING TO FUEL UP. What’s going on? Word is getting around!!!!! Read on:

Have you noticed how the CITGO signs have disappeared in the past 7-8 months? A very clever move by Chavez. But guess what, “CITGO” IS CHANGING ITS NAME, too …

PETRO EXPRESSSS

Being in the refining capital of the U.S., I regularly get readers irate about anything related to Hugo Chavez and Venezuela. The country nationalized Western oil and gas assets there when Chavez came to power and U.S. refiner Citgo is now owned by the Venezuelean national oil company. There’s actually a certain amount of glee some readers show at the recent bad turn of events there. (Full disclosure: I had a soft spot for Citgo from my early days as a driver, pre-Chavez mind you).

But the Petro Express e-mail caught my attention for personal reasons…

I remember Petro Express from the 1990s when I lived in North Carolina. Its parent company — Pantry Inc. — used to be based in the small city of Sanford, N.C. , where I worked previously (the paper did not have a Web site waaay back then). Could the good people of Sanford really have sold out to South American socialists?

Not exactly. It turns out Petro Express is still part of Pantry, but they do get some of their gasoline from Citgo. According to their 2009 annual report:

Gasoline Operations. We purchase our gasoline from major oil companies and independent refiners. At our locations we offer a mix of branded and private branded gasoline based on an evaluation of local market conditions. Of our 1,655 stores that sold gasoline as of September 24, 2009, 1,141, or 68.9%, were branded under the BP ® , CITGO ® , Chevron ® , Shell® , Texaco® or ExxonMobil ® brand names. We purchase our branded gasoline and diesel fuel from major oil companies under supply agreements. We purchase the fuel at the stated rack price, or market price, quoted at each terminal as adjusted per the terms of applicable contracts. The initial terms of these supply agreements have expiration dates ranging from 2010 to 2013 and generally contain provisions for various payments to us based on volume of purchases and vendor allowances. We purchase the majority of our private branded gallons from CITGO Petroleum Corporation (“CITGO”). There are approximately 64 gasoline terminals in our operating areas, allowing us to choose from more than one distribution point for most of our stores. Our inventories of gasoline (both branded and private branded) turn approximately every four days.

Turns out this e-mail is pretty old. It has been the subject of vetting by a couple of online myth-busters in the past.

But would boycotting Petro Express take a bite out of Hugo Chavez’ budget?

Maybe. But there’s no way of really knowing if the gas going in your tank (even at a Citgo branded station) necessarily came from a Citgo refinery. The many arms of gasoline distribution system in the U.S. means a station could be getting fuel from a terminal that is being supplied from some other refinery around the country. Citgo has said in the past such boycott efforts haven’t had an impact on their sales.

And as Citgo has been emphasizing in recent ad campaigns, all of its outlets are independently owned. So a boycott would certainly hurt the mom-and-pop owner of that service station.

Houston Chronicle

On the occasion of International Women’s Day (8 March), UNESCO joins forces with international and regional media organizations to launch the annual Women Make the News (WMN) initiative.
Under the theme “Towards Gender Sensitive Indicators for Media: Best Practices for Gender Perspective in Media and in Media Content”, WMN 2010 is intended to initiate a global exchange on the importance and the need for gender sensitive indicators for media organizations.

Fifteen years ago the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, adopted at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, highlighted the key role of media to promote gender equality in all spheres. All stakeholders are called to join forces to combat “stereotyping of women and inequality in women’s access to and participation in all communication systems, especially in the media”.

As organizations all around the world take stock of the achievements and outcomes of the implementation of the Beijing Declaration, UNESCO and its major international partners believe there is a need to emphasize the role of media to achieve the objectives of the Declaration. This gives rise to such questions as: How media institutions can effectively assess their gender sensitive responsiveness and how civil society can, in turn, evaluate this responsiveness? Are media merely transmitters of information relating to gender equality or are they joint partners to operationalize the Beijing Declaration, enabling the creation of knowledge and multiply its outcomes? How can media effectively play this role? It is hoped that this year’s campaign will help to answer some of these questions.

UNESCO for more

MARYAM BIBI talked with Alasdair Soussi

PHOTO/Khwendo Kor

A chief executive of a women’s charity is not usually what springs to mind when one considers dangerous professions. But when that profession is based in one of the most violent and volatile cities in the world, the dangers are all too real. Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s restive North West Frontier Province (NWFP), has hovered on the brink of war for 30 years. It’s been home to Maryam Bibi and her organization, Khwendo Kor (KK), since 1993. For Bibi, the threat of death is a daily occurrence in this socially conservative city which borders the militant Khyber region and is only an hour’s drive away from war-torn Afghanistan.

