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.

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)

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.