Four days later, Bandit collapsed on the floor.
He was soon experiencing bloody diarrhea, and by the time Higginbotham and her mother got him to his veterinarian, his organs were shutting down. His liver showed that he had eaten something toxic. Certain that Bandit's inexplicable illness had already become too severe, the veterinarian suggested putting him down, and Higginbotham's mother and son agreed.
But she refused, and after nearly $4,000 in medical bills and three weeks of intensive nursing that included in-home I.V. care, Bandit recovered. Though the vet could not link the chicken jerky to the illness, Higginbotham said he thought it was likely the cause.
Bandit's puppyish spark has come back, but Higginbotham remains anxious, feeling an overwhelming sense of helplessness over what she might be feeding her dog.
At the opposite corner of the country, in Eastern Florida, Danielle Kinard-Friedman's story did not end as well. Two weeks ago, Millie, her 18-month-old yellow Labrador, began vomiting bile after weeks of growing progressively more lethargic.
When Millie wouldn't eat anything, Kinard-Friedman took her to a vet. Blood tests revealed that Millie was experiencing kidney failure, and so she spent a week in an emergency pet clinic receiving intensive treatment that eventually proved futile. She was put down this past Sunday.
It was Millie's vet who asked Kinard-Friedman if she had been feeding her dog chicken jerky treats. She had. In fact, she had just started buying the treats -- under a different brand-name from Bandit's -- two months prior.
The vet then asked a more alarming question: Was the chicken from China? She had no idea, but she checked the label as soon as she got home. It was. When Higginbotham checked her treats, she found the same thing. Their vets could not prove anything, but both suspected the treats had sickened the dogs.
Higginbotham and Kinard-Friedman have now joined thousands of pet owners speaking out on the Internet and asking the government to force a recall of chicken jerky dog treats made from Chinese chicken. Concerns over the issue first arose as early as 2007, but the movement has gained significant momentum in the past month, even gaining the support of Ohio's Sen. Sherrod Brown and Rep. Dennis Kucinich after Ohio resident Candace Thaxton contacted them about two of her dogs who fell ill.
Congressmen and FDA sink their teeth in
On February 7, Brown
brought the issue to the Senate floor, saying he had urged the Food and Drug Administration to accelerate its investigation into these chicken jerky treats -- found under multiple brand names but all sourced from China -- that appeared to be sickening dogs across the country. Two weeks later, the senator held a press conference and issued a news release again urging the FDA to act swiftly.
Back on Nov. 18, 2011, the FDA cautioned consumers that chicken jerky dog treats from China may be associated with a rising number of dog illnesses. This followed earlier warnings of the same issue in September 2007 and December 2008. After a drop in 2009 and 2010, reports of dog illnesses have spiked once again. More pet owners are speaking out now than ever before.
The
November 2011 FDA notice warned dog owners who purchased chicken jerky to monitor their pets for decreased appetite, decreased activity, vomiting, diarrhea (including bloody , increased urination or increased water consumption. If any of those symptoms worsen or last more than 24 hours, owners should bring their dog to a vet, the notice said. Blood tests could indicate kidney failure, while urine tests might indicate Fanconi Syndrome, a disorder that results in nutrients normally absorbed into the bloodstream instead being released through urine.
What's more, an FDA spokesperson confirmed to Food Safety News that the agency has recently received more than 600 reports from dog owners who say their pets have fallen ill because of jerky products made from Chinese chicken.
Still, despite the increased scrutiny, the FDA has not revealed a contaminant in the jerky products. Without any clear cause of the illnesses, the agency can do little but continue to investigate the issue. In the meantime, the 15 companies with chicken jerky products implicated by consumers have issued no recalls, seeing no conclusive evidence that their products are harming animals.
Since the issue first arose in September 2007, the FDA has run numerous chemical and microbial tests on Chinese chicken jerky samples in search of a contaminant. Though the agency said it could not conclude anything from the test results, the details remained under wraps until March 1, when an FDA document describing tests dating back to 2007 was sent to Kucinich's office. According to a Kucinich aid, the congressman "took them to task" at a briefing in order to get the information.
The one-page document outlines 241 tests for potential contaminants and 130 tests with pending results, none of which conclusively link the jerky to contaminants at dangerous levels. The 2012 tests with results still pending, however, are searching for heavy metals.
The Kucinich aid and many pet owners said they hope those latest tests might finally link the treats to a toxic substance and resolve the mystery of their pets' problems. The FDA has stated repeatedly that it is actively investigating the issue.
According to the FDA, at least one Australian chicken jerky manufacturer has recently issued a recall of its products made from Chinese chicken, pulling the products as a precaution.
The agency may be mindful of March 2007, when hundreds of pet illnesses linked to melamine-contaminated Chinese ingredients prompted the recall of thousands of pet food products. The FDA received thousands of reports of dogs and cats dying from kidney failure, but confirmed very few cases.
