After the pink goat

You think humans are unique in their intelligence. Think again. In 2 days, I read like 5 articles pointing the otherwise. So, I offer you some of them. 3 of them discuss things like intelligence in plants, a dog's ability to read their master's mind and a cat that predicts death. They all might sound little crazy, but I think most people have stories with animals and people.

For example, I'd never forget what my dog did the day my grandma died. A more than year old, he's very very well trained for toilet. However the very same day and probably the same hour she died, he couldn't restrain himself and emptied all of his bowels all over the kitchen where he resides. Never happened before, never after (fortunately). I was so surprised when I saw it, I'd never have expected it! I mean, if he needs to do it, I understand to do it once just to relieve the need. But so much cannot be coincidence. I was so angry on him, while my dear babe wanted to tell me something I should have known.

Make whatever you want from my story, but I live with various animals for so long, I know they are intelligent. It's just a matter of research to find out how much. And to give some scientific background to the subject, here are two links from New Scientist:

Six 'uniquely' human traits now found in animals
Videos of animals with 'human' abilities
The traits are culture, mind reading(deception), tool use, morality, emotions, personality. Read the articles, they are very interesting.

And next time you interact with a pet or animal in general, try to treat it with respect.

Lab Studies Intelligence in Plants

By Nicole Martinelli

Source: Wired

Professor Stefano Mancuso knows it isn't easy being green: He runs the world's only laboratory dedicated to plant intelligence.

At the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology (LINV), about seven miles outside Florence, Italy, Mancuso and his team of nine work to debunk the myth that plants are low-life. Research at the modern building combines physiology, ecology and molecular biology.

"If you define intelligence as the capacity to solve problems, plants have a lot to teach us," says Mancuso, dressed in harmonizing shades of his favorite color: green. "Not only are they 'smart' in how they grow, adapt and thrive, they do it without neuroses. Intelligence isn't only about having a brain."

Plants have never been given their due in the order of things; they've usually been dismissed as mere vegetables. But there's a growing body of research showing that plants have a lot to contribute in fields as disparate as robotics and telecommunications.

The idea that plants are more than hanging decor at the dentist's office is not new. Charles Darwin published The Power of Movement in Plants -- on phototropism and vine behavior -- in 1880, but the concept of plant intelligence has been slow to creep into the general consciousness.

At the root of the problem: assuming that plants have, or should have, human-like feelings in order to be considered intelligent life forms, Mancuso says.

So while there has been a bumper crop of studies demonstrating that green matter can be nearly as sophisticated as gray matter -- especially when it comes to signaling and response systems, few talk about intelligence.

To christen the lab in 2004, Mancuso decided to use the controversial term "plant neurobiology" to reinforce the idea that plants have biochemistry, cell biology and electrophysiology similar to the human nervous system. But although LINV is part of the University of Florence -- where Mancuso teaches horticulture -- funds for this fertile field of research weren't forthcoming.

In addition to studies on the effects of music on vineyards, the center's researchers have also published papers on gravity sensing, plant synapses and long-distance signal transmission in trees. One important offshoot of the research activity is an international symposium on plant neurobiology. Next year's meeting will be held in Japan.

Leopold Summerer, advanced-concepts team coordinator at the European Space Agency, remembers that the term "plant intelligence" raised a few eyebrows when collaboration with the lab was proposed -- even on a multidisciplinary think-tank team that's used to pondering ideas out of left field. Nonetheless, Summerer says plant research may provide important ideas.

"Biometrics can provide some of the most inspiring resources for us," he says. "Solutions found by nature that might not seem related to real engineering problems at first sight actually are related and give technical solutions."

The lab of LINV looks like any other- while white-coated researcher Luciana Renna patiently tests for DNA markers, molecular biologist Giovanni Stefano analyzes data on two computer monitors around the corner.

"Plants communicate via chemical substances," Mancuso says. "They have a specific and fairly extensive vocabulary to convey alarms, health and a host of other things. We just have sound waves broken down into various languages, I don't see how we could bridge the gap."source

Can Your Dog Read Your Mind?

Source: BrainMysteries.com

Canterbury University psychology student Michelle Maginnity has just completed a masters research project looking at whether the domestic dog has a theory of mind - that is, whether they can think about the thoughts and feelings of self and others.

She said after carrying out a range of experiments which tested the cognitive skills of dogs, she believed they were not only sensitive to human cues, but also had the ability to think about what their human companions may be thinking.

Michelle's research involved testing the social-cognitive skills of 16 dogs, some pure bred and others of mixed breed, in a food-finding task. In four different experiments the dogs had to decide where the food was hidden by following cues from people who either did or didn't know where the food was.

Michelle said a range of scenarios were tested, for example, one person watched food being hidden while the other covered their eyes, and in each test the dogs showed a preference for the person who they believed knew where the food was.

Michelle said research on the social cognition skills of animals had largely focused on chimpanzees and other primates, with relatively inconclusive results. However, she believed dogs were a more appropriate species to look at.

"Domestic dogs have evolved from wolves, which are social pack animals. It would therefore be advantageous to them to be able to think about what other pack members are thinking, especially when taking part in co-operative hunting. In that situation it also helps if they're able to think about what their prey may be thinking," she said.

"Another important factor is that dogs have evolved alongside humans and are likely to have become attuned to human behaviour and social cues to help in their interactions with people."source

The Cat That Predicts Death

By Ray Henry
Source: Washington Post

Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours. His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.

The 2-year-old feline was adopted as a kitten and grew up in a third-floor dementia unit at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. The facility treats people with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and other illnesses.

After about six months, the staff noticed Oscar would make his own rounds, just like the doctors and nurses. He'd sniff and observe patients, then sit beside people who would wind up dying in a few hours.

Dosa said Oscar seems to take his work seriously and is generally aloof. "This is not a cat that's friendly to people," he said.

Oscar is better at predicting death than the people who work there, said Dr. Joan Teno of Brown University, who treats patients at the nursing home and is an expert on care for the terminally ill

She was convinced of Oscar's talent when he made his 13th correct call. While observing one patient, Teno said she noticed the woman wasn't eating, was breathing with difficulty and that her legs had a bluish tinge, signs that often mean death is near.

Oscar wouldn't stay inside the room though, so Teno thought his streak was broken. Instead, it turned out the doctor's prediction was roughly 10 hours too early. Sure enough, during the patient's final two hours, nurses told Teno that Oscar joined the woman at her bedside.

No one's certain if Oscar's behavior is scientifically significant or points to a cause. Teno wonders if the cat notices telltale scents or reads something into the behavior of the nurses who raised him.

