Man dies and several others injured as wild elephant goes on five-hour rampage through Mysore in southern India A wild elephant gored a man to death and injured several other people during a five-hour rampage through Mysore in southern India after farmers chased it from a field outside the city. Residents scattered on Wednesday as the young male charged through the city streets attacking vehicles. It turned on the victim in a doorway in an alleyway and gored him as residents looked on in horror. The elephant later charged towards people who took cover on top of a staircase, and lunged at an SUV on a main street. Several people were injured during the five hours it took to tranquilise the animal, officials said. The elephant was one of four that had earlier entered fields on the outskirts of Mysore after becoming separated from their herd, Press Trust of India news agency reported. Farmers chased the animals, sending two of them back into nearby forests. One of them was later trapped at a farm, while the remaining elephant entered the city. Hundreds of people die in India every year when wild animals wander into cities as their habitats shrink and they have to travel further in search of food. Its parks face massive encroachment from people who live and forage in the forests or graze cattle there. India Wildlife guardian.co.uk
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About 40% more surveyors reported a rise in rents than those who saw a fall in the three months to the end of April, says Rics Growing numbers of tenants are finding themselves priced out of the market as rents continue to be pushed up by strong demand and a shortage of supply, latest research shows. About 42% more surveyors reported a rise in rents than those who saw a fall during the three months to the end of April – up from 40% during the previous quarter, according to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics). Although rents increased across the whole of Great Britain, London and the south-east continued to see the most notable rises. Surveyors said rents in some areas had risen so sharply that previously affordable homes were now out of reach for many people, leaving growing numbers of tenants priced out. Estate agents Cluttons said tenants in central London should brace themselves for increases of between 8% and 10% following record increases of 19.1% in 2010. It added that existing tenants who wish to renew their contracts are facing smaller rises in the region of 4%, as landlords concerned about the general economic outlook opt to retain quality tenants rather than risk void periods. But the high cost of being a tenant was failing to deter people from renting, with many having no alternative due to the large deposits currently demanded by mortgage lenders. A balance of 35% of surveyors reported a rise in demand for rented accommodation during the three months to the end of April, the highest level for more than two years. The proportion reporting an increase in demand was also significantly higher than the 6% who said they had received a rise in new instructions from landlords during the same period, suggesting the mismatch between supply and demand would get worse. Rics said it was the first time the overall level of instructions had increased since April 2009, but this rise was doing little to help the situation as tenants were staying longer in properties than they previously would have. However, there was also a fall in the number of landlords reducing the size of their portfolios, with 2.8% selling a property during the three months, down from 4% during the previous three-month period. Rics spokesman James Scott-Lee said: “Although we are beginning to see more mortgages aimed at first-time buyers , many potential homeowners are still restricted from getting a foot on the property ladder, leading to increased demand in an already oversubscribed rental market. “There has been a small uplift in supply, but the imbalance between demand and availability can only mean rents will continue to rise.” Looking ahead, 33% more surveyors were predicting further rent rises than those who thought rents would fall, with expectations that the cost of being a tenant would increase highest in London, followed by the Midlands, the south-east and the north. Renting property Property First-time buyers Housing market Housing guardian.co.uk
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In an age where the answer to almost any question rests right at our fingertips, it is quite humbling to discover there is still a demand for a bound compendium of strange (and slightly disturbing) information. While scraping through the dregs of the internet researching my new book, “Attack of the Killer Facts: 1001 Terrifying Truths About Little Green Men, Government Mind-Control, Flesh-Eating Bacteria, and Goat-Sucking Vampires,” (Adams Media, a division of F+W Media; May 2011) I learned two concrete things. First, never Google “alien sex experiments” unless you are fully prepared mentally for what you will see. Second, the world is a far weirder place than I could have ever possibly imagined. Here you will find 17 of the strangest bits of trivia I unearthed from various books, magazines, websites, and general hearsay. Some are shocking, some are disgusting, and a few are both, but all of them offer a unique insight into the delightfully disturbing world of the weird.
