Aug 31, 2009

Link by Link - Wikipedia Looks Hard at Its Culture - NYTimes.com

Graphic representation of English language con...Image via Wikipedia

BUENOS AIRES

EUGENE KIM left his conference here on Thursday afternoon to visit the Plaza de Mayo, where the mothers of victims of Argentina’s military dictatorship in the 1970s and ’80s march silently, their hair swept under white scarves.

The weekly marches began in 1977 to remember “the disappeared,” those who were snatched and killed by the dictatorship in an attempt to destroy the political opposition. Today, the mothers represent a movement — they are joined by supporters as they march, and there are key chains and T-shirts for sale. People like Mr. Kim come to take photographs.

“They have been professionalized,” Mr. Kim observed. It’s inevitable, he says. He should know; he is in the professionalization business. Or consulting, as it is also known.

His latest client, as of July, is the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization in San Francisco responsible for Wikipedia projects around the world, which is spending $600,000 to create a five-year strategic plan. And the conference he briefly left was the annual Wikimania gathering, held last week in the General San Martín Cultural Center, just off Corrientes Avenue, one of the main arteries of Buenos Aires, and a short subway ride to the Plaza de Mayo.

He and the other newly hired wiki-consultants tended to stick out. They were a bit older. They were a bit better dressed (O.K., a lot better dressed). They tended to travel in packs of two or three. And they were taking notes. Few had been to this conference before, and they were clearly trying to figure out where to begin in remaking a miraculous project that had become among the top five Web sites in the world, with a total of more than 330 million visitors a month, without the benefit of consultants.

In addition to Mr. Kim, there was Jelly Helm, a former executive creative director at Wieden + Kennedy who worked for clients like Nike before leaving to focus on nonprofit work, and three members of the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit consulting firm that will help analyze trends within the Wikipedia community.

In a similar role is Matt Halprin, a partner of the Omidyar Network, a “philanthropic investing firm” created by Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, which in August announced a $2 million grant to the foundation over two years. Mr. Halprin, a former vice president at eBay in charge of global trust and security, was just named to the Wikimedia board.

The presence of the wiki-consultants was the most tangible sign of soul-searching among Wikipedians, and certainly at the foundation. Wikipedia has never been more influential but this success has come with burdens — errors or vandalism can resonate around the world, while the largest projects, English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia, were losing steam, adding fewer articles and scaring off potential new contributors. And to a certain temperament, great success naturally leads to the question, how long can it last?

“There is a spirit and culture that is starting to shift,” Mr. Kim said of the need for a strategic plan. “That is a necessary thing. But the question is how do you scale without losing sight of your essence.” A student of collaboration, Mr. Kim, whose consulting business is called Blue Oxen Associates, says any plan will have to “do it the wiki-way.”

“We will put those questions up on the wiki and have them go at it for an extended time and hope that we get something,” he said.

He will be soliciting proposals from the community, which will have its own wiki pages, and Wikipedians are being asked to commit 10 hours a week for four months to join task forces divided by issues of concern.

Jimmy Wales, the public face of the project, was unsparing in his criticism in addressing the conference. “We are mostly male computer geeks,” he stated, adding that there might be a measure of diversity, but only in that “we are from different parts of the world.”

As he spoke, a chart showed the self-reported demographics of Wikipedia contributors — more than 80 percent male, more than 65 percent single, more than 85 percent without children, around 70 percent under the age of 30.

Some Wikipedias are dominated by articles about pop culture, Mr. Wales pointed out, especially Japanese Wikipedia; according to one of his slides, barely 20 percent of the articles on Japanese Wikipedia are about anything else.

More profoundly, he said that Wikipedia was losing sight of its commitment to give everyone in the world a free encyclopedia, particularly people in sub-Saharan Africa. “Is it more important to get to 10 million articles in English, or 10,000 in Wolof?” he asked.

In her speech, Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, was effusive in her praise for all that Wikipedians have created, but she too thought there was reason for concern.

“I believe we are pretty suspicious outsiders,” she said, adding that there were good reasons for that. “We are vulnerable to exploitation — people want to monetize the traffic that comes to Wikipedia, or pursue a political agenda.”

“People want to help us,” she said. “We need to open ourselves up to external resources. It is important we open those doors and let those people in.”

Walking through Buenos Aires, Mr. Helm said this was unlike any communications assignment he had taken on. “It is an awesome story to tell, but I have no idea what we’ll do in terms of tactics,” he said. “My hope is that no one will be able to say who did they hire to do this work.”

Mr. Kim said one issue Wikipedians would need to examine would be “the introduction of bureaucratization,” as represented by outsiders like himself. “It is important to me that my participation have a beginning and an end,” he said.
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Invisible Immigrants, Old and Left With ‘Nobody to Talk To’ - NYTimes.com

Sikhism Related Photo of Visitors to a Gurdwar...Image via Wikipedia

FREMONT, Calif. — They gather five days a week at a mall called the Hub, sitting on concrete planters and sipping thermoses of chai. These elderly immigrants from India are members of an all-male group called The 100 Years Living Club. They talk about crime in nearby Oakland, the cheapest flights to Delhi and how to deal with recalcitrant daughters-in-law.

Together, they fend off the well of loneliness and isolation that so often accompany the move to this country late in life from distant places, some culturally light years away.

“If I don’t come here, I have sealed lips, nobody to talk to,” said Devendra Singh, a 79-year-old widower. Meeting beside the parking lot, the men were oblivious to their fellow mall rats, backpack-carrying teenagers swigging energy drinks.

In this country of twittering youth, Mr. Singh and his friends form a gathering force: the elderly, who now make up America’s fastest-growing immigrant group. Since 1990, the number of foreign-born people over 65 has grown from 2.7 million to 4.3 million — or about 11 percent of the country’s recently arrived immigrants. Their ranks are expected to swell to 16 million by 2050. In California, one in nearly three seniors is now foreign born, according to a 2007 census survey.

Many are aging parents of naturalized American citizens, reuniting with their families. Yet experts say that America’s ethnic elderly are among the most isolated people in America. Seventy percent of recent older immigrants speak little or no English. Most do not drive. Some studies suggest depression and psychological problems are widespread, the result of language barriers, a lack of social connections and values that sometimes conflict with the dominant American culture, including those of their assimilated children.

The lives of transplanted elders are largely untracked, unknown outside their ethnic or religious communities. “They never win spelling bees,” said Judith Treas, a sociology professor and demographer at the University of California, Irvine. “They do not join criminal gangs. And nobody worries about Americans losing jobs to Korean grandmothers.”

The speed of the demographic transformation is leading many cities to reach out to the growing numbers of elderly parents in their midst. Fremont began a mobile mental health unit for homebound seniors and recruited volunteer “ambassadors” to help older immigrants navigate social service bureaucracies. In Chicago, a network of nonprofit groups has started The Depression Project, a network of community groups helping aging immigrants and others cope.

But their problems can go unnoticed because they often do not seek help. “There is a feeling that problems are very personal, and within the family,” said Gwen Yeo, the co-director of the Geriatric Education Center at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Many who have followed their grown children here have fulfilling lives, but life in this country does not always go according to plan for seniors navigating the new, at times jagged, emotional terrain, which often means living under a child’s roof.

Mr. Singh, the widower, grew up in a boisterous Indian household with 14 family members. In Fremont, he moved in with his son’s family and devoted himself to his grandchildren, picking them up from school and ferrying them to soccer practice. Then his son and daughter-in-law decided “they wanted their privacy,” said Mr. Singh, an undertone of sadness in his voice. He reluctantly concluded he should move out.

So when he leaves the Hub, dead leaves swirling around its fake cobblestones, Mr. Singh drives to the rented room in a house he found on Craigslist. His could be a dorm room, except for the arthritis heat wraps packed neatly in plastic bins.

“In India there is a favorable bias toward the elders,” Mr. Singh said, sitting amid Hindu religious posters and a photograph of his late wife. “Here people think about what is convenient and inconvenient for them.”

Move to the Ethnoburbs

Sociologists call Mr. Singh and his cohort the “.5 generation,” distinct from the “1.5 generation” — younger transplants who became bicultural through school and work. Immigrant elders leave a familiar home, some without electricity or running water, for a multigenerational home in communities like Fremont that demographers call ethnoburbs.

A generation ago, Fremont was 76 percent Caucasian. Today, nearly one-half of its residents are Asian, 14 percent are Latino and it is home to one of the country’s largest groups of Afghan refugees (it was a setting for the best-selling book “The Kite Runner”). Along the way, a former beauty college has become a mosque; a movie house became a Bollywood multiplex; a bank, an Afghan market, and a stucco-lined street renamed Gurdwara, after the Gurdwara Sahib Sikh Temple.

