JERUSALEM — Leaders in Israel and Turkey envision a network of four underwater pipelines for transporting Russian oil and natural gas, with feeder lines to Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and Lebanon.

The joint Turkish-Israeli development plan holds the promise of accelerating economic growth in the Middle East. A $50 million feasibility study is financed by the Luxembourg-based European Investment Bank, officials from Turkey and Israel say.

India is a main backer of the proposed network of pipelines because of the energy needs of its fast-growing economy.

Delivery of oil and natural gas by means of pipelines that traverse Turkey and Israel through conduits beneath the eastern Mediterranean is considered more practical than an overland route across turbulent Central Asia.

“Turkey gets most of its natural gas from Russia,” said Gabriel Levy, a senior official at the Israeli Ministry of Infrastructure here, noting that a pipeline conveys the gas beneath the Black Sea to Ankara, the Turkish capital. “Russia and Turkey decided they should have another customer.”

Israel would be a major beneficiary of a pipeline network, Mr. Levy said. He predicted that by 2010, 40 percent of Israel’s energy needs will be filled by imported natural gas.
washingtontimes.com

THE dollar has embarked on a big decline that will see it fall against all leading currencies, according to analysts.

The plunge is being prompted by America’s $800 billion (£438 billion) current-account deficit, they say.

The dollar has been under pressure following last weekend’s meeting of G7 finance ministers and central bankers, which emphasised global imbalances and said currencies should reflect economic fundamentals. Then China raised its key interest rate to 5.85%, its first hike for months, and Ben Bernanke, the new Federal Reserve chairman, hinted that American rates would pause at 5% after a rise in May.

Analysts say that without interest-rate support, the dollar will be weighed down heavily by America’s imbalances.

‘I think this is it,’ said Tony Norfield, global head of currency strategy at ABN Amro.
‘The dollar has been supported by high yields but markets are saying that is no longer enough. The question for policymakers is going to be how to manage the dollar’s decline. It won’t be a one-way street but the fall is likely to be biggest against Asian currencies.’
timesonline.co.uk

PHARMACEUTICAL companies are systematically creating diseases in order to sell more of their products, turning healthy people into patients and placing many at risk of harm, a special edition of a leading medical journal claims today.

The practice of ‘diseasemongering’ by the drug industry is promoting non-existent illnesses or exaggerating minor ones for the sake of profits, according to a set of essays published by the open-access journal Public Library of Science Medicine.

The special issue, edited by David Henry, of Newcastle University in Australia, and Ray Moynihan, an Australian journalist, reports that conditions such as female sexual dysfunction, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and ‘restless legs syndrome’ have been promoted by companies hoping to sell more of their drugs.

Other minor problems that are a normal part of life, such as symptoms of the menopause, are also becoming increasingly medicalised, while risk factors such as high cholesterol levels or osteoporosis are being presented as diseases in their own right, according to the editors.

‘Disease-mongering turns healthy people into patients, wastes precious resources and causes iatrogenic (medically induced) harm, they say. Like the marketing strategies that drive it, disease-mongering poses a global challenge to those interested in public health, demanding in turn a global response.’
timesonline.co.uk

In recent years, psychiatric researchers have been experimenting with a bold and controversial treatment strategy: they are prescribing drugs to young people at risk for schizophrenia who have not yet developed the full-blown disorder.

The hope is that while exposing some to drugs unnecessarily, preemptive treatment may help others ward off or even prevent psychosis, sparing them the agonizing flights of paranoia and confusion that torment the three million American who suffer schizophrenia.

Yet the findings from the first long-term trial of early drug treatment, appearing today in The American Journal of Psychiatry, suggest that this preventive approach is more difficult to put into effect Ñ and more treacherous Ñ than scientists had hoped.

Daily doses of the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa, from Eli Lilly, blunted symptoms in many patients and lowered their risk of experiencing a psychotic episode in the first year of treatment, the study found. But the drug also caused significant weight gain, and so many participants dropped out of the study that investigators could not draw firm conclusions about drug benefits, if any.

The long-awaited study, which was financed by Eli Lilly and the National Institute of Mental Health, raised more questions than it answered, experts said.

“The positive result was only marginally significant, and the negative result was clear,” said Dr. Thomas McGlashan, a professor of psychiatry at Yale and the study’s lead author. “This might discourage people, and legitimately so, from using this drug for prevention because of the weight gain, but hopefully it won’t discourage study” of other drugs.

Critics have charged that treating people for a disorder that has not yet been diagnosed is not only premature but stigmatizing, especially for adolescents. The new study was intended in part to clarify the trade-off between the risks and the potential benefits of preemptive treatment.

“Unfortunately, the study’s numbers are so small that it cannot be decisive on the key issue, which is whether it’s prudent to treat people early when there are uncertainties about the diagnosis and given the effect of stigma and adverse effects,” said Dr. William Carpenter, director of the Psychiatric Research Center at the University of Maryland, who was not involved in the study.

The study was plagued by recruitment problems from the beginning, in 1997. Mild, psychosis-like symptoms are rare in adolescents, and families often wait until symptoms are pronounced before seeking treatment, Dr. McGlashan said. Good candidates trickled in slowly; and the researchers added several recruitment sites along the way to increase the numbers of people in the study.