Pet food industry says don't blame us
A month ago, the private Facebook group called "Animal Parents Against Pet Treats Made in China!" had roughly 100 members. Today, the number has exploded to more than 2,500.
One petition demanding the ban of jerky treats from China has acquired more than 3,000 signatures.
Susan Rhodes created
another petition on March 3. She has asked the FDA to recall the jerky treats after she found that her dog, Ginger, had suffered permanent kidney damage and was losing weight at an alarming rate. Rhodes said she had been feeding the treats to Ginger for the past two years. Days after creating the petition, she has racked up more than 300 signatures from dog owners reporting similar diagnoses.
Media coverage and word of mouth have brought a heightened level of attention to the manufacturers of these treats, some of whom report being hit with a large number of complaints. The amount of attention that seems to be snowballing, however, might lead some pet owners to incorrectly blame other health problems on the treats, said Kurt Gallagher, spokesperson for the Pet Food Institute, an industry public education and relations resource.
"Pet food companies want to make safe, nutritious products. It's their top priority," Gallagher told Food Safety News. "When everyone's talking about something like this, I think there's heightened awareness and sensitivity for pet owners looking for it."
Gallagher recommended pet owners take any sick pets to a vet to get a clinical opinion before diagnosing any issues themselves. If the vet considers pointing a finger at a certain food, the owners should contact the food manufacturer. Food companies should be tracking their complaints and looking for patterns and problems within their food supply, he said.
Pet owners have been quick to amass lists of jerky manufacturers sourcing their chicken from China. Rhodes' petition, for example, names 15 such companies.
A spokesperson for a dog treat company at the center of the furor reiterated that the FDA's testing has not found any contaminants and so his company has no reason to believe their product has sickened dogs. The company has a comprehensive food safety system at their Chinese facilities, he said, including quality control inspectors who monitor for safety. He added that his company appreciated hearing from concerned customers.
"Obviously, we take food safety very seriously," he said. "Millions of dogs enjoy our products without ever getting sick."
Multiple pet owners have told Food Safety News that the spokesperson's company has backed away from its original intention to offer customers small monetary settlements for harm their jerky might have caused pets. According to sources, once the complaints reached a certain volume, spokespeople for the company told customers that providing any settlements would be an admission of guilt.
Made in "America"?
Blogger Mollie Morrissette has been following the chicken jerky developments for more than a year on her website,
Poisoned Pets. She said that the issue has reached a sort of tipping point in the last month, with more and more pet owners speaking up about sick dogs.
"I get letters every day from broken-hearted pet parents -- people who had to put down their beloved family dog or five month-old puppy," she said. "They all fed their dogs chicken jerky."
One issue frustrating pet owners, Morrissette said, is that many of these dog treat packages boast that they are made in the U.S., though the fine print on the package often reveals that the chicken actually comes from China, where a cultural preference for dark meat makes for cheap white meat.
These "country of origin" claims are made possible by laws that say that once an ingredient is "substantially" altered in a given country -- the U.S., for example -- the resulting food can be considered a product of that country. These alterations can include cooking, mixing or otherwise reprocessing the ingredients in some way.
Just as oranges from Brazil can be turned into Canadian orange juice, chicken jerky from China can be reprocessed and repackaged in the U.S. to become a U.S. product. This can trick consumers into a false sense of security about the safety of their pet's food, Morrissette said.
Higginbotham said that the brand of jerky she bought for Bandit claimed to be "Proudly manufactured by an American company." Kinard-Friedman believed the same thing about the jerky she fed to Millie.
Morrissette said that pet owners feel helpless as they wait for some sort of justice on behalf of their pet, and she criticized the FDA for what she saw as a lack of urgency in investigating the illnesses.
"A lot of these pet parents are just wringing their hands, hoping the FDA will find some sort of answer," she said. "If this was [potentially contaminated] baby formula, we would have had the answer when it started five years ago. It would all get pulled off the shelves out of caution as soon as anyone suspected it might be contaminated." Owners say they won't back down
Candace Thaxton, the woman who spurred Senator Brown and Congressman Kucinich into action, has more than one dog motivating her to uncover that answer.
In November 2011, when her 10-year-old pug, Chansey, started urinating unusually often and refusing to eat, Thaxton assumed it was just a sign that the dog was simply getting old.
Chansey's health quickly deteriorated. At a vet appointment, Thaxton learned that the dog's kidneys had shut down and she would need intensive medical treatment to recover, if it was possible at all. Thinking Chansey had naturally progressed to the end of her life, the Thaxtons chose to have her put down.
Within weeks, the family had adopted a mixed-breed "pixie" puppy named Penny, who earned a pristine bill of health at her first vet appointment. Right around Christmas Day, Thaxton ran out of the treats that came with Penny when she was adopted, so she started feeding her Chansey's leftover treats: chicken jerky. Of course, Chansey had never eaten jerky until weeks before she grew sick. She had never even finished her first bag.