Continue reading …Michele Bachmann’s new strategist Ed Rollins blasts Sarah Palin as being "Not Serious"
June 8, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media Ed Rollins is a longtime Republican operative who back in 2009 had this to say about Sarah Palin: Ed Rollins on Sarah Palin quitting: It was a disaster and insulting He started his career in politics back in the days of Nixon to Reagan and then he was hired by Huckabee in 2008 as his national campaign chairman. He was interviewed in the documentary called Boogie Man , about the life of Lee Atwater, the man responsible for the Willie Horton ads in which he talked about his friendship to Lee. Rollins is considered a pro in GOPtopia: National Campaign Director to Ronald Reagan in the 1984. In 1987, he had decided to manage the campaign of former New York Congressman Jack Kemp , convinced that Bush was not the true conservative heir to Reagan. {} On December 14, 2007 , Republican Mike Huckabee announced he had hired Rollins as his national campaign chairman and senior advisor. Rollins was later overheard saying that he wanted to “knock out” Mitt Romney ‘s teeth. Rollins is now part of Bachmann’s team and had this to say about Momma Grizzly: Michele Bachmann’s new top consultant, Ed Rollins, began his tenure with scathing criticism of potential Bachmann rival Sarah Palin. “Sarah has not been serious over the last couple of years,” Rollins told Brian Kilmeade on his radio show, Kilmeade and Friends. “She got the Vice Presidential thing handed to her, she didn’t go to work in the sense of trying to gain more substance, she gave up her governorship.” He suggested that the contrast would favor Bachmann. “Michele Bachmann and others [have] worked hard, she has been a leader of the Tea Party which is a very important element here, she has been an attorney, she has done important things with family values.” “She is probably the best communicator [in the GOP field] now that Mike Huckabee’s not in there,” he said. Ed called her out on quitting her job as Governor of Alaska which virtually no Republican has dared to do before. And so it begins.
Continue reading …Guatemala victims of US syphilis study still haunted by the ‘devil’s experiment’
June 8, 2011 No Comment
Survivors tell of damaged lives after being deliberately infected in secret 1940s experiment on 1,500 men, women and children Marta Orellana says she was playing with friends at the orphanage when the summons sounded: “Orellana to the infirmary. Orellana to the infirmary.” Waiting for her were several doctors she had never seen before. Tall men with fair complexions who spoke what she guessed was English, plus a Guatemalan doctor. They had syringes and little bottles. They ordered her to lie down and open her legs. Embarrassed, she locked her knees together and shook her head. The Guatemalan medic slapped her cheek and she began to cry. “I did what I was told,” she recalls. Today the nine-year-old girl is a rheumy-eyed 74-year-old great-grandmother, but the anguish of that moment endures. It was how it all began: the pain, the humiliation, the mystery. It was 1946 and orphans in Guatemala City, along with prisoners, military conscripts and prostitutes, had been selected for a medical experiment which would torment many, and remain secret, for more than six decades. The US, worried about GIs returning home with sexual diseases, infected an estimated 1,500 Guatemalans with syphilis, gonorrhea and chancroid to test an early antibiotic, penicillin. “They never told me what they were doing, never gave me a chance to say no,” Orellana said this week, seated in her ramshackle Guatemala City home. “I’ve lived almost my whole life without knowing the truth. May God forgive them.” The US government admitted to the experiment in October when the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and the health secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, issued a joint statement apologising for “such reprehensible research” under the guise of public health. Barack Obama phoned his Guatemalan counterpart, Alvaro Colom, to say sorry too. Susan Reverby, a professor at Wellesley College in the US, uncovered the experiment while researching the Tuskegee syphilis study in which hundreds of African American men were left untreated for 40 years from the 1930s. The Guatemalan study went further by deliberately infecting its subjects. Not only did it violate the hippocratic oath to do no harm but it echoed Nazi crimes exposed around the same time at the Nuremberg trials. The victims remained largely unknown but the Guardian has interviewed the families of the three survivors identified so far by Guatemala. They chronicled lives blighted by illness, neglect and unanswered questions. “My father didn’t know how to read and they treated him like an animal,” said Benjamin Ramos, 57, the son of Federico, 87, a former soldier. “This was the devil’s experiment.” Mateo Gudiel, 57, said his father, Manuel, 87, another ex-conscript, has syphilis-linked infections, dementia and headaches. “Some of this has been passed on to me, my siblings and our children.” Children can inherit congenital syphilis. More than half of the subjects were low-ranking soldiers delivered by their superiors to US physicians working from a military base in the capital. The Americans initially arranged for infected prostitutes to have sex with prisoners before discovering it was more “efficient” to inject soldiers, psychiatric patients and orphans with