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The movie "Zero Dark Thirty" came not long after the successful US government operation to assassinate Osama Bin Laden. This movie is essentially a media glorified documentary of the event and the ideas of Just War and Just Terrorism come to mind.

The US government of course paints itself in a positive light because they have the opportunity to oversee the production of this movie. Additionally, the whole operation is portrayed as a heroic endeavor, justifying the measures the US had to take to assassinate Bin Laden and to some extent justifying their real world presence in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran.

Just War. The US is waging a justified war against terrorism and the exceptional measures they need to take is due to the exceptional times. But the US government does not allow the movie to acknowledge the terror the locals in the countries the US military occupied must have felt at the presence and sometimes violent actions of US soldiers. The US military was a terror to many of these people, but it ignored because of their emphasis on Just War. A justified terrorism on another country it could be argued, but this will not go as far as to say that.

Media such as this is one way in that the US government further creates fear and panic against terrorism while at the same time boosting public support and deference to government military action.

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ZERO DARK THIRTY - Official Trailer - In Theaters 12/19

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Read the exclusive interview with writer-producer Mark Boal http://insidemovies.ew.com/2012/08/06/zero-dark-thirty-first-look For a decade, an elite team of intelligence and military operatives, working in secret across the globe, devoted themselves to a single goal: to find and eliminate Osama bin Laden.

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"It is not a scandal. It is a sex crime"

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"It is not a scandal. It is a sex crime"

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In the wake of the leak private nude photos of female celebrities, Jennifer Lawrence spoke against the media's derogatory discourse of the situation.

Rather than being apologetic for her private actions she accused the media of perpetuating something wrong with our media-centered society: victim-blaming.

They shame these women and attack them while completely ignoring the fact that hackers violated their personal privacy and that the public that circulated these photos were almost equally at fault.

In our digital age, where everything is put into the public eye, it is hard to remember that there is such a thing as privacy. And that this privacy is a civil right, that should be protected by our government and yet far too often suspended by the same government in mostly ineffective attempts.

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"I was just so afraid. I didn't know how this would affect my career."

That's just the beginning of what Jennifer Lawrence has to say about her stolen-photos saga in the cover story of Vanity Fair 's November issue, the digital edition of which will be available Wednesday, October 8, and which hits newsstands in New York and Los Angeles on Thursday, October 9.
READ MORE: the full story is available October 8 in the digital editions. Subscribe now for access. The magazine will be on national newsstands on October 14.
Lawrence originally met with V.F. contributing editor Sam Kashner on August 13. News broke that hackers had stolen personal photos of her and posted them online on August 31-two weeks after the interview and a month after her July 29 cover shoot with Patrick Demarchelier. So Kashner followed up with Lawrence's team in hopes of giving the actress "a chance to have the last word."

"I could just sense after having spent a little time with her that she would come out swinging," Kashner tells VF.com.

The 24-year-old actress had not previously commented on the incident, but she spoke to Kashner at length about the anger she felt. "Just because I'm a public figure, just because I'm an actress, does not mean that I asked for this," she says. "It does not mean that it comes with the territory. It's my body, and it should be my choice, and the fact that it is not my choice is absolutely disgusting. I can't believe that we even live in that kind of world. "

She had been tempted to write a statement when news of the privacy violation broke, she says, but "every single thing that I tried to write made me cry or get angry. I started to write an apology, but I don't have anything to say I'm sorry for. I was in a loving, healthy, great relationship for four years. It was long distance, and either your boyfriend is going to look at porn or he's going to look at you."

Lawrence also addresses the legal ramifications of the hack. "It is not a scandal. It is a sex crime," she tells Kashner. "It is a sexual violation. It's disgusting. The law needs to be changed, and we need to change. That's why these Web sites are responsible. Just the fact that somebody can be sexually exploited and violated, and the first thought that crosses somebody's mind is to make a profit from it. It's so beyond me. I just can't imagine being that detached from humanity. I can't imagine being that thoughtless and careless and so empty inside."

BIRDS OF PARADISE

Jennifer Lawrence in Beverly Hills with a sulphur-crested cockatoo. "You expect paparazzi to be annoying," she says. "You don't expect them to be terrifying."

Photograph by Patrick Demarchelier. Styled by Jessica Diehl.

WET YOUR APPETITE

"I don't like lackeys," she says. "I don't like people when they fake-laugh at my jokes."

Photograph by Patrick Demarchelier. Styled by Jessica Diehl.

Photograph by Patrick Demarchelier. Styled by Jessica Diehl.

Jennifer Lawrence, photographed in Beverly Hills.

Photograph by Patrick Demarchelier. Styled by Jessica Diehl.

"It's not terrible, people telling you you're great; what's terrible is when you start believing it," says Woody Harrelson. "She never [did]."

Photograph by Patrick Demarchelier. Styled by Jessica Diehl.

Photograph by Patrick Demarchelier. Styled by Jessica Diehl.

In the cover story, the Hunger Games star vents her frustration not just with the offending hackers but also with those-including people she knows-who viewed the images online. "Anybody who looked at those pictures, you're perpetuating a sexual offense. You should cower with shame. Even people who I know and love say, 'Oh, yeah, I looked at the pictures.' I don't want to get mad, but at the same time I'm thinking, I didn't tell you that you could look at my naked body."
READ MORE: the full story is available October 8 in the digital editions. Subscribe now for access. The magazine will be on national newsstands on October 14.
Lawrence also shares a message for the tabloid community: "You have a choice. You don't have to be a person who spreads negativity and lies for a living. You can do something good. You can be good. Let's just make that choice and-it feels better."

Lawrence speaks of the wrenching moment when she had to call her father about the hack. "When I have to make that phone call to my dad and tell him what's happened ... I don't care how much money I get for The Hunger Games," she says. "I promise you, anybody given the choice of that kind of money or having to make a phone call to tell your dad that something like that has happened, it's not worth it." She allows herself to joke a little about that terrible moment: "Fortunately, he was playing golf, so he was in a good mood."