‘It is very dangerous here and our work is badly affected,’ says Bibi, speaking from her home in Peshawar. ‘Our offices have been attacked, our staff have been kidnapped, but 90 per cent of the people here want development and demand our work; only 5 to 10 per cent are miscreants.’

By work, Bibi means her long-standing commitment to empower women through education, better healthcare and job creation. Khwendo Kor – meaning Sister’s Home in the local language, Pashto – has been active in the NWFP for the past 17 years, and was established ‘so women themselves could take the initiative’ in Pakistan’s rural and notoriously hostile tribal communities.

‘I come from Waziristan and I know the situation of women there. I was lucky to get exposure to education – and the credit for that goes to my father, who was courageous enough to educate his daughters – but even being educated I understood how difficult it was to think for yourself as a tribal woman. I wasn’t trying to do anything outside of my religion; I simply wanted to work. I didn’t want to have to be dependent on others just because my husband was not well. When he died I wanted to do things for myself. When I found I was not allowed, culturally, I was shocked. Then, when I came to know other women, I was further shocked – I saw how they were much poorer, not educated. It was then that I decided that I would do something for women. I established this organization to highlight women’s issues, so we could take ownership of our own identity.’

New Internationalist for more

by SONIA SHAH

Compared to, say, espionage or alien warfare, the drug development business rarely appears on the big screen, and its few cinematic portrayals generally involve sinister white-coated characters doing shadowy experiments. In that sense, the new filmExtraordinary Measures, in which a desperate father and biochemist race to develop a cure for a rare genetic disease, marks a refreshing departure. Although not exactly the stuff of industry jingles, there are no bad guys here, either.

Brendan Fraser plays John Crowley, whose two young children suffer from the inherited acid maltase deficiency, Pompe’s disease. As his kids descend to death’s door while the doctors helplessly wring their hands, Crowley, a drug-company marketing executive, decides to take matters into his own hands. Faced with a similar dilemma, Denzel Washington’s character in the 2002 film John Q held an entire emergency room hostage; while Susan Sarandon and Nick Nolte as distraught parents in 1992’s Lorenzo’s Oil did groundbreaking research. Crowley, a businessman who has “everything under control”, as his wife smoothly intones, opts for the miracles of the market. In partnership with curmudgeonly biochemist Robert Stonehill, played by Harrison Ford, and a slew of supercilious venture capitalists, Crowley launches a biotech startup aimed at bringing a lifesaving Pompe drug into clinical trials.

Loosely based on Crowley’s real-life role in the development of Genzyme’s drug Myozyme (alglucosidase alfa)—as described in Geeta Anand’s fine 2006 book, The Cure—the film chronicles an array of challenges on the path to the wonder drug. Stonehill’s academic research is promising, but his university pays its football coach more than his entire research budget, despite his brilliant scientific breakthroughs. Tight-fisted venture capitalists won’t underwrite Crowley and Stonehill’s startup unless the drug can be brought into clinical trials within the impossible timeframe of 12 months. The biotech giant that ultimately buys the startup won’t develop the drug until convinced they can capture a profitable market.

Much of this will be enlightening material for viewers unfamiliar with the travails of drug development. To its credit, the film neither shies away from the heartless calculations of commercial research, nor condemns them; after all, regulators must be appeased and the costs of doing business recouped. And there’s some good fun to be had watching an old action-hero star defend the virtues of scientific freedom.

It’s too bad that the film’s emotional depth rivals that of an afternoon TV special. Keri Russell, who plays Crowley’s wife Aileen, cares for two dying children in wheelchairs with a bland perkiness. You’d think she’d spent the afternoon vacuuming. Brendan Fraser’s soppy portrayal of Crowley has him meeting every business setback with the woeful dutifulness of a dog delivering a wet newspaper. Stonehill’s character is particularly shallow. He’s meant to be an eccentric academic—we know this because he’s shown blasting Grateful Dead and guzzling Budweisers while scribbling mathematical gobbledygook on his chalkboard—but he comes off more like a petulant diva, flouncing off whenever anyone offends his delicate scientific sensibilities. He expounds on his commitment to research—“I don’t care about money! I’m a scientist! I care about more important things than that!”—and yet dumps his university lab for a $6 million cheque and a job at a biotech company.

