Saturday, March 31, 2007

Florida Girls Lift Weights, and Gold Medals

From New York Times

No other state has officially adopted weightlifting for girls, as the Florida High School Athletic Association did in 1997, a sign that the perception endures of weightlifting as a sport for he-men and the occasional bodybuilding queen who slathers her preternaturally bulging biceps with baby oil.

“I find it very surprising,” said Jackie Metcalf, the weightlifting coach at Sarasota High School. “because it’s a great way to get girls involved for gender equity. You don’t have to be a skilled athlete to do this.”

The presence on many teams of cheerleaders — who become better jumpers and fliers after lifting — has helped remove the stigma from the sport, several girls said. Many wear bows in their hair at competitions, and at a recent meet, one wore pearls with her singlet. They share weight rooms with boys who admiringly call them “beast.” T-shirts emblazoned with “Silly Boys, Weights Are For Girls” and the like are de rigueur.

Extracurricular club programs for girls have sprung up around the country since women’s weightlifting became an Olympic sport in 2000. But Florida, with 170 high school teams that have produced two Olympians and several dozen world team members, has “set the gold standard” for the sport, said Rodger DeGarmo, director of high performance and coaching for USA Weightlifting in Colorado Springs, the governing body that oversees Olympic lifting.

“I think it’s awesome for this group of girls because there’s so many times you have to be tall, slender,” said Judy Miller, Jessica’s foster mother. “With this, you can be any size.”

Some chugged bottles of honey before they lifted — the sugar high helps, they said — while others sat silently in a corner of the gym, summoning their strength. They ranged from 93.6 pounds to 379.1, from featherweight cheerleaders to hulking softball players and even girls who never before dabbled in sports.

“It doesn’t matter how much you lift,” said Jessica, a senior at Booker High School in Sarasota, after collecting her gold medal. “It just matters that you’re trying to make yourself better.”

Some coaches have to recruit aggressively to build a team, correcting misperceptions along the way.

“A lot of girls think if you do it you’re going to get all beefy,” said Alexa DeCristofaro, a senior at New Smyrna Beach High School who won first place in the 199-pound weight class. “Well, you really don’t. If you do it, you get toned, which is different from getting totally muscular.”

In the decade since high schools here began offering girls’ weightlifting, certain towns — Port Orange (near Daytona Beach), Port Charlotte (near Sarasota), Fort Walton Beach (near Pensacola) — have become known for their girl weightlifters. Tom Bennett, a coach at Spruce Creek High, said one of his former lifters won a slot at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs and others are bent on joining her.

“The girls are very, very competitive — in some cases more than the boys,” said Mr. Bennett, whose team of 30 girls has won every state weightlifting championship since they began in 2004.

The sport is far more popular in North Florida than in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach Counties, possibly because South Florida has more wealth and its young athletes gravitate toward “upper class” sports like tennis and golf, Mr. Bennett said. Altha, a speck of a town in the Panhandle, sent six girls to this year’s state finals, while Miami sent none.

Mr. Bennett’s team practices at least 12 hours a week. Like other coaches around the state, he recruits from the school softball, soccer, cheerleading and basketball teams, with the promise that weightlifting will improve athletic performance in general.

“It definitely makes them faster, more explosive, more flexible, stronger,” said Richard Lansky, a member of the board of USA Weightlifting who runs an extracurricular club in Sarasota.

Divvying up the cake

March 19, 2007
From The Economist print edition

TONY BLAIR'S most famous pronouncements on wealth aim at opposite ends of the income distribution. The prime minister once declared that Labour would abolish child poverty within a generation. He also said he had no burning ambition to make sure that David Beckham, a commodity with a sideline in football, earns any less. In putting these two thoughts together, Mr Blair was sticking to a consensus that has held for the past 20 years. Broadly, this says that the rich can get as rich as they like, so long as the poor are getting better-off too.

However, new figures out this week suggest that the bargain isn't working. The number of poor children, as defined by the government, has grown by 100,000 in the past year. Furthermore, overall income inequality has grown too (see chart), despite hefty redistribution under Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer.

The failure of this part of the bargain is starting to call into question the other part. Using tax data going back a century, Tony Atkinson, an economist, has calculated that the incomes of the richest 1% have followed a U-shape for the past 60 years, and are now back to the level they were at just after the second world war, when Britain was still a place of great estates and silver soup tureens. Yet ever since Margaret Thatcher's government in the 1980s, this rise has been tolerated, on three conditions: that average incomes are rising too, that there is enough income mobility to prevent the place from feeling too oligarchic, and that those at the bottom are getting less poor.

These terms may be breaking down now, presenting a problem not just for Mr Blair but for his successor—almost certainly Mr Brown—and also for the other main parties. The Conservatives are also keen to reduce child poverty. In a deliberately provocative speech, David Cameron, the Tory leader, adopted the metaphor of a caravan crossing the desert to highlight the importance of making sure that the income growth of the poorest keeps pace with the rest. The provocation was all the greater since the phrase had been coined by Polly Toynbee, who writes for the Guardian and is an unabashed soaker of the rich.

The trouble is that all three of the conditions have taken a turn for the worse. Average incomes have now grown slowly for the past four years. The last time they slowed to this extent was in the mid-1990s, when there was greater appetite for bringing the rich low. Admittedly, part of this pique was owing to the fact that some of them were running utility companies that had been privatised. But the current recipients of windfalls—private-equity partners and money managers—are not much more loved. Getting rich by starting a company is one thing; getting rich by moving money around is another.

As a result of these movements at the top end, Britain “now has a more American pattern of income distribution”, according to Oliver Letwin, the Conservative Party's philosopher-in-chief. But, Mr Letwin notes, there is not yet an American-style culture of giving back to society in return for success. Nor is there a British version of the idea that anyone can make it if they apply themselves, even though Britain has a slightly more fluid society than America's. Instead, people worry that the great shift in social mobility that came with the expansion of higher education and of white-collar work has come to an end, leaving the people who did not benefit from it more stuck than ever. The view that freedom might increase inequality but would promote more social mobility has turned out to be false, says David Laws, the Liberal Democrat spokesman on work and pensions.

Meanwhile, this week's figures suggest that the incomes of those at the bottom are stalling. On March 28th the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), a think-tank, noted that Labour's good record on child poverty—over half a million children have been lifted out of poverty since 1998—is less impressive when the focus is shifted to very poor children. If the poverty line is drawn at 40% of median household income rather than 60%—the government's definition—there has been no improvement since 1997. Adults without children have fared even worse: there are more of them living in relative poverty now than since records began in 1961.

Frank Field, a former Labour welfare minister, thinks these things, together with worries about unaffordable housing, are shifting the consensus on levels of taxation that has remained intact for decades. After Mr Brown's tax-cutting budget, new levies on the rich still look unlikely. But the 20-year-old settlement that Mr Blair so eloquently summed up is now looking increasingly shaky.

Millions face drought in SW China


More than 5.5 million people are short of drinking water because of an acute drought in south-western China, state media reports.

Low rainfall in the province of Sichuan has forced officials to deliver clean water to the worst-hit areas.

Six million livestock and half a million hectares of land are affected, Sichuan's governor said.

Many areas of China are regularly hit by water shortages or droughts, with some blaming climate change.

Most of Sichuan received no major rain in February, and no significant rain predicted before the end of March.

Stunted crops

Lack of rainfall and unusually warm temperatures are to blame for the drought that has hit farmers in Sichuan province, causing losses of nearly 300 million yuan ($38m, £19m), the official Xinhua news agency said.