Nicholas Dodman, who directs an animal behavioral clinic at the Tufts University Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine and has read Dosa's article, said the only way to know is to carefully document how Oscar divides his time between the living and dying.
source

Sick of vaccines? Never too late for another one! I can't but suspect that there is something very wrong in the idea to inoculate all the children for a disease that can be prevented with examinations and condoms. It's not that hard to figure out why they do it-it's one to produce a medicament for few sick, but another to sell vaccines to millions of children. I disagree. I don't like useless vaccines and chemicals in our body. I think it's better to be healthy, because you are taking care of yourself than to be healthy because you're full with chemicals you don't need or know about. But in any case, here's the article. Feel free to share your thoughts on the issue...

Oral Cancer in Men Associated With HPV

The sexually transmitted virus called HPV, for human papillomavirus, is well known to lead to cervical cancer in women — which is why the federal government recommends that all girls be vaccinated for HPV at 11 or 12, before they become sexually active.

Now researchers are finding that many oral cancers in men are also associated with the virus.

A clinical trial testing therapies for advanced tongue and tonsil cancers has found that more than 40 percent of the tumors in men were infected with HPV. If there is good news in the finding, it is that these HPV-associated tumors were among the most responsive to treatment.

Of an estimated 28,900 cases of oral cancer a year, 18,550 are in men.

“The high risk of HPV-associated cancers in men suggests that vaccinating all adolescents is something that should strongly be considered,” said the lead researcher, Dr. Francis P. Worden, a clinical assistant professor of medicine at the University of Michigan.

HPV can enter the mouth during oral sex. A study published in February by researchers at Johns Hopkins estimated that 38 percent of oral squamous-cell cancers are HPV related, and suggested that their increasing number might be a result of changing sexual behaviors.

The new study, published in two papers in The Journal of Clinical Oncology, included 51 men and 15 women with cancers of the tonsils or the base of tongue. The researchers were able to examine biopsies of 42 of the subjects before treatment. After tests for HPV, the researchers found that 27 tumors, nearly two-thirds, were positive for the virus. Of the 51 men, researchers found 22 with HPV.

Other experts found the results interesting, but said it was unclear what they would mean for treatment. Finding the answer to that question is the next step, said to Dr. Maura L. Gillison, an associate professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins who was not involved in the study.

“Clearly,” Dr. Gillison added, “it should give people optimism that the vaccine that was approved largely for women and for cervical cancer could have broader implications, and also for other cancers that occur in both men and women. All of our clinical trials now will be designed for either HPV-positive or HPV-negative patients. Right now, these patients are treated the same way.”

All the patients in the study were initially treated with induction chemotherapy, that is, an initial course to shrink the tumor. Those whose tumors did not shrink by at least 50 percent, 12 patients, were then treated with surgery. Most of those did not survive their illness.

Of the remaining group, 49 of 54 responded to the next step, combined chemotherapy and radiation. In that group, 78 percent needed no surgery, and 70 percent survived more than four years. Of the 49, almost half, 24, were positive for HPV, and all but 3of those were men.

People with tumors with high HPV levels were significantly more likely to respond to treatment. They were also more likely to survive their cancer and to survive over all.

The researchers also tested these tumors for the presence of four genetic markers: EGFR, a cell receptor associated with various cancers; BCLXL, a repressor of cell death; and the tumor-suppressor proteins p53 and p16. The scientists found that these were also accurate predictors of the success or failure of the treatment. Women and smokers were less likely to be treated successfully.

“Patients who have HPV infections are at higher risk for these cancers,” Dr. Worden said. “But the good news is that if that’s the cause of their cancer, they’re more likely to survive treatment. We still don’t know what the ideal treatment regimens are. For example, these patients may benefit from less intense chemotherapy and radiation.”

Although the researchers acknowledge that the number of patients in their study was small, they conclude that especially in patients with HPV-positive tumors, chemotherapy followed by combined chemotherapy and radiation appears to be an effective treatment.

An author of the papers has an interest in a company that is developing an HPV detection method. source

An interesting article I found in NY Times. While I'm generally tolerant to religions, this article worried me. It presented the Turkish style in Islam like something soft and good for the world. While I know turks that are very nice, I still find the tone troubling. Why? Because I can see what's happening in Bulgaria because of those so called Turkish schools. True,I don't know who finance them exactly but the result is still bad. It's not the Islam that is the problem. We here have lived with Muslim for at least 800 years. It's not a big deal. The problems is that when you have schools sponsored from outside, especially religious schools, you commit the children to certain lifestyle. And because Islam is often so exclusive, people often end up with certain ideas that are not really connected to Islam but to somebody's sick ambitions. In the case of Bulgaria, people identify themselves with Turkey, only because they are muslim (in a funny and tragic video a guy who doesn't know turskish, never been there, but is a muslim claims he's Turk). Which is bad, because when citizens of one country start believing they belong to other country, that's always a bad sign for both countries. Especially when those claims are based only on well-done propaganda.

My point? We should be very careful with schools that teach what to believe in and how to live. Schools should only teach us how to use our brain and give us knowledge on the world. The interpretation should be ours. And the patient way of Turkish schools, although obviously better than radicalism still presents a danger- to steal the identity of the children and make them followers to an ideology that isn't their own. Which is just as wrong as any other way.

Mind you, this is not only about Muslim schools, same goes for Christians schools too. I just really want to make it clear-being a teacher is a position of power. In our secular schools that power is diminished by the lack of trust between teacher and students. But in religious schools, where teachers are really in touch with their students, that power is way too big to be ignored.
But I admit- soothing the harshness of Pakistan's Islam is a good starting point.

Turkish Schools Offer Pakistan a Gentler Vision of Islam

KARACHI, Pakistan — Praying in Pakistan has not been easy for Mesut Kacmaz, a Muslim teacher from Turkey.

He tried the mosque near his house, but it had Israeli and Danish flags painted on the floor for people to step on. The mosque near where he works warned him never to return wearing a tie. Pakistanis everywhere assume he is not Muslim because he has no beard.

“Kill, fight, shoot,” Mr. Kacmaz said. “This is a misinterpretation of Islam.”

But that view is common in Pakistan, a frontier land for the future of Islam, where schools, nourished by Saudi and American money dating back to the 1980s, have spread Islamic radicalism through the poorest parts of society. With a literacy rate of just 50 percent and a public school system near collapse, the country is particularly vulnerable.