Reliant on their children, late-life immigrants are a vulnerable population. “They come anticipating a great deal of family togetherness,” Professor Treas said. “But American society isn’t organized in a way that responds to their cultural expectations.”

Hardev Singh, 76, and his wife, Pal Keur, 67, part of Fremont’s large Sikh community, live above the office of the Fremont Frontier Motel, its lone nod to a Western motif a dilapidated wagon wheel sign.

They rented the fluorescent-lighted apartment after living for three years with their daughter, Kamaljit Purewal, her husband, his mother and two grandchildren. As the children grew, Mr. Singh and Mrs. Keur were relegated to the garage, transformed into a room. As Mr. Singh said, “in winter it was too much cold.”(Ms. Purewal said that she “tried to give them a better life,” but felt unappreciated because her parents favored her older brother in India. “If you’re a happy family, a small house is a big house,” she said. )

Fraught family dynamics when elderly parents move in with children often leave older members without a voice in decision-making, whether about buying a house or using the shower.

Pravinchandra Patel, the 84-year-old founder of the 100 Years Living Club, intervened when he heard that the son in one family was taking his parents’ monthly Supplemental Security Income check, for $658, then doling out $20 for spending money.

“I ask the son, ‘How much money do you figure you owe your parents for your education?’ ” he said.

Crying, Not Smiling

Once a lush landscape of fruit trees and cauliflower fields, Fremont, 40 miles south of San Francisco, is now the Bay Area’s fourth-largest city, with voters from 152 countries. Physical distances can be compounded by psychic ones: 13 percent of the city’s immigrant seniors live in households isolated by language. Theirs is a late-life journey without a map.

For the men in the 100 Years Living Club, the road leads to the Hub, where they have been meeting for 14 years, since the Target store was a Montgomery Ward. Mr. Patel, who was an herbal doctor in India, started the group after he noticed his friends were in “house prisons,” as he put it, without even the confidence to use a bus. The men keep their spirits alive by sharing homemade chaat snacks. They are the lucky ones.

Two miles away, Zia Mustafa, an Afghan widow, sits at her kitchen table with its plastic tablecloth, looking at a scrapbook with bright color postcards of Turkmen girls in elaborate dress posed against an azure sky.

Mrs. Mustafa arrived here on a desolate emotional road. Her husband and eldest son were killed by a rocket in Kabul; her son Waheed, now 24 and living with her in Fremont, lost his leg in the attack. Other children remain in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“My family is divided in three,” she said through a translator, weeping.

Waheed Mustafa, after surgery in Oakland, leads the life of a young man in his 20s — going to school, working out, talking on his cellphone, hanging out with friends.

Mrs. Mustafa, who was home-schooled in the Koran, spends her days watching television soap operas, attempting to decipher stories through actors’ facial expressions. She sleeps with the lights on, worrying that even within these safe white walls this son, too, will not come back.

“They come from a country where it takes so much to survive, yet they feel they haven’t done enough,” said Dr. Sudha Manjunath, a psychiatrist who consults with the city’s mental health unit. “To tell them now, ‘It’s time to take care of yourself’ — well, they’ve never heard of such things.”

A recent health survey by Dr. Carl Stempel, a sociology professor at California State University, East Bay, found that most Afghan women here suffer from post-traumatic stress.

“I thought they would be so happy in this country — all the houses, the food, the cars,” said Najia Hamid, who founded the Afghan Elderly Association of the Bay Area, an outreach group for widows, with seed money from Fremont. “But I was met with crying.”

Young couples who need to work to support families have imported grandparents in part to baby-sit. There is a misguided assumption that baby-sitting is sustenance enough for the aging, said Moina Shaiq, founder of the Muslim Support Network, which brings seniors together. “We are all social beings. How much can you talk to your grandchildren?” Mrs. Shaiq said.

Small Things Matter

In 1965 changes to immigration policy allowed naturalized citizens to sponsor the immigration of parents without quota restrictions. By 1996, a growing perception that elderly immigrants were “gaming the system” — that their children were pledging to support them and then enrolling their parents in the Supplemental Security Income and food stamp programs — became an impetus for welfare reform. Congress imposed a five-year waiting period for Medicaid and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and restricted S.S.I. and food stamp eligibility for adults.

Some states, including California and New York, have chosen to eliminate the waiting period for Medicaid for lawfully residing immigrants, paying with state money.

Michael Fix, senior vice president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonprofit center in Washington, said that as immigrants form a larger part of the elderly population, “all the issues that bear on health care and social services will increasingly be transformed in part into immigrant issues.”

In 2007, according to census data, about 16 percent of immigrant seniors lived below the poverty line, compared with 12 percent of native-born elderly, said Steven P. Wallace, the associate director of the Center for Health Policy Research at the University of California, Los Angeles. Another 24 percent of immigrant elderly are “the near-poor,” he said, “sitting on the edge of a cliff.”

Kashmir Singh Shahi, 43, a former engineer who was born in India, is a volunteer for the Community Ambassador Program for Seniors, offering people like Hardev Singh an attuned ear.

Mr. Singh, a retired driving instructor for the Indian army, is 76 and determined to work full time. He takes two buses to work the night shift at a gas station an hour away. “I don’t want to become idle in the heart,” he said matter-of-factly.

Mr. Singh had not been to a doctor in years, and Mr. Shahi helped him and his wife apply for Medicare. Mr. Singh is also entitled to Social Security but will not accept the additional assistance.

Mr. Shahi’s experiences with his own parents have illuminated the way for his clients. He came to the Bay Area in 1991 to work at a fiber optics company, and he sponsored his parents six years later.

After his father died, Mr. Shahi changed careers so he could care for his mother, who has suffered from depression.

She shares a room with her 12-year-old grandson, Kirat, improbably surrounded by Iron Man and Incredible Hulk posters. In this affectionate setting, amid decorations for her granddaughter’s Sweet 16 party, the 84-year-old woman sat quietly, blue slippers on her feet, her eyes cast downward at her folded hands.

“In India, she would walk to the grocery store, go next door to have tea, talk about common things like the wheat and the corn,” said Mr. Shahi of the ingrained visiting culture so universally missed by many ethnic elders. “At home anyone can knock on the door anytime, to relieve the pressure. Here nothing is similar.”

So at the end of his day counseling others, Mr. Shahi sits with his mother before she goes to bed. He always asks if she needs any warm milk.

“The small things matter,” he said of his mother and other elders longing for home. “The feeling that they are welcomed.”
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Likely Japanese PM Hardly a Natural Politician - washingtonpost.com

TOKYO - AUGUST 11:  Yukio Hatoyama, President ...Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 31, 2009 3:51 PM

TOKYO, Aug. 31 -- Stiff, shy and very rich, Yukio Hatoyama cuts a curious figure for an opposition leader whose party laid waste on Sunday to the most formidable political machine in the history of modern Japan.

Hatoyama, 62, who soon will become prime minister, has perhaps the bluest political blood in the land. But he is hardly a natural politician.

He has said that when he was studying for a doctorate in engineering at Stanford, he spent many hours wondering what is was that made him avoid human relationships and turn away from all things political.

When he did enter the family business of politics in the 1980s, a far-away look, an eccentric manner and a wooden style of speaking caused him to be nicknamed the "alien." Part of it was the content of his speeches. He talks about how "politics is love," a formulation not often heard from ambitious Japanese politicians.

That message was honed in this summer's campaign to "putting people's lives first." In a promise that resonated with voters, he said his party would wrench power away from bureaucrats who serve the interests of big business. He said he wanted to create "a horizontal society bound by human ties, not a vertically connected society of vested interests."

In a childhood that echoed the cosseted intellectual ambitions of the New York Roosevelts, including Theodore and Franklin, Hatoyama grew up in a splendid European-style family palace in Tokyo. There he collected insects and stamps with his little brother Kunio. He and his brother, who also grew up to be a politician, are believed to have assets of no less than $100 million.

Their grandfather was a prime minister and a founder of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which had governed Japan as a virtual one-party state for more than half a century -- until Sunday.

That's when Yukio Hatoyama's Democratic Party rolled over the LDP in a historic landslide. For the first time in Japan's postwar history, voters gave an opposition party control of the government.

For Hatoyama, it was a victory that cut three ways against the family grain. For not only was his grandfather an LDP potentate, his father served in an LDP government as foreign minister and his brother had been an LDP minister in the government of Prime Minister Taro Aso, which voters slapped down on Sunday.