Last year, much of Sichuan and neighbouring Chongqing were hit by a severe drought which severely stunted crop growths in many areas.

Other parts of China have experienced abnormal weather conditions recently.

Hundreds of thousands of people in the north-west of the country needed emergency water supplies earlier this year because of low rainfall in Shaanxi province.

Digital lock's rights and wrongs

When a piece of music is purchased you might assume you can listen to it in on any number of different devices: at home, in the car or on a portable music player. But, in the UK at least, you would be wrong.

"You can't copy any form of music or film without the copyright owner's consent," explained copyright lawyer Hamish Porter.

"So if you buy a CD from a record shop, even copying that CD onto your iPod is unlawful unless you have the copyright owner's consent."

In practice, stopping consumers making CD backups has proved impossible to enforce. But our habits are changing; around 10% of purchased music is now downloaded. This raises different issues.

"When you download an electronic copy of a musical work or a film from a website," said Mr Porter, "the copyright owner, as part of the contract under which you have downloaded it, has allowed you to copy that file onto a laptop or an iPod or onto a hard disc.

The problem, some believe, is that the music labels have made these contracts pretty restrictive by using something called Digital Rights Management (DRM).

Flaws

David Roundtree, the drummer with Blur told us: "The idea is that DRM is supposed to allow you to control the copying of your music.
"That's the point of it all. You're supposed to be able to sell something to somebody and restrict what they do with it after that."

Software is embedded in downloaded music, restricting which devices it can be used with and how many copies can be made.

Many in the recording industry claim DRM is necessary to fight music piracy.

"The problem that we really face at the moment is unfettered filesharing, free copying of MP3s," explained Richard Gooch from the International Federation of Phonographic Industry which represents all the major record labels.

"MP3 is fine, but what is not fine is taking artists' work and then swapping it with a large number of people over the internet for free."

DRM is the solution, the music industry says.

But Simon Wheeler, the Director of Digital Beggars Banquet Records, disagrees.

"DRM can allow copyright holders to protect their intellectual property but considering that over 90% of the music sold in the music market today is on a non-DRM format called the CD, then that's not necessarily an answer."

David Roundtree also has misgivings: "I think the fundamental problem with it is that it doesn't work. If it did work we would be having a rather different conversation.
"It's best summed up by the old computer security maxim: whatever you can do in software, you can undo in software. In the case of music, whatever complicated system you have in place, the music has to come out of two wires that you have plugged into a loud speaker.
"I can just as easily plug those into a recording device as a loud speaker, so the whole concept is fundamentally flawed."

Incompatible

There are two main kinds of DRM. One is based on Microsoft code and is used by most of the major download services.
But the one store which dominates the market, Apple's iTunes, uses a completely different and incompatible DRM system called FairPlay.
FairPlay allows music downloaded from the iTunes store to be played on computers running iTunes that have been authorised by the consumer and only one portable device, iPods.

Users can copy downloaded songs to a CD and then copy the disc back on to the computer so that the songs can then be moved to other portable devices - but the quality of the music is affected.

"I think the problem that we've got with DRM at the moment is the most popular music player on the market, the iPod," said Mr Wheeler.
"If you buy digital music outside of iTunes or an MP3 based service then you're not going to be able to put the music on your iPod. I think that confuses consumers more than anything else."

The fight back against DRM has already begun. In Europe, Apple's system is under fire for being anti-competitive and is facing legal action in various European countries.

Consumers are also making their voices heard through various organisations which oppose DRM, which they term Digital Restrictions Management.

While the major labels are still largely behind DRM, the independent sector prefers a different approach. Sites like E-Music and Audio Lunchbox sell DRM-free tracks, all of which come from Indie labels.

"I believe that if music was sold without DRM there would be less confusion for the consumer," said Mr Wheeler. "They wouldn't have to worry whether the track they brought from service X would play on player Y."

"They could buy with confidence knowing that they could take their music with them on whatever portable device they wanted.

"I think this growth in confidence for the consumers would lead to market growth and I think that's a real benefit for the industry."

DRM-free or otherwise, at least some more imaginative approaches to music services have been appearing. Spiralfrog promises ad-supported downloads - when or if it eventually launches.

Aime Street has launched. Here, the price of each track is decided by its popularity. Less popular or new tracks are free, rising to a maximum of 98 cents if their popularity increases. At the moment it deals almost exclusively in independent music.

Silent orchestration

From The Economist print edition

LAST month Ian Gillan, lead singer with Deep Purple, an elderly heavy-metal band, made an angry attack on the group's record label, Sony BMG. His tirade against the company's “opportunistic fat cats” was provoked by the CD release of a 1993 live performance, which the rock star claimed was the band's “worst gig ever”. On March 1st, two days after Mr Gillan's outburst, the European Commission announced its own re-release, saying it would look again at the merger that created Sony BMG in 2004. Europe's anti-trust authorities have until July 2nd to decide whether the merger should now be picked apart.

Before the merger, there were five record “majors”—Universal, Sony, Bertelsmann, Warner and EMI—which together accounted for 80-85% of recorded music sales in western Europe. Once Sony and Bertelsmann fused their record subsidiaries into Sony BMG, the merged entity had an average 20-25% share in national markets. This is not enough clout on its own to trouble the trustbusters: in fact Sony BMG has a smaller European presence than Universal, the leading record company. At issue is whether the four majors together might now reach an unspoken understanding about prices.

The evidence is not yet in. But what about the theory? Cartels—in which pacts among companies are formally agreed—are notoriously difficult to sustain, not to mention illegal in most instances. Witness the tensions that dog OPEC, the cartel of oil-producing countries. A tacit understanding faces even bigger challenges. Suppliers must co-ordinate without negotiation on a mutually profitable price, then stop anybody undercutting it. In principle, industry consolidation makes it easier for firms to synchronise their actions. A merger that turns five big firms into four, for example, cuts their bilateral links from ten to six.

Co-ordinating a price is one thing; sticking to it is another. Companies face the same dilemma that has undone countless hypothetical prisoners in economics textbooks. There is an incentive to collude with other suppliers to boost prices, just as two prisoners have good reason to keep mum about their crime. But there is also a temptation to renege to gain sales, much as one prisoner might end up ratting on another.

Yet in the right circumstances a tacit understanding can endure. Those among equal partners have the best chance of lasting. A rough parity in market shares should mean that the benefits of high prices are split evenly, minimising the risk that one firm breaks ranks. Firms with similar costs and capacity will also share a common view of what the “right” price is. If, on the other hand, one firm has lots of spare capacity or lower costs than its competitors, it will find undercutting them hard to resist.

Symmetry helps, but the temptation to cheat will be too great if rival firms cannot monitor each other's behaviour and respond quickly if one of them reneges. The obvious riposte to cheating is to abandon price co-ordination altogether. But a cleverer response is to suspend it temporarily—introducing “promotional” prices on selected goods, for example—as a prelude to a bloodier price war should the treachery continue. If the short-term gains from cheating are small relative to the long-term losses from lower industry prices, the threat of prompt retaliation may be enough to sustain tacit collusion.

Markets in fast-moving and relatively cheap goods are easiest to police. Where transactions are “lumpy”, as in the commercial aircraft industry, the short-term profits from undercutting rivals are too big to resist.

Even if an understanding can be co-ordinated and policed, it could still be broken by outside forces, such as smaller competitors or new entrants. That is why the consolidation of Europe's package-holiday industry might not ring too many alarm bells in Brussels. The number of big firms is shrinking from four to two, but unless the commission is convinced that one of them could dominate the market on its own, it is likely to tread carefully.