Mr. Kacmaz is part of a group of Turkish educators who have come to this battleground with an entirely different vision of Islam. Theirs is moderate and flexible, comfortably coexisting with the West while remaining distinct from it. Like Muslim Peace Corps volunteers, they promote this approach in schools, which are now established in more than 80 countries, Muslim and Christian.

Their efforts are important in Pakistan, a nuclear power whose stability and whose vulnerability to fundamentalism have become main preoccupations of American foreign policy. Its tribal areas have become a refuge to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and the battle against fundamentalism rests squarely on young people and the education they get.

At present, that education is extremely weak. The poorest Pakistanis cannot afford to send their children to public schools, which are free but require fees for books and uniforms. Some choose to send their children to madrasas, or religious schools, which, like aid organizations, offer free food and clothing. Many simply teach, but some have radical agendas. At the same time, a growing middle class is rejecting public schools, which are chaotic and poorly financed, and choosing from a new array of private schools.

The Turkish schools, which have expanded to seven cities in Pakistan since the first one opened a decade ago, cannot transform the country on their own. But they offer an alternative approach that could help reduce the influence of Islamic extremists.

They prescribe a strong Western curriculum, with courses, taught in English, from math and science to English literature and Shakespeare. They do not teach religion beyond the one class in Islamic studies that is required by the state. Unlike British-style private schools, however, they encourage Islam in their dormitories, where teachers set examples in lifestyle and prayer.

That approach appeals to parents in Pakistan, who want their children to be capable of competing with the West without losing their identities to it. Allahdad Niazi, a retired Urdu professor in Quetta, a frontier town near the Afghan border, took his son out of an elite military school, because it was too authoritarian and did not sufficiently encourage Islam, and put him in the Turkish school, called PakTurk.

The model is the brainchild of a Turkish Islamic scholar, Fethullah Gulen. A preacher with millions of followers in Turkey, Mr. Gulen, 69, comes from a tradition of Sufism, an introspective, mystical strain of Islam. He has lived in exile in the United States since 2000, after getting in trouble with secular Turkish officials.

Mr. Gulen’s idea, Mr. Aytav said, is that “without science, religion turns to radicalism, and without religion, science is blind and brings the world to danger.”

The schools are putting into practice a Turkish Sufi philosophy that took its most modern form during the last century, after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s founder, crushed the Islamic caliphate in the 1920s. Islamic thinkers responded by trying to bring Western science into the faith they were trying to defend.

In Karachi, a sprawling city that has had its own struggles with radicalism the two approaches compete daily.

The Turkish school is in a poor neighborhood in the south of the city where residents are mostly Pashtun, a strongly tribal ethnic group whose poorer fringes have been among the most susceptible to radicalism. Mr. Kacmaz, who became principal 10 months ago, ran into trouble almost as soon as he began. The locals were suspicious of the Turks, who, with their ties and clean-shaven faces, looked like math teachers from Middle America.

Mr. Kacmaz asked a local religious leader to help get people to stop throwing their trash near the school, to no avail. Exasperated, he hung an Islamic saying on the outer wall of the school: “Cleanliness is half of faith.” When he prayed at a mosque, two young men followed him out and told him not to return wearing a tie because it was un-Islamic.

“I said, ‘Show me a verse in the Koran where it was forbidden,’ ” Mr. Kacmaz said, steering his car through tangled rush-hour traffic. The two men were wearing glasses, and he told them that scripturally, there was no difference between a tie and glasses.

The misunderstanding, along with the radicalism that follows, stalks the poorest parts of Quetta.

He is constantly on guard against extremism. He once punished Saadudeen for flying kites with the wrong kind of boys. At the Turkish school, the teenager is supervised around the clock in a dormitory.

“They are totally against extremism,” Mr. Bari said of the Turks. “They are true Muslims. They will make my brother into a true Muslim. He’ll deal with people with justice and wisdom. Not with impatience.”

Illiteracy is one of the roots of problems dogging the Muslim world, said Matiullah Aail, a religious scholar in Quetta who graduated from Medina University in Saudi Arabia.

In Baluchistan, Quetta’s sparsely populated province, the literacy rate is less than 10 percent, said Tariq Baluch, a government official in the Pasheen district. He estimated that about half of the district’s children attended madrasas.

Mr. Aail said: “Doctors and lawyers have to show their degrees. But when it comes to mullahs, no one asks them for their qualifications. They don’t have knowledge, but they are influential.”

Mr. Kacmaz chimed in: “How we interpret the Koran is totally dependent on our education.”

In an interview in 2004, published in a book of his writings, Mr. Gulen put it like this: “In the countries where Muslims live, some religious leaders and immature Muslims have no other weapon in hand than their fundamental interpretation of Islam. They use this to engage people in struggles that serve their own purposes.”

Moderate as that sounds, some Turks say Mr. Gulen uses the schools to advance his own political agenda. Murat Belge, a prominent Turkish intellectual who has experience with the movement, said that Mr. Gulen “sincerely believes that he has been chosen by God,” and described Mr. Gulen’s followers as “Muslim Jesuits” who are preparing elites to run the country.

Hakan Yavuz, a Turkish professor at the University of Utah who has had extensive experience with the Gulen movement, offered a darker assessment.

“The purpose here is very much power,” Mr. Yavuz said. “The model of power is the Ottoman Empire and the idea that Turks should shape the Muslim world.”

But while radical Islamists seek to re-establish a seventh-century Islamic caliphate, without nations or borders, and more moderate Islamists, like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, use secular democracy to achieve the goal of an Islamic state, Mr. Gulen is a nationalist who says he wants no more than a secular democracy where citizens are free to worship, a claim secular Turks find highly suspect.

Still, his schools are richly supported by Turkish businessmen.

The number of Mr. Gulen’s followers in Turkey is estimated to three million to five million. The network itself does not provide estimates, and Mr. Gulen declined to be interviewed.

The schools, which also operate in Christian countries like Russia, are not for Muslims alone, and one of their stated aims is to promote interfaith understanding. Mr. Gulen met the previous pope, as well as Jewish and Orthodox Christian leaders, and teachers in the schools say they stress multiculturalism and universal values.

Pakistani society is changing fast, and more Pakistanis are realizing the importance of education, in part because they have more to lose, parents said.source

Few articles on my favorite subject: FDA and drug conspiracy :) But this time, we see some tries of FDA to get back USA in the game of the big. Which is good. But also, seeing for first time, so many failure of the pharmacy giants to comply some of the rules makes me wonder how many regulations actually they aren't complying and how many lives are being risked. Also notice how FDA is not unofficially blaming Chine for the poisoning of the heparin. Hmmm. Is it washing its hands? Because if China's government is involved in something like this, we have very big problem. Especially if we realise what part of the things we used is produced in China and how easy is for China to abuse its power.

