Fourth Estate Sale

Virus mix-up by lab could have resulted in pandemic

 

It's emerged that virulent H5N1 bird flu was sent out by accident from an Austrian lab last year and given to ferrets in the Czech Republic before anyone realised. As well as the risk of it escaping into the wild, the H5N1 got mixed with a human strain, which might have spawned a hybrid that could unleash a pandemic.

Last December, the Austrian branch of US vaccine company Baxter sent a batch of ordinary human H3N2 flu, altered so it couldn't replicate, to Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, also in Austria. In February, a lab in the Czech Republic working for Avir alerted Baxter that, unexpectedly, ferrets inoculated with the sample had died. It turned out the sample contained live H5N1, which Baxter uses to make vaccine. The two seem to have been mixed in error.

Markus Reinhard of Baxter says no one was infected because the H3N2 was handled at a high level of containment. But Ab Osterhaus of Erasmus University in the Netherlands says: "We need to go to great lengths to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen."

 

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Health--Science/Science/Virus-mix-up-by-lab-could-have-resulted-in-pandemic/articleshow/4230882.cms

Superjunk: Watchmen Goes Full-Frontal

 

Gay guys who geek out for superheroes are about to get an eyeful. Watchmen director Zach Snyder puts Dr. Manhattan (a buff, CGI'd Billy Crudup) front and center, buck naked for minutes at a time.

 

Click the byline to view more stories by this author.

By Ben Walters

Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan

It doesn't take a superhuman intellect to get why so many gay guys geek out for superheroes. For the nervously closeted adolescent comic book reader, there's pretty obvious appeal in all those stories about mild-mannered, unassuming characters with a spandex secret stashed away in the closet. That psychologically precarious balance between the maintenance of a double identity and fantastical powers waiting to be unleashed is potent enough; throw in sustained, worshipful attention to the male physique and you've got a compelling combination.

Ah, yes, the bodies. In the days before any conceivable type, scene, or activity was mere keystrokes away, we pre-internet preteens took our titillation where we found it -- and in the bulges and ripples of the masked avengers, we found it in spades. Not that these guys were naked, of course. They had their colored costumes. Except that, as Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, has convincingly argued, they were really all color and no costume, their true purpose being "the depiction of the naked human form, unfettered, perfect, and free."

Consciously or unconsciously, we recognized the capes, belts, and trunks for the four-color fig leaves they were. Even so, for the mainstream comic book reader, a little imagination was still required -- until Watchmen.

http://www.advocate.com/exclusive_detail_ektid74503.asp

The Canadian Oil Boom

Scraping Bottom

Once considered too expensive, as well as too damaging to the land, exploitation of Alberta's oil sands is now a gamble worth billions.

By Robert Kunzig

Photograph by Peter Essick

One day in 1963, when Jim Boucher was seven, he was out working the trap­line with his grandfather a few miles south of the Fort McKay First Nation reserve on the Athabasca River in northern Alberta. The country there is wet, rolling fen, dotted with lakes, dissected by streams, and draped in a cover of skinny, stunted trees—it's part of the boreal forest that sweeps right across Canada, covering more than a third of the country. In 1963 that forest was still mostly untouched. The government had not yet built a gravel road into Fort McKay; you got there by boat or in the winter by dogsled. The Chipewyan and Cree Indians there—Boucher is a Chipewyan—were largely cut off from the outside world. For food they hunted moose and bison; they fished the Athabasca for walleye and whitefish; they gathered cranberries and blueberries. For income they trapped beaver and mink. Fort McKay was a small fur trading post. It had no gas, electricity, telephone, or running water. Those didn't come until the 1970s and 1980s.

In Boucher's memory, though, the change begins that day in 1963, on the long trail his grandfather used to set his traps, near a place called Mildred Lake. Generations of his ancestors had worked that trapline. "These trails had been here thousands of years," Boucher said one day last summer, sitting in his spacious and tasteful corner office in Fort McKay. His golf putter stood in one corner; Mozart played softly on the stereo. "And that day, all of a sudden, we came upon this clearing. A huge clearing. There had been no notice. In the 1970s they went in and tore down my grandfather's cabin—with no notice or discussion." That was Boucher's first encounter with the oil sands industry. It's an industry that has utterly transformed this part of northeastern Alberta in just the past few years, with astonishing speed. Boucher is surrounded by it now and immersed in it himself.