In 1999 the commission blocked a merger between two of the four big British tour operators, Airtours (now MyTravel) and First Choice, only to see the decision annulled by the courts. It had argued that the big firms might arrive at an implicit understanding to restrict industry supply. The courts disagreed, ruling that it is difficult to collude tacitly on something as complex and opaque as tourism capacity, harder still to discipline cheating, and impossible to prevent smaller competitors or new entrants from expanding supply and spoiling the incumbents' game.

It's hard to sing in harmony

What about the record industry? Wholesale record prices are highly visible—a few prices in company catalogues account for the bulk of sales—which suggests that firms could plausibly co-ordinate on an agreed tariff. Sales turnover is rapid, which means a cheat cannot make much money before its rivals have a chance to retaliate. The main suppliers also interact in a variety of markets and on joint ventures like compilations, so there are ample opportunities to dole out selective punishment.

But tacit collusion may still be beyond them. For one thing, the prices they publish are not always the ones they are paid. Record companies offer retailers targeted discounts in return for shelf space and marketing resources. And although one CD looks much like another, music is a gloriously “differentiated” product, so firms cannot infer what their rivals are doing from their own sales data. If, say, EMI's market share slumps, is it because a competitor is cutting prices or because the new album from its biggest star is no good?

The commission initially cleared the Sony-Bertelsmann merger on the basis that prices were not fully observable. It was forced by the courts to look at it again. Sony BMG has already lost one battle, forced to recall the offending Deep Purple album. It won't want to lose another.

Latin America migrant money tops aid


By Duncan Kennedy

BBC News, Mexico City


The amount of money sent home by Latin American migrant workers to their families has reached more than $62bn.


This figure now exceeds the combined total of all direct foreign investment and foreign aid to Latin America.


According to the Inter-American Investment Bank, the figure could reach $100bn in four years' time.


The biggest share of money, $23bn, was sent back to Mexico, mostly from workers living in the United States remitting small sums each month.


Foreign remittances now rank along with oil and tourism as Mexico's biggest foreign currency earner.


The Inter-American Development Bank, which supports the region with aid and other help, says the remittances will increase by about 15% a year during the next four years.


The bank describes the money as a very effective poverty reduction programme because it keeps between 8m and 10m families above the poverty line.


But it says it also means the economies of the region are not generating enough jobs to keep workers from leaving in the first place.


Another problem is that much of the money is sent back in small amounts and so it is difficult to track.


The average is between $100 and $150 a month.


That in turn makes it an unpredictable source of revenue for governments to tap into.


The bank says it wants people to get away from what it calls cash to cash flows and into account to account transfers but the bank says the recent crackdown on illegal immigrants by the US authorities could hinder efforts to get migrants to use banks.

When Less Is Best

By RORY STEWART.

Why are we in Afghanistan? Vice President Cheney talks terror, Britain focuses on narcotics. The European Union talks 'state-building,' others gender. On a different day, the positions seem interchangeable. Five years ago, we had a clear goal. Now we seem to be pursuing a bundle of objectives, from counterinsurgency to democratization and development, which are presented as uniform but which are in fact logically distinct and sometimes contradictory.

Finance officers in Kabul and shepherds in Kandahar want to know what we did with the $10 billion we spent in the last four years. So do any number of commentators on Afghan TV and radio. And when Helmand villagers see soldiers from countries thousands of miles away carrying guns and claiming to be only building schools, they don't believe them.

I have noticed that many Afghans now simply assume we are engaged in a grand conspiracy. Nothing else in their minds can explain the surreal gap between our language and performance. The United States needs to be honest about what it wants from Afghanistan and what it can achieve.

We should remember that we came first to protect ourselves against terrorist attack. Afghans can understand this and help. But counterterrorism is not the same as counterinsurgency. Counterterrorism requires good intelligence and Special Forces operations, of the sort the U.S. was doing in 2002 and 2003. Recently, however, NATO has become involved in a much wider counterinsurgency campaign, involving tens of thousands of troops. The objective now is to wrest rural areas from Taliban forces.

But many of the people we are fighting have no fixed political manifesto. Almost none have links to Al Qaeda or an interest in attacking U.S. soil. We will never have the troop numbers to hold these areas, and we are creating unnecessary enemies. A more considered approach to tribal communities would give us better intelligence on our real enemies. It is clear that we do not have the resources, the stomach, or the long-term commitment for a 20-year counterinsurgency campaign. And the Afghan Army is not going to take over this mission.

Our second priority should be to not lose the support of the disillusioned population in the central and western part of the country. We have spent billions on programs that have alleviated extreme poverty and supported governance but have not caught the imagination of Afghans. Afghans are bored with foreign consultants and conferences and are saying, 'Bring back the Russians: at least they built dams and roads.'' To win them over we should focus on large, highly visible infrastructure to which Afghans will be able to point in 50 years -- just as they point to the great dam built by the United States in the 1960s. The garbage is still seven feet deep and buildings are collapsing in Kabul. We can deal with these things and leave a permanent symbol of generosity.

Once we are clear about our own interests, we can think more clearly about the third priority, which is to improve Afghan lives through development projects. There are excellent models, from U.N. Habitat to the Aga Khan network, which has restored historic buildings, run rural health projects, and established a five-star hotel and Afghanistan's mobile telephone network. The soap business that the American Sarah Chayes has developed with Afghan women has been more successful than larger and wealthier business associations. Such projects should be separated from our defense and political objectives.

Sometimes it is better for us to do less. Dutch forces in the province of Uruzgan have found that, when left alone, the Taliban alienate communities by living parasitically, lecturing puritanically and failing to deliver. But when the British tried to aggressively dominate the South last summer, they alienated a dangerous proportion of the local population and had to withdraw. Pacifying the tribal areas is a task for Afghans, working with Pakistan and Iran. It will involve moving from the overcentralized state and developing formal but flexible relationships with councils in all their varied village forms.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that we squandered an opportunity in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003, being distracted by Iraq and not bringing enough troops or resources. But my experience in Afghanistan has led me to believe that the original strategy of limiting our role was correct.


URL: http://www.nytimes.com

LOAD-DATE: March 20, 2007

France backs extradition to China

France has signed an extradition treaty with China despite concerns expressed by human rights groups over Beijing's use of the death penalty.

France's justice minister said a suspect would be extradited in cases punishable by death only if China guaranteed they would not be executed.

Pascal Clement also said the treaty excluded offences judged to be political or military.

France is the third EU country after Spain and Portugal to sign such a pact.

"This treaty explicitly anticipates the rejection of extradition requests based on offences viewed as political offences or military offences," said Mr Clement at the signing ceremony.

A further guarantee was that the arrest warrants issued by a police authority also had to be "validated by a judicial authority", he said.

Human rights groups have urged the French parliament - which must ratify the treaty - to block its adoption because of what they say are continuing serious human rights violations in China.

Amnesty International France said there was "no certainty that a Chinese citizen extradited one day with the clearest guarantees will not be sentenced to death at a later date on a different charge".

Outgoing French President Jacques Chirac, who made an official visit to China in October aimed at strengthening economic ties, is a staunch advocate of engagement with Beijing, correspondents say.