• F.D.A. Warns Merck About Plant
• Heparin Contamination May Have Been Deliberate, F.D.A. Says
• Drug From Genentech and Biogen Fails as a Lupus Treatment
• Merck Cholesterol Drug Rejected by F.D.A.

By the way, another something I learned today is that there is an ongoing battle between giants and generic producers over patents in USA. The idea was that if a company lies in order to obtain a patent (meaning it provides falsified data, for example), its patent should be removed. Which is very bad for giants, as they live on the patent so to say, and anyway, they lie quite often in their applications for patents. And thanks to that, it seems officials are lining their way. Which is very bad for the dear patient. Because the pharmacy giants are going to just get away with their frauds and deceptions.

F.D.A. Warns Merck About Plant

The Food and Drug Administration has ordered Merck & Company to correct numerous manufacturing deficiencies at its main vaccine plant, the agency said Wednesday.

The agency released a warning letter sent to Merck’s chief executive, Richard T. Clark, that states its inspectors had determined that manufacturing rules were not being followed at the plant in West Point, Pa., just outside Philadelphia.

The plant, which recalled two vaccines in December over sterility problems, makes a number of children’s vaccines and four for adults.

The nine-page letter states that the agency found “significant objectionable conditions” in the manufacture of vaccines and drug ingredients during repeated inspections from Nov. 26 to Jan. 17.

In a separate posting on its Web site, the agency said it had issued the warning letter because Merck’s response to the F.D.A. report sent after the inspections was “inadequate to address the serious deviations noted.”

Amy Rose, a spokeswoman for Merck, said, “We’re committed to working with the F.D.A. to ensure that all these issues are addressed to their full satisfaction.” source

Heparin Contamination May Have Been Deliberate, F.D.A. Says

WASHINGTON — Federal drug regulators believe that a contaminant detected in a crucial blood thinner that has caused 81 deaths was added deliberately, something the Food and Drug Administration has only hinted at previously.

“F.D.A.’s working hypothesis is that this was intentional contamination, but this is not yet proven,” Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s drug center, told the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations in written testimony given Tuesday.

A third of the material in some batches of the thinner heparin were contaminants, “and it does strain one’s credulity to suggest that might have been done accidentally,” Dr. Woodcock said.

Two weeks ago, Food and Drug Commissioner Andrew C. von Eschenbach told a Senate subcommittee that the contamination was done “by virtue of economic fraud,” but he quickly withdrew the remark, saying he had “probably gone too far.”

Dr. Woodcock’s statement on Tuesday was part of growing chorus that has labeled the heparin contamination as perhaps the most brazen poisoning episode since 1982, when seven people in the Chicago area died after taking Tylenol that had been laced with cyanide.

The Tylenol case led to substantial changes in product packaging, and the heparin contamination has led both Democratic and Republican committee members to call for major changes in the way the F.D.A. functions and is financed.

David G. Strunce, chief executive of Scientific Protein Laboratories, the company that supplied contaminated heparin material to Baxter International, which manufactured and distributed the finished drug, described the contamination as “an insidious act” that “seems to us an intentional act upstream in the supply chain.”

The F.D.A. has identified Changzhou SPL, a Chinese subsidiary of Scientific Protein Laboratories, as the source of the contaminated heparin. A Congressional investigator said the contaminant, oversulfated chondroitin sulfate, cost $9 a pound compared with $900 a pound for heparin.

Mr. Strunce said that his company tried to find the original source of the contamination but was stopped by the Chinese authorities.

Chinese officials have disputed the F.D.A. contention that the contaminant caused death and injury, and they have insisted on the right to inspect American drug plants if the F.D.A. insists on inspecting Chinese ones.

David Nelson, a Congressional investigator, told the House panel that had the F.D.A. inspected the Chinese plant, the contamination could have been averted.

F.D.A. officials have admitted that they mistakenly failed to conduct an inspection of the Changzhou SPL plant but said that an inspection would not have been able to uncover the contamination.

The agency finally conducted an inspection of the facility in February and found so many problems that the F.D.A. blocked the plant from exporting to the United States. Mr. Nelson was even more critical of Baxter International, which bought heparin ingredients from Changzhou SPL from 2004 through 2008 but did not inspect the facility until September 2007.

Under withering questioning, Dr. Woodcock said that the F.D.A. would need another $225 million annually to inspect every foreign drug plant every other year, the frequency most say is needed. The agency will spend $11 million this year on foreign drug inspections.

There is a growing bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill that the F.D.A. needs a rapid increase in its budget to ensure the safety of the nation’s drugs, medical devices and food.

The Bush Administration has proposed increasing the agency’s budget next year by only 3 percent to $1.8 billion, not enough to cover even its expected cost increases. source

Drug From Genentech and Biogen Fails as a Lupus Treatment

The biotechnology giants Genentech and Biogen Idec on Tuesday became the latest companies to fail at treating the immune system disease lupus.

The companies said that their drug Rituxan did not achieve any of seven measures of effectiveness in a late-stage patient trial. Rituxan is already approved to treat non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and rheumatoid arthritis and had sales last year of $2.3 billion in the United States alone.

The lupus setback was announced only two weeks after the companies said that Rituxan had not worked against a severe form of multiple sclerosis. While analysts had generally not expected success in the multiple sclerosis study, expectations were somewhat higher for the lupus trial, despite failures by other companies.

The “complete failure” of Rituxan in the lupus trial “is somewhat of a surprise to us and creates an even more challenging year” for Genentech’s stock, William Tanner, an analyst with Leerink Swann, wrote in a note to clients Tuesday.

Genentech lost more than $5 billion in market value Tuesday, with its stock dropping $5.23, or 7 percent, to $67.93. Biogen shares, which tend to trade more on prospects for its multiple sclerosis drug Tysabri, fell $3.34, or 5 percent, to $61.33.

The news is also a blow to patients with lupus, a disease in which the body’s immune system can attack many of the body’s own organs. No new drugs have been approved to treat lupus in more than three decades, and other companies — including La Jolla Pharmaceutical, Aspreva Pharmaceuticals and Genelabs Technologies — have also had setbacks.

Dr. Merrill said proving that a drug works was difficult because there is great variation in symptoms among patients with lupus, and there are few objective measures of severity of the disease. Dr. Merrill is a consultant to Genentech and was an investigator in the Rituxan trial.

