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| Activists that want copyrights lifted are blind to the dangers, argues Jon Entine People are calling Marcia Bergeron the proverbial canary in the coalmine. The British Columbia woman was found dead in her home last December, felled by chemicals laced with lethal heavy metals believed to have been packed into a counterfeit pill she bought over the internet. She had ingested a drug produced in south-east Asia or China and sold by a website based in eastern Europe. The Canadian woman was the first westerner known to have died from fake drugs. Her death, followed by the headlined scandals over Colgate and Sensodyne toothpastes containing antifreeze and the flood of stories about lead-soaked toys, has finally brought the counterfeiting crisis to the world’s consciousness. Knock-off branded goods, from Rolex watches and cigarettes to aircraft and car parts, cost businesses at least $500 billion a year and governments billions of dollars in tax revenues. For most of us, our brush with copyright pirates amounts to popping, with disappointing results, internet Viagra, or buying a copycat Gucci bag on the streets of London. But sham products can kill. The UN estimates that half the drugs sold in the developing world – worth $45 billion annually – are bogus and often deadly. As many as 200,000 malaria deaths each year could be prevented if only genuine drugs were used. | ||
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| OUR BELIEFS: We are artists. We may not dress all cool like artists, or get chicks like artists, and none of us are starving, quite obviously, but Hollywood screenwriters are certainly artists, perhaps even artistes, and we suffer just the same. Not in a showy, oh-I-live-in-a-tenement-and-turn-tricks- to-buy-paint-and-have-this-special-tuberculosis-only-artists-get kind of way. We suffer as we slave over our screenplays alone, staring into blank laptops, often blinded by pool glare. And we smoke real cigarettes online. We are not in this for the money. Management would have you believe that we all make $200,000 a year. That’s funny. We wouldn’t even eat something that cost $200,000, unless it was actually $200,000, drizzled with truffle oil, the way Silvio makes it. Yum. The only reason we require payment at all is so we can support those little people we keep telling you about—the assistants, amanuenses, baristas, Rolfers, scarf carriers, and erotic muses we need to create our art. Oh, and our babies. And various charities. We are not cogs in some machine. While many of today’s blockbusters are written by that machine, we are not cogs in it, despite having originally written all the dialogue and characters and plot that this machine endlessly recombines and maximizes. When a bitter cop with a shattered family and a monkey on his back flees a narco-terrorist’s fireball while cracking that he’s getting too old for this, some writer wrote some parts of that, some time back. | ||
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| tax cigarettes smoking-related mortality rates are expected to double by 2030, the study revealed. The majority of smoking-related deaths will occur in developing countries, the results of the research have shown. Last week Turkey adopted a new law that will regulate the smoking ban. With the new law the areas in which the ban will be implemented have increased. As of last week it is forbidden to smoke in the outdoor areas of public buildings such as schools, health institutions and places of worship as well as restaurants, bars, hotels and stadiums. While the tobacco market in developed countries becomes smaller, it continues to grow in developing countries, Global Tobacco Control coordinator for the foundation, Judith Longstaff Mackay, said. The number of smokers increases in accordance with the increase in consuming levels in these countries, he said. УEspecially in Asia, there is a great increase in tobacco market. Therefore people are able to buy more and more cigarettes. Tobacco is easily accessible in these countries,Ф Mackay was quoted saying in Radikal. Dormitory for girls in S,arko"y A new dormitory for girls has been built in Tekirdag('s S,arko"y district, an initiative of businessman Muzaffer O"ztu"rk within the framework of the УDady send me to schoolФ (Baba beni okula go"nder) campaign launched by the daily Milliyet, the newspaper reported yesterday. The dormitory has beds for 120 students. Present at the opening ceremony of the C,ag(das, Yas,am Muzaffer O"ztu"rk Girl Student Dormitory Saturday were Tekirdag( Governor Ayd?n Nezih Dog(an, Local Administrator Mu"min Heybet, Milliyet writer Dog(an Heper and head of Association in Support of Contemporary Life Tu"rkan Saylan and many students. | ||
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