Abortion Plan in Mexico City Shakes a Heavily Catholic Land

Dominated by liberals, Mexico City’s legislature is expected to legalize abortion in a few weeks. The bill would make this city one of the largest entities in Latin America to break with a long tradition of women resorting to illegal clinics and midwives to end unwanted pregnancies.
But the measure has stirred a vicious debate and shaken this heavily Roman Catholic country to its roots.
The contours of the debate are familiar to veterans of similar battles in the United States. But Mexico City’s law would be groundbreaking in Latin America, where most countries allow abortion only under strict conditions, like when the life of the mother is in danger or when she is a victim of rape or incest. Only in Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guyana can women have abortions on demand during the first trimester. Three countries — Chile, Nicaragua and El Salvador — ban it without exception.
The Mexico City bill would make it legal to have an abortion during the first trimester for any reason. The procedure would be free at city health facilities. Private hospitals would be required to provide an abortion to any woman who asks for one, though doctors with religious or ethical objections would not be required to perform abortions.
Catholic leaders and church officials have denounced the proponents as “baby killers” and have warned that the law could provoke violence against doctors who agree to provide the service. A group of Catholic lawyers are pushing for a citywide referendum on the issue, hoping to avert the vote in the city Legislative Assembly.
Women are dying, above all poor women, because of unsafe abortions,” said María Consuelo Mejía, the director of Catholics for the Right to Decide. “What we would like is that these women never have to confront the necessity of an abortion, but in this society it’s impossible right now. There is no access to information, to contraceptives. Nor do most women have the power to negotiate the use of contraceptives with their partners.
Conservatives respond that abortion is tantamount to murder. “This law is a law that will cost many lives,” said Jorge Serrano Limón, the head of Provida, an anti-abortion group. “If it is signed, it will spill a lot of blood, the blood of babies just conceived in the maternal womb.”
Mr. Serrano Limón and other opponents also dispute that the law will end illegal abortions. The procedure carries such a stigma here, they say, that whether legal or not, many women will seek out underground clinics to keep their condition secret from their friends and families anyway.
People are talking about abortion openly for the first time in Mexico,” said Lilian Sepúlveda, a lawyer with the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights who tracks the issue in Latin America. “It is historic.”
They say that it’s a problem of a woman’s rights over her body, but they ignore the right over their bodies that all the aborted girls and boys have,” he said later in his homily. “They deny them the fundamental right, which is the right to life.
Many women here are watching the political battle with a mix of trepidation and hope. Like many laws in Mexico, the abortion law is honored as much in its breach as its observance.
Government officials estimate at least 110,000 women a year seek illegal abortions in Mexico, and many abortion rights groups say the number is much higher. At least 88 women died in 2006 from botched abortions, the Health Ministry says, though it is far from clear that all cases were reported.
For the poor, unwanted pregnancies often mean finding a midwife or an underground clinic, abortion rights advocates say. Some young women also resort to huge doses of drugs for arthritis and gastritis, available over the counter, that can cause miscarriages. Others use teas made from traditional herbs to cause miscarriages. All of these methods carry dangers.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Research Topics

Dear All,

These are the debate topics listed on World Debate Website. Now we've got work to do...

Ella

Afghanistan (e.g. failed democracy and drug production)
AIDS prevention (e.g. condoms, drug patents)
Anti social behaviour orders (ASBOs in UK & Ireland)
Assassination of heads of state
Ban hunting (e.g. fox hunting in UK)
Burma (e.g. Aung San Suu Kyi)
CCTV (use of)
Child care (e.g. for working mothers or maternity/paternal leave)
China and Taiwan
Citizen initiated referenda
Citizenship exams
Class action lawsuits (banning them)
Compulsory ID Cards
Condoms in Pornography
Consensual Cannibalism
Cuba (e.g. sanctions against)
Darfue & Sudan
Death penalty (e.g. 1000th execution in US, concept of “redemption”)
Established Journalism vs blogs/podcasts
Egypt (e.g. rise of Islamist political parties)
EU Commission (e.g. lection of)
EU Constitution/Budget
EU working language
EU/US relations (e.g. trade, terror etc)
Euro (e.g. Italy should abandon)
Exploration of Space (e.g. Mars, ISS, China)
Extended alcohol drinking licences (e.g. 24 hour pubs)
Face transplants, ethics of
Fault divorces vs no fault divorces
Freedom of labour movement (e.g. migrant labour in EU)
Free Speech (e.g. Wikipeadia)
Trade Unions (e.g. future of)
Gay rights (marriage, priests etc)
Honour killings
Human genetics (cloning, stem cells etc)
Human Rights and sporting events (e.g. Olympics in China)
Hybrid energy (e.g. hybrid cars)
Illegal Immigration (e.g. Spanish enclaves in Africa)
International Adoption (e.g. Romanian orphans)
International ban on whaling
International Challenge in business (i.e. industry moving from west to east) AKA Outsourcing
International emergency response force (e.g. Tsunami, Earthquake, New Orleans)
International extradition of terrorists (CIA flights to Europe) Also International Rendition
International laws on intellectual property (copyright, patents etc).
Internet music/film Piracy (e.g. BitTorrent etc)
Internet Pornography (e.g. .xxx domain names, child prono)
Internet regulation (ICANN)
Iraq, future of
Judicial independence (e.g. removal of a judge)
Korea (North v South relations)
Lebanon & Syria
Limit Free speech (e.g. Holocaust denial/incitement of terror)
Limits to self defence (e.g. shoot burglars)
Mandatory minimum sentences
Maritime Law (e.g. flags of convince)
Martial Law (e.g. French Riots)
Medical "fashion" (e.g. Bird Flu vaccine)
National/individual carbon quotas
Nuclear Power (e.g. environmental benefits)
Nuclear proliferation/disarmament (e.g. Iran)
Obesity in Children
Outing gay public figures
Parental consent for medial treatment of under 16s (including seeking an Abortion, obesity, MMR)
Parental responsibility for crimes of children
Performance enhancing drugs (e.g. sport)
Pensions (e.g make them compulsory)
Palestine

Pre-emptive military action (e.g. Israel v Iran)
Privacy of the Catholic confessional
Prostitution

Public vs Private education
Public-Private partnerships in infrastructural development
Religious dress in school/work (e.g. Hijab in France)
Religious education (e.g. what should be taught in state funded schools)
Religious law Vs National Law (e.g. canon law)
Respect for national sovereignty (e.g. in war on terror)
Respecting Ethnic Diversity (Muslims in France, travellers in Ireland, race riots in Sydney)
Retirement Age (raising it)
Rights of minority to homeland (Sri-Lanka, Basque, Kurds etc)
Russian economy
Salary cap in sport
Shoot to kill policy in war on terror (e.g. tube in London)
Social partnership
Social welfare vouchers
State funding for charity
State funding for sports
Tax incentives for artists
Telephone records (e.g. state monitoring private calls)
Term limits for politicians (e.g. Tony Blair, Robert Mugabe)
Testing on Animals (e.g. at Oxford)
Torture (e.g. use of in war on terror)
Traffic problems (e.g. Congestion charges, toll roads, mandatory car pooling etc)
Treatment of addicts (e.g. cold turkey or access to further treatment e.g. George Best's liver transplant)
Truth & reconciliation commissions
Try Saddam Hussein in private
Turkish entry to EU (including Cyprus issue)
UN (e.g. reform of)
Uganda Elections
War Crimes Tribunals (e.g. Croatian general)
Women's rights (e.g. in the Church, workplace, education etc)
Women in politics (e.g. Germany Chile)
WTO Negotiations (e.g. Agricultural subsidies)
Zimbabwe (democracy, constitution, elections)

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Organ Harvesting Before “Brain-Death“ Increasingly Common

By Gudrun Schultz

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 21, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Organ harvesting from patients before brain-death has been declared is a rapidly increasing trend in U. S. hospitals, the Washington Post reported March 18, alarming doctors and ethicists about the dubious ethics behind the practice.

