Nexus - 0904 - New Times Magazine-pages

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... GLOBAL NEWS . ... NEWS EARTH'S MAGNETIC FIELD PRIMED FOR A FLIP? $37 billion, according to Public Citizen's analysis of the data. Together, the 10 drug companies on the list had the greatest return on revenues, reporting a profit of 18.5 cents for every dollar of sales—eight times higher than the median for all Fortune 500 industries, which was 2.2 Egypt, Israel, China, Zimbabwe, Malaysia and Uzbekistan have all cracked down on domestic opponents in the name of terrorism." That summary is close to what the group warned in the January 16 press release for its annual global survey: "The anti-terror campaign led by the United States is inspiring opportunistic attacks on civil liberties around the world." But one country singled out for criticism y Human Rights Watch was conspicuous- ly absent from ABC's report: the United States, whose anti-terrorism measures were described in the group's press release as "threatening long-held human rights rinciples". Among Bush administration actions that were identified as demonstrating a "troubling disregard for well-established uman rights safeguards" were "new laws ermitting the indefinite detention of non- citizens, special military commissions to try suspected terrorists, the detention of over 1,000 people, and the abrogation of the confidentiality of attorney-client communications for certain detainees". While ABC ignored this criticism of the US in favour of pointing fingers at other countries, the HRW report actually drew a connection between the erosion of human rights standards in the US and overseas. On January 17, the UK Guardian quoted HRW thus: "...dictators need do nothing more than photocopy measures introduced by the Bush administration, whose ability to criticise abuses in other countries was thus deeply compromised, said the New York-based Human Rights Watch in a devastating 660-page report.” (Source: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, January 18, 2002, http:/www.fair.org) arth's magnetic field could be gearing up for a flip, sending magnetic north to new digs in Antarctica, a study suggests. Although such a reversal has never been recorded by humans, switches have occurred many times in Earth's past. Little is known about why this happens, but researchers have suspected for years that currents of molten iron circulating in Earth's outer core (creeping at about one metre per hour) set up the opposite mag- netic poles at the antipodes. And computer models hint that vortices in the molten flow that swirl in a direction which weak- ens the magnetic field might begin the pole-flipping process. Now, satellite observations have turned up evidence that these subterranean vor- tices do exist. By comparing the strength and orientation of the magnetic field mea- sured by two satellites in 1980 and 2000, researchers at the Physics of the Globe Institute of Paris (IPGP) and the Danish Space Research Institute in Copenhagen were able to plot the currents of molten iron that create the magnetic dipole. In an April 11 letter to Nature, the team describes large whorls off the southern tip of Africa and near the poles—areas where the magnetic field has already flipped. (Source: American Association for the Advancement of Science, April 10, 2002, www.academicpress.com/inscight; also see Linda Moulton Howe's website, http:/www.earthfiles.com) cents. The drugs industry says it needs extraor- dinary profits to fund risky research and development of new drugs and to absorb the high cost of drug failures in clinical tri- als. The industry's output of new drugs has risen only modestly in the past two decades, despite a more than sixfold increase, after adjustment for inflation, in spending on research and development to more than $30 billion a year. In the past few years, output has actually declined. Many industry supporters blame tougher scrutiny by the Food and Drug Administration. The time spent to develop a drug, not counting the months consumed by govern- ment review, has lengthened from about nine years in the 1980s to more than 11 years, according to the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, and the cost has more than doubled, after adjustment for inflation, to $800 million. Public Citizen notes that the Tufts Center gets money from drug companies and maintains that the centre's figures are inflated to justify high drug costs. (Sources: British Medical Journal, no. 324, May 4, 2002; Public Citizen report available at http:/www.citizen.org) DRUG COMPANIES CONTINUE TO INCREASE PROFITS harmaceuticals again ranked as the most profitable sector in the United States in 2001, topping the annual Fortune 500 ranking of American corporations. The pharmaceutical industry topped all three of Fortune magazine's measures of profitability for 2001, making this decade the third in which the industry has been at or near the top in all the magazine's mea- sures of profitability. Overall profits of Fortune 500 compa- nies declined by 53 per cent in 2001, while the top 10 US drug makers increased prof- its by 32 per cent from US$28 billion to —) JUNE - JULY 2002 NEXUS ¢ 7 www.nexusmagazine.com