World Bank accused of cooking the books, using wrong drugs in fight against malaria

A Lancet paper claims the bank faked figures, boosting the success of its malaria projects, and reneged on a pledge to invest $300-500m in Africa.It also claims the bank funded obsolete treatments – against expert advice.
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The claims against the bank, made by 13 international public health experts headed by Amir Attaran, of Canada’s University of Ottawa, centre on the financial pledges the fund made to fight malaria on the African continent and a programme in India.
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The study also claims: “The bank’s secrecy and technical errors combine dangerously when we look at malaria treatment.”Our investigations suggest that the bank wasted money and lives on ineffective medicines.”

source: BBC News

20 years after Chernobyl, Welsh lambs still screened before slaughter, still turn up “dirty”

On April 25, 1986, the world’s worst nuclear power accident occurred at Chernobyl in the former USSR….

Before Emlyn Roberts, a North Wales sheep farmer, can take any of his lambs to market, he has to call in the government inspectors with their Geiger counters. They scan the animals for signs of radiation because the land they graze is still contaminated from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which occurred 20 years ago this month. If the radiation levels are too high, the lambs cannot be sold for meat until they have spent time on other land.

As the twentieth anniversary approaches and the nuclear power debate resurges, Catriona Davies reports in The Age, April 2, 2006.

Field Notes From a Catastrophe: foreign robins and floating roads

Mariana Gosnell reviews Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes From a Catastrophe in The New York Times, “In Epoch of Man, Earth Takes a Beating” (Books of The Times), March 16, 2006

[Ms. Kolbert] visits the Netherlands, where rising sea levels caused by global warming are expected to swallow up large parts of the country. In areas where there are already periodic floods, a construction firm has started building amphibious homes (they resemble toasters, Ms. Kolbert says) as well as “buoyant roads.” Another field trip took her to Washington, where she was treated to double-speak by an under secretary charged with explaining the administration’s position on climate change. “Astonishingly,” she comments in a rare show of heat, “standing in the way” of progress seems to be President Bush’s goal. Not only did he reject the Kyoto Protocol, she notes, with its mandatory curbs on emissions, almost killing the treaty in the process, but he also continues to block meaningful follow-up changes to it.

Yes, you’ve probably heard or sensed much of this before, but the devil is in those telling details – the Dutch engineering for a flooded future, the Inuit seeing birds for which their language has no name…