In the weeks that followed, Penny started urinating a lot more than normal. Then, after New Year's Day, Thaxton saw a news story online about the FDA's warning for chicken jerky made from China. She checked her bag of treats, which said it was from South Carolina.
Then she noticed the text over the barcode: "Made In China."
Thaxton stopped feeding her the treats, but Penny started vomiting. When the vet saw her, she showed all the same symptoms as Chansey.
"Her kidneys were worse than Chansey's," Thaxton said.
Penny went on 24-hour surveillance at an emergency pet clinic. She recovered a week later, but Thaxton was just getting started.
"Candace went to bat," Morrissette said. "She's the driving force behind all of this, all the publicity."
Thaxton filed two complaints with the treat manufacturer -- one for Chansey, one for Penny. It looked like she was going to at least get a settlement amount to cover part of her $3,000 vet bill, but the company eventually rescinded as more complaints began to pour in, Thaxton said.
Even before the settlement talks broke down, Thaxton's story had run on two local news channels. When the company refused to pay her, Thaxton promised to take the issue national within the week.
"By Friday night, Congressman Kucinich had written a letter to the FDA. By Monday, I had a press conference with Senator Brown," she said. "We've had two more conferences since then. I talked to Inside Edition. I told them I was going to be the one who pushed. I'm not stopping now."
Like Thaxton, other pet owners seem determined to keep the pressure on FDA to find answers and hold any guilty party responsible. For many, a sense of uncertainty, frustration, and even guilt, lingers.
"Pets are part of your family. When they die, you lose a family member," Higginbotham said. "I'm dealing with a lot of guilt over this. I'm the one who feeds my dog and is supposed to make sure he's safe and healthy. How do I do that if I can't even trust his food?"
-------
Photo captions, from top to bottom:
- Bandit, Maria Higginbotham's dog
- Ginger, Susan Rhodes' dog
- Sarge, Ray Parker's dog. Sarge, a seven year-old chow-corgi mix, fell ill soon after eating a single chicken jerky dog treat, Parker said. After nearly two weeks of clinical treatment, including intensive critical care, Sarge was put down.
- Chansey, Candace Thaxton's dog
“Don’t underestimate this simple activity,” says Jolene Matthews, who trains
The Real Housewives of New Jersey star
Jacqueline Laurita. She recommends skipping steps (i.e. two at a time on a staircase of about a dozen. Take ten trips to the top and you’ll burn about 200 calories (plus work your abs, butt, and legs all at the same time .
Matthews also recommends something you may have done without realizing its leg-shaping benefits–dancing! “There’s a reason why dancers all have amazing legs. It’s the perfect activity. It gets your heart rate up and firms the legs,” she adds.
Other exercises that offer leaner legs in just a few weeks?
Squats, lunges, jumping rope, and walking on an incline on the treadmill.
Electrolysis, the process of inserting a hair-thin needle device into the hair follicle that expels a small amount of electrical energy to eventually eliminate hair growth permanently, can be time consuming and costly. Depilatories, chemical-based hair removal creams, dissolve the hair but can irritate the skin and must be used regularly. And while waxing rips hair up at the root, it can be painful and you must have significant hair re-growth before you can wax it again (not a fan of showing stubble . Also; Beware of ingrown hairs with this method.
The most permanent option of the bunch is growing in popularity–laser hair removal. In fact, the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery estimates that in 2009 alone, more than 1.2 million laser hair removal procedures were performed in the U.S. Dr. Bank uses a type of laser called the LightSheer Diode Laser, which works by “targeting the hair follicle, below the skin’s surface.” The company that makes the laser says patients can see a 75-percent reduction in treatment time. With any laser, patients can expect to undergo at least three or four treatments at intervals of 4-8 weeks before their hair is permanently reduced.
There are also downsides to laser treatments such as pain, swelling and redness and, although rare,
blistering or permanent pigment changes can occur, especially if the patient has a tan. As for cost? Prices are based on the size of the area you’d like to treat and how many treatments you’ll need to undergo. Sessions can range anywhere from $500-600 and up.
When it comes to getting rid of stubborn, unwanted fat, there are a few new options.“The laser lipo body sculpting procedure, a procedure that uses a laser to ‘melt fat’ prior to performing liposuction, works particularly well at reducing unwanted fat on the inner and outer thighs and knee areas with minimal risks and a short recovery time,” plastic surgeon Dr. Neil Goodman says.
Similar procedures known as S.L.I.M Laser Liposuction and VelaShape, a combination of light and bi-polar radio frequency energies that, when combined with pressure, are also said to reduce the appearance of so-called “cottage cheese thighs.”
When it comes to bruises and scars, Dr. Bank recommends Fraxel laser, a treatment which can get rid of old scars. A drug called Tretinion, a combination of Retin-A and Renova, has also been shown to lessen the appearance of scars. For bruising, an array of creams or gels containing the herbs arnica Montana and Bromelain have been shown to make a difference.