Instead of waiting until brain function ceases and the patient is declared “brain-dead“ by medical officials (itself a questionable practice since there is no universally-accepted definition of brain-death) surgeons have begun following an approach known as “donation after cardiac death.“ Organs are harvested once the heart has stopped beating and several minutes have passed without the heart spontaneously re-starting.

“Non-beating heart“ organ donations have more than doubled since 2003, from 268 to more than 605 in 2006, and the numbers are continuing to rise. The United Network for Organ Sharing and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations now require all hospitals to evaluate the practice and decide whether or not to adopt it.

The Alliance for Human Research Protection issued an alert Sunday warning that the policy is under consideration by hospitals without allowing for public input.

The race to catch-up to China's policy of live vivisection organ removal from prisoners is underway right here in the US where, the Post reports, the trend is expected to accelerate this year,“ the AHRP stated.

So far as we know, our right to informed consent--which means the right to
say, NO--has been abrogated without so much as a public hearing!“

While doctors normally wait five minutes after the heart has stopped before pronouncing death, more and more doctors are shortening the wait period to maximize the quality of the organs. Surgeons at the Children's Hospital in Denver, Colorado wait only 75 seconds after infants' hearts stop beating before removing the heart for transplant, according to the Post. The demand for usable organs is a powerful incentive to push back the ethical boundaries of harvesting policies, say alarmed physicians.

A lot of us are not particularly happy about cutting that line particularly
close,“ said Gail A. Van Norman, an anesthesiologist and bioethicist at the
University of Washington in Seattle.

It's worrisome when you stop thinking of the person who is dying as a patient but rather as a set of organs, and start thinking more about what's best for the patient in the next room waiting for the organs.“

While the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine approved the practice as ethical so long as strict guidelines are followed, opponents say it is difficult to ensure patients are not being killed by over-eager harvesting, particularly in pediatric situations. Van Norman and others said the practice could put pressure on families to stop care prematurely, especially when doctors and nurses are caring for both the potential donor and potential recipient.

David Crippen, a University of Pittsburgh critical-care specialist, told the Post he is concerned the changing definition of death will eventually lead to organ harvesting from the disabled.

Now that we've established that we're going to take organs from patients
who have a prognosis of death but who do not meet the strict definition of
death, might we become more interested in taking organs from patients who
are not dead at all but who are incapacitated or disabled?“

THW permit legislating by citizen initiated referenda


Citizen-initiated referendums

We cannot all go down to the local town centre as the ancient Athenians did. Our nations and our states are too big for that. Citizen-initiated referendum is one way for citizens to have a direct say in government decisions where there are large populations. Two of the things citizen-initiated referendum can do are:

allow citizens to propose a new law

allow citizens to vote against laws passed by parliament.

Some countries that have citizen-initiated referendum have one of the above and others have both.

Citizen-initiated referendum in three countries

Switzerland

The Swiss have had citizen-initiated referendum for over 100 years and in that time have voted on more than 300 issues. In 1977 the people rejected a proposal by the government for a new kind of tax. In 1984 they rejected another government proposal to reduce the working week from 42 hours to 38 hours.

United States

In the United States many states have some form of citizen-initiated referendum. In California during the 1990 elections, voters had to deal with a ballot paper with 20 referendum questions and 144 pages containing arguments for and against each referendum proposal.

In the 1960s the Californian government passed a law that real estate agents and owners of apartment houses could not use racial discrimination against people who wanted to rent or buy apartments or houses. The real estate agents initiated a referendum to overturn this law so that they could discriminate against people in this way. The real estate agents won.

Four states have voted to bring back the death penalty through referendum. Anti-gun laws have been introduced in several states.

Italy

In Italy the citizens can only initiate a referendum to vote against a law passed by the government. They cannot initiate a referendum to propose a law. In 1991 Italian people voted to remove a law which prohibited divorce.

How citizen-initiated referendum could work

Step 1

Some people in the community want a new law or to remove an existing law. They collect a number of petitions of registered voters and take them to the electoral office (say 1 per cent of voters in a majority of electorates in order to move to the next step).

Step 2

Parliamentary officers prepare a proposed law.

Step 3

The proposed law is debated in the parliament. If the parliament does not pass the proposal, it moves to Step 4.

Step 4

A referendum is held and if a majority of voters in a majority of electorates support the proposal, it becomes law.



This House Believes That we should have more direct democracy?

Arguments against more direct democracy

Arguments for more direct democracy

People already have a choice between members of parliament and the government programs they support.

People have more say about particular issues. Sometimes politicians of opposite sides agree among themselves on a policy they know the people don't support.

People already have to vote for federal, state and local governments. They don't want to have to go to polling booths more often. Electronic voting is not a realistic option; it has too many problems.

Electronic media allows debate and voting among large populations without any need for people to come to one place.

People have an opportunity, apart from elections through community and lobby groups to influence governments and governments are often guided by opinion polls.

Governments and parties can still play a role as they do today.

Citizen campaigns can more easily be led by people or groups with money - meaning wealthy groups have too much influence. Individual citizens or groups of citizens who propose change may not have the interest or the ability to make proposals in the best interests of all the different groups in the country or state.

Politicians are not the only people who are expert in making decisions for the nation as a whole. As people become more involved they become more expert.

Representative governments should look after the interests of minorities as well as the majority that voted for them. The people may be more influenced by prejudice or less concerned about minority rights.

Representative governments have not always looked after the interests of minority groups.

Once the people had voted on a citizen-initiated referendum it would have to become law. There would be no opportunity for the parliament to review the proposed legislation or make changes before it became law.

There is no reason to think that citizens will be any better or worse than governments.




referendum campaigning is much less well developed and well understood than the art of election campaigning. More effective in saying “NO” than saying “YES”
Amongst other things, modern political advertising tends to be:

* negative, often fiercely so;
* visual rather than textual;
* targeted to different segments of an electorate which is profiled and segmented in depth by party organisations;
* in particular, targeted at “swinging voters” who are considered by the parties to be the voters who are least well-informed, least civic minded, most materialistic and most easily stirred to negative emotions;
* increasingly short and simple;
* content-free as far as substantive issues and policies are concerned;
* geared to selling personalities rather than policies.

None of this is well suited to securing the passage of a referendum proposal, and task which requires (a) clearly explaining the proposal so that a large majority of the voting population understand it and (b) providing persuasive arguments to convince a majority of the voters to support it.

Monday, March 26, 2007

Poor Behavior Is Linked to Time in Day Care

A much-anticipated report from the largest and longest-running study of American child care has found that keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class — and that the effect persisted through the sixth grade. And as expected, parents’ guidance and their genes had by far the strongest influence on how children behaved.
But the finding held up regardless of the child’s sex or family income, and regardless of the quality of the day care center. With more than two million American preschoolers attending day care, the increased disruptiveness very likely contributes to the load on teachers who must manage large classrooms, the authors argue.
On the positive side, they also found that time spent in high-quality day care centers was correlated with higher vocabulary scores through elementary school. The findings are certain to feed a long-running debate over day care, experts say.
The debate reached a high pitch in the late 1980s, during the so-called day care wars, when social scientists questioned whether it was better for mothers to work or stay home. Day care workers and their clients, mostly working parents, argued that it was the quality of the care that mattered, not the setting. But the new report affirms similar results from several smaller studies in the past decade suggesting that setting does matter.
That the troublesome behaviors lasted through at least sixth grade, he said, should raise a broader question: “So what happens in classrooms, schools, playgrounds and communities when more and more children, at younger and younger ages, spend more and more time in centers, many that are indisputably of limited quality?
The study did not take into account employee turnover, a reality in many day care centers that can have a negative effect on children, said Marci Young, deputy director of the Center for the Child Care Workforce, which represents day care workers.
In 2001, the authors reported that children who spent most of their day in care not provided by a parent were more likely to be disruptive in kindergarten. But this effect soon vanished for all but those children who spent a significant amount of time in day care centers.
What the findings tell me is that we need to pay as much attention to children’s social and emotional development as we do to their cognitive, academic development, especially when they are together in groups,” said Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit research group.