Where the trapline and the cabin once were, and the forest, there is now a large open-pit mine. Here Syncrude, Canada's largest oil producer, digs bitumen-laced sand from the ground with electric shovels five stories high, then washes the bitumen off the sand with hot water and sometimes caustic soda. Next to the mine, flames flare from the stacks of an "upgrader," which cracks the tarry bitumen and converts it into Syncrude Sweet Blend, a synthetic crude that travels down a pipeline to refineries in Edmon­ton, Alberta; Ontario, and the United States. Mildred Lake, meanwhile, is now dwarfed by its neighbor, the Mildred Lake Settling Basin, a four-square-mile lake of toxic mine tailings. The sand dike that contains it is by volume one of the largest dams in the world.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/03/canadian-oil-sands/kunzig-text

Supreme Court Rules Against Wyeth

Justices say FDA-approved drug labels do not shield companies from legal damages

by Glenn Hess

In a major defeat for the pharmaceutical industry, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that drugmakers can be sued in state court for harm caused by medicines that carry warning labels approved by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA).

Voting 6-3, the Justices upheld a $6.7 million Vermont jury award to musician Diana Levine, who lost her right forearm after Wyeth's anti-nausea drug Phenergan was improperly administered and gangrene set in. Her lawsuit claimed that Wyeth failed to adequately warn about the risks of a method of intravenous injection known as IV push (C&EN, Feb. 9, page 25).

Wyeth argued that FDA's approval of the drug and the prescribing information on its label effectively shields the company from liability claims based on state law.  

"Wyeth fully complied with federal law in its labeling of Phenergan, which provided clear instructions and warnings about its use," says Wyeth's attorney, Bert Rein. "We believed that federal law prohibited the company from revising its product label as the Vermont court required, and we regret that the Supreme Court disagreed."

Justice John Paul Stevens says Wyeth could have unilaterally strengthened its warning about the IV push method of administration, and there is no evidence that FDA would not have ultimately approved such a labeling change.

"We conclude that it is not impossible for Wyeth to comply with its state and federal law obligations," he wrote in the court's majority opinion, which was joined by Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer.  

Justice Clarence Thomas sided with the majority, but did not join Stevens' opinion.

"This case illustrates that tragic facts make bad law," Justice Samuel A. Alito wrote in a dissenting opinion that was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia. "The court holds that a state tort jury, rather than the FDA, is ultimately responsible for regulating warning labels for prescription drugs."

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/87/i10/8710news3.html

Sita Sings the Blues is finally free!

Posted by Cory Doctorow

 

After years of wrangling, Nina Paley's acclaimed, brilliant short film, Sita Sings the Blues is finally available as a free, open-licensed downloads. Paley spent a shocking amount of time and money fighting over the copyrights to the 1920s jazz music that is integral to the film (some have likened it to Betty Boop in Bollywood, which is catchy, but fails to capture the fantasticness of the film), Paley's finally secured a license that allows her to distribute the whole movie, for free, forever, under a remix-friendly license.

I hereby give Sita Sings the Blues to you. Like all culture, it belongs to you already, but I am making it explicit with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. Please distribute, copy, share, archive, and show Sita Sings the Blues. From the shared culture it came, and back into the shared culture it goes.

You don't need my permission to copy, share, publish, archive, show, sell, broadcast, or remix Sita Sings the Blues. Conventional wisdom urges me to demand payment for every use of the film, but then how would people without money get to see it? How widely would the film be disseminated if it were limited by permission and fees? Control offers a false sense of security. The only real security I have is trusting you, trusting culture, and trusting freedom.

That said, my colleagues and I will enforce the Share Alike License. You are not free to copy-restrict ("copyright") or attach "Digital Rights Management" (DRM) to Sita Sings the Blues or its derivative works.

Congratulations, Nina! It was a long ride, but man, was it worth it!

Sita Sings the Blues

Premises, Premises

 A Peer-Enforced Marketplace for New Ideas

 

Featured Ideas

Minitrue Fact-Checking Services (idea #149)

What's the difference between a blog and a newspaper, a Wikipedia and a Britannica? It's the fact-checking, stupid! Minitrue Fact Services is a team of experienced fact-checkers from top national publications who've gone independent, and now offer their professional services to anyone. For newspapers and magazines looking for ways to cut back, Minitrue lets you lay off your research desks and start outsourcing. We all live in the same reality-- so why should everyone have to hire and manage their own redundant research desks? For bloggers, Minitrue gives you the authority and credibility of the big boys if you can pay the price (and spend the time on corrections). All approved content gets to display the Minitrue Seal-of-Truth logo, which links to the verified clients list on the Minitrue website. Look for it! And for all you old journalists who started out as fact-checkers and have been trying to work your way "up" to editorial writers: Don't bother. Opinions are cheap, now more than ever. These days, the real action is in verification.