When all else fails, simply use a heavy duty cover-up like
Dermablend that matches your skin coloring. Here’s a stylist’s secret: I’m a big fan of
Sally Hansen Airbrush Legs, which is actually a skin-colored leg makeup that comes in several shades and mimics the appearance of pantyhose. It can be found at any drugstore for just a few dollars. I use it for all my television appearances—it makes legs look perfect!
“It's not only your face that gets those unattractive brown spots, discolorations, and wrinkling from sun exposure,” says Allison Stallings, MD, a New York-based dermatologist. She notes that women’s legs are a common spot for skin cancer.
Both Dr. Stallings and Dr. Bank recommend this daily routine to improve over all skin tone and protect from sun damage: regular exfoliation (shaving does the trick , followed by a hydrating moisturizer with an SPF of at least 30. A good, regular pedicure with a mask never hurts either.
That being said, we still like our gams golden bronzed so the best thing to do is fake it! This can be achieved through sunless tanning. You can pick up an array of products at the drugstore or cosmetics counter, or you can go to a professional. Almost any tanning salon offers a spray tan via machine. You just step into the machine and within minutes are tanned to perfection. Or, you can do what the stars do and get an
“airbrush” tan done by a technician. This can cost a little more ($50-$80 , but the tech can better control the amount of the spray and the color.
fashionable ways you can enhance the gams you’ve got! The best news is you can cover up those legs until you’re ready to show them to the world with a great maxi! Stock up on an array of fun maxi skirts and dresses like Busy Philips, and you’ll be right on trend. Look for an all-over print and vertical seams for visual lengthening.
There are also a few stylists’ tricks I can share to make you look super-leggy. Nude shoes visually lengthen the leg line, and when they’re nude and high heels, your legs go on for miles. Another trick for creating the illusion of longer legs is by wearing pointy-toed shoes. Look for shoes with low-cut sides for extra elongation and, if you’re a little thicker in the ankles, avoid anything with an ankle strap that’ll stump the leg line or draw attention to that area. When you’re ready for that shorter skirt, make sure the hem hits just above the knee.
So go ahead, show some legs, ladies!
Whether it’s that your stems haven’t seen the sun in six months, you haven’t bothered to shave since Christmas, or your once-defined ankles have seemingly become one with your calves,
baring your bottom half can be bleak, to say the least.
Russia’s problems are many and varied – low life expectancy and falling population figures, soaring rates for crime, alcoholism and drug abuse, not to mention ubiquitous corruption. In a country rich in natural resources, half the population lives in poverty. Andrei Konchalovsky takes us through the horrifying facts and figures and argues that things can only change when Russians themselves learn to be horrified by them.
I chose my title for a reason. There’s a famous saying by Marx, that ‘to inspire courage in a nation, you have to make them horrified at themselves’.
For many years now I have been appealing to my fellow-Russians to be horrified by many facts and conditions of Russian life, in order to gain courage and the desire to desire. To desire to change oneself and the life around oneself.
I have long since been dismissed as a Russophobe who holds his people in contempt. That is nonsense – if it were the case then you could apply the name of Russophobe to Chekhov, Gorky, Herzen and Chaadayev – great Russians who wished to awake Russia from its sleep, and not just constantly find others to blame for its own woes.
The Russian people are not a corpse, to be spoken only good of. They are a living people, full of energy and talent, who have just not yet completed the historical journey that leads to wellbeing and success for each individual. So let’s look for a moment at what is horrific in Russian life today. And anyone who wants to hear good things about themselves can go and read President Medvedev’s speeches or Afanasyev’s folk tales.
Life expectancy and population loss
Today I would like to remind you of a few startling facts and figures showing that according to many social indicators Russia is on a par not with Europe and not even with Asia – in terms of levels of corruption, life expectancy, investment in science etc. we are comparable to Africa!
‘The figures for suicide, poisoning, murder and accidental deaths in Russia are comparable with death rates in Angola and Burundi.’
I will go further and say that it is not we that should feel insulted by such a comparison, but the Africans. They at least have an explanation for their lack of development: they had four centuries of exploitation and extermination by racists and colonisers, whereas over the last three centuries who colonised us Russians and treated us with contempt but ourselves?
We often ignore statistics, and it is true that it can be difficult to grasp the reality behind dry figures. But the scale of the tragedy being played out in our country is so great that I urge you to give it your full attention.
Museums of Russian vodka seen throughout Russia convey a simple message: drink and have fun. Yet alcoholism has remained one of Russia’s major social problems. With consumption of 15 litres of pure alcohol per head, millions of Russians ruin their health and die early (photo: flickr.com, jimjimovich's photostream .
Russia’s death rate: the last 20 years saw the deaths of more than seven million Russians. This converts to a death rate 50% higher than in Brazil and Turkey, and several times the rate for Europe.