The man who routed the party of his forebears came into politics with the help of that party. He became a private secretary to his father in 1983, and three years later, running for his father's seat, was elected to the lower house of parliament.

It is one of the ironies of Japanese-style reform politics that Hatoyama's party, as part of its manifesto, has promised to ban inherited seats.

Hatoyama had had enough of the LDP by the early 1990s. He defected to a small opposition party and was a leader of a fragile eight-party coalition that briefly grabbed control of the lower house -- and tossed the LDP out of power. But the coalition fell apart in less than 11 months and the LDP again took control.

Hatoyama soon co-founded the Democratic Party -- a slightly left-of-center mix of disaffected LDP veterans, trade unionists, former bureaucrats and ex-socialists. The party jelled as a vote-winning force under the leadership of Ichiro Ozawa, a wily political strategist and former LDP power broker, surprising and humiliating the LDP in a 2007 election by winning control of the upper house of parliament. If the party also was able to win control of the lower house, which selects the government, Ozawa would become prime minister.

Then a campaign fundraising scandal forced Ozawa to resign as party leader in May, creating an opening for Hatoyama. After it became clear on Sunday that voters had resoundingly rejected the LDP, Hatoyama thanked Ozawa on national television for engineering their party's victory.

As the long reign of the LDP demonstrates, Japanese voters tend to like continuity in government. It makes them anxious to toss aside the powers that be. For that reason, there are worries here about the new, largely untested leadership.

In polls and interviews, even voters who support the Democratic Party have expressed doubts about the experience and competence of its leaders. Many economic and political analysts say the party does not have a credible economic plan. It is highly doubtful, they say, that new leadership can deliver on promises to put more cash into the hands of consumers.

There are also doubts about Hatoyama's decisiveness and leadership skills. He has never held a major position in government, serving only in 1994 as a deputy cabinet spokesman for a government that soon collapsed.

But on the campaign trail this summer, his speeches have become more engaging and his message more inspiring. He has developed a reputation as a gentle man, one who kneels and talks eye-to-eye with children and with elderly people in wheelchairs.

His political vision, he says, is a "spirit of fraternity." As he explains it, this means "every person should have a bond to society by making oneself useful and being needed."

In a country with record unemployment, a chronically stagnant economy, a staggering public debt and the most aged population in world history, that vision is soon to be tested.

Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this report.

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Howard Kurtz: Obama's Liberal Base Loving His Cool Approach Less and Less - washingtonpost.com

US Senator Barack Obama campaigning in New Ham...Image via Wikipedia

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 31, 2009

It is as inevitable in Washington as sweltering summers and steamy sex scandals.

A president is going to be smacked around from the moment he takes office and the uplifting rhetoric of campaign rallies meets the gritty reality of governing.

But the criticism of Barack Obama has turned strikingly personal as some of his liberal media allies have gone wobbly on him. After playing a cheerleading role during the campaign, some are bluntly questioning whether he's up to the job.

If Obama is losing Paul Krugman, can the rest of the left be far behind?

"I'm concerned as to whether, in trying to reach out to the middle, he is selling out his base," says Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page. "I find myself saying, 'Where's that well-oiled Obama machine we saw last year?' . . . Maybe he's being a little too cool at this point."

David Corn, a blogger for Politics Daily, says that despite a reservoir of support for the president, some of his policies "have caused concern, if not outright anger, among certain liberal commentators and bloggers. It's been a more conventional White House than many people expected or desired. . . . He's made compromises that have some people concerned about his adherence to principle."

Perhaps that's why a recent Frank Rich column in the New York Times was headlined, "Is Obama Punking Us?"

Rich says by phone that there is "a kind of impatience" with Obama as his initiatives stall, but that the 24-hour news cycle is producing a rush to judgment just seven months into the administration.

"The big mistake made in looking at him during the campaign was that he was a wuss or an academic or professorial and couldn't rise to the occasion, and he did," Rich says. "It's too early to talk about whether he's strong enough. He's got to be pretty damn strong to have won the campaign. . . . Of course he's not the messiah. He never was going to be the messiah."

But the sense of letdown is palpable. Krugman wrote recently that "Mr. Obama was never going to get everything his supporters wanted. But there's a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of that line."

Arianna Huffington has lamented Obama's "lack of leadership," asking: "How could someone with a renowned ability to inspire, communicate complex ideas, and connect with voters find himself in this position?" Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen has noted "his distinct coolness, an above-the-fray mien that does not communicate empathy." The Post's Eugene Robinson, writing about the White House seeming to retreat from a public health insurance option, wrote: "We didn't elect Obama to be an expedient president. We elected him to be a great one."

Robinson says now: "I'd be lying if I didn't say there was a feeling, an excitement that attended the advent of the Obama presidency, and I'm the first to say it infected me." But, he says, "I wanted to remind readers -- and if he reads the column, to remind him -- of what he said and what people voted for. . . . Any president, coming in at any time, in any context, is going to make decisions I might not like."

The White House is well aware of the diminishing enthusiasm. "I don't think anyone anticipated that we would have broad consensus on everything we did, even from our friends," deputy press secretary Bill Burton says. "People have meaningful differences with our policies. The president doesn't view his approval ratings as something to be put up on a shelf and admired."

Burton suggests a certain journalistic impatience, saying: "Do I think it's too early to say that our friends will abandon us? I certainly do."

It was liberal commentators, of course, who formed the leading edge of the most favorable coverage that any White House contender has drawn in a generation. Having swooned as they did, some were probably more susceptible to having their hearts broken.

As Lee Siegel writes in the Daily Beast, "Maybe all of us who think that making universal health care the law of the land is the most important issue of our lifetimes would not be feeling so angry and bitter if we took a step back and looked at the true cause of our rage: the liberals who raised such impossible expectations of Obama in the first place."

Obama's essential appeal in 2008 was his vow to move beyond red and blue partisanship. But that has disappointed some of the liberal pundits who thought he shared their goals. Unlike the late Ted Kennedy, who was beloved by the left, Obama had to be taken on faith.

It's easy to forget, in light of Obama's global celebrity, that five years ago he was a state senator in Illinois. Given his short tenure as a national figure, Obama finds himself having to prove, at least to the opinion-mongers, what he's really made of. "Is He Weak?" asked a recent Jim Hoagland column, on foreign policy, in The Post. One theme running through the chatter on the left is that Obama compromises too much, especially, in this view, with Republicans who have little interest in working with him.

To be sure, the liberals aren't neglecting their usual targets. In a recent Time column, Joe Klein called the GOP a "party of nihilists," adding that "the Republicans are curling themselves into a tight, white, extremist bubble."

But brickbats from your own side can inflict a greater toll. The conservative media turned on George W. Bush when he named Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, helping to doom her nomination. By the end of Bush's second term, some commentators on the right were bemoaning the president's huge increase in spending. And the lack of enthusiasm that conservative pundits displayed toward John McCain hampered him in the fall election.

The president's liberal critics tend to cluster around particular issues. Some see health reform as making or breaking Obama's first term. Others are disappointed at the pace of withdrawal from Iraq, the escalation in Afghanistan and the delay in closing Guantanamo Bay. Still others argue that Obama should be leading the charge to investigate terrorism-related abuses during the Bush administration.

For reporters and columnists alike, campaigns are an adrenaline rush and governing, in truth, is a slog. Obama's election may have spawned talk of a "post-racial" society, but that faded somewhere between the "birther" flap and the Skip Gates arrest. With his poll numbers dipping, he is increasingly depicted as a struggling salesman, unable to close the deal.

Even sympathetic commentators face an inherent tension when dealing with their side. The day after Robinson won a Pulitzer Prize in April, Obama called to congratulate him, saying his columns were "thoughtful and fair." Except, the president added, for that morning's piece on how he should have been tougher on Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, which was "complete nonsense." The two had a spirited 10-minute discussion before Obama signed off by saying Robinson's family must be proud of him.

"This is not new for me," Robinson said of the mixed reaction.

In today's hyperpartisan atmosphere, liberal pundits are likely to remain in Obama's corner. But for those who once felt a thrill up their leg, the sensation may be wearing off.

Kurtz also works for CNN as a contributor and host of its weekly media program, "Reliable Sources."

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Many Women Stayed Away From the Polls In Afghanistan - washingtonpost.com

Women standing in line to vote in Bangladesh.Image via Wikipedia

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 31, 2009

KABUL, Aug. 30 -- Five years ago, with the country at peace, traditional taboos easing and Western donors pushing for women to participate in democracy, millions of Afghan women eagerly registered and then voted for a presidential candidate. In a few districts, female turnout was even higher than male turnout.