 

http://www.premisespremises.com/home.php

For Sale: The $100 House

By TOBY BARLOW

 

RECENTLY, at a dinner party, a friend mentioned that he'd never seen so many outsiders moving into town. This struck me as a highly suspect statement. After all, we were talking about Detroit, home of corrupt former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, beleaguered General Motors and the 0-16 Lions. Compared with other cities' buzzing, glittering skylines, ours sits largely abandoned, like some hulking beehive devastated by colony collapse. Who on earth would move here?

Then again, I myself had moved to Detroit, from Brooklyn. For $100,000, I bought a town house that sits downtown in the largest and arguably the most beautiful Mies van der Rohe development ever built, an island of perfect modernism forgotten by the rest of the world.

Two other guests that night, a couple in from Chicago, had also just invested in some Detroit real estate. That weekend Jon and Sara Brumit bought a house for $100.

Ah, the mythical $100 home. We hear about these low-priced "opportunities" in down-on-their-luck cities like Detroit, Baltimore and Cleveland, but we never meet anyone who has taken the plunge. Understandable really, for if they were actually worth anything then they would cost real money, right? Who would do such a preposterous thing?

A local couple, Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert, started the ball rolling. An artist and an architect, they recently became the proud owners of a one-bedroom house in East Detroit for just $1,900. Buying it wasn't the craziest idea. The neighborhood is almost, sort of, half-decent. Yes, the occasional crack addict still commutes in from the suburbs but a large, stable Bangladeshi community has also been moving in.

So what did $1,900 buy? The run-down bungalow had already been stripped of its appliances and wiring by the city's voracious scrappers. But for Mitch that only added to its appeal, because he now had the opportunity to renovate it with solar heating, solar electricity and low-cost, high-efficiency appliances.

Buying that first house had a snowball effect. Almost immediately, Mitch and Gina bought two adjacent lots for even less and, with the help of friends and local youngsters, dug in a garden. Then they bought the house next door for $500, reselling it to a pair of local artists for a $50 profit. When they heard about the $100 place down the street, they called their friends Jon and Sarah.

Admittedly, the $100 home needed some work, a hole patched, some windows replaced. But Mitch plans to connect their home to his mini-green grid and a neighborhood is slowly coming together.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/opinion/08barlow.html

Cheap Thrills

Posted by Drew Friedman

This recent piece is a depiction of my old friend (and favorite artist) Robert Crumb presenting his original "Cheap Thrills" comic strip cover art to Janis Joplin, (with various members of "The Holding Company" lurking behind), backstage at the Filmore West in San Fran' in 1968. It was commissioned by the private collector who owns the original Crumb "Cheap Thrills" art, as a companion piece to hang along side it in his office. Interestingly, Crumb's original intention was for this art to run on the back cover and a portrait of Joplin to run on the front. But Joplin loved the the comic strip art so much, (she was an avid underground comics fan, especially the work of Crumb, and already at that point in her escalating career, had the power to hire her own cover artist), she decided to run it on the front. It's arguably the SECOND most famous album cover ever, after Sgt. Pepper. One amusing side note: bending no doubt to pressure, Crumb wore his hair for a time at it's longest in '68, which I try to show. Joplin was also encouraging him to "loosen up" and wear "hippie clothes and beads" but he just couldn't go that far.

http://www.drawger.com/drewfriedman/?section=comments&article_id=7249

Conservatives angry over Michelle Obama's trip to homeless shelter

By Alex Koppelman

 

It seems Michelle Obama can't even do a good deed without inspiring some outrage on the right.

The first lady visited a Washington, D.C., homeless shelter on Thursday, bringing fruit collected in a White House food drive and serving some of the shelter's clients. That alone isn't objectionable, of course. But some conservatives -- sparked by a blog post from the Los Angeles Times' Andrew Malcom -- are in a tizzy over an Associated Press photo that shows a man taking a picture of Obama using a cellphone.

"It doesn't detract from the first lady's generous gesture or the real needs she seeks to highlight to ask two bothersome journalistic questions about these news photos," Malcom wrote, continuing:

If this unidentified meal recipient is too poor to buy his own food, how does he afford a cellphone?

And if he is homeless, where do they send the cellphone bills?

Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin was one of those who joined the resulting scrum, writing that the photo "ruin[ed] what was supposed to be a sob story photo op of the compassionate Mrs. O catering to the downtrodden." She, in turn, linked to another blogger, Kathy Shaidle. Shaidle -- who is, to put it politely, not a particularly nice person -- wrote:

Today's "poor" are the rich Jesus warned you about: fat, slovenly, wasteful of their money and other people's...