An estimated 250,000 to 500,000 Americans, most of them young women, have systemic lupus erythematosus, the severe form of the disease against which Rituxan was tested. More than 1.5 million Americans have some form of lupus, according to the Lupus Foundation of America.

The late-stage clinical trial involved 257 patients, who received either Rituxan or a placebo, along with a steroid to damp the immune system. The main indicator of success was to be how many patients had responded to treatment, as measured by an index of disease activity. Rituxan was not superior to the placebo on this measure or on any of six secondary measures, the companies said.

Genentech and Biogen are continuing a separate late-stage clinical trial testing Rituxan as a treatment for lupus nephritis, an inflammation of the kidneys. Results are expected in the first quarter of 2009.

Rituxan works by depleting B cells — blood cells involved in forming antibodies, proteins that attack invading pathogens. The main use of the drug is against non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of B cells. But there is emerging evidence that antibodies and B cells are involved in diseases like lupus, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, in which the immune system attacks the body’s own tissue.source

Merck Cholesterol Drug Rejected by F.D.A.

An experimental cholesterol drug being developed by Merck & Company was rejected by the Food and Drug Administration, the company said on Monday.

Merck said the agency issued a “not approvable” letter, stating that it needed more information on the drug, Cordaptive, a cholesterol treatment that Merck had long promoted as a crucial addition to its lucrative cholesterol franchise, which has been under fire this year.

The cholesterol drug, also known as MK-0524A, can both lower LDL, or bad cholesterol, and raise HDL, or good cholesterol, Merck says.

“We plan to meet with the F.D.A. and to submit additional information to enable the agency to further evaluate” the drug’s risks and benefits, Peter S. Kim, president of Merck Research Laboratories, said in a statement. Merck disclosed the agency’s action after the close of market trading, and its stock fell 5 percent, to $39.35 a share, in after-hours trading on Monday.

Merck’s former cholesterol blockbuster, Zocor, lost billions in annual sales after it faced generic competition in 2006. The company, and a partner, the Schering-Plough Corporation of Kenilworth, N.J., jointly sell two other cholesterol drugs, Zetia and Vytorin, which combines Zetia and Zocor.

The drug makers have been accused of trying to protect sales by delaying results of a study that showed Vytorin worked no better than Zocor, which is much cheaper; the companies deny the accusation.

Cordaptive combines an extended-release form of the B vitamin niacin with a chemical to inhibit a niacin side effect called flushing — redness, burning and tingling of the face.

Niacin has been used to control cholesterol for decades, and an extended-release version called Niaspan, made by Abbott Laboratories, has been on sale for years.

In a 24-week study of about 1,600 patients, reported at a European cardiology conference in the fall, researchers found that compared with dummy pills, Cordaptive produced an 18 percent decline in levels of LDL cholesterol, a 26 percent decline in another type of blood fat called triglycerides and a 20 percent increase in HDL levels.

Merck also said that the F.D.A. rejected Cordaptive as a brand name, so it may use the name Tredaptive in the United States. The company noted that an advisory committee on Thursday recommended that European Union countries approve the drug. source

You think you can't survive without oxygen? Think again! Read the article, it's a response to the idea of D.Blane to hold his breath for 16minutes, something he obviously did successfully. Now, I'm not saying we don't need oxygen at all. I'm just saying it's striking we can survive without it and stay active. I mean, why our brain will have to have such ability? I don't see a good reason. But it has it. Obviously. Interesting, right?

Is Breath-Holding Hazardous to Your Brain?

By John Tierney

My comment: Sleep apnea patients obviously do recover after they are being threated and my guess is that they suffer more from the lack of sleep than the lack of oxygen. Every person who makes a little experiment to not sleep few days in a row or to wake up on every 2 minutes will experience the power of sleep deprivation. And the fact that some people might even not know they have sleep apnea for a while and not feel disabled by it speaks that the conditions isn't so horrible from the health point of view. People are still "operating". Yes, the lack of oxygen do destroy the brain, but if you look at yogis, they hold their breath for random periods and they don't seem to have brain damage. My own experiment on me show that if you train yourself, you really can hold your breath within certain limit and without troubles. The only problem I have is to hold my breath while doing something else, like walking, which significantly decrease my ability to not-breath. That's why I find it well, cool, that divers can swim and act while not breathing. Which implies the brain is much more surviving than we suppose. And that the lack of oxygen can be a condition the brain can be trained to ignore. Which is really cool. Honestly, I'm rather surprised the brain don't get damaged at all by severe oxygen starvations like this. And I do believe those studies, if there was something visibly really wrong, they'll find it. Obviously even if the experience do change the brain in some way, it's far from the pathologies we know. Maybe it's not a pathology at all. Just a function we never suspected it exists. Due to the obvious empirical fact we live until we breath and if we stop breathing we're either death or heading toward it. But we all have read novels about divers for pearls. They seem not to have problem with not-breathing too. But still, it's curious you may very well drown in as little as 5 minutes, but you can as well stay sound and safe after 15 minutes without oxygen. Is it just a matter of training and if it is, shouldn't we train ourselves for it? And what else our brain can do if it's trained :)
An explanation from the article on Blaine:
This ability isn’t new — it involves an ancient reflex shared with dolphins and other mammals — but it has only recently been rediscovered, thanks largely to the sport of free diving. Using just their lungs, free divers have kept going deeper and holding their breath longer than anyone expected.
A century ago, Houdini was celebrated for being able to hold his breath for three and a half minutes. Today even a novice can quickly learn to last longer than that.

Researchers in the 1960s calculated, based on lung capacity and the effect of water pressure, that humans couldn’t dive deeper than 165 feet. Today free divers are going down more than 600 feet and returning in apparently fine shape. Most of the time.

to one of the most common and sometimes fatal dangers of free diving — and one of the reasons you shouldn’t try any prolonged breath-holding unless someone like Mr. Krack is supervising.

“Divers rarely get into trouble at depth,” Dr. Potkin said. “But as the diver approaches the surface, the decreasing water pressure causes a drop in pressure of the oxygen in the brain. If the level in the brain gets too low, it’s like a switch: lights out.”

The natural impulse to stop holding your breath (typically within 30 seconds or a minute) is not because of an oxygen shortage but because of the painful buildup of carbon dioxide.

Immersing the face in water produces a protective action in humans similar to that in dolphins, seals, otters and whales. Called the mammalian diving reflex, it quickly lowers the heart rate and then constricts blood vessels in the limbs so that blood is reserved for the heart and the brain.