With her words now out in the open, the F.B.I. on the case, and a billion-dollar franchise to carry over the finish line, Lawrence seems to be regaining her footing.

"Time does heal, you know," she tells Kashner. "I'm not crying about it anymore. I can't be angry anymore. I can't have my happiness rest on these people being caught, because they might not be. I need to just find my own peace."

In Kashner's more than 3,000-word piece, Lawrence speaks extensively about a variety of subjects, including what she needs in a relationship ("I would so much rather be bored than excited and have passion"), her adoration for the Real Housewives franchise, and her love for comedian Larry David. Kashner also speaks to Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence, Serena director Susanne Bier, and actor Woody Harrelson, who says of Lawrence, "You know, it's not terrible, people telling you you're great; what's terrible is when you start believing it. She never got fucked up."

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Cover Preview: Jennifer Lawrence Calls Photo Hacking a "Sex Crime"

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"I was just so afraid. I didn't know how this would affect my career." That's just the beginning of what Jennifer Lawrence has to say about her stolen-photos saga in the cover story of *Vanity Fair*'s November issue, the digital edition of which will be available Wednesday, October 8, and which hits newsstands in New York and Los Angeles on Thursday, October 9.

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One of the most memorable moments of this movie for myself was the scene in which the smuggler sent ships of people to Elysium. The people on those ships paid enormous sums of money for the chance of a better life using the resources found in that utopia, in the end 2/3 of them died, shot out of the sky at the command of Secretary of Defense.

These smugglers and those desperate people are direct reflections of coyotes and illegal immigrants along the US-Mexico border today. The smugglers in Elysium manned the ships but faced little of the immediate danger themselves as they watched from the ground. Coyotes operate similarly, taking huge sums of money for an extremely dangerous journey with high mortality rates, and only being able to offer a vague promise of success.

In fact, coyotes at the US-Mexico border take far more advantage of migrants than the smugglers in the movie. It has been common practice for coyotes to abandon people on these long treks, when supplies become scarce, when danger is higher, or when the migrant is not compliant with their demands. Often many people die on the journey across the border, just as in the movie where 2/3 of the attempted migrants died. The reality of smuggling is much darker than portrayed in Elysium, but the danger is just as real.

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"Was this for them or was this for you?" 

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"Was this for them or was this for you?" 

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Humanitarian aid can be beneficial for the country receiving said aid, if done correctly. One drawback of humanitarian aid is often is temporary nature, and there is no better illustration of that than in Christian Mission Trips. This video criticizes the short-term nature of the mission trips as one of the most detrimental aspects.

It takes a long while to truly become acclimated to the culture and the needs of a country and these mission trips often last for only a few weeks. Christian missionaries are not held to a set standard of the knowledge and skills they are required to have before they participate in said trips meaning quality can fluctuate greatly. After a trip is complete then most missionaries will return home and tell others about how they helped those less fortunate in another country while promptly ceasing their efforts until the next year's mission trip.

Rather than spending the time and effort on these short-term trips, the funding for a mission trip could be instead used to fun a humanitarian cause that will be able to base themselves in a country and remain there for the long-term and truly make a more significant difference.

Side note: Religion can feed the soul but the body needs actual food. The religious goal of these trips is far less useful to a people in need.

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why christian mission trips don't actually help.

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Why Christian Mission Trips Don't Actually Help.

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Why Christian Mission Trips Don't Actually Help. Hemant Mehta (http://www.friendlyatheist.com) Join the conversation. Leave your questions and comments below...

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Millions for Viagra, Pennies for Diseases of the Poor

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Millions for Viagra, Pennies for Diseases of the Poor

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US pharmaceutical companies have been more and more focused on the development of "beauty drugs." Drugs such as botox, viagra, and weight loss pills are being developed and produced widely by US pharmaceuticals while vaccines for diseases endemic on Third World countries are not considered a priority for study and drug development.

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Most Popular

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) claimed in newspaper ads early this year that its goal is to "set every last disease on the path to extinction." Jeff Trewhitt, a PhRMA spokesman, says US drug companies will spend $24 billion on research this year and that a number of firms are looking for cures for tropical diseases. Some companies also provide existing drugs free to poor countries, he says. "Our members are involved. There's not an absolute void."

The void is certainly at hand. Neither PhRMA nor individual firms will reveal how much money the companies spend on any given disease-that's proprietary information, they say-but on malaria alone, a recent survey of the twenty-four biggest drug companies found that not a single one maintains an in-house research program, and only two expressed even minimal interest in primary research on the disease. "The pipeline of available drugs is almost empty," says Dyann Wirth of the Harvard School of Public Health, who conducted the study. "It takes five to ten years to develop a new drug, so we could soon face [a strain of] malaria resistant to every drug in the world." A 1996 study presented in Cahiers Santé, a French scientific journal, found that of forty-one important medicines used to treat major tropical diseases, none were discovered in the nineties and all but six were discovered before 1985.

Contributing to this trend is the wave of mergers that has swept the industry over the past decade. Merck alone now controls almost 10 percent of the world market. "The bigger they grow, the more they decide that their research should be focused on the most profitable diseases and conditions," one industry watcher says. "The only thing the companies think about on a daily basis is the price of their stocks; and announcing that you've discovered a drug [for a tropical disease] won't do much for your share price."

That comment came from a public health advocate, but it's essentially seconded by industry. "A corporation with stockholders can't stoke up a laboratory that will focus on Third World diseases, because it will go broke," says Roy Vagelos, the former head of Merck. "That's a social problem, and industry shouldn't be expected to solve it."

Drug companies, however, are hardly struggling to beat back the wolves of bankruptcy. The pharmaceutical sector racks up the largest legal profits of any industry, and it is expected to grow by an average of 16 to 18 percent over the next four years, about three times more than the average for the Fortune 500 [see sidebar]. Profits are especially high in the United States, which alone among First World nations does not control drug prices. As a result, prices here are about twice as high as they are in the European Union and nearly four times higher than in Japan.