the bacterium. Guatemala’s official inquiry, headed by its vice-president, is due to publish its report in June. “What impacted me the most was how little value was given to these human lives. They were seen as things to be experimented on,” said Carlos Mejia, a member of the inquiry and head of the Guatemalan College of Physicians. The US scientists treated 87% of those infected with syphilis and lost track of the other 13%. Of those treated about a tenth suffered recurrences. The US medical establishment, including the surgeon-general, keenly followed the study even though John Cutler, who led the Guatemala team, acknowledged ethical violations in a 1947 letter, saying: “Unless the law winks occasionally, you have no progress in medicine.” His supervisor, RC Arnold, urged discretion. “If some goody organisation got wind of the work there would be a lot of smoke.” In the end the study yielded no useful information and was buried. Guatemalan co-operation was won by offering cigarettes to subjects and material to resource-starved institutions. Psychiatric patients who could not give their own names were registered under nicknames such as the “mute of St Marcos”. It is unclear what, if anything, was promised to the Sisters of Charity in return for supplying orphans to the tall men in white coats who visited each week from 1946-48. “They didn’t tell me why they singled me out,” said Orellana, who was four when sent to the institution after her parents died. After the initial gynaecological probing, when she assumes she was infected, she was given penicillin weekly. “My body hurt and I was sleepy, I didn’t want to play.” At least 10 other girls were also picked for the study, she added. The treatment failed – but even as an adult, when she worked as a maid and in factories, doctors would say only that she had “bad blood”, leaving her ailments a mystery. A “loving and patient” husband helped her overcome intimacy issues. She has five children, 20 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. When the US finally owned up to the scandal in 2010 Orellana, near crippled from a stroke but still lucid, was mesmerised. She tested positive for syphilis, said Rudy Zuniga, a lawyer who is representing alleged victims in a class action in the US. Only a handful of the original 1,500 may still be alive but there could be dozens if not hundreds of infected children and grandchildren, he said. Pablo Werner, a human rights lawyer who is investigating the case, doubted Guatemala would accept responsibility let alone pay compensation for its complicity in the experiment. “Our judicial system is not famous for speed or fairness. Even if the Guatemalan doctors who participated in this are dead their families still have connections,” he said. With the few survivors ailing, their Guatemalan and US lawyers hope to negotiate speedy compensation with US officials at a meeting due in August, said Zuniga. If that fails the case will go to a Washington district court and could last years. For Orellana the resolution of her life’s mystery, published in local media, has come with a catch. The criminal gangs which plague Guatemala City think she received a huge payout and are making threats, demanding a cut. Guatemala United States Obama administration Human rights Medical research Rory Carroll guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Kenneth Clarke drops shorter jail terms for rapists after tussle with Cameron
June 8, 2011 No Comment
No 10 sounds retreat on cuts to prison numbers while justice secretary insists Treasury must bear costs Justice secretary Kenneth Clarke has been forced by Number 10 to abandon a plan to give rapists, and other serious offenders, a 50% sentence discount in return for early guilty pleas, but he is fiercely resisting Treasury demands to make his justice ministry bear the multi-million pound cost. Clarke had proposed to increase the discount from 33% to 50% for all offenders, so saving £130m from a departmental budget being slashed by a quarter. Following talks with David Cameron over the past 48 hours, Clarke accepted rapists will now be excluded, but he is battling to retain the extra discount for less serious offences, a policy that would free up badly needed prison places. In difficult talks yesterday with the Treasury chief secretary, Danny Alexander, Clarke pointed out he had last year won Treasury agreement that if the government’s so-called rehabilitation revolution did not deliver a lower jail population, then the Treasury would bear the costs from the reserve. Clarke is insisting this be honoured by the Chancellor, George Osborne; if jail places are to go up, Clarke should not pay by finding cuts elsewhere in his budget such as legal aid. The Treasury is insisting he has a four-year settlement with clear ceilings. A Clarke ally said: “He is a former chancellor, and he is involved in a negotiation. He offered up some of the biggest cuts of any government department last year, and if Number 10 wants to change the policy, they are going to have to pay for it.” Clarke’s allies insist he enjoyed the clear agreement of the Treasury and the prime minister for the increase in the discount for pleading guilty early, but that support had gone cold in the past 48 hours. Cameron had been warned by his chief strategist and pollster, Andrew Cooper, that the Conservatives’ credentials as the party of law and order were being fatally damaged by a furore over shorter sentences in return for rapists pleading