By exploiting that reflex, free divers can remain active underwater for more than four minutes, and much longer if they remain still. The world-record holders have exceeded nine minutes after filling their lungs with ordinary air, and more than 16 minutes after inhaling pure oxygen. source

You remember the secret of the conversation between a lawyer and his/her client?Forget about it! Read that article from NY Times. My comment: For me the monitoring of a lawyer should be justified ONLY if he/she is suspected in committing illegal actions and there is a court order. Only then. Otherwise, it's very easy to monitor like everyone under some connection with a lawyer and the National security label. Because as the article says, it's not just the conversations with the client that are monitored-it's all the communications! That includes the family, the friends and other unsuspecting decent citizens. Why should they worry if they are innocent?Because in most countries people are innocent until they are proven guilty and their private life is PRIVATE!

Lawyers Fear Monitoring in Cases on Terrorism

PORTLAND, Ore. — Thomas Nelson, an Oregon lawyer, has lived in a state of perpetual jet lag for the last two years. Every few weeks, he boards a plane in Portland and flies to the Middle East to meet with a high-profile Saudi client who cannot enter the United States because he faces charges here of financing terrorism.

Mr. Nelson says he does not dare to phone this client or send him e-mail messages because of what many prominent criminal defense lawyers say is a well-founded fear that all of their contacts are being monitored by the United States government.

Because he is constantly shifting time zones to see his client face to face, “I just don’t sleep normally anymore,” Mr. Nelson said. “But I don’t have a choice. It’s very clear to me that anything I say to my client or to other lawyers in this case is being recorded.”

Across the country, and especially here in Oregon, it seems, lawyers who represent suspects in terrorism-related investigations complain that their ability to do their jobs is being hindered by the suspicion that the government is listening in, using the eavesdropping authority it obtained — or granted itself — after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Steven T. Wax, a Portland lawyer involved in several terrorism cases, said he has told clients to assume that everything they say to him is being secretly monitored. Mr. Wax said he “self-censors” his e-mail messages, even to other lawyers and friends. The situation, he said, has elements of “Kafka and ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ ”

The Justice Department does not deny that the government has monitored phone calls and e-mail exchanges between lawyers and their clients as part of its terrorism investigations in the United States and overseas.

But in cautiously worded court statements, the department says that if there has been surveillance of lawyers involved in terrorism cases, it has been handled in strict accordance with federal law and with the Constitution’s promise of a criminal defendant’s right to counsel.

The department’s promises of ethical conduct have met with special skepticism in Oregon, where lawyers believe they have seen proof of secret government monitoring.

In a terrorism-financing investigation centered on the offices of an Islamic charity here, the government mistakenly provided defense lawyers in August 2004 with what the lawyers say was a logbook of intercepted phone calls between the charity’s lawyers in Washington, D.C., and clients in Saudi Arabia.

The charity’s lawyers say the logbook, which was stamped “top secret,” appeared to reflect eavesdropping under the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program.

After the government realized its mistake, defense lawyers were ordered to return all copies of the logbook to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and were warned that they could face prosecution if they disclosed its contents.

It is believed to be the only case in which nongovernment lawyers might have seen physical evidence of the security agency’s so-called terrorist surveillance program, which has been called unconstitutional by many legal scholars, lawmakers and civil liberties groups because it allowed the monitoring of the phone calls of Americans without a court’s permission.

Sean M. Maher, a New York lawyer who is a co-chairman of the national security committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said he knew talented private lawyers who were refusing to take on terrorism cases because of potential violations of their privacy, including monitoring of their communications with clients. That fear has grown as a result of the disclosures in Oregon, Mr. Maher said.

Lawyers who agree to defend terrorism suspects in cases involving classified information are required to undergo background checks that can include an F.B.I. review of their financial and medical records, including records of psychiatric care.

“People just aren’t going to get involved in this process,” Mr. Maher said. “I find it unfathomable that in our adversarial system, we’ve created a process to weed out qualified defense counsel.”

The anxiety among defense lawyers has grown as the Bush administration has pressed Congress to pass a bill that would permanently ease restrictions on domestic wiretapping in investigations involving national security. Democratic Congressional leaders and the White House are at a stalemate over the legislation.

A few private lawyers around the country have found themselves under criminal investigation in recent years as a result of terrorism-related cases. In New York, Lynne F. Stewart, a civil rights lawyer, was convicted in 2005 of helping an imprisoned terrorist leader communicate with his extremist Muslim followers in Egypt and elsewhere. Prosecutors said the messages were passed along to her in supposedly private jailhouse meetings with her client. She was sentenced to 28 months in prison.

“If a terrorist suspect living in a foreign country is calling into the United States and all of his calls are being monitored, the calls to his lawyers here might be intercepted, as well,” one of the officials said. “It’s not as if we’re targeting the lawyer for surveillance. It’s not like we’re eager to violate lawyer-client privilege. The lawyer is just one of the people whose calls from the suspect are being swept up.”

While the Bush administration insists that the warrantless wiretapping program has ended, Mr. Belew and other lawyers say they are concerned that the government has found another way of monitoring lawyer-client conversations, perhaps through the use of secret warrants obtained through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a special court used in national security cases. The earlier N.S.A. program bypassed the surveillance court. source

Happy Day of Workers! Or whatever it's called :) To comply with the socialist ideas of the holiday, I'll post something on capitalist world. If you're reading that well after 1st of May, well, sorry, but my schedule isn't exactly fitting with that of the posts. Whatever.
The following article if from NY Times. It basically says how bad are the non-OPEC countries to not produce more oil when it's needed. Fingers pointed at Russia, that is trying to stabilise after the wild ages and to find its place in the world. And it explains dearly how poor OPEC countries cannot produce enough to meet the demand. Ah, yeah, and how the bad developing countries-China and India are consuming our oil and making it hard for producers to catch up with the demand.
I find it rather infantile way to explain the situation. We cannot stop growing and industrialising countries from buying our oil. We can only offer higher price. Or find another way. I personally think, we really should find another way as there is a limit in any kind of production. Even if we're not running out of oil beneath the surface, increasing production means more stress for economies, more workers, more investments and more pollution. While Exon and the rest aren't exactly worried about the Nature, this should be national priority for every country. Because if there is no air, there are no citizens, no taxes and basically no need of politicians. I doubt any politician wants that. It's not all about the money after all, it's also about the power. And owning a country is better than just owning billions. Probably. But that could be just me, with my scientific mind. Whatever. Enjoy the article. (yeah, just notice, that the growing China and India are the reason behind the soaring prices of food also)

Oil Price Rise Fails to Open Tap

As oil prices soared to record levels in recent years, basic economics suggested that consumption would fall and supplies would rise as producers drilled for more oil.