But on Aug. 20, when Afghans again went to the polls to choose a president, that heady season of political emancipation seemed long gone. This time, election monitors and women's activists said, a combination of fear, tradition, apathy and poor planning conspired to deprive many Afghan women of rights they had only recently begun to exercise.

With insurgents threatening to attack polling places and voters, especially in the rural south, many families kept their women home on election day, even if the men ventured out to vote. In cities, some segregated female polling rooms were nearly empty, and many educated women who had voted or even worked at polling stations in previous elections decided not to risk going out this time.

"Everywhere I went before elections, I urged women in the villages to vote. But when the day came, even professional women in the city who normally felt free to go to work and shops and weddings stayed home. I was shocked," said Safia Siddiqui, a legislator from Nangahar province. "There has been a lot of talk about women's civic life and political movements, but security comes first."

Although no official turnout figures are available and the election results are not yet final, election monitoring groups and political activists from Taliban-plagued provinces report that in dozens of insecure districts, almost no women voted. Nationwide, they say, women's participation was much lower than in either the 2004 presidential or 2005 parliamentary elections.

The sense of eroding political rights for women did not begin with this election. In the past several years, Taliban attacks on prominent women have sent a powerful message to others who dreamed of entering public life. In the southern province of Kandahar alone, a female legislator, a women's affairs official and a female prosecutor were gunned down by terrorists. Others have received constant threats, travel with armed guards or rarely visit their constituencies.

When rural women did vote in this election, it was often by proxy, which lent itself to fraud, monitoring groups report. Monitors and others said that across the south, women's voter registration cards, which often had no photographs because of conservative taboos on women's faces being seen, were taken to the polls in batches by male relatives or tribal elders.

In some cases, they said, those same cards were used by officials or partisans to stuff ballot boxes, either for President Hamid Karzai or his top challenger, ex-foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, as well as for candidates for provincial council seats. With about one-third of the vote counted, Karzai now leads Abdullah 46.2 percent to 31.4, leaving both short of the 50 percent-plus-one-vote needed to avoid a runoff.

"Our constitution gives all men and women equal rights to vote, but in most areas that were not safe and secure, men did not let the women leave home and voted for them," said Sabrina Saghib, a member of a parliamentary committee on women's rights. "That is against the law and those votes should not be counted as women's votes."

Abdullah and Karzai have accused each other's camps of widespread election fraud. More than 2,000 complaints of fraud have been sent to the internationally led Electoral Complaints Commission, reportedly including some that describe the use of women's voting cards for ballot-box stuffing. The commission has not released any details, and it could take weeks to finish investigating the most serious claims.

A contributing factor in the low female turnout was that in many insecure areas, not enough women were willing to work at the polls as monitors or staff, so men were sent instead. That meant many families would not allow their female members to vote at those sites.

Accounts of low participation by women came from female activists and politicians in Kabul and a dozen provinces. Some described voting in short lines and empty rooms, or said they were unable to vote because of Taliban threats. Some tried to encourage local women to vote but found them afraid, confused and subject to strong family pressure to stay home.

Sahira Sharif, a women's rights activist from the southeastern province of Khost, said that in 2004 and 2005 she traveled freely across the province, talking to women about the importance of voting. This time, she said, she received support from the International Republican Institute to undertake a similar campaign but had to arrange her meetings in secret to avoid detection by the Taliban.

"It made me sad to see how far backward things have gone for women in my province in just a few years," Sharif said, adding that long distances from villages to polling stations made it especially risky for women to vote. In an ironic twist on the abuse of women's voting cards, she also said that a female candidate for Khost's provincial council took several thousand unused cards and stuffed ballot boxes for herself.

Shahazad Akbar, a staff member of the Free and Fair Election Foundation in Kabul, said her mother, a teacher, had worked as a polling official in the last election but was too fearful even to go to the polls this time. Akbar's sister knocked on doors as a campaign worker and found that most women had little idea about the election. Akbar toured several polling places in the capital and found almost no women there.

"Women feel special pressures in our society," she said. "Even in areas where you'd think women would face less obstacles, they could not get permission to go because of insecurity." In Kandahar, she said, female election observers from her organization did not tell their friends or neighbors what they were doing.

Many urban women who did go to the polls expressed a strong sense of defiance, saying they were determined not to be cowed by Taliban threats to cut off their ink-dipped fingers. But others said they were fed up with national leadership and saw no point in risking physical harm to participate.

"I voted for Mr. Karzai last time. We were all so excited then, and we thought peace would come. But now things have gotten much worse, and I decided not to vote at all," said Shuqufa, 38, a mother of five in Karte Nau, a Kabul district where suicide bombers and gunmen attacked the police station on election day. "These political leaders bring us nothing but fighting and rockets. We are fed up with the Taliban, and we are fed up with them."

The major candidates did little to appeal to the women's vote, campaigning without their wives in deference to conservative traditions. At the last moment, Abdullah and Karzai brought their wives out to vote with them, but the gesture seemed like a belated photo opportunity. Abdullah's wife was the only female voter in her polling room.

Some rights activists said the election-day chill signified a wider, continuing setback for Afghan women's role in social, political and economic life after a brief period of hope for change after the Taliban regime was ousted in late 2001. They noted that domestic violence against women is increasing, that the Taliban has attacked and shut down hundreds of girls' schools and that most women remain economically in thrall to their fathers and husbands, even when they are abused.

"Things are reverting, and it's because of a mix of insecurity, economy and culture," said Soraya Sobrang, a physician and member of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. "For a few years when security was better, women could participate in public life and the new constitution gave them political rights. But then the attacks started, and people were warned not to send their daughters to school, not to send their wives to work. All their new rights came under threat, and nothing really changed in their lives."

Now, Sobrang said, many Afghan women have lost hope.

"We have lost a lot of the ground we made. Women still face forced marriages, still work in the fields, still depend on men who beat them every day," said Sobrang, who voted on Aug. 20 in a very short line of nervous, unsmiling women. "We can give a card to a woman and tell her to vote, but that does not protect her from danger, and it does not give her any real rights at all."

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Kashmiris oppose Pakistan’s Northern Areas package - Dawn

The Disputed Territory : Shown in green is Kas...Image via Wikipedia

ISLAMABAD: Kashmiri politicians opposed a Pakistani plan on Monday they say is aimed at integrating the strategic but disputed Northern Areas into Pakistan, arguing it will undermine their case for independence from India.

The Northern Areas of Gilgit and Baltistan were bundled in with Kashmir and demarcated as disputed territory under UN resolutions passed after Pakistan and India fought the first of their three wars in 1948.

Bordering China on one side and the mainly Buddhist Indian region of Ladakh on the other, Pakistan's sparsely populated Northern Areas are known to mountaineers as the home of many of the world's highest peaks.

Pakistan and India fought a brief but intense border conflict in the Kargil sector of this region in 1999.

Although Pakistan has held the northern territories since the first war with India, their status was hitherto undefined as Pakistan had not wanted to compromise its case in the broader dispute over Kashmir.

On Saturday, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani unveiled a reform package that would result in these areas having their own governor and chief minister.

The areas have also been renamed as Gilgit-Baltistan.

Amanullah Khan, leader of the pro-independence Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, rejected the package, saying it appeared to be aimed at merging the disputed areas into Pakistan.

‘We strongly condemn this package. It will harm the interests of Pakistan as well as Kashmiris,’ he told Reuters.

‘It looks like they are integrating these areas into Pakistan as done by India.’

‘Suspicious, unacceptable’

Sardar Attique Ahmed Khan, a pro-Pakistan politician and a former prime minister of Pakistani-administered Kashmir, also expressed reservations about the package.

‘We support internal autonomy for these areas...but such moves to unilaterally alter the status of these areas and gradually give them the status of a province are suspicious and unacceptable,’ he said.

The roughly 1.5 million people of Gilgit and Baltistan largely oppose integration into Kashmir and demand the territory be merged into Pakistan and declared a separate province.

Officials in the past had stonewalled on this demand because it would have diluted Pakistan's demand for implementation of a UN-mandated plebiscite to allow the people of Kashmir to determine their own future.

Pakistani-administered Kashmir, known as Azad Kashmir, enjoys some sort of self-rule with its own government, parliament and flag, but the Northern Areas are directly ruled by Islamabad.

India holds about 45 per cent of Kashmir and Pakistan more than a third. China controls the remainder.

Analysts say the reform package appears to be aimed at striking a balance between giving some sort of internal autonomy to the Northern Areas without undermining Pakistan's position on the Kashmir dispute.