"It's obvious that some of the industry's surplus profits could be going into research for tropical diseases," says a retired drug company executive, who wishes to remain anonymous. "Instead, it's going to stockholders." Also to promotion: In 1998, the industry unbuckled $10.8 billion on advertising. And to politics: In 1997, American drug companies spent $74.8 million to lobby the federal government, more than any other industry; last year they spent nearly $12 million on campaign contributions.

Just forty-five years ago, the discovery of new drugs and pesticides led the World Health Organization (WHO) to predict that malaria would soon be eradicated. By 1959, Garrett writes in The Coming Plague, the Harvard School of Public Health was so certain that the disease was passé that its curriculum didn't offer a single course on the subject.

Resistance to existing medicines-along with cutbacks in healthcare budgets, civil war and the breakdown of the state-has led to a revival of malaria in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and, most recently, Armenia and Tajikistan. The WHO describes the disease as a leading cause of global suffering and says that by "undermining the health and capacity to work of hundreds of millions of people, it is closely linked to poverty and contributes significantly to stunting social and economic development."

Total global expenditures for malaria research in 1993, including government programs, came to $84 million. That's paltry when you consider that one B-2 bomber costs $2 billion, the equivalent of what, at current levels, will be spent on all malaria research over twenty years. In that period, some 40 million Africans alone will die from the disease. In the United States, the Pentagon budgets $9 million per year for malaria programs, about one-fifth the amount it set aside this year to supply the troops with Viagra. For the drug companies, the meager purchasing power of malaria's victims leaves the disease off the radar screen. As Neil Sweig, an industry analyst at Southeast Research Partners, puts it wearily, "It's not worth the effort or the while of the large pharmaceutical companies to get involved in enormously expensive research to conquer the Anopheles mosquito."

Public $, Private Gain

The drug companies defend their extraordinary profit margins, and their neglect of tropical disease, by pointing to the risks and costs of R&D. According to PhRMA, the costs run to an average of about $500 million per new drug, a figure routinely regurgitated in news stories.

Many public health activists believe the number is wildly inflated. PhRMA gets the $500 million figure by extrapolating from a controversial 1987 Tufts University study that factored in such variables as "opportunity costs"-i.e., the amount of money companies forgo by not investing their R&D funds in, say, the stock market-pegged to an outrageous 9 percent rate of inflation. One of the chief researchers on the Tufts study was Dr. Louis Lasagna, whose work has been heavily subsidized by the industry. Asked by a member of Congress at a 1992 hearing if he considered Lasagna to be "knowledgeable," Sidney Wolfe of Public Citizen replied, "He's knowledgeable in getting money from the drug industry."

The lion's share of new drug development costs involve preclinical research, and much of that is performed by universities and government-funded research facilities, not industry. Taxol, an important cancer drug, was discovered, tested and manufactured by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and then turned over to Bristol-Myers Squibb for marketing. The company had an inside track on its bid to win marketing rights because it had taken the precaution of hiring Dr. Robert Wittes, an NCI official familiar with the Institute's Taxol program, to help prepare its application. In return, Bristol-Myers was required only to supply the government with Taxol for clinical trials. The company purchased 400 kilos of the drug from the NCI's supplier, Hauser Chemical, for which it paid 25 cents per milligram. When the FDA approved Taxol for sale in late 1992, the company announced a wholesale price of $4.87 per milligram. Today, Taxol brings in more than $1 billion annually for Bristol-Myers.

-K.S.

Click here to return to the feature article.

The same companies that are indifferent to malaria are enormously troubled by the plight of dysfunctional First World pets. John Keeling, a spokesman for the Washington, DC-based Animal Health Institute, says the "companion animal" drug market is exploding, with US sales for 1998 estimated at about $1 billion. On January 5, the FDA approved the use of Clomicalm, produced by Novartis, to treat dogs that suffer from separation anxiety (warning signs: barking or whining, "excessive greeting" and chewing on furniture). "At Last, Hope For Millions of Suffering Canines Worldwide," reads the company's press release announcing the drug's rollout. "I can't emphasize enough how dogs are suffering and that their behavior is not tolerable to owners," says Guy Tebbitt, vice president for research and development for Novartis Animal Health.

Also on January 5 the FDA gave the thumbs up to Pfizer's Anipryl, the first drug approved for doggie Alzheimer's. Pfizer sells a canine pain reliever and arthritis treatment as well, and late last year it announced an R&D program for medications that help pets with anxiety and dementia.

Another big player in the companion-animal field is Heska, a biotechnology firm based in Colorado that strives to increase the "quality of life" for cats and dogs. Its products include medicines for allergies and anxiety, as well as an antibiotic that fights periodontal disease. The company's Web site features a "spokesdog" named Perio Pooch and, like old "shock" movies from high school driver's-ed classes, a photograph of a diseased doggie mouth to demonstrate what can happen if teeth and gums are not treated carefully. No one wants pets to be in pain, and Heska also makes drugs for animal cancer, but it is a measure of priorities that US companies and their subsidiaries spend almost nothing on tropical diseases while, according to an industry source, they spend about half a billion dollars for R&D on animal health.

Although "companion animal" treatments are an extreme case-that half-billion-dollar figure covers "food animals" as well, and most veterinary drugs emerge from research on human medications-consider a few examples from the brave new world of human lifestyle drugs. Here, the pharmaceutical companies are scrambling to eradicate:

§ Impotence. Pfizer invested vast sums to find a cure for what Bob Dole and other industry spokesmen delicately refer to as "erectile dysfunction." The company hit the jackpot with Viagra, which racked up more than $1 billion in sales in its first year on the market. Two other companies, Schering-Plough and Abbott Laboratories, are already rushing out competing drugs.

§ Baldness. The top two drugs in the field, Merck's Propecia and Pharmacia & Upjohn's Rogaine (the latter sold over the counter), had combined sales of about $180 million in 1998. "Some lifestyle drugs are used for relatively serious problems, but even in the best cases we're talking about very different products from penicillin," says the retired drug company executive. "In cases like baldness therapy, we're not even talking about healthcare."

