Commercialization of the pharmaceutical industry – health for sale

animo – young flemish socialists - is deeply concerned with the recent developments in the pharmaceutical sector, where the European commission strives towards a minimal ruling in the sector. Gunter Verheugen, the European commissioner for Enterprise & Industry announced a couple of weeks ago that the pharmaceutical industry should be allowed to inform patients directly about their products, even for prescription drugs. The difference between informing and advertising, however, is paper thin and very easy to circumvent.

Directly informing the patients has disastrous consequences. Costs for marketing will take a bigger amount of the total revenue that in many drug companies has already risen up to 30%. This leads to more expensive drugs and valuable research&development money being lost. In the end this will lead to a struggle of the most commercial and not of the best fit of medicine. In addition, the knowledge and expertise of the doctors will be undermined , when a patient is confused through industrial “information” . The partially informed consumer will of course be held blind for possible adverse effects, all with the purpose of maximizing profit. Lastly, this is a perverse method to encourage the overall use of medicine. For example, advertising for foot mould medicine in Belgium has led to a multiplication of revenues (and nausea reactions) by five.
This commercialization of the pharmaceutical industry under the liberal impulse of this commissioner is once more a step in the wrong direction. animo stands up to turn the tide.
animo makes the following demands:

• Marketing directly from industry to patients must be forbidden, be they medicines with or without prescription

• Maximum expenditure of 7% of total revenue of a pharmaceutical company for sharing objective information towards healthcare personnel. Needed pharmaceutical funds need to be invested in research&development of new medicines and not in advertising

Gaza film shows white phosphorus from alleged Israeli attack by Robert Booth in the Guardian

The Guardian has obtained vivid footage of the effect of white phosphorus allegedly used by Israel during a bomb attack on Gaza last week.

The film was made by Fida Qishta, a camerawoman working for the International Solidarity Movement, a non-governmental organisation operating in Gaza. It was shot on Wednesday 14 January in Khoza'a, east of Khan Younis in the south of the Gaza Strip.

It shows clumps of the burning chemical on the ground as locals try to put it out by covering it with dust, mud and grass. The chemical, which locals describe as phosphorus, fails to go out and continues to burn through the debris piled upon it. As they kick it about, it subdivides into smaller lumps and continues to burn.

The use of white phosphorus as a weapon – as opposed to its use as an obscurant and infrared blocking smoke screen – is banned by the United Nation's third convention on conventional weapons, which covers the use of incendiary devices. Though Israel is not a signatory to the convention, its military manuals reflect the restrictions on its use in that convention.

A second film reveals the impact of the white phosphorus on the human body. A 15-year-old boy is shown in a Gaza hospital receiving treatment for burns to his back and right arm which a doctor explains were caused by the chemical, which appears to have eaten into his flesh in several places.

Lying on his hospital bed, the boy tells how he was sitting with his family in their four-storey house when an Israeli bomb hit, killing his sister with shrapnel.

His testimony follows an earlier film by Qishta which contains graphic descriptions of attacks by Israeli forces in the same area.

Amnesty International said today that Israel has committed a war crime by using phosphorous over Gaza's densely populated residential neighbourhoods. The human rights organisation also said they had fresh evidence of its use.

"Yesterday, we saw streets and alleyways littered with evidence of the use of white phosphorus, including still burning wedges and the remnants of the shells and canisters fired by the Israeli army," said Christopher Cobb-Smith, a weapons expert who is in Gaza as part of a four-person Amnesty International fact-finding team. "White phosphorus is a weapon intended to provide a smokescreen for troop movements on the battlefield. It is highly incendiary, air burst and its spread effect is such that it that should never be used on civilian areas."

What is white phosphorus?

White phosphorus weapons are 155mm artillery shells containing 116 white phosphorus wedges. When the shell explodes it spreads the wedges over several hundred square metres. They ignite on contact with the air and burn at more than 800C. When they touch human skin they burn to the bone, causing terrible injuries and forcing doctors to excise large areas of flesh to prevent the burn spreading.

Using white phosphorous is not illegal. It can be used as an incendiary weapon, to set fire to military targets, to mark military targets, or to spread smoke. However, its use is strictly limited under UN conventions and international humanitarian law.

Fundamental rules stipulate civilians must be protected, and that attacks must not cause "disproportionate" damage to civilians and civilian objects. Particular care must be taken when using white phosphorus weapons and they cannot be used as an incendiary weapon against a military target that is not clearly separated from civilian areas.