But what really had me scratching my head was the film’s presentation of the obstacles to creating a drug for Pompe’s disease as primarily economic, rather than scientific and technical. The technical challenges in synthesising enzyme-replacement therapies are legion. Genzyme is still plagued with manufacturing difficulties, with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) discovering particles of trash and viral contamination in some of its enzyme-replacement drugs last year. By contrast, economic obstacles to development are minimal. Regulatory authorities provide generous incentives for orphan drugs, and insurance companies can be shamed into paying astronomically high prices for them.

That’s why Genzyme and its cinematic counterpart already had three drugs for Pompe’s disease in the pipeline before buying Crowley’s startup (the one they ended up launching was not Crowley’s). And it’s why about a third of all new drugs approved by the FDA last year were the so-called orphan drugs, aimed at rare diseases. Myozyme, priced at $200,000 a year, netted Genzyme over $300 million last year. What demands superhuman action is launching drugs and interventions that aren’t profitable for drug companies, such as those that are off-patent, or which cater to the illnesses of the poor and poorly insured. John Crowley is undoubtedly a driven, heroic figure. But for bringing a lucrative drug like Myozyme to market, few “extraordinary measures” are really required.

Sonia Shah’s The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind For 500000 Years will be published by Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux in July. Her website is Sonia Shah

by BELEN FERNANDEZ

PHOTO/ Eduardo Fuentes

The second paragraph of a January 27 article in Venezuelan daily El Universal entitled “Riot leaves at least 7 dead and 17 wounded in La Planta” announces that “a little after 9 this morning, inmates in the La Planta prison, mainly in cell blocks 1, 2 and 3, initiated a shootout. Meanwhile the National Guard responded with shots from above.” The fact that the Caracas prison inmates have obtained materials with which to initiate a shootout suggests that the National Guard, tasked with prison security, may have had more to do with the scene than simply responding from above—something additionally suggested by the reaction of prisoners’ wives outside the complex to the arrival of more troops:

“More than 60 members of the National Guard deployed around the penitentiary with antiriot gear but the inmates’ wives would not permit them to enter the premises and instead threw rocks at [them] while screaming ‘Assassins of the people’ and ‘You will not go in.’”

The El Universal article also describes the evacuation of part of the Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV) building due to proximity to the shootout, although it fails to propose such proximities as a potential way to get rid once and for all of the media outlet, whose role in the 2002 coup against Chávez the government had cited as one reason not to renew its broadcast license. As for ways to get rid of other sectors of the Latin American population, Maria Luisa Borjas—former chief of internal affairs for the Honduran police force —commented in a November 2009 interview that “in Honduras being young is a crime.”

Upside Down World for more

by HELENA NORBERG-HODGE

Today, the planet is on fire with global warming, toxic pollution and species extinction, with fundamentalism, terrorism and fear. The dominant media tell us that WE are to blame: our greed is the cause, and we as individuals must change our consumer habits. However, if we try to deal with these crises individually, we won’t get very far. We need to stand back and look at the bigger picture. It then becomes obvious that the driving force behind our crises is a corporate -led globalization. Despite the apparent enormity of making changes to our economic system, isolating this root cause can be very empowering. Rather than confront an overwhelming list of seemingly isolated symptoms, we can begin to discern the disease itself.In so doing it also becomes apparent that joining hands with others is a key to reversing environmental and social breakdown.

The most powerful solutions involve a fundamental change in direction – towards localizing rather than globalising economic activity. In fact, “going local” may be the single most effective thing we can do. Localisation is essentially a process of de-centralisation – shifting economic activity back into the hands of local businesses instead of concentrating it in fewer and fewer mega-corporations. Food is a clear example of the multi-layered benefits of localisation.

Since food is something everyone, everywhere, needs every day, a shift from global food to local food would have a great and immediate impact, socially, economically and environmentally. Local food is, simply, food produced for local and regional consumption. For that reason, ‘food miles’ are relatively small, which greatly reduces fossil fuel use and pollution. There are other environmental benefits as well. While global markets demand monocultural production – which systematically eliminates all but the cash crop from the land – local markets give farmers an incentive to diversify, which creates many niches on the farm for wild plant and animal species. Moreover, diversified farms cannot accommodate the heavy machinery used in monocultures, thereby eliminating a major cause of soil erosion. Diversification also lends itself better to organic methods, since crops are far less susceptible to pest infestations.