§ Toenail fungus. With the slogan "Let your feet get naked!" as its battle cry, pharmaceutical giant Novartis recently unveiled a lavish advertising campaign for Lamisil, a drug that promises relief for sufferers of this unsightly malady. It's a hot one, the war against fungus, pitting Lamisil against Janssen Pharmaceutical's Sporanox and Pfizer's Diflucan for shares in a market estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

§ Face wrinkles. Allergan earned $90 million in 1997 from sales of its "miracle" drug Botox. Injected between the eyebrows at a cost of about $1,000 for three annual treatments, Botox makes crow's feet and wrinkles disappear. "Every 711/2 seconds someone is turning 50," a wrinkle expert told the Dallas Morning News in an article about Botox last year. "You're looking at this vast population that doesn't want frown lines."

Meanwhile, acute lower respiratory infections go untreated, claiming about 3.5 million victims per year, overwhelmingly children in poor nations. Such infections are third on the chart of the biggest killers in the world; the number of lives they take is almost half the total reaped by the number-one killer, heart disease, which usually strikes the elderly. "The development of new antibiotics," wrote drug company researcher A.J. Slater in a 1989 paper published in the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene's Transactions, "is very costly and their provision to Third World countries alone can never be financially rewarding."

In some cases, older medications thought to be unnecessary in the First World and commercially unviable in the Third have simply been pulled from the market. This created a crisis recently when TB re-emerged with a vengeance in US inner cities, since not a single company was still manufacturing Streptomycin after mid-1991. The FDA set up a task force to deal with the situation, but it was two years before it prodded Pfizer back into the field.

In 1990 Marion Merrell Dow (which was bought by German giant Hoechst in 1995) announced that it would manufacture Ornidyl, the first new medicine in forty years that was effective in treating African sleeping sickness. Despite the benign sounding name, the disease leads to coma and death, and kills about 40,000 people a year. Unlike earlier remedies for sleeping sickness, Ornidyl had few side effects. In field trials, it saved the lives of more than 600 patients, most of whom were near death. Yet Ornidyl was pulled from production; apparently company bean-counters determined that saving lives offered no return.

Because AIDS also plagues the First World, it is the one disease ravaging Third World countries that is the object of substantial drug company research. In many African countries, AIDS has wiped out a half-century of gains in child survival rates. In Botswana-a country that is not at war and has a relatively stable society-life expectancy rates fell by twenty years over a period of just five. In South Africa, the Health Ministry recently issued a report saying that 1,500 of the country's people are infected with HIV every day and predicting that the annual deathrate will climb to 500,000 within the next decade.

Yet available treatments and research initiatives offer little hope for poor people. A year's supply of the highly recommended multidrug cocktail of three AIDS medicines costs about $15,000 a year. That's exorbitant in any part of the world, but prohibitive in countries like Uganda, where per capita income stands at $330. Moreover, different viral "families" of AIDS, with distinct immunological properties, appear in different parts of the world. About 85 percent of people with HIV live in the Third World, but industry research to develop an AIDS vaccine focuses only on the First World. "Without research dedicated to the specific viral strains that are prevalent in developing countries, vaccines for those countries will be very slow in coming," says Dr. Amir Attaran, an international expert who directs the Washington-based Malaria Project.

All the blame for the neglect of tropical diseases can't be laid at the feet of industry. Many Third World governments invest little in healthcare, and First World countries have slashed both foreign aid and domestic research programs. Meanwhile, the US government aggressively champions the interests of the drug industry abroad, a stance that often undermines healthcare needs in developing countries [see sidebar, "Blood and Gore"].

Blood and Gore

Vice President Al Gore is being beset by protesters over his attempts to strong-arm South Africa into barring the manufacture of cheap generic substitutes for drugs to treat its huge population that is HIV-positive or suffering with AIDS. Yet Gore's efforts are just a sliver of the story when it comes to US harassment of Third World nations over their drug policies.

In the past few years, the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), which is charged with promoting American commercial interests abroad, has become a virtual appendage of the drug industry. One of its chief aims has been to discourage-by wielding the threat of trade sanctions-the use of generic drugs abroad, especially in the Third World. Such policies are especially cruel because the cost of drugs accounts for up to 60 percent of the healthcare budget in poor countries. "In the old days, the government made the world safe for Standard Oil," says Jamie Love of the Center for the Study of Responsive Law. "Now it's making the world safe for the drug companies."

The USTR, which did not return phone calls, has threatened at least seven countries with trade sanctions if they allow generic substitutes for the cancer drug Taxol onto domestic markets. Bristol-Meyers Squibb-one of the corporate world's most generous political donors, with soft-money contributions of $559,975 in the last election cycle-has also enlisted the services of Gore, who personally pressured South African officials to ban substitutes for Taxol. The South Africans have held firm.

Thailand, too, has felt the whip of the USTR, which threatened to impose sanctions if the government passed a bill requiring that generic substitutes be listed on the packaging of brand-name drugs. Argentina was punished because in international forums its drug companies opposed US positions on patent protection and the intellectual property rights of multinational drug-makers. Its firms "continue to work aggressively to frustrate our efforts," Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky said in explaining a 1997 decision increasing tariffs on exports from Buenos Aires.

The United States is also trying to outlaw the practice of "parallel imports" of drugs, by which countries shop the world for the best prices instead of buying only from local distributors for US pharmaceutical companies. Parallel imports can dramatically lower a country's drug bill, because pharmaceutical firms charge different prices from nation to nation. As of 1995 an identical amount of the antibiotic Amoxil, made by SmithKline Beecham, cost $8 in Pakistan, $14 in Canada, $36 in the United States, $40 in Indonesia and $60 in Germany. The USTR has been at war with New Zealand over the issue of parallel imports for years. In 1996 the US ambassador to New Zealand, Josiah Beeman, warned of "severe consequences" after the government removed restrictions on parallel imports. That prompted Prime Minister Jenny Shipley to blast back, "We will not be told how to run our country."