In terms of population, Russia loses each year the equivalent of a district similar to Pskov, or a city the size of Krasnodar.
The figures for suicide, poisoning, murder and accidental deaths in Russia are comparable with death rates in Angola and Burundi.
Global tables of male life expectancy put Russia in about the 160th place, below Bangladesh.
Russia has the highest rate of absolute population loss in the world.
According to UN estimates, the population of Russia will fall from its present 140 million to 121-136 million by 2025.
The family in crisis
Other statistics reflect the crisis of the family in Russia. Eight out of ten elderly people in residential care have relatives who could support them. Nevertheless they are sent off to care homes.
Between two and five million kids live on our streets (after World War Two the figure was around 700,000 . In China, a country with a population of 1.4 billion, there are only 200, 000 homeless children – 100 times less. That’s how important children are to the Chinese! And surely the welfare of children and the elderly is the foundation of a healthy nation.
Eighty percent of children in care in Russia have living parents. But they are being looked after by the state!
We head the world for the number of children abandoned by their parents.
All these figures bear witness to the erosion of the family in this country.
Crime and corruption
Crimes against children: according to data published by the Russian Federation Investigative Commission, in 2010 there were 100,000 child victims of crime, of whom 1700 were raped and murdered (theses figures are higher even than those for South Africa .
'Four or five children are murdered in Russia every day'
This means that four or five children are murdered in Russia every day.
In 2010, 9500 sexual offences were committed against underage victims, including 2600 rapes and 3600 cases of non-violent sexual relations (the last eight years have seen a twentyfold rise in sexual crime . Only South Africa has a higher rate of such crimes.
Drug addiction and alcoholism. Thirty thousand Russians, equivalent to the population of a small town, die annually from drug overdoses.
Seventy thousand Russians drink themselves to death each year.
According to WHO statistics, Russia gets through the annual equivalent of 15 litres of pure alcohol per head of population. And bear in mind the fact that alcohol consumption of more than eight litres per annum per head of population constitutes a threat to a nation’s survival.
Corruption: the scale of bribery in Russia has increased tenfold, and the goings on in a London court battle between two oligarchs have made us the laughing stock of the global business world. The impunity of our judicial system is such that a criminal charge has been instigated against Sergey Magnitsky, a lawyer who died in prison in 2009. In Europe such a thing last happened in the 17th century!
Russia comes out as one of the world’s most corrupt places (154th out of 178 countries in Transparency International’s annual Corruption Index, where it is listed next to Guinea-Bissau and Kenya.
Looking at all these figures one can safely talk of a decline in national morality – and it is our rulers who are ultimately responsible for this state of affairs.
‘It is shameful that in a country with such rich natural and aquatic resources over 50% of the population should be classified as poor.’
And now, did you know that:
- in the last 10 years 11,000 villages and 290 towns have disappeared in Siberia;
- average population density in Siberia and the Russian Far East is two people per square kilometre;
- average population density in Russia’s central regions is 46 people per square kilometre;
- average population density in China is 140 people per square kilometre;
- average population density in Japan is 338 people per square kilometre?
It is shameful that in a country with such rich natural and aquatic resources over 50% of the population should be classified as poor.
All these figures send me into a state of shock. I am sure that all the facts are known to Putin. I wonder what effect they have on him.
And it will only get worse...
The tragedy is that I believe things will only get worse; we still haven’t touched bottom, and the Russian people has still not reached the stage where it can feel horrified at itself and finally gain the courage to ask ‘Where are we living?’. We no longer notice the stink in hallways and public toilets. We are used to people being murdered around us. We are accustomed to the fact that people all over Russia are literally fighting for their lives.
Journalist Anatoly Yermolin was born in Kushevskaya, a village in Southern Russia which was the scene of a mass murder in 2010. He wrote of this incident: ‘If twelve people hadn’t been murdered in one go, if there had been five incidents with two people killed in each, no one would have paid any attention to it, as is normally the case in our country’. But surely it is obvious that Kushevskaya doesn’t just belong to the Krasnodar region – it’s part of Russia as a whole! Local mafia boss (and district councillor Sergey Tsapok and his gangsters are the people you put into power by voting for them at local elections! Everybody everywhere knows who the local hard man is, who has connections with the police and the prosecutor’s office.
The Kremlin is only pretending to fight corruption when it sacks Interior Ministry generals and middle level bureaucrats by the dozen. In the old days they would have been shot – now they get to spend a ‘well-earned retirement’ in Dubai or the Cote d’Azur! Do our rulers really believe that is the way to end corruption? But then you all elect to your local council candidates with the words ‘I am a thief’ branded on their foreheads, and then wonder why corruption rules!
‘Russia today is facing a demographic and moral catastrophe, the like of which it has never seen before.’