guilty. Cameron decided to execute a policy U-turn last week, but had not forseen that one-to-one discussions with Clarke on Tuesday would leak. Coming alongside the U-turn over health policy, Cameron will be aware of the danger in being seen as weak or irresolute. He is due to make a crime speech later this month, and the tabloid barrage over rapists was threatening to obscure his message, as well as anger his backbenchers. At prime minister’s questions Cameron went out of his way to praise Clarke, saying “he is doing a superb job” and adding “he has got plenty more fuel in his tank”. In face of claims by Labour leader Ed Miliband that “government sentencing policy was in a mess”, Cameron insisted there had been no U-turn, arguing the discount proposal had only been floated in a consultative green paper. Yet Clarke had in the Commons a fortnight ago described the policy as agreed, and is personally in no doubt Cameron sounded the retreat. The problem for Clarke is that the discount is a major part of his drive to stabilise the record 85,000 prison population in England and Wales. The Ministry of Justice has agreed to find savings of £2bn from a budget of £8.7bn. Ministry estimates show 3,400 of the 6,000 fewer prison places that will be needed as a result of his sentencing package will come from the plan to increase the maximum available sentence discount from 33% to 50%. In practice, the ministry estimates the average actual discount in sentences for early guilty pleas would rise from 25% to 34%. There were 1,058 rapists sentenced in 2010, of which 466 had pleaded guilty. Asked by Miliband to confirm the policy had been dropped, Cameron told MPs: “What we want is tough sentences for serious offenders. We produced a consultation paper that had widespread support for many of the proposals that it made, and in the coming weeks we will be publishing our legislation.” Miliband said there was widespread concern about the proposal and asked Mr Cameron if he had “torn it up, yes or no?” In one of Miliband’s weaker Commons performances, Cameron was able to hit back by pointing out that Sadiq Khan, Miliband’s own shadow justice secretary had described the plan as “a perfectly sensible vision for a sentencing policy”. He suggested it was Miliband who had undergone “a sudden U-turn”. Downing Street is also believed to have insisted that ministers look again at a plan to restore a judge’s discretion in imposing indeterminate sentences for public protection, a major factor in the increase in the jail population in England and Wales. The changes were welcomed on the Tory right. Philip Davies said today: “I think the Prime Minister has realised that Ken Clarke was in danger of single-handedly ruining the reputation of the Conservative party as the party of law and order.” Kenneth Clarke David Cameron Rape Crime Prisons and probation UK criminal justice Patrick Wintour guardian.co.uk
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Lady Cox, the proposer, says aim is to prevent discrimination against Muslim women and ‘jurisdiction creep’ in Islamic tribunals Islamic courts would be forced to acknowledge the primacy of English law under a bill being introduced in the House of Lords. The bill, proposed by Lady Cox and backed by women’s rights groups and the National Secular Society, was drawn up because of “deep concerns” that Muslim women are suffering discrimination within closed sharia law councils. The Arbitration and Mediation Services (Equality) Bill will introduce an offence carrying a five-year jail sentence for anyone falsely claiming or implying that sharia courts or councils have legal jurisdiction over family or criminal law. The bill, which will apply to all arbitration tribunals if passed, aims to tackle discrimination, which its supporters say is inherent in the courts, by banning the sharia practice of giving woman’s testimony only half the weight of men’s. Cox said: “Equality under the law is a core value of British justice. My bill seeks to preserve that standard” In a similar way to Jewish Beth Din courts, sharia tribunals can make verdicts in cases involving financial and property issues which, under the 1996 Arbitration Act, are enforceable by county courts or the high court. The tribunals should only be deciding civil disputes but two years ago the think-tank Civitas claimed sharia courts, some 85 of which operate in Birmingham, London, Bradford and Manchester, had crossed the proper limits of their jurisdiction and were regularly giving illegal advice on marriage and divorce. Cox said they are increasingly ruling on family and criminal cases, including child custody and domestic violence. Jurisdiction “creep” had caused considerable suffering among women compelled to return to abusive husbands, or to give up children and property. Diana Nammi, of the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation, said: “Women and children are very vulnerable members of the community and under sharia law they become invisible. Women and children are the most vulnerable in minority communities where religion tradition and culture has become the identity taking precedence over the human rights and women’s rights that are protected under civil, UK law.” The bill requires public bodies to inform women they have fewer legal rights if their marriage is unrecognised in English law. Cox said she had found “considerable evidence” of women, some of whom are brought to Britain speaking little English and kept ignorant of their legal rights, suffering domestic violence or unequal access to divorce, due to discriminatory decisions made. “We cannot continue to condone this situation. Many women say: ‘We came to this country to escape these practices only to find the situation is worse here.’ ” Cox said she would be asking the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, who caused a row last year when he said a recognised role for sharia law seemed unavoidable, to back her bill. She said: “By appearing to condone this inherent discrimination system which is causing real suffering to women, he has failed to recognise that suffering. He is appearing to forward the acceptability and validity of Sharia law in this country.” Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society, said: “Laws should not impinge on religious freedoms, nor should courts judge on theological matters. By the same token, democratically determined and human rights compliant law must take precedence over the law of any religion.” Aina Khan, a solicitor who advises on sharia law, said: “It is good in parts. I would like to see best practice in sharia councils, like in the Beth Din model and I would like some legislation. I don’t want somebody opening up a sharia board in their front room. Of course sex discrimination laws must apply. But there are some alarmist tones in the bill. Where she goes wrong is assuming that some sort of misogyny and discrimination goes on. Eighty per cent of its users are women.” Khurshid Drabu, adviser on constitutional affairs to the Muslim Council of Britain, said: “Bills of this kind don’t help anybody. They don’t appear to understand that we live in a free country where people can make free choices. Yet again, it appears to be a total misunderstanding of the concept that underpins these arbitration councils. Sharia councils operate under consent. If there is a woman who suffers as a result of a decision by one of these councils a woman is free to go to the British courts.” Islam Communities Women Human rights Equality Religion Karen McVeigh Amelia Hill guardian.co.uk
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Institutions including Harvard and Vanderbilt reportedly use hedge funds to buy land in deals that may force farmers out Harvard and other major American universities are working through British hedge funds and European financial speculators to buy or lease vast areas of African farmland in deals, some of which may force many thousands of people off their land, according to a new study. Researchers say foreign investors are profiting from “land grabs” that often fail to deliver the promised benefits of jobs and economic development, and can lead to environmental and social problems in the poorest countries in the world. The new report on land acquisitions in seven African countries suggests that Harvard, Vanderbilt and many other US colleges with large endowment funds have invested heavily in African land in the past few years. Much of the money is said to be channelled through London-based Emergent asset management, which runs one of Africa’s largest land acquisition funds, run by former JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs currency dealers. Researchers at the California-based Oakland Institute think that Emergent’s clients in the US may have invested up to $500m in some of the most fertile land in the expectation of making 25% returns. Emergent said the deals were handled responsibly. “Yes, university endowment funds and pension funds are long-term investors,” a spokesman said. “We are investing in African agriculture and setting up businesses and employing people. We are doing it in a responsible way … The amounts are large. They can be hundreds of millions of dollars. This is not landgrabbing. We want to make the land more valuable. Being big makes an impact, economies of scale can be more productive.” Chinese and Middle Eastern firms have previously been identified as “grabbing” large tracts of land in developing countries to grow cheap food for home populations, but western funds are behind many of the biggest deals, says the Oakland institute, an advocacy research group. The company that manages Harvard’s investment funds declined to comment. “It is Harvard management company policy not to discuss investments or investment strategy and therefore I cannot confirm the report,” said a spokesman. Vanderbilt also declined to comment. Oakland said investors overstated the benefits of the deals for the communities involved. “Companies have been able to create complex layers of companies and subsidiaries to avert the gaze of weak regulatory authorities. Analysis of the contracts reveal that many of the deals will provide few jobs and will force many thousands of people off the land,” said Anuradha Mittal, Oakland’s director. In Tanzania, the memorandum of understanding between the local government and US-based farm development corporation AgriSol Energy, which is working with Iowa University, stipulates that the two main locations – Katumba and Mishamo – for their project are refugee settlements holding as many as 162,000 people that will have to be closed before the $700m project can start. The refugees have been farming this land for 40 years. In Ethiopia, a process of “villagisation” by the government is moving tens of thousands of people from traditional lands into new centres while big land deals are being struck with international companies. The largest land deal in South Sudan, where as much as 9% of