‘They have met the demands of people of the Northern Areas on a limited scale,’ said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a political analyst.

‘It's a mid-way house. They will give them some concessions and then will wait and see what happens to the Kashmir issue.’
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RI should not use reactive nationalism against Malaysia : observer - Antara

Indonesia Ritual in Penang Island - MalaysiaImage by tesKing via Flickr

Jakarta (ANTARA News) - A socio-economic observer has warned Indonesian people not to be trapped in what he called "reactive nationalism" or "suicidal nationalism" in responding to the various provocations by Malaysia.

"What we need in facing Malaysia is common-sense nationalism," Fajroel Rachman, chairman of the non-governmental organization "Pedoman Indonesia" said here Monday commenting on the neighboring country`s provocations against Indonesia ranging from making claims on Indonesian arts and culture to persecution of Indonesian migrant workers (TKI).

According to Rachman, the preferred way to settle the problem with Malaysia should be negotiations.

Therefore, Rachman expressed disagreement if the Indonesian people later take emotional or provocative steps let alone armed actions under the once-popular slogan of "Crush Malaysia".

He stressed that the government should immediately form a special team to be led directly by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, and Foreign Minister acting as chairman and assisted by legal team, artists and cultural experts.

In the meantime, about the Indonesian migrant workers who experienced the persecution in Malaysia, Rachman said, it should be delegated to the Malaysian courts, but the Indonesia Embassy in Kuala Lumpur must also provide physical protection and law to the migrant workers.

Fadjroel further said that Malaysia is only a small and monarchic country that is not too concerned about human right issues, while Indonesia is a large and democratic country.

"If Indonesia is well managed, then our competitors are only China, India and Brazil, not Malaysia. So, do not be trapped," he added.

In the meantime, the Indonesian minister of culture and tourism Jero Wacik said on Thursday (Aug.27) that Malaysia had offered an apology over the "Pendet" traditional dance controversy.

"Just now in the afternoon the Malaysian minister of tourism called me to offer an apology over the Pendet case," he said.

The minister said the apology was offered in connection with the depiction without permit of a Balinese "Pendet" welcome dance in the Enigmatic Malaysia tourism advertisement program broadcast in the Discovery Channel.

He admitted that the apology was offered verbally but he hoped an official reply would be given by the Malaysian government to the Indonesian government following its complaint over the issue submitted recently.(*)
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Troops exit temple complex - Phnom Penh Post

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Cambodia's Defence Ministry says government has halved deployed troops at Preah Vihear but warns that forces remain prepared for any future hostilities.
090831_03
Photo by: Tracey Shelton
Soldiers walk down the mountain near Preah Vihear temple last month. One brigade left the area this week following Hun Sen’s promise to reduce troop numbers around the disputed temple.

Troops stationed at the Preah Vihear temple complex near the Thai border completed their redeployment over the weekend, a Royal Cambodian Armed Forces commander told the Post on Sunday.

Srey Doek, commander of RCAF Division 3, said Prime Minister Hun Sen on Saturday met soldiers from Brigade 11 during their redeployment to their base in Kampot province.

"[Hun Sen] welcomed them as they travelled near Siem Reap and offered them each 50,000 riels [US$12], and the prime minister's wife offered them gifts of fruit," Srey Doek said.

Srey Doek said the money and fruit were given to nearly 1,000 RCAF soldiers as expressions of gratitude for their service at the front line, adding that troops from other brigades from Siem Reap as well as members of Hun Sen's personal bodyguard who were also redeployed over the weekend did not meet the prime minister.

Meanwhile, an official at the Defence Ministry said Sunday that forces at the border have now been halved.

"We have pulled out 50 percent of the troops from Preah Vihear temple," said ministry spokesman Chhum Socheat.

"This shows that the situation at the border is really getting better, and that both countries have a mutual understanding of peace," he added.

Hun Sen declared last week that the 13-month standoff with Thailand over the disputed Preah Vihear temple complex, which claimed more than seven lives and left hundreds homeless, had effectively ended following a bilateral withdrawal of troops announced during a meeting on August 24 between the head of RCAF, General Pol Saroeun, and his Thai counterpart, General Songkitti Jaggabatra of the Royal Thai Armed Forces.

Troops still on guard
Despite a thaw in relations, Cambodian military officials last week were quick to point out that troops would still be necessary to guard the integrity of the border and the sovereignty of the nation.

Defence Minister Tea Banh said some troops would remain at the border.

"We do not need too many soldiers there now. We are currently adjusting the numbers to achieve the right balance for the situation," Tea Banh said last week.

Chea Dara, RCAF deputy commander in chief, echoed this sentiment Sunday, saying the border's security remained a vital concern and downplaying the impact of the withdrawal on Cambodia's ability to secure its border with Thailand.

"It is not a problem for our soldiers to defend the nation, even as their numbers have been reduced by the withdrawal," he said Sunday. "We have kept enough of our troops in place."

He said if Thailand "shows a softer manner" Cambodia could cut troop numbers further. "However, if anything happened, our troop mobility would be very swift."

Thailand in June reignited the row over the temple when it asked World Heritage body UNESCO to reconsider its decision to formally list the temple in Cambodia.

Cambodia and Thailand have been at loggerheads over the land around Preah Vihear temple for decades.
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Junta briefs KIO on Kokang war - Mizzima

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Monday, 31 August 2009 20:55
Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – The Burmese military junta has taken pains to explain to the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) that its recent war on the Kokang armed group was to nip in the bud production of narcotic drugs and arms and ammunition by the ethnic ceasefire group.

A junta delegation led by Col. Thet Pone from Northern Military Command Military Affairs Security (MAS) met ethnic Kachin leaders on August 29 in Laiza Hotel in KIO’s headquarter in Laiza. Col. Thet Pone told them that the Kokang ethnic group led by Peng Jia Xing was into manufacturing arms and traded in drugs.

On the KIO’s side, the Strategic Command Commander Brig. Gen. En Banla, Vice Chief-of-Staff Col. Guan Mau and Secretary Dr. Laja attended the meeting.

"They made out that the Kokang group led by Peng Jia Xiang fired first at them, when they wanted to inspect their arms manufacturing unit and search for narcotic drugs. After which they had no option but to occupy the area," a Kachin officer said on condition of anonymity.

The military government's mouthpiece the 'New Light of Myanmar' reported that in the three-day clashes between the junta's forces and the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), 11 were killed and 31 injured on the Burmese Army’s side. Besides 15 policemen were killed, 13 injured and eight bodies of Kokang soldiers were also found, the news paper reported.

But according to a statement issued by Peng Jia Xiang's, about 200 civilians were killed in the two-day battle and three Chinese civilians were killed in artillery fire from government troops.

The statement added that the junta had threatened ethnic armed groups which had rejected the 2008 constitution. The regime was trying to divide and weaken them.

Military observers in the region said that about 800 Kokang troops were still moving along the Sino-Burma border. Some of them crossed into China and surrendered their arms to Chinese authorities.

A KIO officer felt that the junta had deliberately created a rift among Kokang troops.

"The SPDC (junta) launched the war, while rival Kokang groups were fighting for power, which was created by SPDC. As soon as the new administrative body was formed they set up the Border Guard Force (BGF). If Peng Jia Xiang had gone to that meeting, the junta would certainly have arrested him for interrogation," he said.

The junta backed the breakaway group led by Vice-Chairman Bai So Cheng leading to the clashes.

The SPDC has been putting pressure on all ceasefire ethnic armed groups to disarm and transform into the Border Guard Force. There is concern that there would be similar war against other ceasefire groups which refused the junta's proposal on BGF.

Four ceasefire groups the 'United Wa State Army' (UWSA), 'Kachin Independence Organization' (KIO), 'Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army' (MNDAA) and Maila group or 'National Democracy Alliance Army' (NDAA) formed a military alliance.

The allies, however, did not pitch in, in the war against the Kokang group. The Kachin people are concerned with the clashes between junta’s forces and Kokang forces.

The local military command in Kachin State, the Northern Command, has tightened security in the region.

The military command has restricted movement near Bala Min Htin bridge in Sitapu Ward, Myitkyina August 29 night and announced that all those who violate the restriction will be dealt with.

It has ordered closure of the Myitkyina night market after 10 p.m.
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VOA News - Burma Refugees in China Head Home as Fighting Dies Down



31 August 2009

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Refugees that fled to China to escape fighting in Burma are beginning to head home after Burmese authorities said the situation has returned to normal. But analysts say more fighting could break out as Burmese forces try to consolidate control ahead of next year's elections.