But as prices flirt with $120 a barrel, many energy experts are becoming worried that neither seems to be happening. Higher prices have done little to suppress global demand or attract new production, and the resulting mismatch has sent oil prices ever higher.

That has translated into more pain at the pump, with gasoline setting a fresh record of $3.60 a gallon nationwide on Monday. Experts expect prices above $4 a gallon this summer, and one analyst recently predicted that gasoline could reach $7 in the next four years.

A central reason that oil supplies are not rising much is that major producers outside the OPEC cartel, like Russia, Mexico and Norway, are showing troubling signs of sluggishness. Unlike OPEC, whose explicit goal is to regulate the supply of oil to keep prices up, these countries are the free traders of the oil market, with every incentive to produce flat-out at a time of high prices.

But for a variety of reasons, including sharply higher drilling costs and a rise of nationalistic policies that restrict foreign investment, these countries are failing to increase their output. They seem stuck at about 50 million barrels of oil a day, or 60 percent of the world’s oil supplies, with few prospects for growth.

“According to normal economic theory, and the history of oil, rising prices have two major effects,” said Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency in Paris. “They reduce demand and they induce oil supplies. Not this time.”

With global supplies tight, geopolitics continue to play a big role in pushing up oil prices. Oil futures closed at $118.75 a barrel, up 23 cents, on the New York Mercantile Exchange, after strikes by oil workers in Scotland and Nigeria that shut down nearly 1.7 percent of the world’s daily production.

Countries outside the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries have been the main source of production growth in the past three decades, as new fields were discovered in Alaska, the North Sea and the Caspian region.

But analysts at Barclays Capital said last week that non-OPEC supplies were “seemingly dead in the water.” Goldman Sachs raised similar concerns last month, saying that growth in non-OPEC supplies “can no longer be taken for granted.”

At the same time, oil consumption keeps expanding. Global consumption is forecast to increase by 1.2 million barrels a day this year, to 87.2 million barrels a day, with much of the growth in demand coming from China, India and the Middle East, according to the International Energy Agency, a group that advises industrialized countries.

In the United States and through much of the developed world, the higher fuel prices have led drivers to reduce their consumption, and gasoline demand is expected to drop this year. But that drop will be more than offset by the rise in energy demand from developing countries. In the next two decades, demand is projected to jump by 35 percent, and developing countries will consume more oil than industrialized countries.

Higher oil prices mean record profits for oil companies that have, to some extent, masked the supply problems. Exxon Mobil and Chevron are both expected to deliver knockout performances when reporting quarterly earnings this week, even as they struggle to increase production.

“What is disturbing here is that things seem to get worse, not better,” said David Greely, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. “These high prices are not attracting meaningful new supplies.”

The outlook for oil supplies “signals a period of unprecedented scarcity,” Jeff Rubin, an analyst at CIBC World Markets, said last week. Oil prices might exceed $200 a barrel by 2012, he said, a level that would very likely mean $7-a-gallon gasoline in the United States.

Some regions are simply running out of reserves. Norway’s production has slumped by 25 percent since its peak in 2001, and in Britain, output has dropped 43 percent in eight years. Production from the giant Prudhoe Bay field in Alaska has dropped by 65 percent from its peak two decades ago.

In many other places, the problems are not below ground, as energy executives like to put it, but above ground. Higher petroleum taxes and more costly licensing agreements, a scarcity of workers and swelling costs, as well as political wrangling and violence, are making it harder to raise production.

“It’s a crunch,” said J. Robinson West, chairman of PFC Energy, an energy consulting firm in Washington. “The world is not running out of oil, but rather it’s running out of oil production capacity.”

Mexico, the second-biggest exporter to the United States, seems increasingly helpless to find new supplies to offset the collapse of its largest oil field, Cantarell. A combination of falling production and rising domestic consumption could wipe out Mexico’s exports within five years.

Foreign investment could help Mexico produce oil from deeper waters, but that is a controversial proposition in a country where oil has long been seen as part of the national patrimony.

Another country, Russia, is also a focus of analysts’ worries. Russia is not exactly running out of places to look for oil — a huge chunk of eastern Siberia remains unexplored — and the country has been the biggest contributor to the growth in energy supplies in the last decade.

But Russian energy officials warned recently that the days of stunning growth that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union were over, as the country focuses on stabilizing its output. Russia today produces about 10 million barrels of oil a day, up from a low of 6 million barrels in 1996.

The Russian government has been muscling Western companies to gain more control over its energy resources. That rise in energy nationalism could freeze new investment and slow any meaningful growth in supplies there for years.

As countries like Russia slow output, analysts say OPEC will have to pick up the slack. The oil cartel accounts for 40 percent of the world’s oil exports and owns more than 75 percent of global reserves. But there are serious concerns that OPEC will also find it tough to increase production.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, is completing a $50 billion plan to increase capacity to 12.5 million barrels a day, but it signaled recently that it would not go beyond that. That means Saudi Arabia could fall short of the 15 million barrels a day that most experts had expected it to produce in the long run.

OPEC’s 13 members plan to spend $150 billion to expand their capacity by five million barrels a day by 2012. But OPEC will need to pump 60 million barrels a day by 2030, up from around 36 million barrels a day today, to meet the projected growth in demand. Analysts say that without Iran and Iraq — where nearly 30 years of wars and sanctions have crippled oil production — reaching that level will be impossible.

Not everyone is pessimistic about energy supplies. A study by the National Petroleum Council, an industry group that provides advice to the secretary of energy, concluded that the world still had plenty of petroleum resources that could be tapped.

In fact, high prices have set off a global dash for oil. Brazil, for example, has struck large offshore fields that could turn the country into one of the world’s top 10 producers. But developing new fields can take many years.

To make up the shortfall, the world is also increasingly turning to fuels from unconventional sources, like biofuels or heavy oil. Canadian tar sands, for example, have attracted large investments.

But the International Energy Agency estimates that current investments will be insufficient to replace declining oil production. The energy agency said it would take $5.4 trillion by 2030 to raise global output. Otherwise, it warned that a crisis before 2015 involving “an abrupt run-up in prices” could not be ruled out.

source

A rather interesting survey of the public opinion. It's about the attitude of ordinary citizens toward big corporations and what people need to get in order to make people happy. I hope corporations that I usually bash take a note and understand that without a market they are nothing. So they really have to take care of that market and threat it with respect. Personally I like that people are interested in ecology and safety of the products. That is really really important!