In 1983 Guatemala sought to counter the aggressive marketing tactics of multinational companies with an "infant health law" that made it illegal to use pictures of babies on packaging for infant formula. Gerber, now a subsidiary of Novartis, claimed that the law constituted an unfair trade restriction and insisted that it be permitted to market its formula with a label sporting the Gerber baby. "A fat, chubby blue-eyed westernized baby is an absolutely winning marketing strategy for Gerber," UNICEF legal adviser Leah Margulies told Corporate Crime Reporter in discussing the case. "It seduces the mother into using [formula] early."

Backed by the USTR, Gerber refused to obey the law. In 1996 the Guatemalan Supreme Court ruled that the infant health law could not be applied to imported products. The Gerber baby still smiles gaily from Guatemalan supermarket shelves.

-K.S.

In one case where a drug company put Third World health before profit-Merck's manufacture of Ivermectin-governmental inertia nearly scuttled the good deed. It was the early eighties, and a Pakistani researcher at Merck discovered that the drug, until then used only in veterinary medicine, performed miracles in combating river blindness disease. With one dose per year of Ivermectin, people were fully protected from river blindness, which is carried by flies and, at the time, threatened hundreds of millions of people in West Africa.

Merck soon found that it would be impossible to market Ivermectin profitably, so in an unprecedented action the company decided to provide it free of charge to the WHO. (Vagelos, then chairman of Merck, said the company was worried about taking the step, "as we feared it would discourage companies from doing research relevant to the Third World, since they might be expected to follow suit.") Even then, the program nearly failed. The WHO claimed it didn't have the money needed to cover distribution costs, and Vagelos was unable to win financial support from the Reagan Administration. A decade after Ivermectin's discovery, only 3 million of 120 million people at risk of river blindness had received the drug. During the past few years, the WHO, the World Bank and private philanthropists have finally put up the money for the program, and it now appears that river blindness will become the second disease, after smallpox, to be eradicated.

Given the industry's profitability, it's clear that the companies could do far more. It's equally clear that they won't unless they are forced to. The success of ACT UP in pushing drug companies to respond to the AIDS crisis in America is emblematic of how crucial but also how difficult it is to get the industry to budge. In late 1997, a coalition of public health organizations approached a group of major drug companies, including Glaxo-Wellcome and Roche, and asked them to fund a project that would dedicate itself to developing new treatments for major tropical diseases. Although the companies would have been required to put up no more than $2 million a year, they walked away from the table. Since there's no organized pressure-either from the grassroots or from governments-they haven't come back. "There [were] a number of problems at the business level," Harvey Bale, director of the Geneva-based International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers' Association, told Science magazine. "The cost of the project is high for some companies."

While the industry's political clout currently insures against any radical government action, even minor reforms could go a long way. The retired drug company executive points to public hospitals, which historically were guaranteed relatively high profit margins but were obligated to provide free care to the poor in return. There's also the example of phone companies, which charge businesses higher rates in order to subsidize universal service. "Society has tolerated high profit levels up until now, but society has the right to expect something back," he says. "Right now, it's not getting it."

The US government already lavishly subsidizes industry research and allows companies to market discoveries made by the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies. "All the government needs to do is start attaching some strings," says the Malaria Project's Attaran. "If a company wants to market another billion-dollar blockbuster, fine, but in exchange it will have to push through a new malaria drug. It will cost them some money, but it's not going to bankrupt them."

Another type of "string" would be a "reasonable pricing" provision for drugs developed at federal laboratories. By way of explanation, Attaran recounted that the vaccine for hepatitis A was largely developed by researchers at the Walter Reed Army Institute. At the end of the day, the government gave the marketing rights to SmithKline Beecham and Merck. The current market for the vaccine, which sells for about $60 per person, is $300 million a year. The only thing Walter Reed's researchers got in exchange for their efforts was a plaque that hangs in their offices. "I'll say one thing for the companies," says Attaran. "They didn't skimp on the plaque; it's a nice one. But either the companies should have paid for part of the government's research, or they should have been required to sell the vaccine at a much lower price."

At the beginning of this year, Doctors Without Borders unveiled a campaign calling for increased access to drugs needed in Third World countries. The group is exploring ideas ranging from tax breaks for smaller firms engaged in research in the field, to creative use of international trade agreements, to increased donations of drugs from the multinational companies. Dr. Bernard Pécoul, an organizer of the campaign, says that different approaches are required for different diseases. In the case of those plaguing only the Southern Hemisphere-sleeping sickness, for example-market mechanisms won't work because there simply is no market to speak of. Hence, he suggests that if multinational firms are not willing to manufacture a given drug, they transfer the relevant technology to a Third World producer that is.

Drugs already exist for diseases that ravage the North as well as the South-AIDS and TB, for example-but they are often too expensive for people in the Third World. For twenty-five years, the WHO has used funding from member governments to purchase and distribute vaccines to poor countries; Pécoul proposes a similar model for drugs for tropical diseases. Another solution he points to: In the event of a major health emergency, state or private producers in the South would be allowed to produce generic versions of needed medications in exchange for a small royalty paid to the multinational license holder. "If we can't change the markets, we have to humanize them," Pécoul says. "Drugs save lives. They can't be treated as normal products.

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Millions for Viagra, Pennies for Diseases of the Poor

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The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) claimed in newspaper ads early this year that its goal is to "set every last disease on the path to extinction." Jeff Trewhitt, a PhRMA spokesman, says US drug companies will spend $24 billion on research this year and that a number of firms are looking for cures for tropical diseases.

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How Ebola is Stealing Attention from Diseases the Kill More People

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How Ebola is Stealing Attention from Diseases the Kill More People

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The pandemic scare of the Ebola outbreak was the major news headline in the summer of 2014, eclipsing endemic diseases such as malaria, diarrhea, or AIDS/HIV.