Kokang refugees walk with their belongings after returning to the China-Burma border town of Yanlonkyaing, Burma, 29 Aug 2009
Kokang refugees walk with their belongings after returning to the China-Burma border town of Yanlonkyaing, Burma, 29 Aug 2009
Hundreds of refugees left China's Yunnan province Monday for home in Kokang, the mainly ethnic Chinese region of Burma's northeastern Shan state.

More than 30,000 people from Kokang had fled across the border to China to escape weeks of fighting between Burma's government forces and a local militia that controls the region.

Burma's state media reported more than 30 people were killed in the clashes but that the fighting in Kokang, which broke the region's 20-year ceasefire, had stopped.

Ian Holliday is dean of social sciences at the University of Hong Kong and researches Burma politics. He says Burma's military government is looking to take back control of the country's several militia-controlled areas in time for the 2010 elections.

"Ahead of that election, the junta is extremely keen to really pacify the entire territory and bring it under political control," said Holliday. "So, instead of having this rather gray area of a ceasefire deal which enables ethnic militias to control parts of the territory, the government now wants to make sure that its control extends across all of Burma. And, to do that, the government is upping the ante in its long standing struggle with these militias."

In June, Burmese forces attacked Karen rebels, who control territory on Burma's border with Thailand, forcing thousands of villagers to flee into Thailand.

Holliday says more fighting is possible in the coming weeks in other areas of Burma that are outside of government control.

But, he says the fighting in the Kokang region should stay quiet as China, one of Burma's few backers, is very concerned about stability on its western border.

"We are talking about something which goes right into Chinese security on a border which the Chinese themselves are very worried about," he said. "We have seen Tibet last year, we have seen Xinjiang this year... So, the last thing that they want is anything that might be destabilizing on a frontier like that.

Holliday says China has more leverage on Burma than any other country in the world and that it will use every means to prevent the spread of the conflict. But, he adds Beijing is facing an extremely nationalistic military government in Burma that does not like to take orders from anybody.
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Aug 30, 2009

Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption - The New York Review of Books

Resized image of Ritalin-SR-20mg-full.png; squ...Image via Wikipedia

By Marcia Angell

Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower, and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial
by Alison Bass

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 260 pp., $24.95

Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs
by Melody Petersen

Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pp., $26.00

Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness
by Christopher Lane

Yale University Press, 263 pp., $27.50; $18.00 (paper)

A Note to Readers

Recently Senator Charles Grassley, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has been looking into financial ties between the pharmaceutical industry and the academic physicians who largely determine the market value of prescription drugs. He hasn't had to look very hard.

Take the case of Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of pediatric psychopharmacology at Harvard's Massachusetts General Hospital. Thanks largely to him, children as young as two years old are now being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with a cocktail of powerful drugs, many of which were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for that purpose and none of which were approved for children below ten years of age.

Legally, physicians may use drugs that have already been approved for a particular purpose for any other purpose they choose, but such use should be based on good published scientific evidence. That seems not to be the case here. Biederman's own studies of the drugs he advocates to treat childhood bipolar disorder were, as The New York Times summarized the opinions of its expert sources, "so small and loosely designed that they were largely inconclusive."[1]

In June, Senator Grassley revealed that drug companies, including those that make drugs he advocates for childhood bipolar disorder, had paid Biederman $1.6 million in consulting and speaking fees between 2000 and 2007. Two of his colleagues received similar amounts. After the revelation, the president of the Massachusetts General Hospital and the chairman of its physician organization sent a letter to the hospital's physicians expressing not shock over the enormity of the conflicts of interest, but sympathy for the beneficiaries: "We know this is an incredibly painful time for these doctors and their families, and our hearts go out to them."



Or consider Dr. Alan F. Schatzberg, chair of Stanford's psychiatry department and president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association. Senator Grassley found that Schatzberg controlled more than $6 million worth of stock in Corcept Therapeutics, a company he cofounded that is testing mifepristone—the abortion drug otherwise known as RU-486—as a treatment for psychotic depression. At the same time, Schatzberg was the principal investigator on a National Institute of Mental Health grant that included research on mifepristone for this use and he was coauthor of three papers on the subject. In a statement released in late June, Stanford professed to see nothing amiss in this arrangement, although a month later, the university's counsel announced that it was temporarily replacing Schatzberg as principal investigator "to eliminate any misunderstanding."

Perhaps the most egregious case exposed so far by Senator Grassley is that of Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff, chair of Emory University's department of psychiatry and, along with Schatzberg, coeditor of the influential Textbook of Psychopharmacology.[2] Nemeroff was the principal investigator on a five-year $3.95 million National Institute of Mental Health grant—of which $1.35 million went to Emory for overhead—to study several drugs made by GlaxoSmithKline. To comply with university and government regulations, he was required to disclose to Emory income from GlaxoSmithKline, and Emory was required to report amounts over $10,000 per year to the National Institutes of Health, along with assurances that the conflict of interest would be managed or eliminated.

But according to Senator Grassley, who compared Emory's records with those from the company, Nemeroff failed to disclose approximately $500,000 he received from GlaxoSmithKline for giving dozens of talks promoting the company's drugs. In June 2004, a year into the grant, Emory conducted its own investigation of Nemeroff's activities, and found multiple violations of its policies. Nemeroff responded by assuring Emory in a memorandum, "In view of the NIMH/Emory/GSK grant, I shall limit my consulting to GSK to under $10,000/year and I have informed GSK of this policy." Yet that same year, he received $171,031 from the company, while he reported to Emory just $9,999—a dollar shy of the $10,000 threshold for reporting to the National Institutes of Health.

Emory benefited from Nemeroff's grants and other activities, and that raises the question of whether its lax oversight was influenced by its own conflicts of interest. As reported by Gardiner Harris in TheNew York Times,[3] Nemeroff himself had pointed out his value to Emory in a 2000 letter to the dean of the medical school, in which he justified his membership on a dozen corporate advisory boards by saying:

Surely you remember that Smith-Kline Beecham Pharmaceuticals donated an endowed chair to the department and there is some reasonable likelihood that Janssen Pharmaceuticals will do so as well. In addition, Wyeth-Ayerst Pharmaceuticals has funded a Research Career Development Award program in the department, and I have asked both AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals and Bristol-Meyers [sic] Squibb to do the same. Part of the rationale for their funding our faculty in such a manner would be my service on these boards.

Because these psychiatrists were singled out by Senator Grassley, they received a great deal of attention in the press, but similar conflicts of interest pervade medicine. (The senator is now turning his attention to cardiologists.) Indeed, most doctors take money or gifts from drug companies in one way or another. Many are paid consultants, speakers at company-sponsored meetings, ghost-authors of papers written by drug companies or their agents,[4] and ostensible "researchers" whose contribution often consists merely of putting their patients on a drug and transmitting some token information to the company. Still more doctors are recipients of free meals and other out-and-out gifts. In addition, drug companies subsidize most meetings of professional organizations and most of the continuing medical education needed by doctors to maintain their state licenses.

No one knows the total amount provided by drug companies to physicians, but I estimate from the annual reports of the top nine US drug companies that it comes to tens of billions of dollars a year. By such means, the pharmaceutical industry has gained enormous control over how doctors evaluate and use its own products. Its extensive ties to physicians, particularly senior faculty at prestigious medical schools, affect the results of research, the way medicine is practiced, and even the definition of what constitutes a disease.

Consider the clinical trials by which drugs are tested in human subjects.[5] Before a new drug can enter the market, its manufacturer must sponsor clinical trials to show the Food and Drug Administration that the drug is safe and effective, usually as compared with a placebo or dummy pill. The results of all the trials (there may be many) are submitted to the FDA, and if one or two trials are positive—that is, they show effectiveness without serious risk—the drug is usually approved, even if all the other trials are negative. Drugs are approved only for a specified use—for example, to treat lung cancer—and it is illegal for companies to promote them for any other use.

But physicians may prescribe approved drugs "off label"—i.e., without regard to the specified use—and perhaps as many as half of all prescriptions are written for off-label purposes. After drugs are on the market, companies continue to sponsor clinical trials, sometimes to get FDA approval for additional uses, sometimes to demonstrate an advantage over competitors, and often just as an excuse to get physicians to prescribe such drugs for patients. (Such trials are aptly called "seeding" studies.)