Never mind the Role of the State by David Marquand

One thing is certain. The current crisis cannot be overcome without a substantial increase in the role and scope of public power. The crisis stems, above all, from lax and incompetent public regulation of private economic power. That in turn stems from a profoundly dangerous economic philosophy, which holds that government failure is more prevalent and more damaging than market failure, that markets are always wiser and more rational than governments, and that if private market actors are allowed to pursue their private interests without interference from public authorities, the invisible hand of the market will necessarily deliver the best possible outcome for society as a whole.

After the fall of Communism, that philosophy became part of the conventional wisdom in the United States, in Britain, in the institutions of global economic governance like the IMF and the World Bank and to a lesser extent in most member states of the European Union. We have now been reminded that it was fatally flawed: that as Keynes pointed out more than seventy years ago, financial markets, left to themselves, are governed less by reason than by a quintessentially irrational herd instinct and therefore have an inherent propensity to generate bubbles which are bound to burst sooner or later. When they burst, they are likely, in the absence of countervailing public action, to drag the whole economy down with them.

So public power has to be deployed; and, as Keynes also showed, it has to be deployed in good times as well as in bad. The notion of the ‘managed economy’ has fallen so far out of favour in the last twenty years that it has become little more than a memory. It must now return to the centre of the public policy stage: not just during the current crisis, but after it as well. But who is to do the managing? What form should public power take? In Keynes’s day, the answers were not in doubt. The state would manage the economy, for it was in the state that public power took visible shape.

In Europe, at least, I believe that the answer is grossly over-simplified, and may turn out to be almost as dangerous as the market fundamentalism that has got us into the current mess. The small and medium-sized states of Europe are too small and vulnerable – and also too divergent – to do the job. As I write, the British Government has just launched a massive fiscal stimulus to avert the danger that the current down-turn will turn into a real depression on the scale of the depression of the 1930s. It was right to do so. But there are formidable risks – chief among them, the risk of a confidence crisis, and a precipitate fall in the value of the pound that would make it impossible for the government to borrow enough to finance the stimulus it seeks. The obvious answer is for Britain to join the euro; and although this is highly unlikely in the medium term, I don’t rule it out.

But irrespective of what may or may not happen to Britain, the crisis has shone a harsh light on a fatal flaw in the Eurozone itself. Monetary policy has been Europeanised, but fiscal policy has been left to national governments. That was always a risky thing to do, but as long as the boom proceeded on its merry way all seemed to go well. Now the flaw has become obvious. In short, the Eurozone, as presently constituted, is not enough. We need a smaller role for public power on the national level, and a bigger role for it on the European level. In that perspective, the whole language of ’state’ and ‘non-state’ obscures more than it illuminates.

Professor David Marquand is a former Labour MP and Principal of Mansfield College (Oxford University). He also served as Chief Advisor to former President of the European Commission Roy Jenkins.

Israel may face UN court ruling on legality of Gaza conflict by Afua Hirsch in the Guardian

Israel faces the prospect of intervention by international courts amid growing calls that its actions in Gaza are a violation of world humanitarian and criminal law.
The UN general assembly, which is meeting this week to discuss the issue, will consider requesting an advisory opinion from the international court of justice, the Guardian has learned.



"There is a well-grounded view that both the initial attacks on Gaza and the tactics being used by Israel are serious violations of the UN charter, the Geneva conventions, international law and international humanitarian law," said Richard Falk, the UN's special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories and professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University.
"There is a consensus among independent legal experts that Israel is an occupying power and is therefore bound by the duties set out in the fourth Geneva convention," Falk added. "The arguments that Israel's blockade is a form of prohibited collective punishment, and that it is in breach of its duty to ensure the population has sufficient food and healthcare as the occupying power, are very strong."
A Foreign Office source confirmed the UK would consider backing calls for a reference to the ICJ. "It's definitely on the table," the source said. "We have already called for an investigation and are looking at all evidence and allegations."

An open letter to the prime minister signed by prominent international lawyers and published in today's Guardian states: "The United Kingdom government ... has a duty under international law to exert its influence to stop violations of international humanitarian law in the current conflict between Israel and Hamas."
The letter argues that Israel has violated principles of humanitarian law, including launching attacks directly aimed at civilians and failing to discriminate between civilians and combatants.
The letter follows condemnation earlier this week from leading QCs of Israel's action as a violation of international law, and a vote by the UN's human rights council on Monday on a resolution condemning the ongoing Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip.
"The blockade of humanitarian relief, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and preventing access to basic necessities such as food and fuel are prima facie war crimes," a group of leading QCs and academics, including Michael Mansfield QC and Sir Geoffrey Bindman, wrote in a letter to the Sunday Times.