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Sanctions wreaked havoc on the Iraqi people, in part because the Pentagon intentionally destroyed Iraq’s water-treatment systems during the first U.S.-Iraq war

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Sanctions wreaked havoc on the Iraqi people, in part because the Pentagon intentionally destroyed Iraq’s water-treatment systems during the first U.S.-Iraq war

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"Iraqi Water Treatment Vulnerabilities"

The US sanctions against Iraq were put into place as a measure to limit Iraqi productivity in the first US-Iraq war and make the country weaker. In the case of this sanction against water treatment equipment, the US new the consequences of their actions, "Failing to secure supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease…. Unless the water is purified with chlorine, epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid could occur."

This is a case of humanitarian warfare committed by the US government that was never a major public issue because the proposal was not publicly announced. The US government was fully aware of the detrimental effects this sanction would have on the general population and still continued with the project. The Iraqi people are must now continue to deal with the widespread longterm effects of US humanitarian warfare.

http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/iraqi-sanctions-american-intentions-blameless-carnage-part-1/

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Another way of understanding this concept explained using the term "Hipster" (Buzzfeed)

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One problem was that signs don't produce one fixed meaning. Zach's beard evokes not only "hipster" but "gay bear", "hobo", "Hagrid" ... and so on.

Another post-structuralist, Jean Baudrillard, said that signs like hipster beards don't actually refer to real things any more. In our high-tech world, signs construct their own reality made up entirely of other signs, which he called "hyperreality".

Judith Butler used post-structuralist ideas to think about gender, arguing that - like signs - gender doesn't have a fixed essence. Rather, she famously said, gender is performed.

Some say it's a fad whose time has passed. Others believe its insights will stick around for a long time to come, like a trusty old penny-farthing or a collection of early 80s Italo-disco on vinyl. What do you think?

You can follow me on Twitter at @chrisrodley

This post was created by a member of BuzzFeed Community, where anyone can post awesome lists and creations. Learn more or post your buzz!

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Post-Structuralism Explained With Hipster Beards 2

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One problem was that signs don't produce one fixed meaning. Zach's beard evokes not only "hipster" but "gay bear", "hobo", "Hagrid" ... and so on. Another post-structuralist, Jean Baudrillard, said that signs like hipster beards don't actually refer to real things any more.

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Another way of understanding this concept explained using the term "Hipster" (Buzzfeed)

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Post-Structuralism Explained With Hipster Beards: Part 1

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The most controversial intellectual movement of the 20th century explained with the help of 11 epic face-forests.

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The 2014 World Cup and the Child Sex Trade

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The 2014 World Cup and the Child Sex Trade

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There has been enormous controversy regarding human rights violations in the Qatar's construction industry as it readies itself to host the 2020 Olympic games. But there are other consequences of events such as these that result in mass tourism, and one such is the increase of the sex trade and human trafficking, most notably the for children.

Brazil saw a spike in its child sex trade in the time surrounding its hosting of the 2014 World Cup. Due to a high influx of tourists for the World Cup making policing a difficult task as well as the opportunity for sex tourists to enter the country surrounded and relatively hidden from view by the massive influx of other tourists.

Not only are there stories about controversy in the time a country spends preparing for large scale international events such as these, but there are many situations wherein there have been far reaching negative consequences of these events. The West and more developed countries need to outrightly acknowledge their part in these happenings in order to make better policies and incite change.

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A tiny figure in minuscule white shorts and a pink strapless top leans against a metal fence outside a school in Fortaleza, the capital of Ceará state, north-east Brazil.

She has gloss-coated lips, and her yellow headband, holding back long hair, glows in the lamplight along Juscelino Kubitschek Avenue, which connects the city to the Castelão arena, one of the venues for the 2014 World Cup. A car pulls up. The girl climbs in.

This is a common scene around the stadium in Fortaleza, considered Brazil's child prostitution capital and a magnet for sex tourism, according to local authorities.

Transvestites also work the dusty pavements of this newly renovated thoroughfare but young girls are in higher demand. "As soon as they hit the avenue they're picked up," says Antônia Lima Sousa, a state prosecutor who works on children's rights in Fortaleza. "It's really a matter of minutes. You'll find them around town during the day too."

Despite more than a decade of government pledges to eradicate child prostitution, the number of child sex workers in Brazil stood at about half a million in 2012, according to the National Forum for the Prevention of Child Labor, a non-governmental organisation.

That's a fivefold increase since 2001, when 100,000 children worked in the sex trade, according to estimates by Unicef, the UN children's charity.

And with the World Cup approaching in June, officials and campaigners fear an explosion in child prostitution as sex workers migrate to big cities from interior states and pimps recruit more young people to meet increased demand from local and foreign football fans.

"We're worried sexual exploitation will increase in the host cities and around them," says Joseleno Vieira dos Santos, who co-ordinates a national programme to fight the sexual exploitation of children at Brazil's Human Rights Secretariat. "We're trying to co-ordinate efforts as much as we can with state and city governments to understand the scope of the problem."

But the authorities have a battle on their hands as sex workers prepare to cash in on a bumper trade.

The Minas Gerais State Association of Prostitutes, which represents sex workers in one of Brazil's largest states, is even offering free English lessons to prostitutes in the capital Belo Horizonte, another World Cup host city.

"There'll be a lot more people circulating in this area during the games for sure and the city will be full of tourists," says Giovana, 19, a transvestite working a corner near Castelão stadium. "I know there'll be more work for everybody - women, girls, everybody."

Big bucks

The tournament is expected to attract 600,000 foreign visitors to Brazil who will spend an estimated 25bn reals (£6.5bn) while travelling around the country, the Brazilian tourism board, Embratur, says.

The championship could inject 113bn reals into the economy by 2014, Fifa has said, citing an Ernst & Young report.

Brazil's government will have spent 33bn reals on stadiums, transport and other infrastructure by the time the tournament kicks off, as well as £6m on advertising. In contrast, very little is being spent on fighting the sexual exploitation of minors, campaigners say.

The Human Rights Secretariat has set aside 8m reals for host cities to set up projects to fight child prostitution, but not all cities have programmes in place to absorb the funds, Santos says.