Since drug companies don't have direct access to human subjects, they need to outsource their clinical trials to medical schools, where researchers use patients from teaching hospitals and clinics, or to private research companies (CROs), which organize office-based physicians to enroll their patients. Although CROs are usually faster, sponsors often prefer using medical schools, in part because the research is taken more seriously, but mainly because it gives them access to highly influential faculty physicians—referred to by the industry as "thought-leaders" or "key opinion leaders" (KOLs). These are the people who write textbooks and medical journal papers, issue practice guidelines (treatment recommendations), sit on FDA and other governmental advisory panels, head professional societies, and speak at the innumerable meetings and dinners that take place every year to teach clinicians about prescription drugs. Having KOLs like Dr. Biederman on the payroll is worth every penny spent.

A few decades ago, medical schools did not have extensive financial dealings with industry, and faculty investigators who carried out industry-sponsored research generally did not have other ties to their sponsors. But schools now have their own manifold deals with industry and are hardly in a moral position to object to their faculty behaving in the same way. A recent survey found that about two thirds of academic medical centers hold equity interest in companies that sponsor research within the same institution.[6] A study of medical school department chairs found that two thirds received departmental income from drug companies and three fifths received personal income.[7] In the 1980s medical schools began to issue guidelines governing faculty conflicts of interest but they are highly variable, generally quite permissive, and loosely enforced.

Because drug companies insist as a condition of providing funding that they be intimately involved in all aspects of the research they sponsor, they can easily introduce bias in order to make their drugs look better and safer than they are. Before the 1980s, they generally gave faculty investigators total responsibility for the conduct of the work, but now company employees or their agents often design the studies, perform the analysis, write the papers, and decide whether and in what form to publish the results. Sometimes the medical faculty who serve as investigators are little more than hired hands, supplying patients and collecting data according to instructions from the company.

In view of this control and the conflicts of interest that permeate the enterprise, it is not surprising that industry-sponsored trials published in medical journals consistently favor sponsors' drugs—largely because negative results are not published, positive results are repeatedly published in slightly different forms, and a positive spin is put on even negative results. A review of seventy-four clinical trials of antidepressants, for example, found that thirty-seven of thirty-eight positive studies were published.[8] But of the thirty-six negative studies, thirty-three were either not published or published in a form that conveyed a positive outcome. It is not unusual for a published paper to shift the focus from the drug's intended effect to a secondary effect that seems more favorable.

The suppression of unfavorable research is the subject of Alison Bass's engrossing book, Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower, and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial. This is the story of how the British drug giant GlaxoSmithKline buried evidence that its top-selling antidepressant, Paxil, was ineffective and possibly harmful to children and adolescents. Bass, formerly a reporter for the Boston Globe, describes the involvement of three people—a skeptical academic psychiatrist, a morally outraged assistant administrator in Brown University's department of psychiatry (whose chairman received in 1998 over $500,000 in consulting fees from drug companies, including GlaxoSmithKline), and an indefatigable New York assistant attorney general. They took on GlaxoSmithKline and part of the psychiatry establishment and eventually prevailed against the odds.

The book follows the individual struggles of these three people over many years, culminating with GlaxoSmithKline finally agreeing in 2004 to settle charges of consumer fraud for $2.5 million (a tiny fraction of the more than $2.7 billion in yearly Paxil sales about that time). It also promised to release summaries of all clinical trials completed after December 27, 2000. Of much greater significance was the attention called to the deliberate, systematic practice of suppressing unfavorable research results, which would never have been revealed without the legal discovery process. Previously undisclosed, one of GlaxoSmithKline's internal documents said, "It would be commercially unacceptable to include a statement that efficacy had not been demonstrated, as this would undermine the profile of paroxetine [Paxil]."[9]

Many drugs that are assumed to be effective are probably little better than placebos, but there is no way to know because negative results are hidden. One clue was provided six years ago by four researchers who, using the Freedom of Information Act, obtained FDA reviews of every placebo-controlled clinical trial submitted for initial approval of the six most widely used antidepressant drugs approved between 1987 and 1999—Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Serzone, and Effexor.[10] They found that on average, placebos were 80 percent as effective as the drugs. The difference between drug and placebo was so small that it was unlikely to be of any clinical significance. The results were much the same for all six drugs: all were equally ineffective. But because favorable results were published and unfavorable results buried (in this case, within the FDA), the public and the medical profession believed these drugs were potent antidepressants.

Clinical trials are also biased through designs for research that are chosen to yield favorable results for sponsors. For example, the sponsor's drug may be compared with another drug administered at a dose so low that the sponsor's drug looks more powerful. Or a drug that is likely to be used by older people will be tested in young people, so that side effects are less likely to emerge. A common form of bias stems from the standard practice of comparing a new drug with a placebo, when the relevant question is how it compares with an existing drug. In short, it is often possible to make clinical trials come out pretty much any way you want, which is why it's so important that investigators be truly disinterested in the outcome of their work.

Conflicts of interest affect more than research. They also directly shape the way medicine is practiced, through their influence on practice guidelines issued by professional and governmental bodies, and through their effects on FDA decisions. A few examples: in a survey of two hundred expert panels that issued practice guidelines, one third of the panel members acknowledged that they had some financial interest in the drugs they considered.[11] In 2004, after the National Cholesterol Education Program called for sharply lowering the desired levels of "bad" cholesterol, it was revealed that eight of nine members of the panel writing the recommendations had financial ties to the makers of cholesterol-lowering drugs.[12] Of the 170 contributors to the most recent edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), ninety-five had financial ties to drug companies, including all of the contributors to the sections on mood disorders and schizophrenia.[13] Perhaps most important, many members of the standing committees of experts that advise the FDA on drug approvals also have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry.[14]

In recent years, drug companies have perfected a new and highly effective method to expand their markets. Instead of promoting drugs to treat diseases, they have begun to promote diseases to fit their drugs. The strategy is to convince as many people as possible (along with their doctors, of course) that they have medical conditions that require long-term drug treatment. Sometimes called "disease-mongering," this is a focus of two new books: Melody Petersen's Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs and Christopher Lane's Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness.

To promote new or exaggerated conditions, companies give them serious-sounding names along with abbreviations. Thus, heartburn is now "gastro-esophageal reflux disease" or GERD; impotence is "erectile dysfunction" or ED; premenstrual tension is "premenstrual dysphoric disorder" or PMMD; and shyness is "social anxiety disorder" (no abbreviation yet). Note that these are ill-defined chronic conditions that affect essentially normal people, so the market is huge and easily expanded. For example, a senior marketing executive advised sales representatives on how to expand the use of Neurontin: "Neurontin for pain, Neurontin for monotherapy, Neurontin for bipolar, Neurontin for everything."[15] It seems that the strategy of the drug marketers—and it has been remarkably successful—is to convince Americans that there are only two kinds of people: those with medical conditions that require drug treatment and those who don't know it yet. While the strategy originated in the industry, it could not be implemented without the complicity of the medical profession.

Melody Petersen, who was a reporter for The New York Times, has written a broad, convincing indictment of the pharmaceutical industry.[16] She lays out in detail the many ways, both legal and illegal, that drug companies can create "blockbusters" (drugs with yearly sales of over a billion dollars) and the essential role that KOLs play. Her main example is Neurontin, which was initially approved only for a very narrow use—to treat epilepsy when other drugs failed to control seizures. By paying academic experts to put their names on articles extolling Neurontin for other uses—bipolar disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, insomnia, restless legs syndrome, hot flashes, migraines, tension headaches, and more—and by funding conferences at which these uses were promoted, the manufacturer was able to parlay the drug into a blockbuster, with sales of $2.7 billion in 2003. The following year, in a case covered extensively by Petersen for the Times, Pfizer pleaded guilty to illegal marketing and agreed to pay $430 million to resolve the criminal and civil charges against it. A lot of money, but for Pfizer, it was just the cost of doing business, and well worth it because Neurontin continued to be used like an all-purpose tonic, generating billions of dollars in annual sales.

Christopher Lane's book has a narrower focus—the rapid increase in the number of psychiatric diagnoses in the American population and in the use of psychoactive drugs (drugs that affect mental states) to treat them. Since there are no objective tests for mental illness and the boundaries between normal and abnormal are often uncertain, psychiatry is a particularly fertile field for creating new diagnoses or broadening old ones.[17] Diagnostic criteria are pretty much the exclusive province of the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is the product of a panel of psychiatrists, most of whom, as I mentioned earlier, had financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Lane, a research professor of literature at Northwestern University, traces the evolution of the DSM from its modest beginnings in 1952 as a small, spiral-bound handbook (DSM-I) to its current 943-page incarnation (the revised version of DSM-IV) as the undisputed "bible" of psychiatry—the standard reference for courts, prisons, schools, insurance companies, emergency rooms, doctors' offices, and medical facilities of all kinds.