He spends all his (our) money on cellphones and, most likely, tattoos and drugs and booze and other crap, and has no money left for a home and food. And why should he bother? We pay for his shelter and food anyhow...

What's really funny in that news story by the way is what they're serving at the soup kitchen: risotto with brocolli. Obviously some rich white liberal did the cooking that day, feeling all proud of herself, and what thanks did she get? Some lowclass loser going, "You expect me to eat this weird crap?!"

(For the record, it was actually mushroom risotto. And her nasty "weird crap" remark? It's rice cooked in chicken stock with some vegetables, something most cultures are quite familiar with, no matter what you choose to call it. Come on.)

At the Corner, one of the National Review's blogs, Kathryn Jean Lopez chimed in as well, saying, "America has the wealthiest poor people in the world" and claiming the photo illustrated that. She added, "I don't envy this man's situation, whatever it is, and don't mean to make light of it. But we are a blessed people when our poor have cell phones."

A couple key points here: First, as far as I can tell, none of these people even know whether the man in the photo is homeless. True, he was at the shelter and he appears to be standing in line, but that was, after all, the best vantage point for taking that photo. He could just as easily have been a volunteer at the shelter or a completely unrelated person who'd heard Obama was there, and no one complaining about the photo can prove otherwise, I don't think.

The only information we really have to go on is the original AP caption for the picture, which reads only, "First lady Michelle Obama, right, stops to have her photo taken as she helps to hand out meals during her visit to Miriam's Kitchen in Washington, Thursday, March 5, 2009. The center provides meals, case management services and housing support to nearly 250 men and women in Washington."

I've checked the pool report from the event, and there's nothing in there about the man either. I e-mailed the Times' Malcolm to ask why he assumed the man in question was homeless, but haven't yet heard back. If I do, I'll update this post.

Also, as Malkin herself acknowledged in her post, there's a very valid reason for a homeless person to have a cellphone -- how else can they get a job?

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2009/03/06/cellphone_photo/index.html

You too can comprehend the AIG bailout

Measured against the number of galaxies in the universe, for instance, the rescue package seems reasonable.

By Steve Clifford

The cost of the AIG bailout has now reached $152 billion. You may find this number difficult to comprehend.

We understand a million. That's what used to make one rich, before it became the price of a small fixer-upper in Madison Park. Billions are more of a problem. Only when placed in context can one understand the enormity of $152 billion.

Allow me to illustrate. Consider a stack of bond certificates, each worth $1 billion. To reach a value of $152 billion, this stack would rise to MORE THAN ONE AND ONE-QUARTER OF AN INCH in height.

Here are a few more illustrations of how $152 billion measures up:

· If you wanted to give one dollar for each galaxy in the universe, $152 billion would pay FOR THE FIRST 30 PER CENT.

· $152 billion equals 0.2 per cent of THE NUMBER OF CELLS IN THE AVERAGE HUMAN BODY.

· $152 billion is MORE THAN DOUBLE $75 billion and MORE THAN HALF of $300 billion.

· $152 billion equals 0.3 per cent of the TOTAL CREDIT DEFAULT SWAP MARKET.

· $152 billion could reduce the actuarial DEFICIT OF THE SOCIAL SECURITY SYSTEM by 1.1 per cent.

· $152 billion could finance ALMOST SEVEN Boston-style "Big Digs."

· If one divided this $152 billion bailout equally among ten insurance companies, EACH WOULD RECEIVE $15.2 BILLION. If one divided it equally between five insurance companies, EACH WOULD RECEIVE $30.4 BILLION.

· With $152 billion, one could purchase A LOT OF EXPENSIVE STUFF, including the Honus Wagner T206 baseball card, AND STILL HAVE MONEY LEFT OVER.

· Invested in municipal bonds paying 5 per cent, $152 billion would produce annual TAX-FREE INCOME OF $7.6 BILLION.

· $152 billion equals 0.9 per cent of THE GDP OF THE EUROPEAN UNION.

· $152 billion is equal to 37 per cent of the $410 billion OMNIBUS-SPENDING BILL the Senate passed last Tuesday.

· If ants were priced at 20 cents per thousand, one could PURCHASE 7 PER CENT OF THE WORLD'S ANT SUPPLY for $152 billion.

I trust this has helped you to put the IMMENSE SUM OF $152 BILLION in perspective.

http://crosscut.com/2009/03/09/flip-side/18896/

Preferred stocks

Canada profits from bizarre U.S. bans

By Froma Harrop

When a pizzeria closes, the pizzeria down the block usually sees a surge in business. That principle applies to commerce in the larger North American neighborhood. Whenever the United States locks the gate on a plausible economic activity, Canadians move in and profit.

