Month: July 2005

Eli Lilly Plans Withdrawal of Insulin in Canada; Diabetics Not Happy

Animal-based insulin is becoming increasingly difficult to find in the West, and Eli Lilly recently announced plans to stop selling animal-insulin in Canada. That decision has brought on the anger of a number of diabetes charities who accuse the drug company of putting people ahead of profits in withdrawing the animal-insulin.

Until the early 1980s, all insulin was either beef or pork-based. But in the early 1980s, synthetic insulin began to get approval in Western countries and has gradually displaced animal-based insulin. Synthetic insulin has a number of advantages, including that it is cheaper to produce, has fewer impurities, and its is more-or-less identical to human insulin.

But some users of animal-based insulin claim that the synthetic insulin causes any number of side effects, and that it gives them better awareness of impending low blood sugar.

Comparative studies between the two, however, have tended to show that synthetic insulin is just as safe and effect as animal-based insulin, and avoids the potential of an immune response that is a risk with animal-based insulin.

Source:

Diabetics fear loss of animal insulin. Don Harrison, The Province, July 22, 2005.

USDA Reports Increase in Mink Pelt Production

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently released its annual report on mink pelt production in the United States.

In 2004, total mink production increased by 1 percent over 2003, while the cash value of all mink pelts produced in 2004 increased by 21 percent to $124 million, up from $102 million in 2003. Average pelt price increased from $40.10 in 2003 to $48.40 in 2004. That was the highest average pelt price sinced 1995 when mink pelts averaged $53.10.

In all, 2,563,100 mink pelts were produced in the United States in 2004, and 642,100 females were bred to produce kits.

The total number of mink farms in the United States declined by 3 percent in 2004, down to 296 compared to 305 in 2003.

The USDA’s complete report on mink pelt production can be read here.

Profile of Researcher Who Spent Six Months in Jail to Protect Rodney Coronado

This month Alta Mira press published Skidmore College professor Rik Scarce’s book Contempt of Court: A Scholar’s Battle for Free Speech from Behind Bars describing the six months Scarce spent in jail for refusing to testify to a grand jury about his interviews with Rodney Coronado.

When he was a doctoral student at Washington State University, Scarce interviewed Coronado as part of research he was doing for his book, Eco-Warriors. Apparently, Scarce liked to keep his friend close and his research subjects closer, as Coronado was house-sitting for Scarce when the Animal Liberation Front broke into a lab at Washington State in 1991 and caused more about $150,000 in damages.

Not surprisingly, Scarce was subpoenaed in 1993 to testify before the grand jury investigating the Washington State attack. When he refused to answer questions put to him by the grand jury, U.S. District Court Judge William Fremming ordered Scarce jailed for contempt of court. Scarce remained imprisoned for 159 days when the judge decided further incarceration was unlikely to lead to Scarce testifying.

The Washington State University break-in was never solved.

Scarce’s story is, of course, interesting in part due to the recent jailing of New York Time’s reporter Judith Miller over her refusal to divulge information about sources to a grand jury investigating the disclosure of a CIA agent’s identity. This writer believes that there should simply be no shield protecting journalists or researchers from divulging information in the investigation of a crime. Scarce’s position is even more ridiculous, given that he clearly had a personal relationship with Coronado beyond any interviews he did with Coronado for his research (in fact, Scarce refused to even testify if he’d ever had any confidential conversations with Coronado, much less what those conversations might have included).

Scarce deserved the censure and imprisonment he received for trying to shield Coronado.

In an odd twist, after receiving his PhD, Scarce ended up teaching for a while at Michigan State University — Coronado, of course, was ultimately convicted of firebombing at lab at the university.

But Coronado’s subsequent conviction and advocacy of violence don’t stop Scarce and Coronado from getting together when the two appear the same animal rights extremist conferences. According to a 2004 State News article,

Last year, Scarce was reacquainted with Coronado for the first time in more than 10 years at a “Revolutionary Environmentalism” conference in California.

. . .

At that conference, Scarce spent about an hour with Coronado in his hotel room, getting reacquainted.

“We had just the most wonderful talk,” Scarce said. “He is continuing to think deeply about the environmental movement and what it is all about.”

Yeah, that must have been a scintillating conversation.

Sources:

‘Scared to death,’ but kept his word. Dennis Yusko, Times Union, July 22, 2005.

Can Scholars Protect Confidential Sources? Peter Monaghan, The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 7, 1999.

Supreme Court Case Forces Prosecutor’s to Drop Charges Against Animal Rights Extremists

Federal prosecutors announced in July that a 2003 Supreme Court decision forced them to drop four extortion charges against animal rights extremist Peter Daniel Young. Young, 27, was indicted in 1998 and accused of several fur farm break-ins. He was captured earlier this year after 7 years on the run.

Young had originally been charged with four counts of extortion using the same legal theory that had led to a novel civil lawsuit against anti-abortion activists. That theory attempted to stretch the definition of extortion to include criminal acts that were designed to drive a legal establishment, such as an abortion clinic, out of business.

The National Organization for Women won a civil racketeering lawsuit against anti-abortion extremist Joe Scheidler. NOW argued that Scheidler had engaged in pattern of encouraging and participating in numerous criminal acts designed to shut down abortion clinics. Like the animal rights extremists, the anti-abortion extremists used violence, threats, and harassment to intimidate their targets.

