Thursday, July 10, 2003

Beware of Bush Bearing Gifts by Louise Richards 07 Jul 03 Bush's commitment to provide additional funds lays down the gauntlet to European Union, and not before time. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is in dire need of money. But should we be thankful for Bush's lead on this issue? It's a debatable point. Behind the headlines - and qualified support from international NGOs for the new funds - lies a different story. To start with, only $10 billion of Bush's pledged $15 billion is new. Second, as ActionAid has pointed out, there's no guarantee that this money will be spent over the next five years. The U.S. Congress has to sign off the funds each year, and recent history is littered with aid initiatives that slid into the sand. A recent joint report from U.S. think-tanks the Center for Global Development and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that as little as $45 million of Bush's money to fight AIDS will be spent in 2004. There is also the question of whether the funds will be tied aid - a hallmark of U.S. official development assistance. Revealingly, the USA has said it will deliver only one third of pledged dollars through the Global Fund, with the remaining money coming as bilateral aid. The Global Fund was set up specifically to be free of the conditionality associated with tied aid and it champions the purchase of the cheaper generic drug treatments central to fighting HIV/AIDS in the least-developed countries. The USA has in fact opened its taxpayers' chequebook to safeguard the patent rights of its powerful pharmaceutical lobby. The Bush plan states that 2 million sufferers of HIV/AIDS will be provided with drug treatments. This could be a bonanza for U.S. drug corporations whose AIDS drug sales in Africa account for just 0.2 per cent of turnover. If other U.S. aid programmes are anything to go by, contracts to supply treatments will be offered to US pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, which reportedly rakes in profits of more than $1 million an hour. Yet overseas manufacturers of generic treatments can massively undercut the price of Western drugs. [OneWorld.net] 8:09:23 AM  Google It!

All Spin All The Time by Russ Baker 09 Jul 03 Viva Nihilism! It must be great working in the Bush White House. Zero accountability. It's All Spin, All the Time. Nothing matters but politics, hence no unfounded claim requires correction or apology. Unless, of course, they are pushed to the end of the plank, as they were recently with the tale about Niger and nuclear materials. Take those elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction. Despite the failure of the concentrated might of the U.S. military-intelligence complex to find anything that might qualify in the remotest possible way, the administration labels critics 'revisionist historians' and imperturbedly moves on. The initial assertions and touted 'discoveries' usually get more attention than does the sound of a balloon deflating. That's why polls find a sizable chunk of the American public still under the impression that WMD have been found. Whatever Saddam's interest in WMD, the administration didn't know what he had and didn't have solid evidence to make the claims it did -- much less to launch a war over them. For those amateur 'revisionist historians' out there, here is a partial, unscientific reconstruction of the claims that fizzled. [TomPaine.common sense] 12:48:42 AM  Google It!

DNA Profiles Link Dope to Its Source 09 Jul 03 Forensic scientists in the U.S. are applying DNA fingerprinting methods to the cannabis plant. They say the technique, which is being used to create a database of DNA profiles of different marijuana plants, will help them to trace the source of any sample. 'It links everybody together: the user, the distributor, the grower,' says the database's creator, Heather Miller Coyle of the Connecticut State Forensic Science Laboratory in Meriden. 'That's the real intent of it, to show it's not just one guy with a little bag of marijuana, but it's a group of people.' A method for spotting the tiniest traces of marijuana, based on detecting DNA unique to cannabis chloroplasts, has already been developed in the UK (New Scientist print edition, 07 Aug 1999). But the profiling method, based on the same principles as DNA fingerprinting of people, can distinguish between closely related cannabis plants (Croatian Medical Journal, vol 44, p 315). In a case awaiting trial in Connecticut, prosecutors plan to use cannabis DNA profiles to show that two apparently separate cannabis growing operations were actually linked. The two operations, in different parts of the state appeared separate until analysis of the plants revealed that some had identical DNA fingerprints, showing that the growers were sharing material. [NewScientist.com] 12:43:00 AM  Google It!

National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States 08 Jul 03 The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9-11 Commission), an independent, bipartisan commission created by congressional legislation and the signature of President George W. Bush in late 2002, is chartered to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, including preparedness for and the immediate response to the attacks. The Commission is also mandated to provide recommendations designed to guard against future attacks. The Commission released its first interim report on July 8, 2003. The Commission held its third public hearing on 'Terrorism, Al Qaeda, and the Muslim World' on July 9, 2003 in Washington, DC. [National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States] 12:24:53 AM  Google It!

Cheney Loses Ruling on Energy Panel Records by Henri E. Cauvin 09 Jul 03 A federal appeals court yesterday rejected Vice President Cheney's bid to keep secret all the workings of his energy task force, saying sufficient safeguards were already in place to prevent the disclosure of genuinely privileged information. The 2 to 1 ruling, by a panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, does not in itself order the release of specific information, but it affirms a lower court judge's order seeking documents that would shed light on the membership of the group Cheney assembled more than two years ago to help develop U.S. energy policy. [Washington Post] 12:01:17 AM  Google It!