the land is said by Norwegian analysts to have been bought in the last few years, was negotiated between a Texas-based firm, Nile Trading and Development and a local co-operative run by absent chiefs. The 49-year lease of 400,000 hectares of central Equatoria for around $25,000 (£15,000) allows the company to exploit all natural resources including oil and timber. The company, headed by former US Ambassador Howard Eugene Douglas, says it intends to apply for UN-backed carbon credits that could provide it with millions of pounds a year in revenues. In Mozambique, where up to 7m hectares of land is potentially available for investors, western hedge funds are said in the report to be working with South Africans businesses to buy vast tracts of forest and farmland for investors in Europe and the US. The contracts show the government will waive taxes for up to 25 years, but few jobs will be created. “No one should believe that these investors are there to feed starving Africans, create jobs or improve food security,” said Obang Metho of Solidarity Movement for New Ethiopia. “These agreements – many of which could be in place for 99 years – do not mean progress for local people and will not lead to food in their stomachs. These deals lead only to dollars in the pockets of corrupt leaders and foreign investors.” “The scale of the land deals being struck is shocking”, said Mittal. “The conversion of African small farms and forests into a natural-asset-based, high-return investment strategy can drive up food prices and increase the risks of climate change. Research by the World Bank and others suggests that nearly 60m hectares – an area the size of France – has been bought or leased by foreign companies in Africa in the past three years. “Most of these deals are characterised by a lack of transparency, despite the profound implications posed by the consolidation of control over global food markets and agricultural resources by financial firms,” says the report. “We have seen cases of speculators taking over agricultural land while small farmers, viewed as squatters, are forcibly removed with no compensation,” said Frederic Mousseau, policy director at Oakland, said: “This is creating insecurity in the global food system that could be a much bigger threat to global security than terrorism. More than one billion people around the world are living with hunger. The majority of the world’s poor still depend on small farms for their livelihoods, and speculators are taking these away while promising progress that never happens.” United States Africa Hedge funds Investing Aid John Vidal Claire Provost guardian.co.uk
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Under new laws being drawn up addicts would be forced into treatment or jailed, and dealers ‘treated like serial killers’ Drug dealers are to be “treated like serial killers” and could be sent to forced labour camps under harsh laws being drawn up by Russia’s Kremlin-controlled parliament. Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of the state duma, the lower house, said a “total war on drugs” was needed to stem a soaring abuse rate driven by the flow of Afghan heroin through central Asia to Europe. Russia has as many as 6 million addicts (one in 25 people). Every year 100,000 people die from using drugs, Gryzlov said in a newspaper. The scale of the problem “threatens Russia’s gene pool”, he said. “We are standing on the edge of a precipice. Either we squash drug addiction or it will destroy us.” This year, President Dmitry Medvedev said drug abuse was cutting up to three percentage points off economic growth. Injecting drug use is also accelerating Russia’s Aids crisis because – unlike most other European countries – methadone treatment is banned and needle exchange programmes are scarce, meaning the virus spreads quickly from addict to addict via dirty syringes. An estimated one in 100 Russians are HIV positive. Under legislation promoted by the ruling United Russia party and now being reviewed in parliament, drug addicts will be forced into treatment or jailed, and dealers will be handed heftier custodial sentences. “The barons of narco-business must be put on a par with serial killers with the appropriate punishment in the form of a life sentence,” said Gryzlov, who is chairman of the party. Activists criticised the idea of putting addicts behind bars, pointing to a growing worldwide consensus that treating drug users as criminals has failed as a strategy. The Global Commission on Drugs Policy said in a report last week that there needed to be a shift away from criminalising drugs and incarcerating those who use them. Gryzlov, however, claimed that “criminal responsibility for the use of narcotics is a powerful preventative measure”. Special punishments should also be considered for dealers, he added: “Sending drug traders to a katorga [forced labour camp], for example. Felling timber, laying rails and constructing mines – that’s very different from sitting in a personal cell with a television and a fridge while you keep up your ‘business’ on the outside.” While it remains unclear how many of the measures will become law, other leading members of United Russia – which is headed by Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, and which dominates the duma – said they supported the initiative. The plans follow an admission by Medvedev in April that Russia’s fight against drug addiction had failed. He called for radical measures such as mandatory drug tests