Failing Schools See a Solution in Longer Day

States and school districts nationwide are moving to lengthen the day at struggling schools, spurred by grim test results suggesting that more than 10,000 schools are likely to be declared failing under federal law next year.
In Massachusetts, in the forefront of the movement, Gov. Deval L. Patrick is allocating $6.5 million this year for longer days and can barely keep pace with demand: 84 schools have expressed interest.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York has proposed an extended day as one of five options for his state’s troubled schools, part of a $7 billion increase in spending on education over the next four years — apart from the 37 minutes of extra tutoring that children in some city schools already receive four times a week.
“In 15 years, I’d be very surprised if the old school calendar still dominates in urban settings,” said Mark Roosevelt, superintendent of schools in Pittsburgh, which has added 45 minutes a day at eight of its lowest-performing schools and 10 more days to their academic year.
But the movement, which has expanded the day in some schools by as little as 30 minutes or as much as two hours, has many critics: among administrators, who worry about the cost; among teachers, whose unions say they work hard enough as it is, and have sought more pay and renegotiation of contracts; and among parents, who say their children spend enough time in school already.
Still others question the equity of moving toward a system where students at low-performing, often urban, schools get more teaching than students at other schools.
And of all the steps school districts take to try to improve student achievement, lengthening the day is generally the costliest — an extra $1,300 a student annually here in Massachusetts — and difficult to sustain.
The idea of a longer day was first promoted in charter schools — public schools that are tax-supported but independently run.
Pressed by the demands of the law, school officials who support longer days say that much of the regular day must concentrate on test preparation. With extra hours, they say, they can devote more time to test readiness, if needed, and teach subjects that have increasingly been dropped from the curriculum, like history, art, drama.
“As people are starting to really sweat, they’ve increasingly started to think really hard about ‘are we giving them enough time?’ ”
Still, some educators question whether keeping children in school longer will improve their performance. A recent report by the Education Sector, a centrist nonprofit research group, found that unless the time students are engaged in active learning — mastering academic subjects — is increased, adding hours alone may not do much.
Money also has proved a big obstacle.
Given that expense, New Mexico is acting surgically. The state is spending $2.3 million to extend the day for about 2,100 children in four districts who failed state achievement tests. The money, $1,000 a student, goes for an extra hour of school a day for those children, time they spend on tutorials tailored to their weaknesses in math or reading.
Many parents in Fall River said they were pleased by the commitment a longer schedule signaled, reasoning that more hours meant more chances for their children to succeed.
Some parents in this working-class community, like John Chaves, father of a seventh-grader, Mindy, said they supported more time at school simply because so few are home earlier to welcome their children. “We’re never home at the time that they’re home, so at least we know where our kids are,” Mr. Chaves said.

Mr. Puck’s Good Idea

From time to time, consumers are reminded of the power they have, and the power of the choices they make. There is no better example than the rising popularity of organic food — a matter of conscience and of taste. More and more people are buying local, organic produce and trying to find meat and eggs and dairy products from farms that are not part of the horror of factory farming.
Not surprisingly, people who shop that way also like to dine out that way. That will now be easier thanks to Wolfgang Puck, the universal restaurateur. He has decided that his culinary businesses will now use products only from animals raised under strict humane standards.
Mr. Puck is not the first chef and restaurateur to decide to forgo factory-farmed meat and eggs. You can find a few restaurants upholding these standards in nearly every major American city. But Mr. Puck runs an empire, not a restaurant. His outreach is enormous, and so is his potential educational impact. In fact, he has come late to this decision, perhaps because it affects a corporation, not the menu of a single restaurant.
For one thing, Mr. Puck’s new standard will help correct a misimpression. Many diners assume that most of the cruelty in factory farming lies in producing foie gras and veal. But Americans consume vastly more chicken, turkey, pork and beef than foie gras and veal, and most of the creatures those meats come from are raised in ways that are ethically and environmentally unsound. Until recently, most Americans have been appallingly ignorant of how their food is produced. That is changing. And Mr. Puck’s gift for showmanship will help advance Americans’ knowledge that they can eat well and do right all at the same time.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Down the YouTube?

IT HAS been a terrible month for Google, the biggest search engine and the internet’s reigning superpower, and for its subsidiary, YouTube, the pioneer and precocious leader of online video. Users may love them, but the old-media companies, feeling increasingly exploited, loathe them, sue them, and gang up on them. And that matters, because neither Google nor YouTube, as quintessential “new-media” companies, own any of the content that they organise so well.
Viacom is suing them for $1 billion, alleging massive copyright theft; it is also teaming up with an innovative new online-television company, Joost, to make its videos available legally. Walt Disney is allied with Apple and its iTunes store, which is increasingly a squeaky-clean (in terms of copyright law) video retailer besides being a music store. And the NBC/News Corporation venture, which may yet be joined by Sony and others, embraces not only a vast library of video content but also an equally staggering distribution alliance. The videos will play not only on the venture’s new (as yet unnamed) site to be launched this summer, but on the websites of Yahoo!, Time Warner’s AOL, and Microsoft’s MSN, the three biggest web portals. At a stroke the venture will, legally, reach almost the entire American internet audience.
Of greater concern to YouTube, however, is the clear evidence that NBC and News Corporation both realise that they must not try to trap viewers on specific websites, but rather let them watch videos “on the sites where they live,” as Peter Chernin, News Corporation’s president, puts it. Teenagers will be able to post video clips on their own MySpace pages; even bloggers using independent services will be able to embed videos on their personal diaries. They will be able to discuss and annotate the clips and films with their own gossip, and thus be “social” in exactly the same way that YouTube allows. Just as on YouTube, the audience will be in control, by rating videos and spreading them “virally” throughout the entire web.
The only remaining difference will be that the content spread in this manner will be entirely and uncontroversially legal, and that advertising revenues will remain under the full control of the content owners. For the first time, it will be in the interests of the media companies to spill their best content onto the web. This is in stark contrast to the situation on YouTube today.
All this points to a clear trend. All over the chaotic and confusing field of online video, once naughty revolutionaries are suddenly becoming shockingly well behaved. BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file-sharing service that accounts for a big chunk of all internet traffic, has in the past been used for illegal trading of films. But it recently announced a new identity, in which it licences films from Hollywood and shares the rental and sales revenues with the studios. Joost, which was launched by the founders of Skype and KaZaa, another peer-to-peer service that was once used to trade pirated music, has been designed from scratch to be impeccably legal and to make money for participating content owners.
The future, in short, appears to favour old-fashioned, professionally produced content from which traditional media companies can make money. This comes as a shock after a year when YouTube seemed to herald the dawn of a new and different media era—that of “user-generated”, or amateur, content.
Was YouTube—and the bigger “Web 2.0” movement that it symbolised—just a brief bout of silliness, an echo of the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s? It was not. YouTube has already changed society and democracy in lasting ways, by lowering the barriers to entry for talented amateurs to reach an audience, and by providing an outlet for the creative impulse of millions. This is hardly trivial. But what YouTube has not done is to make professional content less attractive. YouTube has earned its place in the history books; just not on a profit-and-loss account.