His department is finishing a review of child prostitution in key locations and will then decide what action to take. But any programmes will scratch only the surface.

"We realise we're only touching the tip of the iceberg with these actions for the World Cup, but we hope to build capacity and implement longer-lasting programmes in the future," Santos says.

Beyond the Human Rights Secretariat, the government could not provide accurate data on total spending to fight child prostitution but campaigners say some schemes have been shut down. They argue that the government is not doing enough to address the problem.

"This subject isn't really part of the government's agenda and we don't see a willingness to combine efforts or increase resources to address the sexual exploitation of children," says Denise Cesario, executive manager of Fundação Abrinq, a local partner of Save the Children International.

The lure of Fortaleza

Sex tourism occurs across Brazil but Fortaleza - one of the north-east's top tourist destinations with white sandy beaches and about 300 days of sunshine - is the industry's main hub.

A culture of machismo, combined with extreme poverty and drug use, has created the perfect environment for sexual exploitation, say social workers like Cecília dos Santos Góis, who works for Cedeca, a children's rights charity.

"Women in the north-east have traditionally been treated as second-class citizens, as objects even," she says. "Many fathers see their young daughters as a source of income and that is a cultural attitude that's hard to change."

More phone calls are made from Fortaleza to a nationwide toll-free number to report child sexual exploitation than from any other Brazilian city on a per capita basis, experts say.

Many of Fortaleza's young sex workers see prostitution as a way of escaping their circumstances. But for 16-year-old Jessica, a tall brunette, her escape plan has landed her in trouble.

She began sex work with local clients, earning about $18 (£11) a night, before graduating to bigger nightclubs and groups of foreign tourists for about $90 a night.

Police arrested her in September in a raid on a club on Iracema beach, a crowded neighbourhood packed with lively restaurants, hotels and bars.

They took her to one of four shelters for underage prostitutes, a discreet two-storey house in a lower-class neighbourhood, accessible only through a narrow iron gate watched around the clock by security guards. She is waiting for a judge to decide whether she can return home to her mother.

Waiting for a prince

Sitting in the small room she shares with three younger girls, Jessica says one of her regular clients, a Spaniard, has promised to take her to Europe. "I told him I was 18 and I was getting my passport," she says, tucking a rainbow-coloured tank top into green and yellow tropical-print trousers. "I paid 500 reals for a fake ID and was saving money to buy a fake passport. But in the end I was afraid to go."

Leonora Albuquerque, one of the shelter's co-ordinators, says Jessica's story is typical. "Like so many girls who get into this life, Jessica has fantasies that she will find her prince charming - a foreign client who will fall in love with her - and he'll take her to Europe and buy her fancy clothes, perfume, jewels," she says.

Pimps and clients are rarely punished and when prosecutors do manage to build a case against them, survivors often change their testimonies and the cases are thrown out, says Francisco Carlos Pereira de Andrade, a criminal prosecutor who specialises in child exploitation.

Of 2,000 cases before his department, which handles sexual violence against children, only about 20 involve child prostitution.

The face of sex tourism in Fortaleza is also changing, making it more difficult to catch criminals, Sousa says.

Instead of working the streets, organised rings of pimps, hotel managers and taxi drivers recruit young girls. Foreign clients order the underage prostitutes before they arrive in Fortaleza and they are delivered directly to their hotels, Sousa adds.

Girls on the menu

Friday night at Iracema beach and a small group of blond German men are drinking beer at pavement tables, watched closely by a bouncer.

Six adult sex workers stand nearby, some sitting with them, swishing their hair from side to side. But the tourists have something else on their mind.

"They're waiting for a cue to let them know the girls they ordered are ready," says social worker Góis, on one of her routine surveillance rounds of child prostitution hubs. "The bar is involved. The taxi drivers that wait on the corner are probably involved too. And some hotels nearby are part of this network."

While international sex tourism is prominent in Fortaleza, it represents only a third of all reported child prostitution cases. Prostitutes with Brazilian clients, from Ceará or surrounding states, are far more common, prosecutors say.

That was the case for Vanessa, who was 13 when police picked her up in October, not far from Castelão stadium.

She left her home in a poor neighbourhood when she was 10, after her stepfather started to beat her, she says. She has lived mostly on the streets, going to shelters now and then and spending nights with clients, some of whom she calls friends.

Her chubby cheeks, perfectly aligned white teeth and sparkling eyes make it hard to believe she is undergoing treatment for crack cocaine abuse. "I want to study; I really like maths. But sometimes I just want to disappear and go and live on Mars with the astronauts," she laughs.

Last month, Vanessa broke into the maintenance room at the shelter, took a ladder and scaled the 2.5-metre wall surrounding the building, according to Albuquerque, who works at the shelter. She convinced two other girls, aged 12 and 13, to go back with her to the Castelão stadium area. It was the fourth time she had escaped in less than six months.

"It's very hard to convince these girls to lead normal lives," Albuquerque adds. "Most of them think abuse and selling their bodies is just a fact of life."
Topics

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Adriana Brasileiro for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, part of the Guardian development network

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Brazil's child sex trade soars as 2014 World Cup nears

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A tiny figure in minuscule white shorts and a pink strapless top leans against a metal fence outside a school in Fortaleza, the capital of Ceará state, north-east Brazil. She has gloss-coated lips, and her yellow headband, holding back long hair, glows in the lamplight along Juscelino Kubitschek Avenue, which connects the city to the Castelão arena, one of the venues for the 2014 World Cup.

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Saving our planet, lifting people out of poverty, advancing economic growth... these are one and the same fight. We must connect the dots between climate change, water scarcity, energy shortages, global health, food security and women's empowerment. Solutions to one problem must be solutions for all

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Saving our planet, lifting people out of poverty, advancing economic growth... these are one and the same fight. We must connect the dots between climate change, water scarcity, energy shortages, global health, food security and women's empowerment. Solutions to one problem must be solutions for all

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Ban Ki-Moon

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Women have a distinct and powerful impact on their societies. In the Arab Spring many women were on the front lines, often leading demonstrations and protests. When they were more violently punished they were required to retreat, hurting the Arab Spring's overall success.