I wonder: will it take the extinction of half the nation and the shrinkage of Russia to the Urals, for the people (that is, the mass of the population, not a tiny group of thinking people to wake up and demand of their rulers not pleasant, reassuring news stories and the usual promises, but the truth, and in the first place an admission of how bad things are.
That, as you may remember, was what Stalin was forced to do in the face of a German invasion in 1941.
It is also what Khrushchev was forced to do in 1956, when the Bolsheviks realised they might be called to account for decades of terror.
Russia today is facing a demographic and moral catastrophe, the like of which it has never seen before.
There are many reasons for this, the chief one being the irresponsible economic policies of the 1990s that overwhelmed people accustomed to feudal rule, without any experience of either private property or capitalism, and who in seventy years of Soviet rule had lost any potential entrepreneurial spirit.
So what is to be done?
As the writer and cultural commentator Mikhail Berg has written (I quote from memory : ‘We live in one country, but we are two nations. There is a tiny handful of thinking people who demand freedom and fair elections, and the enormous ‘slumbering’ mass of ‘ordinary’ Russians. And between them lies a huge gulf of fear, fear of the most acute and dangerous kind, and social distrust…We can fight the ‘party of swindlers and thieves’, we can blame the Russian bureaucratic mindset that has messed up the whole of Russian history, but we can’t escape the fact that a definite majority of the Russian population has not changed its basic mentality for centuries.’ And I would add to that - your oppressors come from your own ranks.
Homelessness and juvenile crime have remained serious problems in Russia. Pictured is a Russian youth detention center in a remote part of the Urals. The boys, many under 12, are doing time for crimes. Mostly they are there for thieving, but there are a fair number of murderers too (from ‘Alone in four walls’, a documentary film directed by German filmmaker Alexandra Westmeier .
So I don’t know what is to be done, apart from trying to shake people up and make them horrified at themselves. Yulia Latynina thinks me not only a pessimist, but a de-motivator. I think one can motivate someone who is conscious and wants to be saved. But what if he is unconscious or in a lethargic doze? Sometimes, to bring someone round, a doctor will slap their cheeks.
I know what you will say to that, but I know that if a third of the people who will read these words agree with me, Russia would be a different place.
‘I don’t know whether Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has it in him to proclaim the equality of all before the law. If he does have it in him, he will win himself a prominent place in the Pantheon of Russian history. If not…’
I am convinced that Russia needs a leader with the daring of Peter the Great, who would tell people things they haven’t heard for a long time. The truth will be bitter, for it is difficult to accept that the reason why Russia cannot move forward is because it doesn’t want to admit to itself how far it lags behind Europe in terms of developed civilisation. Only a clear and inspiring message - let it be harsh, so long as it is invigorating and sincere - can provide an impetus for the nation to awake from its feudal torpor.
Only if that happens can one hope that the nation’s instinctive wisdom will prompt it to take the hard and possibly unforgiving road which is the only way to drag our country out of the pit in which it currently languishes. I don’t know whether Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has it in him to take such a suicidal step, to take the bull by the horns and proclaim the equality of all before the law. If he does have it in him, he will win himself a prominent place in the Pantheon of Russian history. If not…
I am a Russian and I miss my country, because I don’t see it! I don’t see a country of which I want to be proud. I see a crowd of unhappy, frustrated faces and people alienated and afraid of one another. I want to be proud of my country, and instead I am ashamed of it. When did I last feel any pride in Russia? I don’t remember! But I know for a fact that if the truth, the truth about the situation our people find themselves in, were to be shouted loud and clear to the whole world, I would feel even more pride than if our hockey team were to win gold at the Olympics.
(Reuters - Regulators have rejected a move by AstraZeneca that could have delayed the entry of generic versions of its top-selling antipsychotic Seroquel onto the U.S. market later this month.
Britain's second biggest drugmaker said on Friday the Food and Drug Administration had denied its Citizen Petitions requesting the agency withhold finally approving any generic with labeling that did not have certain warning language required for its branded version.
Generic copies of the original instant-release form of Seroquel, or quetiapine, are due to hit the market on March 26 when AstraZeneca's patent expires.
It was less than a day after Rupert Murdoch's supposedly triumphant return to the Sunday tabloid market in the UK, with the new Sun on Sunday, when the deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sue Akers dropped a
bombshell on Murdoch's UK newspaper empire.
The Sun, the daily tabloid flagship which had birthed the Sun on Sunday from its inky loins, was found to have engaged in the systematic bribing of high-profile public officials and policemen.
On a scale calibrated by the Milly Dowler phone hacking scandal, this would seem to be a trifle. The rule of thumb is that if you think of the worst thing the Murdoch papers could possibly be doing, and double it, it's only a matter of time before it is matched and surpassed by real life. As a well-known tabloid columnist is apt to say, "you couldn't make it up".
The Sun's leading journalists, led by the weathered drudge Trevor Kavanagh, had recently been in rebellion against company managers who ordered the staff to fully comply with the police investigation.