Counter Currents for more

by RAMZY BAROUD

When American historian Howard Zinn passed away recently, he left behind a legacy that redefined our relationship to history altogether.

Professor Zinn dared to challenge the way history was told and written. In fact he went as far as to defy the conventional construction of historical discourses through the pen of victor or of elites who earned the right of narration though their might, power and affluence.

This kind of history might be considered accurate insofar as it reflects a self-seeking and self-righteous interpretation of the world by a very small number of people. But it is also highly inaccurate when taking into account the vast majority of peoples everywhere.

The oppressor is the one who often articulates his relationship to the oppressed, the colonialist to the colonized, and the slave-master to the slave. The readings of such relationships are fairly predictable.

Even valiant histories that most of us embrace and welcome, such as those celebrating the legacy of human rights, equality and freedom left behind by Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela still tend to be selective at times. Martin Luther King’s vision might have prevailed, but some tend to limit their admiration to his ‘I have a dream’ speech. The civil rights hero was an ardent anti-war champion as well, but that is often relegated as non-essential history. Malcolm X is often dismissed altogether, despite the fact that his self-assertive words have reached the hearts and minds of millions of black people throughout the United States, and many more millions around the world. His speech was in fact so radical that it could not be ‘sanitized’ or reinterpreted in any controllable way. Mandela, the freedom fighter, is celebrated with endless accolades by the very foes that branded him a terrorist. Of course, his insistence on his people’s rights to armed struggle is not to be discussed. It is too flammable a subject to even mention at a time when anyone who dares wield a gun against the self-designated champions of ‘democracy’ gets automatically classified a terrorist.

Tehran Times for more

by WASSIM MROUEH

BEIRUT: The Arabic language is one of the few languages that still lacks fixed and comprehensive standards when it comes teaching and testing, according to educational expert Adnan el-Amine.

Directing a seminar held in Le Bristol Hotel entitled “Arab and International Experiences in measuring the Capability of University Students in Mother Tongue Language,” Amine explained that “there are simply no fixed standards telling us how to teach students the Arabic language in every stage of education.”

The series of seminars held for the seventh year for the occasion of the mother tongue language international day kicked off Thursday with the participation and sponsorship of Sidon MP Bahia Hariri, in addition to a number of educational figures. The secretary general of the UNESCO Lebanese National Committee, the institution that convened the seminar, Salwa Siniora Baasiri welcomed the audience stressing that “ the committee was interested in coming up with a method to measure the abilities of students in their mother tongue language so that they explore its ability in the fields of knowledge, science, philosophy and sociology.”

For her part, Hariri praised the seminar “because it’s centered around testing students for their abilities in their mother tongue language just before joining university.” She added that improving the use of the native language during the high school phase is critical because it represents the last chance for the new generation to master their mother tongue. “If this opportunity is wasted, it means that our children will not be able to lead and improve their societies in the future, as language is the only means of communication between educated people,” Hariri said.

The Daily Star for more

by HUSSAIN KASHIF

LAHORE: Outspoken opposition legislator Samina Khawar Hayat, on Thursday, shook the House with a startling declaration when she called on the Punjab government to amend the existing laws to allow men to marry for a second, third and fourth time without the consent of their first wife.

The PML-Q lawmaker went as far as saying that she had no problem if her husband, Khawar Hayat, were to marry again without her permission.

She was taking part in debate on an adjournment motion, moved by Sheikh Allauddin of the PML-Q dissidents, regarding the recruitment of unmarried women – over the prescribed age of 30 – in government departments. He asked the government to allot a special 18 percent job quota in the public sector for such women.

Both opposition and treasury lawmakers supported the motion and succeeded in convincing the chair to put up the issue for further debate on Monday. Speaking on the House floor, Allauddin argued that more than 17 percent of women in Punjab remained unmarried due to financial constraints or other social reasons, such as a lack of dowry, and that their number was increasing day by day. He also maintained that many affluent individuals spent millions of rupees on ‘mistresses’ and illicit affairs, but were too embarrassed to enter into wedlock with them.

Speaking on the issue, Samina Khawar Hayat said, “If there is no bar on them marrying again, all of men’s frustrations would be reduced, while the women would be able to salvage their honour and lead secure lives”.

Daily Times for more