Addressing consumer concerns about climate change

As climate change moves up the political agenda, consumers are beginning to push corporations to address the effect they have on the environment, says a March 2008 strategy paper published by consulting firm McKinsey. Meanwhile, corporations are responding to consumers' needs by providing better products and company benefits, it says.

McKinsey bases its conclusions on a survey of over 2,500 business executives and 7,500 consumers in eight countries carried out in September 2007. The results show the environment will be the major sociopolitical issue to attract most attention from the public and politicians over the next five years.

The consultants believe taking steps to act against the negative effects of climate change is crucial to closing the 'trust gap' between consumers and corporations. However, there is still a big gap between what corporate executives and consumers think is being done to tackle the issues, the paper argues.

While confronting climate change is important, consumers want businesses to focus on many other issues including healthier and safer products, pension benefits and health care benefits, according to McKinsey. On the other hand, executives find privacy, data security and overseas job losses the main causes for concern, claim the consultants.

The survey shows consumers believe corporations have a negative impact on society due to pollution and the harm they do to ecosystems. This is why corporations cannot ignore the environment as they look to improve their reputations, McKinsey argues. Therefore, it observes, companies must decide what role environmental issues should play in their business strategies.

A majority of the consumers surveyed said they would be willing to recycle and revert to energy-efficient appliances, thereby boosting the markets for these products.

Consumers are particularly unhappy with petroleum companies, indicating they should be sincere in investing more in renewable and alternative energy sources. As for the food and beverage industry, consumers want improved health and safety, environmental and ethical standards for business, according to the survey. The business sector with the highest trust rating among consumers is the high-tech industry, it reveals.

The study concludes that if businesses were to examine consumer needs at a very local level, they might be able to gain a competitive advantage as well as address global environmental problems. source

My comment:

So much about the new Afghanistan society. I didn't expect immediate change, but this is surely a step back. Obviously Indian serials are not exactly a norm of social behavior, but a society can develop if it shies away from everything that's different from its traditions. It's normal to not be able to accept everything, but its a sign of maturity to be able to accept it and move on. Banning is not one of the good options. For me, this is wrong. And a step back for the finally free from the Talibans Afghan society. I'm not into any of the American propaganda, but I have read books and watched movies and I know how people survived it. And how much it cost to them. I can't believe someone might want a similar regime back .

Afghan Ministry Bans the Broadcast of 5 Foreign Soap Operas

KABUL, Afghanistan — After four years of watching television programs test the boundaries of decorum and build devoted audiences in the process, conservatives are striking back.

In the latest battle of the long-simmering war between cultural conservatives and liberals, the minister for information and culture ordered television networks to stop broadcasting five soap operas on Tuesday, saying they were not in keeping with “Afghan religion and culture.”

The minister, Abdul Karim Khurram, said last week that he had made the decision in consultation with the Council of Clerics, made up of the country’s most influential religious leaders.

The private television companies initially refused to obey the order and said they would plead their case to Afghanistan’s president. The television shows, all soap operas produced in India, continued to be broadcast every evening and have much of the urban population hooked.

As the deadline approached, however, one network, Ariana TV, buckled and pulled one of the soap operas, “Kumkum,” on Sunday. The network was immediately deluged with calls from viewers, said Abdul Qadir Mirzai, Ariana’s chief news editor.

Control of television and its content has been a hotly debated issue here for decades. The strictly conservative Taliban government banned it outright, and the government before that, run by mujahedeen leaders, banned female singers and presenters.

But under President Hamid Karzai, who is backed by the West, television has flourished, with 17 private television companies starting in the past six years, 11 of them based in Kabul, the capital. Numerous cable television companies also provide a wide selection of foreign films and television shows.

The Afghan networks present a mix of news, popular-music programs and imported serials and soap operas, and are hugely popular, drawing crowds in teahouses and ice cream parlors. Call-in shows, including an Afghan version of “American Idol,” also have large followings, as do news programs.

Many viewers in this struggling country are so absorbed by the soap operas that they rush home in the evening to find out what happens next.

The television companies have also made themselves felt on the political front, not only by broadcasting probing news reports but also by taking sides in ethnic and language debates, which reflect political divisions in Afghanistan.

As Afghanistan prepares for a presidential election next year, some station owners and journalists contend that the ban on television programs is part of a political tussle for control of the airwaves. Political party leaders have opened their own television stations, which are already challenging the Karzai government.

President Karzai has signaled that he sides with the conservatives in the controversy over the serials. Although he said that he would ensure the freedom of the media while he was in power, he has said several times that programs that go against Afghan culture should not be allowed.

Despite his liberal leanings, Mr. Karzai has been swayed before by conservatives on cultural issues. After complaints in Parliament two years ago, Mr. Karzai appointed the more conservative Mr. Khurram as minister of culture, replacing Sayed Makhdoom Raheen, who oversaw the expansion of free media after the fall of the Taliban.

Mr. Khurram ordered the ban of the five shows after strong protests in Parliament over a recent televised awards ceremony on a private station, Tolo TV, that showed Afghan men and women dancing together, an activity that is virtually taboo in this country.

Mr. Khurram has defended his action, saying he did less than the Council of Clerics, or Ulema, had asked.

“The Ulema wanted to ban all TV serials,” Mr. Khurram said in an interview. “But I tried hard to ban only those serials that caused the most upset.”

Describing one of the soap operas broadcast by Tolo TV, he said, “There are scenes that are difficult for an Afghan family to watch, such as that of a woman with more than one husband.”

A member of the Council of Clerics, Said Enayatullah Baligh, who is the imam of Kabul’s large Khishti mosque, confirmed the council’s opposition to the television programs.

Abdul Hamid Mubariz, director of the National Association of Journalists, an independent group that supports Afghan journalists and media organizations, called the ban “unjustifiable.”

Ehsanullah Arianzai, director of Ariana TV, the network that acceded to the order to drop “Kumkum,” suggested that some of the politicians calling for the ban were motivated less by beliefs than by business concerns. He said they had started rival television stations and that they were having difficulty competing with the established ones.

The ban would hurt Ariana TV financially, Mr. Arianzai said. “From a commercial perspective, it would put pressure on us as we receive a lot of advertising for these serials,” he said.

The television companies defend the shows largely on the basis of their popularity. The companies said they had already edited out culturally offensive scenes, like those in which actors exposed too much flesh. source