Drug Patent Politics

This sounds pretty awful. Novartis, the Swiss drugs company, is challenging the patent law in India and if they are successful, the price of some drugs could skyrocket. A woman who reported a rape was arrested and refused a morning-after pill in Florida.

You Are What You Eat Revisited

An interesting (and substantial) article in the New York Times Magazine by Michael Pollan about the rise of "Nutritionism" and decline of nutrition in the American diet. Before and After retouching shots of models from (Flash Movie) Christiane Beaulieu

Guantanamo: Set Them Free

Guantanamo Bay is an illegal detention centre run by the US Government. They run it in a different country in order to avoid judicial regulations in their own country. Amnesty International is campaigning for the closure of Guantanamo or the fair trial of its prisoners, but the camp continues and the suffering continues. Join the (Flash movie) Amnesty Flotilla and call for the closure of the prison.

Pat Robertson predicts major terrorist attack in late 2007

I've been checking No Se Nada at Science Blogs occasionally and saw this post about a prediction by Pat Robertson, the conservative christian. Mr. Robertson says God told him during a prayer meeting that there would be a major attack in America that would mean mass killings. He says this will happen in the later part of the year. He really provides a lot of good copy - the Wikipedia entry has a larger section on "Controversies and Criticisms" than the part that deals with his life and views. This guy ran for President in 1988! From reading the scurrilous Wikipedia entry you'd think this man's life was dominated by hilarious self-promotion, attacks on fellow christians, muslims and hindus and vague but bullying threats aimed at whole groups of people. Oh, and scandalous corruption. My favourite is the "Age-Defying Shake", which is not a convulsion brought on by a visit of the Holy Spirit, but a recipe for a refreshing drink that Pat uses, enabling him to leg-press 2000 pounds!

American Paranoia Sheesh

Sheesh, there are apparently a lot of people in the Land Of The Free who think that their government cynically manufactured 9/11 (or stood by and watched it) so they could start a war in the Middle East. I don't believe it and I think it's amazing that so many Americans believe it. There is a video called "Loose Change" on Google that goes through some of the arguments, the main one being that the hole in the Pentagon looks too small for a large passenger jet to have crashed into it; it looks more like the hole a cruise missile might have made! OK the hole looks small, but the jump from there to the cruise missile theory is a bit of a leap. Here's a (video link of course!) copy of the same video with added comments from a disbeliever.

Iranian Holocaust Denial

Iran has been organising a conference to investigate the truth behind The Holocaust. They said it would be a "scientific" investigation and unbiased because they were not involved in the issue, however President Ahmadinejad recently said that the Holocaust was a myth, or that if it were true, then Western nations were responsible and should pay the price. He has been saying this for some time. Here's another article by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian again (the Guardian is hardly the champion of Israel). On Al-Jazeera there's a report that links a statement from the Iranian Foreign Ministry saying that Israel's crimes are worse than what jews suffered in the Second World War to the furore about the Danish cartoons and "Freedom of Speech" debate, so maybe this conference can be seen as a demonstration by Iran of the West's hypocrisy over freedom of speech. Iran made a similar move in August 2006 with an exhibition in Tehran of "Holocaust Cartoons". More discussion of the conference on the Guardian's "Comment is Free" site. The Guardian also has this story from just after the liberation of Buchenwald about a young boy from Lodz who escaped from Auschwitz after witnessing the gas chambers in action.
Update Christmas 2006: Frances Harrison reports for the BBC on the Conference.