The Bush administration's hostility toward stem-cell science created opportunity in Canada. Starved of adequate federal support, American labs doing this cutting-edge science shrank or closed down, and many of their researchers moved to Canada. Between 2002 and 2007, the number of American university professors and assistants relocating to Canada jumped 27 percent, according to Canadian immigration officials. Some were stars in stem-cell research.

The Obama administration has ended that Canadian advantage by reversing the Bush policy. Canadians now fear they might suffer their own brain-drain back to the United States — and not just of Americans. European, Asian and other scientists, who went to Canada rather than the United States, may decide to head south.

A recent headline from Toronto's Globe and Mail says it all: "As U.S. emerges from Dark Age, Canada's scientific edge fades."

Hemp is a plant used to make paper, oils, textiles and other products. American farmers from George Washington on grew it. But because hemp is related to marijuana, the U.S. government outlawed its cultivation in the "50s.

Now get this: American manufacturers are free to import hemp fibers, oil and seed from other countries. For example, U.S. carmakers use hemp inside door panels and for insulation in seats.

Industrial hemp doesn't contain enough THC (the euphoric agent in marijuana) to get anyone high, but that hasn't stopped the federal Drug Enforcement Administration from sending out helicopters to scour the land for hemp plants growing wild in ditches.

The sight of waving hemp fields just across the Canadian border frustrates many American farmers. One of them, Dave Monson, a Republican, is speaker of the North Dakota House.

Monson and other farmers sued the DEA in 2007, demanding the right to plant hemp. The case was dismissed by a U.S. district court judge in Bismarck but is now before the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, in St. Paul, Minn.

Monson told me that he tried to reason with the DEA about industrial hemp. The federal agency responded that minuscule amounts of THC could be processed out of the plants, admittedly with great effort.

"Well, why would anybody do that?" Monson asked, especially now that actual marijuana plants are freely grown in California and other states that have legalized medical pot.

"The ironic thing is that they may get medical marijuana legalized before we can get industrial hemp legalized," Monson said. The Obama administration has yet to signal a change in policy toward industrial hemp.

http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site557/2008/0715/20080715__headBG.jpg

Intelligence failures crippling fight against insurgents in Afghanistan, says report

by Peter Beaumont

A highly critical analysis of the US-led coalition's counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan has raised serious questions about combat operations in both countries - and the intelligence underpinning them.

The confidential document presents a bleak picture of a counterinsurgency effort undermined by intelligence failures that at times border on the absurd.

Based on scores of interviews with British, US, Canadian and Dutch military, intelligence and diplomatic officials - and marked for "official use only" - the book-length report is damning of a US military often unwilling to share intelligence among its military allies. It depicts commanders in the field being overwhelmed by information on hundreds of contradictory databases, and sometimes resistant to intelligence generated by its own agents in the CIA.

Counterinsurgency efforts are also shown as being at the mercy of local contacts peddling identical "junk" tips around various intelligence officials, with the effectiveness of the intelligence effort being quantified by some senior officers solely in terms of the amount of "tip money" disbursed to sources.

The report describes a rigid reliance on economic, military and political progress indicators regarded by the authors and interviewees as too often lacking in real meaning.

Its sources complain of commanders who have slipped into relying on "the fallacy of body counts", discredited after the war in Vietnam as a measure of success.

The report, prepared by the RAND national defence research institute for US Joint Forces Command in November and leaked to the Wikileaks website, reveals the case of Dutch F-16 pilots in Afghanistan who were ordered by the US to bomb targets, only to be refused access to American "battle damage assessments" showing what they had hit, on the grounds that the Dutch were not "security cleared" to view them.

Another interviewee describes how coalition forces at Camp Holland near Tarin Kowt in southern Afghanistan maintained 13 different intelligence sections, including US, Dutch, UAE, and Australian, all operating with minimal co-operation.

"It would have been helpful [for us to have] combined them; then we would have known everything," complained Lt Neils Verhoef, one of those interviewed for the report. "One section knew the location of an IED [improvised explosive device] factory, and we drove by it for three months."

The unflattering document will make grim reading for President Barack Obama as he grapples with the worsening crisis in Afghanistan, confronted by an increasingly emboldened Taliban and its allies. With counterinsurgency tactics now placed at the centre of the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the RAND report suggests that many of the national armed forces involved lack skills to operate effectively.

It calls for a substantial overhaul of how military intelligence is gathered, organised and acted on. Quoting senior officers, it questions many everyday operations - from weapons searches to the killing or arrest of wanted individuals - suggesting that they "alienate" the local population for little measurable gain.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/06/us-intelligence-afghanistan

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