Kavanagh had written a tired, emotional and belligerent tirade positioning the paper, never normally known for its concern with civil liberties, as a sort of Solidarnosc, labouring under a Stalinist boot.
"Who polices the police?" he lamented.
The answer as suggested by recent disclosures is, until recently, The Sun. But he went further, implicitly attacking Newscorp bosses for capitulating to the police investigation. Murdoch's response followed shortly afterwards. He promised to lift the suspension of all journalists who had not yet been found guilty of an offence, and announced that the tabloid's new Sunday newspaper would be launched soon. This would be, he vouched, "the best answer to our critics".
In short, the Sun on Sunday was to represent the assertion of Murdoch's continuing power in the UK newspaper market, amid what would seem to be his unravelling. His Twitter account lauded the new paper's supposedly staggering sales and success in attracting advertisers.
A day later, The Sun brand was toxic again. But Akers' revelation, only the beginning of a bad week for Murdoch, was more than a comeback spoiler. If borne out, not only will many Sun journalists face trial, but the scale of the offences would seem to implicate the highest levels of management. The investigation has not only identified bribery, but also its widespread acceptance in The Sun, as well as "a recognition by the journalists that this behaviour is illegal". No journalist can claim, as they have tried to do, that these payments were merely low-key disbursements designed to lubricate already willing informants. They were knowingly corrupt inducements.
Yet, there was more, and this is where the investigation into corruption has borne sinister fruit. In March 1987, a young man named Daniel Morgan was found deceased beside his car. Morgan, who worked in a private investigators firm called Southern Investigations, had been on the brink of alleging serious, high-level police corruption. Before he had the opportunity to speak to this, he was bludgeoned and mutilated with an axe. Initially, three detectives were arrested along with Morgan's partner in Southern Investigations, Jonathan Rees, charged with involvement in his murder. One of the detectives, Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery, had worked for Southern Investigations, and had initially been assigned the case. As the Metropolitan Police commissioner acknowledged in 2005, the investigation was 'compromised'. The charges were dropped, and Fillery later left the police to take up a full-time job in Southern Investigations, which seems to have continued in a similar pattern of behaviour. Rees was eventually discovered in the act of plotting to frame a woman for drugs possession.
It was known that News of the World, the recently closed Sunday tabloid which the Sun on Sunday is intended to replace, had close relations with Southern Investigations. The company had sold News of the World confidential information, and Rees was a direct recipient of payments from the paper. During the fifth, secret police inquiry into the murder of Morgan, which began in 2005, police presented Rebekah Brooks, who then edited the News of the World, with
evidence that the tabloid's resources had been used on behalf of two of the murder suspects, Rees and Fillery, to spy on those investigating the murder. The paper's executive editor,
Alex Marunchak, was the link between Southern Investigations and the News of the World. But for most of the 25 years that he worked at the paper, he also worked for the Metropolitan Police on a freelance basis, as an interpreter. Marunchak claims that nothing he saw or heard while working for the Met would have been of interest to the paper, and that he was paid a mere 40 pounds per shift. Well… he would say that, wouldn't he?
The news last week was that after five failed inquiries, one conducted entirely in secret, and the collapse of a recent prosecution after the trial judge dismissed a number of key 'supergrasses', the police would carry out a
forensic review of the evidence surrounding Morgan's death. This seems to have resulted in part from pressure by Tom Watson MP, now among a cluster of Labour politicians using his position to assail the fortresses of Murdoch's media power. It is unlikely that the full truth will emerge. The modus operandi of the Metropolitan Police in dealing with corruption has been to manage it internally, conceal information and mislead the public. This was the approach of the so-called 'Ghost Squad' set up by the Met to look at corruption, and of its successor, the
'Untouchables'.
Moreover, the police have their own public mess to clean up, regarding recent reports that they have been involved in passing information to construction firms to help them form
blacklists of workers deemed too noisome and militant. There is also the
report that a senior investigating officer in the case of the murdered Stephen Lawrence was part of a network of crooked officers who acted as a crime syndicate, and had a corrupt relationship with the gangster and father of one of the murder suspects, Clifford Norris. Even so, when there is blame to be distributed, it is not beyond the wit of police to disclose just enough to incriminate a complicit partner in crime without doing too much damage to their own standing.
The impact of these revelations was swift. James Murdoch
resigned from running Newscorp's British newspaper business, News International, in order to spend more time on his father's television networks. And a senior figure on Newscorp's board, Chase Carey, indicated that the UK newspapers may be sold off or separated from the parent company. Murdoch's stock in the UK has never been this low.
Running through all of these stories, with striking consistency, are
networks of class power. None of this criminality would have been possible were it not for the relationships between the Murdoch press, politicians, the police, judiciary and sections of the business establishment. And those relationships themselves were predicated on the power accumulated by Murdoch's awesome media dominion. Yet, something about the nature of these relations lent itself to illicit practices. The history of News International's involvement in criminal conspiracies is not one of aberrant crookedness, defying the integrity and professional standards of the industry. Somehow it is inscribed in the very network of relationships that makes media power what it is today. It is in the structures of news production itself.