But in 2003, the Supreme Court by an 8-1 vote overturned the judgment against Scheidler, saying that regardless of what Scheidler may have done, he did not commit extortion because he did not “obtain” property from his targets which is required by federal law for the crime of extortion to have occurred. The majority opinion said that,

It is undisputed that petitioners interfered with, disrupted, and in some instances completely deprived respondents of their ability to exercise their property rights. Likewise, petitioners’ counsel has acknowledged that aspects of his clients’ conduct were criminal. But even when their acts of interference and disruption achieved their ultimate goal of shutting down an abortion clinic, such acts did not constitute extortion because petitioners did not “obtain” respondents’ property. Petitioners may have deprived or sought to deprive respondents of their alleged property right of exclusive control of their business assets, but they did not acquire any such property. They neither pursued nor received “something of value from” respondents that they could exercise, transfer, or sell. United States v. Nardello, 393 U. S. 286, 290. To conclude that their actions constituted extortion would effectively discard the statutory “obtaining” requirement and eliminate the recognized distinction between extortion and the separate crime of coercion.

In his lone dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens argued the court had interpreted the statutes too narrowly, writing,

For decades federal judges have uniformly given the term “property” an expansive construction that encompasses the intangible right to exercise exclusive control over the lawful use of business assets. The right to serve customers or to solicit new business is thus a protected property right. The use of violence or threats of violence to persuade the owner of a business to surrender control of such an intangible right is an appropriation of control embraced by the term “obtaining.” That is the commonsense reading of the statute that other federal judges have consistently and wisely embraced in numerous cases that the Court does not discuss or even cite. Recognizing this settled definition of property, as I believe one must, the conclusion that petitioners obtained this property from respondents is amply supported by the evidence in the record.

The 2003 decision is why there have been no similar substantive RICO prosecutions of animal rights extremists. When federal prosecutors decided to indict extremists connected with Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, they wisely chose to go after them for interstate stalking and conspiracy to commit same.

In light of the Scheidler decision, prosecutors in the Young case had no option but to drop the charges.

The solution to Scheidler case, by the way, is to petition Congress to alter the Hobbs act to make Stevens point explicit that a criminal conspiracy to deny access to legitimate business or other assets is included in the definition of extortion. Until then, the current federal approach of using federal statutes against interstate stalking is the best option available.

Unfortunately, the four counts of extortion filed against Young were the main charges against him. All prosecutors have left are two misdemeanor charges of violating the Animal Enterprise Act which each carry only one year in prison.

Source:

Feds drop extortion charges against accused mink farm raider. Associated Press, Todd Richmond, July 22, 2005.

CBC: “Terrorist” Is Biased, “Extremist” Is Objective

The CBC has a nice example of how journalists will twist themselves into knots trying to count the number of objective angels on a pin.

In a memo, an editor at CBC goes on at ridiculous lengths explaining that the words “terrorism” and “terrorist” are not neutral terms and that they should be avoided by CBC reporters where possible. According to the memo,

Terrorism generally implies attacks against unarmed civilians for political, religious or some other ideological reason. But it’s a highly controversial term that can leave journalists taking sides in a conflict.

By restricting ourselves to neutral language, we aren’t faced with the problem of calling one incident a “terrorist act” (e.g., the destruction of the World Trade Center) while classifying another as, say, a mere “bombing” (e.g., the destruction of a crowded shopping mall in the Middle East).

Why wouldn’t they call the intentional destruction of a shopping mall a terrorist act?

Anyway, the problem that the CBC editor doesn’t notice is that pretty much all language that isn’t stiltingly clinical entails value judgements. Consider the CBC’s advice on alternatives to “terrorist,”

Use specific descriptions. Instead of reaching for a label (“terrorist” or “terrorism”) when news breaks, try describing what happened.

For example, “A suicide bomber blew up a bus full of unarmed civilians early Monday, killing at least two dozen people.” The details of these tragedies give our audience the information they need to form their own conclusions about what type of attack it was.

Rather than calling assailants “terrorists,” we can refer to them as bombers, hijackers, gunmen (if we’re sure no women were in the group), militants, extremists, attackers or some other appropriate noun.

But almost all of those examples would also be disputed by different sides of conflicts. A Palestinian who blows himself up clearly sees himself as a brave soldier and martyr, and might object to the term “suicide bomber,” just as some in the U.S. object that it should properly be called a “homicide bomber.”

“Militants” and “extremists” are obviously loaded words. Were the 9/11 terrorists “extremists”? That depends on who you’re asking — presumably the Taliban didn’t think so. Isn’t referring to the 9/11 terrorists as “extremists” just another way of taking sides in a conflict?

Even something as seemingly non-biased as “attackers” is not so obvious on further inspection. A Palestinian who blows himself up on an Israeli bus might argue that he is simply defending his culture and people from aggression.

The whole affair is made even more bizarre by CBC’s mischaracterization of the role of words like “terrorist”. Calling a Palestinian suicide bomber a terrorist no more takes sides in that conflict than calling an Israeli who shoots up a mosque a terrorist does. The real conflict is non-ideological in that sense, and rather is between those who believe on the one hand that intentionally killing unarmed civilians is wrong, and those on the other hand who think that it is a perfectly wonderful way to spend the afternoon.

Leave it to the CBC to say that its devotion to “objective” journalism means it is impermissible to take a side even in that conflict.