Europe, a Moment to Ponder

IT is not easy to think of Spain as Poland. Stroll around this southern city at dusk, beneath the palms, beside the handsome bridges on the Guadalquivir River, past the chic boutiques and the Häagen-Dazs outlet, the Gothic cathedral and the Moorish palace, and it is scarcely Warsaw that comes to mind.
But, insisted Adam Michnik, the Polish writer, “Poland is the new Spain, absolutely.” He continued: “Spain was a poor country when it joined the European Union 21 years ago. It no longer is. We will see the same results in Poland.
If history is prologue, Mr. Michnik is likely to be right. The European Union, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its founding treaty this weekend, is more often associated with Brussels bureaucrats setting the maximum curvature of cucumbers than with transformational power. But step by step, stipulation by stipulation, Europe has been remade.
What began in limited fashion in 1957 as a drive to remove tariff barriers and promote commercial exchange has ended by banishing war from Europe, enriching it beyond measure, and producing what Mr. Michnik called “the first revolution that has been absolutely positive.”
Asia, still beset by nationalisms and open World War II wounds, can only envy Europe’s conjuring away agonizing history, a process that involved a voluntary dilution of national sovereignty unthinkable in the United States.
But it is a celebration in uncertainty. A bigger union, expanded to include the ex-Communist states of Central Europe, has proved largely ungovernable. A constitution designed to streamline its governance was rejected in 2005. Integration has been a European triumph, but not always of those who are part of large-scale Muslim immigration. The founding treaty, signed by the six founding members on March 25, 1957, rested on creative ambiguity. It called for an “ever closer union among the European peoples”; behind it lay dreams of a United States of Europe.
Still, the ambiguity persisted; it has proved divisive. Economic power has been built more effectively than political or strategic unity. Military power has lagged.

Nonetheless, “autopilot” in the union still amounts to a lot.
It will ensure, for example, that over $100 billion is sent to Poland from now to 2013 to upgrade its infrastructure and agriculture, a sum that dwarfs American aid. Similarly, more than $190 billion has been devoted to Spain since it joined the union in 1986, 11 years after the end of Franco’s dictatorship.
The result has been Spain’s extraordinary transition from a country whose per capita output was 71 percent of the European average in 1985, 90 percent in 2004, and now 100.7 percent of the median of the 27 members. Spain has moved into the club of the well off. Dictatorship seems utterly remote.
The E.U. slashes political risk,” said Chris Huhne, a Liberal Democrat member of the British Parliament. “It also exercises a soft power on its periphery that has far more transformational impact than the American neocon agenda in the Middle East. Countries in the Balkans wanting to come into the European democratic family have to adapt.”
That adaptation is economic as well as political. The creation of something approximating an American single market has been powerful in ending cartels and monopolies, introducing competition, pushing privatization and generally promoting the market over heavily managed capitalism.
Indeed, defense of what is called the European social model, with universal health care and extensive unemployment benefits, has become a tenet of European identity. How far that identity, as opposed to national identities, exists today is a matter of dispute. Only 2 percent of European Union inhabitants of working age live in member states other than their own.
But a survey in the French daily Le Figaro showed that 71 percent of French people now feel some pride in a European identity.
It is also open politically: How much of a federation should Europe be?
Germany has been utterly remade by an integrating Europe to the point that more people worry today about German pacifism than expansionism. But Poland is just entering that transformational process; under Lech Kaczynski’s conservative presidency its wariness of the pooling of sovereignty inherent in the union has been clear.
“The E.U. is an unfinished project, but so what?” Mr. Voigt said. “Why be nervous? We have time.”

City in Florida Fires Official Who Planned to Change Sex

The longtime city manager here was fired early Saturday, one month after he disclosed his plans to seek a sex change.
The City Commission voted 5 to 2 to dismiss the man, Steven B. Stanton, after a six-hour hearing in which he and his supporters argued that he could do his job just as well once he became a woman. Some commissioners said they had voted to fire Mr. Stanton not because he wanted to become a woman, but because he had violated their trust and caused a major disruption.
Several transgender people spoke on Mr. Stanton’s behalf, including a former deputy mayor of St. Paul, as did a few dozen people from Largo and throughout the state. A smaller number spoke in favor of firing him, including one man who said Mr. Stanton had made Largo “the laughingstock of the whole country.”
Mr. Stanton’s wish to become a woman named Susan came to light last month, after The St. Petersburg Times learned of it, got him to confirm it and published an article. Before that, Mr. Stanton said, he planned to announce his decision later this year, when his son would be out of town.
The City Commission had generally praised Mr. Stanton in performance reviews, and it gave him a raise last year. But within a week of the newspaper’s report, the commission voted to begin the process of firing him. Mr. Stanton filed an appeal on March 8 in hopes of keeping his job of 14 years, which paid $140,000 a year.

Friday, March 23, 2007

Federal Judge Blocks Online Pornography Law

background
A federal judge in Philadelphia struck down a 1998 law today that made it a crime for Web sites to allow children to access material deemed “harmful.”
Under the law, the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, commercial Web publishers would have been required to request credit card information or other proof of age from Web site users to prevent children from viewing material deemed “harmful to minors” by “contemporary community standards.” Penalties included a $50,000 fine and up to six months in prison.

pros
Senior Judge Lowell Reed Jr. of the Federal District Court ruled that the law was ineffective, overly broad and at odds with free speech rights. He added that there are far less restrictive methods, including software filters, that parents can use to control their children’s Internet use.
“Despite my personal regret at having to set aside yet another attempt to protect our children from harmful material,” Judge Reed wrote, he was blocking the law out of concern that “perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.
“If this law had gone into effect, it would have resulted into dumbing down of the Internet,” said Chris Hansen, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. “All Internet would have had to be brought down to a level that is acceptable to a 6-year-old and that would have had a devastating effect on the kind of interactions that take place on the Internet.

cons:
But others were disappointed.
“It’s a very frustrating decision. We have an epidemic problem of kids accessing pornographic material online,” said Donna Rice Hughes, president of Enough is Enough, a nonprofit group that works to protect children from pornography and online predators. “Pornographers continue to get a free pass on the Internet from our federal courts, and efforts by Congress keep getting trumped.
In 2000, Congress passed a law requiring schools and libraries receiving certain federal money to use software filters. The high court upheld that law in 2003.
Lawrence Lessig, a constitutional law professor at Stanford University, said the case decided today indicates the shifting stances that civil libertarians have taken regarding controls placed on the Internet.
“Civil libertarians have long had a ‘love-hate’ relationship with filters,” he said, adding that while the A.C.L.U. argued in this case that filters are preferable, the organization has also voiced concerns about them.
People buy filters worried about pornography, but then they see they can also block sports, politics and lots of other things, so they block those, too,” Professor Lessig said. “The result is to reinforce this infrastructure of filters.” That, he said, may lead to “less free speech than we would have if the government could only get it right in their approach to limiting pornography.
Mr. Hansen said that his organization has only opposed the mandatory use of filters, not filters themselves.
Sexual health sites, the online magazine Salon.com and other Web publishers backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, said the law would have a chilling effect on free speech.
“We know from experience that putting up any barrier in front of your content, whether its an advertisement or a subscription wall or anything that delays someone’s access, has a big impact on traffic,” said Joan Walsh, editor of Salon.com.
In a post-trial brief, Peter D. Keisler, a government lawyer, argued that depending solely on filters was insufficient.It is not reasonable for the government to expect all parents to shoulder the burden to cut off every possible source of adult content for their children, rather than the government’s addressing the problem at its source,” he wrote.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