News is not a given set of facts, but rather a carefully sorted and selected presentation of pieces of information that, in their total effect, produce a common stock of ideas and knowledges about the societies in which media institutions operate.
Stuart Hall and his colleagues at the Centre for Cultural Studies in Birmingham identified some of the mechanisms by which the 'newsworthy' is identified and produced for mass consumption. The media is overwhelmingly reliant upon 'accredited' and 'authoritative' sources of information. This is embedded in the ideology of 'objectivity', a rigorous distinction between fact and opinion, which underpins the journalist's professional code.
Since most journalists are not well-placed to determine independently what is fact and what is not, they become dependent on sources which have already established legitimacy: politicians, courts, police, intelligence agencies, academic and technical experts and, in certain contexts, the representatives of business and high finance. In deciding whom to report on as an objective source of information, the media create a hierarchy of credibility, which tends to validate existing hierarchies and already dominant ideologies. In addition, because they rely on predictable sources of information, journalists tend to gravitate toward powerful institutions that produce constant supplies of the material from which their livelihood is made. This gives already powerful institutions, as well as the PR agencies they work through, the opportunity to be the 'primary definers' of what is news.
However, they also then become dependent on how the information is present. Journalists work on the information in various ways to make it saleable to two kinds of audience: the consumer market it is targeted at, and the advertising market that seeks access to this consumer market. Where there is a powerful and interventionist proprietor, the information is also tailored in light of his or her business strategy, politics and preference regarding the paper's tone. But the flack from sources, and threat of the withdrawal of future access, is another factor in determining what eventually is produced as news.
The result is a lattice of mutual dependencies, networks of power in which the dominant currency is information - or, more accurately, ideological signification. The dependency is, in effect, one between different sectors of power which monopolise and strategically disburse different kinds of information. The journalistic dependency on the aforementioned sources is only reinforced by the existence of a competitive newspaper market, where a number of papers vie for access to the same streams of information. And in a context of declining profitability and reduced readership such as has been the case in the UK market for some time, there is a premium on the novel, dramatic, and thus far occluded. At the same time, the institutions they depend upon have a definable interest in creating illicit flows of disavowable information, whether to create issues around which they can mobilise opinion and organise existing projects, or to vilify and disorient opponents.
We have seen that this is particularly so of the police, whose role in dispensing law also gives them a privileged position in defining a wide range of social situations. The information upon which criminality is determined, court action proceeds and wider social and political issues are identified, to a large extent flows upward from officers involved in routine 'enforcement'. It is a logical entailment of this role that police will seek to directly define issues pertinent to their role via the media. Importantly, there are no clear boundaries between licit and illicit conduct in this regard. A
witness statement to the Leveson Inquiry from Jacqueline Hames, a Metropolitan Police officer and former presenter of the BBC program Crimewatch, suggests that this indeterminacy could be settled by better training and a wider awareness of guidelines. But this is a 'technological' solution to a non-technical problem: the same professional autonomy that allows police to define the situations they work in - to 'work up' charges where they are so motivated, to stop and search, to detain without charge, to deploy strategic violence and then write up the reports which rationalise their approach in the language of bureaucracy – empowers the police to define their relations with reporters.
This brings the media into the field of 'parapolitics', an area in which the exercise of political and ideological power is conducted in forms and according to hierarchies not formally recognised in the 'public' sphere. 'Parapolitics' is a term that is usually associated with researchers into 'conspiracy theory', a field that is blighted with kookiness, silliness and 'infotainment' posing as revelation. But when theory becomes scandalous fact, there is no reason to be coy. The networks of mutual dependency that I have described are effectively a 'conspiracy machine', an ensemble of mechanisms that are apt to produce constant flows of illicitly obtained information, and the constant maintenance of relations which keep the flows going. The staggering range and depth of the Murdoch empire's involvement in criminal enterprise at various levels over many years, of which it is prudent to assume we know only a fraction, would have been impossible to sustain otherwise.
And this enjoins us to re-phrase familiar questions in a different light. It is common, for example, to despairingly ask how we can root out the culture of corruption and sleaze in journalism. Or, one might ask, how far up the chain does the corruption go? As if, were we to identify Rupert Murdoch as conspirator-in-chief, a knowing agent of political corruption, the problem would be resolved. In reality, despite Murdoch's hands-on approach to running his tabloids, and without wishing to foreclose future investigation, it is highly improbable that the Dirty Digger personally would have dug in the dirt. The real question, for those who do not want this situation to be endlessly repeated, is: what sort of media would behave differently? And, as a corollary: what sort of society would give rise to a better media?
Richard Seymour is a London-based writer and PhD student. View his full profile
here.
No comments:
Post a Comment