in schools. Possession of small quantities of psychotropic substances in Russia carries an administrative fine of up to 15,000 roubles (£330), but Gryzlov indicated it would now result in a jail term. The state should offer narkomany – addicts – a stark choice, he said: “Prison or forced treatment.” That could be a bleak prospect. Some of Russia’s detox clinics still use “coding”, a controversial therapy in which patients are scared into thinking terrible consequences (such as their testicles falling off) will result if they mix drugs with medicines which are actually placebos. Several activists condemned Gryzlov’s suggestion to “isolate” drug users from society. “Sending more people to prison will not reduce drug addiction or improve public health,” said Anya Sarang, president of the Andrey Rylkov Foundation, an advocacy group for people with HIV which works with injecting drug users (IDUs). “Russian prisons are terrible places full of HIV, tuberculosis and other diseases. Drugs are often even more accessible there than anywhere else.” She added: “What we need instead of this harsh drug control rhetoric is greater emphasis on rehabilitation, substitution treatment, case management for drug users and protection from HIV.” HIV prevalence among IDUs in western countries is 1 or 2%, but lack of outreach work and the absence of opiate substitution (methadone) and other “harm reduction” measures mean the figure is 16% in Russia – rising to 60% in hotspots such as St Petersburg. Denis Broun, the Moscow-based director of UNAIDS for Europe and central Asia, told the Guardian that Gryzlov’s proposals could make matters even worse. “It has been widely shown that criminalising people using drugs simply drives them underground and makes them much harder to reach with preventative measures,” he said. “This is not an effective strategy for fighting HIV. Purely repressive measures do not work.” Russia Drugs Aids and HIV Europe Health Tom Parfitt guardian.co.uk
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Development secretary faces down rightwing criticism of overseas aid, saying it is good value for money Andrew Mitchell, the development secretary, has faced down rightwing criticism of higher government spending on aid by defending British help for the world’s poor as morally right and in the national interest. Mitchell used a speech in London to mark his first year in office to say that the coalition’s development strategy provided good value for money, was targeted at countries in most need and was the best way to “protect UK security and prosperity”. In a direct riposte to those in the media and on the Tory right who have attacked the government’s decision to spare the aid budget from George Osborne’s austerity programme, Mitchell said: “It is a stain on all our consciences that a girl born in South Sudan today is more likely to die having a baby than to complete primary school. “When we know what life – and death – is like for over a billion people living on less than 80p a day, and we have the wherewithal to do something about it, then, yes, I do believe we have a moral imperative to do so.” Mitchell said that since becoming development secretary he had completed reviews of Britain’s aid spending to ensure that the extra money from British taxpayers was being well spent. “They [the reviews] have allowed ministers to take a strategic, informed view about where to focus our efforts in order to achieve the greatest impact. And to recognise the relative success of many countries that are coming out of poverty themselves. “So, over the next four years UK bilateral aid will be concentrated on 27 rather than 43 countries, among the poorest countries in the world, where the need is greatest. And whether we channel funds through multilateral agencies, or indeed through NGOs or others, we will expect the same rigour in results, transparency and value from them as we do from ourselves.” Mitchell rejected criticism that the government’s aid strategy increased dependency in poor countries and was often going to fast-growing emerging countries, such as India, which did not need it. “We are withdrawing aid from those countries that have succeeded in pulling themselves out of poverty. And we will continue to take this approach, celebrating when countries make the transition to self-sufficiency and supporting them through this process. Aid is a means to an end not an end in itself.” David Cameron stressed at last month’s G8 summit in Deauville that Britain would meet its pledge to increase aid spending to 0.7% of national output by 2013, but Mitchell said that the budget would be focused on “the poorest and the most vulnerable. On women and girls, including those who, because of the conflict in which they live, lose out twice over.” Mitchell said he wanted to “galvanise the entrepreneurial spirit of the private sector in the poorest countries and be open about what the government was doing. “We’ve made it easy for people to understand what we’re doing – publishing clear, simple data that’s easy to understand. Not only can the British taxpayer see what we are doing, but so too can the people our aid programmes are intended to help. Whether it’s a British person sitting in Manchester or a Kenyan sitting in Kisumu, any individual can hold us to account – and tell us if they think we’re getting it wrong.” Development Aid Global economy Conservatives David Cameron Larry Elliott guardian.co.uk
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