Israel has already been found to have violated its obligations in international law by a previous advisory opinion of the ICJ, and is likely to vigorously contest arguments that it is an occupying power. It previously stated that occupation ceased after disengagement from Gaza in 2005.
Its stance raises questions as to the utility of an advisory opinion by the ICJ after Israel rejected its finding in a previous case, which found the wall being constructed in the Palestinian territories to be a violation of Israel's obligations under international humanitarian law.
Questions are also being raised as to whether the international criminal court, which deals with war crimes and crimes against humanity, would have any jurisdiction to hear cases against perpetrators of the alleged crimes on both sides of the conflict. Neither Israel nor the Palestinian territories are signatories to the Rome statute, which brings states within the jurisdiction of the ICC.

More likely, experts say, is the establishment of ad-hoc tribunals of the kind created to deal with the war in the former Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda.
"If there were the political will there could be an ad-hoc tribunal established to hear allegations of war crimes," Falk said. "This could be done by the general assembly acting under article 22 of the UN charter which gives them the authority to establish subsidiary bodies."

Barack Obama to issue order to close Guantánamo Bay detention centre in first week as president by Ewan MacAskill in the Guardian

President-elect Barack Obama is to issue an order to close the Guantánamo detention centre in his first week in office, according to his advisers.
Obama, who takes over the presidency next Tuesday, will make closure one of his first decisions, two of his advisers told the AP news agency.
The pledge comes only the day after Obama appeared to row back from campaign promises by saying closure was more complicated than he had realised and it would be a challenge to do so in his first 100 days in office.
Guantánamo has become a touchstone for the new administration. Democrats and liberal lawyers, as well as European governments, have repeatedly called for its closure, seeing it as an affront to human rights. Some of the detainees have been tortured.
There were about 700 detainees after a sweep of countries throughout the world as part of George Bush's "war on terror". While most have been released, more than 200 are still held.
There is no consensus yet on what to do with them. Some will be released, and some could be transferred to other countries, while the remainder could face trial on the US mainland.
Five human rights groups today urged Obama to stop a war crimes trial at Guantanamo of a Canadian, Omar Khadr, now 22, who is accused of killing a US soldier in Afghanistan when he was 15.

Gaza: The death and life of my father by Fares Akram in the Independent

For Fares Akram, The Independent's reporter in Gaza, the Israeli invasion became a personal tragedy when he discovered his father was one of the first casualties of the ground war

By Fares Akram in GazaMonday, 5 January 2009

The phone call came at around 4.20pm on Saturday. A bomb had been dropped on the house at our small farm in northern Gaza. My father was walking from the gate to the farmhouse at the time. It was our beloved place, that farm and its two-storey white house with a red roof. Nestled in a flat fertile agricultural plain north-west of Beit Lahiya, it had lemon groves, orange and apricot trees and we had recently acquired 60 dairy cows.

It was the closest farm to the northern border with Israel. Ironically, we always thought the biggest danger there was not from Israeli troops, who usually went straight past if they were mounting an incursion, but from stray Hamas rockets aimed at the Israeli towns north of us.
But shortly before sunset on Saturday, as Israeli ground troops and tanks invaded Gaza in the name of shutting down Hamas rocket sites, the peace of that place was shattered and my father's life extinguished at the age of 48. Warplanes and helicopters had swept in, bombing and firing to open up the space for the tanks and ground forces that would follow in the darkness. It was one of those F16 airstrikes that killed my father.
The house was reduced to little more than powder, and of Dad there was nothing much left either. "Just a pile of flesh," my uncle, who found him in the rubble, said later with brutal honesty.

Like most Gazans, my mother, my sisters and my wife – who is nine months' pregnant – and I have spent the past week of the Israeli onslaught trapped inside our flat in the city. But my father had decided to stay up at the farm; he knew it would be impossible to get back to tend the livestock if the expected troop invasion began. But he called us every day.
The last time I saw him was on Thursday when he brought cash and a bag of flour. We talked about the imminent birth of my first child and how we would get my wife, Alaa, to hospital amid the bombing and chaos. Of course, on Saturday evening there was no hope of getting an ambulance up to the farm because the roads were cut off by the Israelis. So my uncle and brother drove the 8km and the rest of us sat, in shock, shivering in the dark apartment, bed covers over us to keep warm, the sound of non-stop tank shelling around us. Deep down we all knew Dad was dead. He would have been in or near the house, and if an F16 strikes directly at your house you know what it means.

They arrived to find a smoking pile of rubble. Most of the cows lay dead; others had run off injured. Mahmoud, a teenage relative, was with my father when the Israeli bomb smashed into the house. The force of the airstrike threw him 300 metres. They found Mahmoud's body in a neighbour's field.