Given its importance, you might think that the DSM represents the authoritative distillation of a large body of scientific evidence. But Lane, using unpublished records from the archives of the American Psychiatric Association and interviews with the princi-pals, shows that it is instead the product of a complex of academic politics, personal ambition, ideology, and, perhaps most important, the influence of the pharmaceutical industry. What the DSM lacks is evidence. Lane quotes one contributor to the DSM-III task force:

There was very little systematic research, and much of the research that existed was really a hodgepodge—scattered, inconsistent, and ambiguous. I think the majority of us recognized that the amount of good, solid science upon which we were making our decisions was pretty modest.

Lane uses shyness as his case study of disease-mongering in psychiatry. Shyness as a psychiatric illness made its debut as "social phobia" in DSM-III in 1980, but was said to be rare. By 1994, when DSM-IV was published, it had become "social anxiety disorder," now said to be extremely common. According to Lane, GlaxoSmithKline, hoping to boost sales for its antidepressant, Paxil, decided to promote social anxiety disorder as "a severe medical condition." In 1999, the company received FDA approval to market the drug for social anxiety disorder. It launched an extensive media campaign to do it, including posters in bus shelters across the country showing forlorn individuals and the words "Imagine being allergic to people...," and sales soared. Barry Brand, Paxil's product director, was quoted as saying, "Every marketer's dream is to find an unidentified or unknown market and develop it. That's what we were able to do with social anxiety disorder."

Some of the biggest blockbusters are psychoactive drugs. The theory that psychiatric conditions stem from a biochemical imbalance is used as a justification for their widespread use, even though the theory has yet to be proved. Children are particularly vulnerable targets. What parents dare say "No" when a physician says their difficult child is sick and recommends drug treatment? We are now in the midst of an apparent epidemic of bipolar disease in children (which seems to be replacing attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder as the most publicized condition in childhood), with a forty-fold increase in the diagnosis between 1994 and 2003.[18] These children are often treated with multiple drugs off-label, many of which, whatever their other properties, are sedating, and nearly all of which have potentially serious side effects.

The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of TheNew England Journal of Medicine.

One result of the pervasive bias is that physicians learn to practice a very drug-intensive style of medicine. Even when changes in lifestyle would be more effective, doctors and their patients often believe that for every ailment and discontent there is a drug. Physicians are also led to believe that the newest, most expensive brand-name drugs are superior to older drugs or generics, even though there is seldom any evidence to that effect because sponsors do not usually compare their drugs with older drugs at equivalent doses. In addition, physicians, swayed by prestigious medical school faculty, learn to prescribe drugs for off-label uses without good evidence of effectiveness.

It is easy to fault drug companies for this situation, and they certainly deserve a great deal of blame. Most of the big drug companies have settled charges of fraud, off-label marketing, and other offenses. TAP Pharmaceuticals, for example, in 2001 pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $875 million to settle criminal and civil charges brought under the federal False Claims Act over its fraudulent marketing of Lupron, a drug used for treatment of prostate cancer. In addition to GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, and TAP, other companies that have settled charges of fraud include Merck, Eli Lilly, and Abbott. The costs, while enormous in some cases, are still dwarfed by the profits generated by these illegal activities, and are therefore not much of a deterrent. Still, apologists might argue that the pharmaceutical industry is merely trying to do its primary job—further the interests of its investors—and sometimes it goes a little too far.

Physicians, medical schools, and professional organizations have no such excuse, since their only fiduciary responsibility is to patients. The mission of medical schools and teaching hospitals—and what justifies their tax-exempt status—is to educate the next generation of physicians, carry out scientifically important research, and care for the sickest members of society. It is not to enter into lucrative commercial alliances with the pharmaceutical industry. As reprehensible as many industry practices are, I believe the behavior of much of the medical profession is even more culpable.[19] Drug companies are not charities; they expect something in return for the money they spend, and they evidently get it or they wouldn't keep paying.

So many reforms would be necessary to restore integrity to clinical research and medical practice that they cannot be summarized briefly. Many would involve congressional legislation and changes in the FDA, including its drug approval process. But there is clearly also a need for the medical profession to wean itself from industry money almost entirely. Although industry–academic collaboration can make important scientific contributions, it is usually in carrying out basic research, not clinical trials, and even here, it is arguable whether it necessitates the personal enrichment of investigators. Members of medical school faculties who conduct clinical trials should not accept any payments from drug companies except research support, and that support should have no strings attached, including control by drug companies over the design, interpretation, and publication of research results.

Medical schools and teaching hospitals should rigorously enforce that rule, and should not enter into deals with companies whose products members of their faculty are studying. Finally, there is seldom a legitimate reason for physicians to accept gifts from drug companies, even small ones, and they should pay for their own meetings and continuing education.

After much unfavorable publicity, medical schools and professional organizations are beginning to talk about controlling conflicts of interest, but so far the response has been tepid. They consistently refer to "potential" conflicts of interest, as though that were different from the real thing, and about disclosing and "managing" them, not about prohibiting them. In short, there seems to be a desire to eliminate the smell of corruption, while keeping the money. Breaking the dependence of the medical profession on the pharmaceutical industry will take more than appointing committees and other gestures. It will take a sharp break from an extremely lucrative pattern of behavior. But if the medical profession does not put an end to this corruption voluntarily, it will lose the confidence of the public, and the government (not just Senator Grassley) will step in and impose regulation. No one in medicine wants that.

Notes

[1]Gardiner Harris and Benedict Carey, "Researchers Fail to Reveal Full Drug Pay," The New York Times, June 8, 2008.

[2]Most of the information in these paragraphs, including Nemeroff's quote in the summer of 2004, is drawn from a long letter written by Senator Grassley to James W. Wagner, President of Emory University, on October 2, 2008.

[3]See Gardiner Harris, "Leading Psychiatrist Didn't Report Drug Makers' Pay," The New York Times, October 4, 2008.

[4]Senator Grassley is current investigating Wyeth for paying a medical writing firm to ghost-write articles favorable to its hormone-replacement drug Prempro.

[5]Some of this material is drawn from my article "Industry-Sponsored Clinical Research: A Broken System," TheJournal of the American Medical Association, September 3, 2008.

[6]Justin E. Bekelman et al., "Scope and Impact of Financial Conflicts of Interest in Biomedical Research: A Systematic Review," The Journal of the American Medical Association, January 22, 2003.

[7]Eric G. Campbell et al., "Institutional Academic–Industry Relationships," The Journal of the American Medical Association, October 17, 2007.

[8]Erick H. Turner et al., "Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trials and Its Influence on Apparent Efficacy," The New England Journal of Medicine, January 17, 2008.

[9]See Wayne Kondro and Barb Sibbald, "Drug Company Experts Advised Staff to Withhold Data About SSRI Use in Children," Canadian Medical Association Journal, March 2, 2004.

[10]Irving Kirsch et al., "The Emperor's New Drugs: An Analysis of Antidepressant Medication Data Submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration," Prevention & Treatment, July 15, 2002.

[11]Rosie Taylor and Jim Giles, "Cash Interests Taint Drug Advice," Nature, October 20, 2005.

[12]David Tuller, "Seeking a Fuller Picture of Statins," The New York Times, July 20, 2004.

[13]Lisa Cosgrove et al., "Financial Ties Between DSM-IV Panel Members and the Pharmaceutical Industry," Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Vol. 75, No. 3 (2006).

[14]On August 4, 2008, the FDA announced that $50,000 is now the "maximum personal financial interest an advisor may have in all companies that may be affected by a particular meeting." Waivers may be granted for amounts less than that.

[15]See Petersen, Our Daily Meds, p. 224.

[16]Petersen's book is a part of a second wave of books exposing the deceptive practices of the pharmaceutical industry. The first included Katharine Greider's The Big Fix: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Rips Off American Consumers (PublicAffairs, 2003), Merrill Goozner's The $800 Million Pill: The Truth Behind the Cost of New Drugs (University of California Press, 2004), Jerome Avorn's Powerful Medicines: The Benefits, Risks, and Costs of Prescription Drugs (Knopf, 2004), John Abramson's Overdo$ed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (HarperCollins, 2004), and my own The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It (Random House, 2004).

[17]See the review by Frederick Crews of Lane's book and two others, The New York Review, December 6, 2007.

[18]See Gardiner Harris and Benedict Carey, "Researchers Fail to Reveal Full Drug Pay," The New York Times, June 8, 2008.

[19]This point is made powerfully in Jerome P. Kassirer's disturbing book, On the Take: How Medicine's Complicity With Big Business Can Endanger Your Health (Oxford University Press, 2005).

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