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Change must start from within each individual. As quoted in the Quran, "Indeed, Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves."

At first, opportunistically then pragmatically, a growing number of us thought that the Arab Spring would enhance women rights in the MENA region.

Though we are acutely aware of the pace of such a development, the speed at which it has deteriorated is quite shocking. The dream of women being effective participants in political, economic and social life in the post-Arab Spring countries has been crushed.

From a blooming chance for women to claim their rights, dreams and be active participants in the political sphere, to smashed spirits that have been left behind hopeless under authoritarian regimes in deeply enshrined patriarchal societies. In countries like Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen and Palestine, the fight seems to have disappeared.

In some countries, on the surface it appears that women's rights issues are being addressed, however, a deeper look indicates that it's only ink on paper, if even that. The day-to-day life of a woman in the Middle East has become unbearable and dangerous.

Leading up to and during the Arab Spring, women were actively leading protests and demonstrations but they were targeted by their regimes in an attempt to squash the uprisings.

In Syria, more than 16,000 women have been martyred and hundreds of thousands either harmed or jailed. In the last year, they were targeted by the so called the Islamic State and the other terrorist groups. The videos, photos and stories being revealed about the practices against women are horrific.

Before Syria's break into civil war, Syrian women were among the most educated (Literacy rate) in the Arab world, with high rates of political engagement and participation, freedom in life style and more importantly, steps were being taken for political reform in increasing women's participation in parliament.

However, as the situation continues to deteriorate, Syrian women are now exiled in refugee's camps in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon living in dire conditions. The few lucky ones have made it to the platforms of Milano Centrale in the hopes for asylum in Scandinavia.

In Iraq, on the other hand, women suffered from the dictatorship, and their malaise has tripled after the American invasion. Following the eruption of sectarian conflict between the Shiaa and Sunni groups, and the outgrowth of militias, women are paying the highest price as the threats of rape, murder, imprisonment and torture become day-to-day fears.

Women are also deprived from other social rights as the Iraqi constitution delegates women's rights to the different ethnic groups. The 1949 Iraqi constitution was much more progressive with regards to women rights than the one Iraq has now. Over the years, the discrimination and harassment against Iraqi women has only increased.

In Egypt, women were some of the first to revolt, calling for protests against Mubarak's regime. They struggled alongside men to get rid of a 30-year dictatorship. However, they are now victims of a political and social struggle.

Although women's rights were not at the top of the Mubarak agenda, since the fall of the Mubarak regime women rights groups have been further de-legitimized and thrown out of the legal framework.

Since 2013 women have paid a hefty price; the regime has imprisoned hundreds in order to stop protests demanding political and social rights. Shaimaa El Sabbagh, for example, was shot dead during a peaceful march with flowers to Tahrir Square on the anniversary of the revolution in January 2015.

In Tunisia, what seems to be the most liberal country in North Africa, women are not expected to make a breakthrough in political to social rights. In reality, the liberalism that women enjoy could quite easily disappear in a matter of a few years, because what we are seeing now is a result of top-down policies set in place by the former president of Tunisia who called for secularism and not as a result of social interaction and struggle between the different fractions of society.

Similarly in Yemen, Bahrain, Palestine and the rest of the Arab World. The only differences are the numbers of women killed, imprisoned, raped or tortured.

According to Varieties of Democracy Institute ( V-dem) women's access to justice in Arab countries has sharply decreased after 2011. In the absence of access to justice, women are unable to have their voice heard, exercise their basic rights, fight against discrimination and harassment or even be active participants in political and social spheres.

Has the Arab Spring betrayed women? The answer is simple, yes.

No society will ever progress and develop without respecting women's rights, and engaging women in top-level decision-making. No matter how rich the country is, women are the main pillars of society and their role must be equal to that of men.

For genuine shifts to take place with regards to women's positions in their respective societies, change must start from within each individual. As quoted in the Quran, "Indeed, Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves."

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Women and the Arab Spring: a dream turned nightmare

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Change must start from within each individual. As quoted in the Quran, "Indeed, Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves." At first, opportunistically then pragmatically, a growing number of us thought that the Arab Spring would enhance women rights in the MENA region.

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Jezebel: Progress Towards a Truly Feminist News Outlet (http://jezebel.com/)

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Jezebel: Progress Towards a Truly Feminist News Outlet (http://jezebel.com/)

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Feminist popular news site with the tagline "Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for Women. Without Airbrushing"

This site is a strong push forward for a media outlet that caters to women. The majority of the articles on this site do offer substantial news regarding current events pertaining to women. But like in all beginning stages of progress, Jezebel falters in their publication of fluff pieces (most recently 50 Cents sex tape, Drake and Meek Mill's twitter wars, and the Kardashians

doing cocaine at a birthday party), that does not do anything in the way of progressing female journalists nor feminist idea of the site as a feminist media outlet.

Yes, traffic to the site is important to generate, but when advertising a site as a feminist media outlet there should be far fewer articles on the topic of celebrity gossip and a focus on more substantial issues.

Jezebel, though having been in production for a while now, is still in its developing stages, and hopefully will grow past publishing fluff pieces about celebrity goings on and focus their energies on providing substantial pieces that it has already shown itself to be capable of.

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"Quite simply the colonizer's model of the world"

-JM Blaut

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"An economic strategy based on the use of measures (e.g. blockade) of which the primary effect is to weaken the economy of another state" (Oxford English Dictionary).

Beyond traditional warfare over insulted monarchs and state pride, today's post international policy issues often do not directly involve states. The complicated modern global economy

is arguably one of the main modern reasons for states to go to war. Interstate war is not in decline, it is evolving. No longer in the form of outright physical violence, it can come in the

subtler shape of embargoes or deprivation of necessary resources. Economic power is now a major measure of the strength of an individual state

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The harsh reality of war between the United States and Vietnam are shown realistically, neither country portrayed more positively than the other. Illustrative of the negative aspects of not only war, but of human nature as well.