We buried my father and Mahmoud yesterday morning in a very quick funeral, knowing Israeli tanks were just 3km away, on the outskirts of the city. We could hear the rattle of the machine-gun fire accompanying the tanks. The Israelis may say there were militants in the area of our farm, but I'll never believe it. The most advanced point for rocket-launchers is 6km south. Up at the border, it is just open farmland with nowhere to hide.
My father, Akrem al-Ghoul, was no militant. Born in Gaza and educated in Egypt, he was a lawyer and a judge who worked for the Palestinian Authority. After Hamas took over, he quit and turned to agriculture. Dad's father, Fares, who had been driven out of his home in what is now Israeli Ashkelon in 1948, had bought the land in the 1960s.

During the second intifada and until the Israelis withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the farm was taken over by Israeli settlers, but after 2005 we went there every holiday. In Gaza, the only escape is the beach or, if you are lucky enough, the farmland. My father hated what Hamas was doing to Gaza's legal system, introducing Islamist justice, and he completely opposed violence. He would have worked hard for a just settlement with Israel and a better future for Palestinians. When the PA gained control over the West Bank, he moved to Ramallah to help establish the courts there.

My grief carries no desire for revenge, which I know to be always in vain. But, in truth, as a grieving son, I am finding it hard to distinguish between what the Israelis call terrorists and the Israeli pilots and tank crews who are invading Gaza. What is the difference between the pilot who blew my father to pieces and the militant who fires a small rocket? I have no answers but, just as I am to become a father, I have lost my father.

Land, sea, sky: all will kill you by Karma Nabulsi in The Guardian

Last Saturday, the first day of massive air strikes on Gaza, I finally get through to my old friend Mohammed. We speak for a few moments, he reassures me he is OK, he asks about my now-delayed trip to Gaza, and suddenly I ask: "What is that noise?" It is a sort of distant keening, like the roar of approaching traffic, or a series of waves hitting a rocky shore. "I am at the cemetery, Karma", he says, "I am burying my family." He now sounds exhausted. He repeats, over and over again in his steady, tired voice as if it were a prayer: "This is our life. This is our life. This is our life."

I had just come off the phone with Jamal, who at that moment was in another cemetery in Jabaliya camp, burying three members of his own family. They included two of his nieces, one married to a police cadet. All were at the graduating ceremony in the crowded police station when F16s targeted them that Saturday morning, massacring more than 45 citizens in an instant, mortally wounding dozens more. Police stations across Gaza were similarly struck. Under the laws of war (or international humanitarian law as it is more commonly known), policemen, traffic cops, security guards: all are non-combatants, and classified as civilians under the Geneva conventions. But more to the point, Palestinian non-combatants are not mere civilians, but possess something more real, more alive, more sovereign than a distancing legal classification: the people in Gaza are citizens. Some work in the various civic institutions across the Strip, but most simply use them on a daily basis: their schools, police stations, hospitals, their ministries.

Later on that first day I finally reach Khalil, who runs a prisoners' human rights association in Gaza. He was trying to organise a press conference. It was chaotic: he was shouting, he couldn't finish his sentences or form words. When I told him what I had just heard, he told me that he too had just come from the cemetery. His cousin, Sharif Abu Shammala, 26 years old, had recently got a job as a guard at the university. He had been asked to go in that morning to sign his worksheet at the local police station; he had felt lucky to find the work.

For the one and a half million Palestinian citizens living in Gaza, ways to absorb and describe their daily predicament - these collective and individual experiences of extreme violence - had already been used up by the two years of siege that preceded this week's carnage. Hanging out with Mohammed at his office in Gaza City six months ago, mostly just watching him smoke one cigarette after another, he abruptly leant over his desk and said to me: "Everyone is dead. There is no life in Gaza. Capital has left. Ask someone passing by: where are you going? They will answer: I don't know. What are you doing? I don't know. Gaza today is a place of aimless roaming."

And so on, and so on, and so on... Brilliant article. The rest of the article at this link .

Katyusha, Katyusha by Sean O'Brien

Katyusha, Katyusha,
Arrow of fire:
Kingdom Come, is it
Below or above?
Choked in a tunnel
With morphine and bread,
Or charred in the wreck
Of an olive grove?
Katyusha, Katyusha,
Spear of desire,
Are there green pastures,
A brave desert rose,
Or must it be prison
With pillars of flame?
Katyusha, Katyusha,
A grave, or a rose?
Katyusha, Katyusha,
God only knows.