Nexus - 0303 - New Times Magazine-pages

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... GLOBAL NEWS ... NEWS win congressional approval of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the idea of an ever greater and freer exchange of goods and services seemed as popular as motherhood and apple pie. Anyway, who in the world would bother to read all of the WTO/GATT agreement's 22,000 pages? Well, apparently, a few sharp-eyed crit- ics have gone through enough of the volu- minous accord to discover some unsettling fine print which they are now making pub- lic, such as: * Portions of Sections 501-534, which make basic changes in US patent laws that diminish the constitutional rights of patent protection. + Section 742, which requires every new- born baby to get an IRS Taxpayer Identification Number at birth. * Section 745, which authorises the US Treasury to eliminate the guaranteed mini- mum interest rate on US savings bonds. * Section 766, "which is a mysterious change in pension laws, slipped into GATT/WTO to benefit some powerful spe- cial interest whom congressional commit- tees refuse to identify. Changes in US pen- sion laws should have absolutely no place in a trade bill." Nor is this all. Hidden in the 1,000-page GATT/WTO implementing legislation is a provision (Section 801) to give federal sub- sidies worth over US$2 billion to The Washington Post, Cox Enterprises (which owns the Atlanta Constitution), and a con- sortium of insiders operating under the name "Omnipoint". According to the October 1995 report of Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, "The our book, and that's why we can't let them silence us." The “Censorship Bypass" web site fea- tures internal government memos and other documents never before shown to the pub- lic. Their web site address is: http://www.kaiwan.com/~bypass. For further information, contact "Save The AIDS Book" Legal Defense Fund, 4141 Ball Road, #157, Cypress, CA 90630, USA; phone/fax (805) 681 9988, email AIDSCENTRL @aol.com. (Source: alt.conspiracy, the Internet) whopping subsidy was negotiated in secret, and its revelation by (media) competitors was a huge surprise to everyone." “In August of this year," says the Eagle Forum report, "the Federal Communications Commission adopted a fee formula for the valuable licenses grant- ed for PCS (personal communications ser- vice—a technical advance in cellular ser- vice). The fair market value of the licenses issued by the FCC to these three firms for the lucrative New York, Los Angeles and Washington, DC, markets is estimated by experts to approximate US$3 billion. However, the Chairman of the House Commerce Committee, Democrat John Dingell, and President Clinton slipped Section 801 into the GATT/WTO legisla- tion, which reduces the FCC fees to be paid by these three companies to about US$875 million." According to the report, this hidden financial subsidy "explains the lavish sup- port given to Bill Clinton and to GATT/WTO by those big newspapers”. (Source: America's Future Inc., PO Box 1625, Milford, PA 18337, USA, via alt.news- media, off the Internet) PROZAC SETTLEMENT KEPT SECRET An American judge has taken Prozac manufacturer Eli Lilly to task for making a secret settlement with the families of the victims killed and injured by Joseph Wesbecker who went on a shooting ram- page while on the drug. The families argued that Eli Lilly had not accurately reported the test results of Prozac to the drug regulator, the Food and Drug Administration. They also cited Eli Lilly's history of criminal disclosure, par- ticularly in relation to its anti-inflammatory drug, Oraflex. In the Oraflex case, Eli Lilly pleaded guilty to 25 criminal misdemeanour counts of failing to report information about the drug's adverse reactions to the FDA. But after fighting to get the Oraflex evi- dence admitted, the plaintiffs decided not to introduce it after allegedly reaching a secret agreement with Eli Lilly. Eli Lilly, while admitting that a settle- ment had been reached, stated that its exis- tence and terms should now remain a THE LINK BETWEEN BREAST CANCER AND BRAS Can the wearing of bras actually cause cancer? Two medical anthropologists, backed by carefully compiled data, suggest in their book, Dressed to Kill, that a scien- tifically valid link between breast cancer and bras does exist. The authors, Sydney Ross Singer and Soma Grismaijer, claim that by artificially constricting the female upper torso the bra secret. But Judge John Potter, who presided at the case, commented: "Secrecy is certainly not important to the millions of people tak- ing Prozac and the thousands of doctors prescribing Prozac. They want to know." (Source: Townsend Letter for Doctors & Patients, October 1995) HIDDEN BOMBSHELLS IN WORLD TRADE BILL When the World Trade Organisation Bill was submitted to the US Congress last autumn, quick and easy approval was expected. But critics have uncovered some hidden bombshells that may spell trouble. Supporters of US membership in the WTO, an outgrowth of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), had cause for confidence. After all, the Clinton Administration had managed to Sa APRIL-MAY 1996 NEXUS ¢ 7