They eventually enrolled 60 people, most of them adolescents, who scored highly on a scale that assesses risk for psychosis. The scale rates severity of more than a dozen symptoms, including suspiciousness, grandiosity and bizarre thoughts. From 20 to 45 percent of people who score high on the scale go on to develop full-blown psychosis, in which these symptoms become extreme, researchers have found.
nytimes.com

Shoot, why not just give Zyprexa to ALL teenagers?

I really had no idea how to spot a terrorist until I studied the manuals published by the Phoenix FBI, the state employees of Virginia, and the Texas Department of Public Safety. Now that I have absorbed these manuals, I not only know how to spot a terrorist, but I have discovered that I probably am a terrorist.
motherjones.com

In the Atlanta suburbs of DeKalb County, local officials wasted no time after the 9/11 attacks. The second-most-populous county in Georgia, the area is home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FBI’s regional headquarters, and other potential terrorist targets. Within weeks of the attacks, officials there boasted that they had set up the nation’s first local department of homeland security. Dozens of other communities followed, and, like them, DeKalb County put in for–and got–a series of generous federal counterterrorism grants. The county received nearly $12 million from Washington, using it to set up, among other things, a police intelligence unit.

The outfit stumbled in 2002, when two of its agents were assigned to follow around the county executive. Their job: to determine whether he was being tailed–not by al Qaeda but by a district attorney investigator looking into alleged misspending. A year later, one of its plainclothes agents was seen photographing a handful of vegan activists handing out antimeat leaflets in front of a HoneyBaked Ham store. Police arrested two of the vegans and demanded that they turn over notes, on which they’d written the license-plate number of an undercover car, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is now suing the county. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial neatly summed up the incident: “So now we know: Glazed hams are safe in DeKalb County.” usnews.com

WASHINGTON Apr 28, 2006 (AP)Ñ Bodies piling up so quickly it takes dump trucks to haul them away. Barbed wire to keep whole neighborhoods quarantined. It’s Hollywood’s version of bird flu, a blur of fact and fiction that some scientists say could confuse the public.

“Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America,” an ABC made-for-television movie, airs May 9, just as scientists are to begin testing of wild birds in Alaska that could herald the arrival of bird flu in North America. Scientists fear the bird flu virus could evolve so it could be passed from human to human, sparking a global pandemic.

The two-hour movie plays up that notion to the fullest, with a running ticker that tallies tens of millions of victims worldwide. In one scene, the bodies are thrown on a pyre, like the carcasses of cows torched in the 2001 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in Great Britain. The producers of the movie, from the writer of 2002’s “Atomic Twister,” bill their work as a “thinking man’s disaster film.”

“We call this a plausible, worst-case scenario. This could actually happen. It may not be this bad but it could be this bad. The reason to portray it this way is to kind of give a wake-up call to everyone and this is something we shouldn’t ignore and we should be as prepared as we should be,” said Diana Kerew, one of the movie’s executive producers.

Bird flu expert Michael Osterholm said the movie realistically portrays the shortages of goods and services, and some of the ensuing panic, that could occur in a pandemic. But Osterholm frets the blurring of information and entertainment could do the public a disservice and hopes to arrange a conference call with television critics before the movie airs to set the record straight. He singled out for criticism how the movie shows Virginia officials using barbed wire to fence off and quarantine entire neighborhoods.
abcnews.go.com

Havana, Apr 29, (P26). – “We have an obligation to find a way to nationalize our natural resources,” said Bolivia’s President at a rally held on Saturday at Havana’s Jose Marti Revolution Square to mark the first anniversary of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), a regional integration program launched by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

In a keynote address, the Bolivian leader noted it is important to free the country’s natural resources from foreign domination, assuring that his government is organized and prepared to recover those resources from the oil companies, which have caused great damage to Bolivia.

The rally was presided over by Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Bolivia’s Evo Morales.
periodico26.cu

ABUJA, Nigeria – Sudanese rebels rejected a proposal to end the bloodshed in the Darfur region on Sunday, throwing into question the outcome of yet another series of talks to put a stop to fighting that has left tens of thousands of people dead.

African Union mediators brokering the talks said they would extend by 48 hours the deadline for the peace parley’s end.

Salim Ahmed Salim said the talks would continue till midnight on Tuesday, pushing back a scheduled Sunday end to talks that have gone on for two years but so far failed to halt the violence.

Earlier, the rebels called for changes to the deal – after the Sudanese government indicated it would accept the proposal.
thestate.com

WASHINGTON – As the Bush administration has dramatically accelerated the classification of information as “top secret” or “confidential,” one office is refusing to report on its annual activity in classifying documents: the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

A standing executive order, strengthened by President Bush in 2003, requires all agencies and “any other entity within the executive branch” to provide an annual accounting of their classification of documents. More than 80 agencies have collectively reported to the National Archives that they made 15.6 million decisions in 2004 to classify information, nearly double the number in 2001, but Cheney continues to insist he is exempt.

Explaining why the vice president has withheld even a tally of his office’s secrecy when such offices as the National Security Council routinely report theirs, a spokeswoman said Cheney is “not under any duty” to provide it.
mercurynews.com