TWBN#3: Racism at Home and Away

There will be few people in future years who defend the South African State and its Apartheid laws of 1948-1990. The UN describes these laws as "Racist beliefs enshrined in law". Racist arguments in the UK have always focussed around immigration. I wasn't aware at the time (1968) of Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech, but it was certainly quoted often enough in the 70s and 80s as I grew up. I remember particularly the abuse that some people got as "niggers" or "pakis", though in my little rural town there were not many people of different ethnic origins around, so most of the abuse was in the press or at football matches. There was one particular television programme that makes me wince when I think about it - it was called "Love Thy Neighbour". I wonder whether black people complained about this programme when it was aired; perhaps this was in the days when complaints weren't taken so seriously. "Love Thy Neighbour" was written by a team with a record of ridiculing bigots, and the main white character in this was certainly a racist bigot, but the black characters suffered a lot of outrageous abuse in the name of ridiculing the bigot. It was apparently immensely popular though. Around that time I'm sure you would have heard a lot more racism in pubs and clubs; I think Bernard Manning's and Jim Davidson's heydays were back then. Davidson's act included a character called "Chalkie", which was basically a chance to take the piss out of West Indians. People complain about political correctness, but I think it's good that (video link) idiots don't get away with racist stuff so easily these days; I can't imagine many black people feeling comfortable going to see Manning or Davidson in the 70s


The Story of Apartheid in South Africa at the BBC World Service.
The UN web page about Apartheid with pictures
Informative article at InfoPlease

TWBN#1: The IRA Bombing Campaign

This is the first in what might be a series of "Think the World is Bad Now?" (TWBN) posts, which I warned you about in an earlier post. People seem to think everything is worse than it used to be, but a lot of things that are going wrong now are not unprecedented and some things have actually got better. I'll start with a terrorist campaign that was "provoked", instigated and nurtured, then was relaxed, revived and finally (?) abandoned, all within the UK (although many would say it would never have got far without serious financial support from Irish Americans).

I only want to talk about what I remember of this with just a bit of prompting / help from other sources. I think it can teach us a lot about living with a terrorist threat and what mistakes it can push the Government into. I don't remember much about the first period in the early seventies, I don't think I paid much attention to the news in general at that point, but I did sort of know that some people were letting off car bombs and sending letter bombs. The main attacks in the early seventies were the Guildford and Birmingham pub bombings. The ones I remember are these (I had to look up the dates):

Car bomb kills Airey Neave (1979)
Hyde Park Bandstand Bombing (1982)
Harrods bomb (1983)
Grand Hotel Brighton blown up during the Conservative Party Conference (1984)
Manchester Arndale Centre (1996)
Mortars in Whitehall (1991)
Canary Wharf (1996)
Bus bomb near Waterloo Bridge (1996)

When Airey Neave was killed it was a big shock because it was a car bomb that went off in the House of Commons car park. The Hyde Park bandstand bombing stands out because the press made a big fuss about the horses that were killed and injured. I remember that being on the front pages. The Harrod's bomb apparently made some of my family worry for me because I lived in London at that point. This attack was apparently the model for a similar one in Doris Lessing's "The Good Terrorist" (good book by the way).

The biggest attack of the 80's was the Grand Hotel in Brighton which was blown up during the Conservative Party Conference. The Tories at that time were at the height of their powers, Thatcher particularly. I hated the Government and its policies at that time, but this attack was pretty shocking and the pictures made me queasy. The stand-out image was of Norman Tebbit (he was once paraphrased as telling unemployed people to "get on your bikes" to look for work) being lifted from the ruins in his pyjamas I think (the bomb went off in the middle of the night).

The Arndale Centre in Manchester in June 1996 is the one I remembered out of order. It actually came after Canary Wharf. I just read on the BBC site about this one that it went off while bomb disposal people were trying defuse it (or were about to) and that those injured were mostly outside the police cordon (hit by flying glass). Apparently the Centre has been rebuilt and is much better than it used to be.

The mortars that went off in Whitehall were fired from the back of a van. One exploded in the Garden of 10 Downing Street but no one was hurt.

Canary Wharf was hit by a large bomb in 1996. This marked the breaking of a ceasefire that had lasted over a year. The bomb that went off prematurely in Aldwych near the Strand killed a young man called Edawrd O'Brien, the bomber. This one brought home to me that the IRA frequently chose volunteers who were able to blend into their surroundings and seemed unremarkable.

In 1997 the IRA declared a new ceasefire that has remained in place since then, though there have been further attacks by splinter groups, notably the Real IRA.

Sources
Wikipedia
20th Century London
BBC News