China Scrambles for Stability as Its Workers Age

The proportion of people 60 and older is growing faster in China than in any other major country, with the number of retirees set to double between 2005 and 2015, when it is expected to reach 200 million. By midcentury, according to United Nations projections, roughly 430 million people — about a third of the population — will be retirees.
That increase will place enormous demands on the country’s finances and could threaten the underpinnings of the Chinese economy, which has thrived for decades on the cheap labor of hundreds of millions of young, uneducated workers from the countryside. Changes in the country’s population structure are taking place hand in hand with changes in the structure of the Chinese family. China’s one-child policy, which began in 1980, means that, beginning with the current generation of young adults, couples will face the difficult task of caring for four parents through old age.
By the same token, the ratio of workers to retired people will decline from about six to one now to about two to one by 2040.
Obviously, raising the retirement ages would ease a substantial amount of pressure on the pension system. But there are no plans to do so, and raising the retirement ages would present another set of problems for the government, experts here say.
Last year, for example, 4.13 million young Chinese graduated from universities, and fully 30 percent of them are still unemployed. Unemployment is high among those who are not university graduates, as well. Prolonging employment for older workers would make this predicament worse, possibly with volatile consequences.
The bind that China finds itself in takes form in an often-posed question: Can the country grow rich before it grows old? Increasingly, experts here say the answer, which also has huge implications for the global economy, appears doubtful.
Already, experts say the large financing gap resulting from the early retirement of public sector workers has repeatedly caused the state to improvise to keep the system afloat. Receipts from lottery ticket sales and from foreign initial private offerings of stocks, for example, have been drawn upon to finance the system.
Most troubling to financial experts, the government has used payroll taxes paid by the current generation of workers, who in theory are paying into their individual retirement accounts, to pay pensions for the previous generation.
China’s relatively young private life insurance industry is one of the sectors that stands to benefit most from the growing uncertainty over aging and pensions, but even within the industry, analysts express worry.
If we continue to have sound and healthy development in the economy we might get through this, but what if we cannot?” said Jiang Shihua, a senior official of the Pingan Life Insurance Company, who spoke of a time when China would have 400 to 500 million old people who “only consume and don’t produce at all.”

F.D.A. Rule Limits Role of Advisers Tied to Industry

Expert advisers to the government who receive money from a drug or device maker would be barred for the first time from voting on whether to approve that company’s products under new rules announced Wednesday for the F.D.A.’s powerful advisory committees.
Indeed, such doctors who receive more than $50,000 from a company or a competitor whose product is being discussed would no longer be allowed to serve on the committees, though those who receive less than that amount in the prior year can join a committee and participate in its discussions.
A “significant number” of the agency’s present advisers would be affected by the new policy, said the F.D.A. acting deputy commissioner, Randall W. Lutter, though he would not say how many. The rules are among the first major changes made by Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach since he was confirmed as commissioner of food and drugs late last year.
Advisory boards recommend drugs for approval and, in rare cases, removal, and their votes can have enormous influence on drug company fortunes.
“The $50,000 threshold is something that we think strikes an appropriate balance between” getting smart advisers and reassuring the public that their advice is not tainted, Dr. Lutter said.
The changes are intended to respond to a growing chorus of critics who contend that drug and device makers have hijacked the Food and Drug Administration’s approval process by paying those who serve on the agency’s advisory panels.
In one famous example, 10 of the 32 advisers who voted in 2005 to allow the painkiller Bextra to remain on the market and the painkiller Vioxx to return to the market despite safety worries had taken money from the drug makers. Under the new rules, their votes would not have counted and the committee would have voted to keep both drugs off the market.
In the end, the F.D.A. removed Bextra from the market anyway, and Vioxx has never returned. But the controversy surrounding that panel’s vote, and similar ones, tarnished the process and provided new fodder for critics in Congress.
Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, Democrat of New York, said he was delighted with the change, which will not become final until the end of a 60-day comment period.
“So many lives have been lost as a result of the failure of the F.D.A. to review drugs properly,” said Mr. Hinchey, who for two years has proposed legislation to ban agency advisers from having financial conflicts of interest. “The F.D.A. is now moving back to where it was supposed to be, a principled agency that protects the people.”
“F.D.A. is trying to strike a balance here,” Mr. Troy said, “and they would rather strike it themselves than have it struck for them.”
Drug makers routinely hire doctors as consultants for marketing and research. The New York Times reported on Wednesday that records in Minnesota show that at least 20 percent of licensed physicians in the state received money from drug makers between 1997 and 2005 — an average of $10,000.
Some conservatives were not happy with the new rule.
“I think it’s likely to improve the quality of the recommendations, remove the taint of the recommendations and improve the credibility of the recommendations,” Dr. Lurie said.
Advisory panels are important to the F.D.A. not so much because they provide the agency with expert advice — the F.D.A. can get that privately any time — but because they serve to increase public confidence in the agency’s decisions.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

EU's emission restriction

Standard and Poor's is warning that the EU's stricter emissions rules will put its carmakers at serious competitive disadvantage, and could adversely affect their credit quality. This is just one of many such challenges that the EU will face as it tries to control emissions; it remains to be seen how much economic pressure the commission is prepared to withstand.

Britain Proposes Allowing Schools to Forbid Full-Face Muslim Veils

British authorities proposed new rules on Tuesday to allow schools to forbid Muslim students to wear full-face veils in class, reflecting a wider debate over Britain’s relationship with its Muslim minority.
The recommendation was the latest episode in a saga of rancorous discussion of the full-face veil, known as the niqab. Last October, Prime Minister Tony Blair described the niqab as a “mark of separation” that made “other people from outside the community feel uncomfortable.”
The Department of Education published the new guidelines after a court in Buckinghamshire rejected a 12-year-old Muslim girl’s demand to wear the niqab in class last month.
The proposed regulations, which have yet to be formally adopted, said the individual right to “manifest a religion or belief” did not bestow a right to demonstrate faith “at any time, in any place or in any particular manner.”
School principals should be allowed to order pupils to show their faces because otherwise “the teacher may not be able to judge their engagement in class,” the proposed regulations said. Moreover, they said, “schools need to be able to identify individual pupils in order to maintain good order and identify intruders easily.”
The issue of Islamic dress in schools has been contentious in many parts of Europe, sometimes pitting secularist ideologies against the religious beliefs of growing Islamic minorities.
But Islamic dress made headlines in Britain for another reason recently, when a trial of terrorism suspects included surveillance television footage of a male suspect at a bus station as he fled London in what appeared to be an all-covering burqa-style dress.
Jim Knight, the schools minister, said Tuesday that schools should consult with parents when setting their regulations on permissible uniforms. “While they should make every effort to accommodate social, religious or medical requirements of individual pupils, the needs of safety, security and effective learning in the school must always take precedence,” he said in a statement.
The government’s position drew angry responses from some Muslim groups, including the Islamic Human Rights Commission, whose chairman, Massoud Shadjareh, said it was “simply shocking” for the government to “issue guidance against Muslim communities.”
“Successive ministers dealing with education issues have failed to give proper guidance when requested by human rights campaigners about schools’ obligations regarding religious dress, including the head scarf,” he said.
Others sought to defuse the debate by insisting that disagreements over dress codes could be resolved within schools. “The vast majority of schools are able to solve these issues locally, and that should continue to be the case,” said Tahir Alam, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain.
The proposed dress regulations also included recommendations enjoining school principals not to discriminate indirectly against minorities by banning hair styles “more likely to be adopted by specific racial groups.”
The rules urged school authorities to outlaw forms of dress “associated with gangs,” but said students should not be expelled for refusing to wear standard school uniforms except in the event of “persistent and defiant” transgressions.