company:the guardian

  • ’We should have talked to Taliban’ says top British officer in Afghanistan | World news | The Guardian
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/28/talks-taliban-british-officer-afghanistan

    General Nick Carter says west could have struck a deal with Taliban leaders after they were toppled a decade ago

    Comme l’aurait dit Churchill, https://www.byliner.com/jim-cooper/stories/fixing-congress

    Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing—after they have exhausted all other possibilities.

  • US army blocks access to Guardian website to preserve ’network hygiene’ | World news | guardian.co.uk
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/28/us-army-blocks-guardian-website-access

    The US army has admitted to blocking access to parts of the Guardian website for thousands of defence personnel across the country.

    A spokesman said the military was filtering out reports and content relating to government surveillance programs to preserve “network hygiene” and prevent any classified material appearing on unclassified parts of its computer systems.

    The confirmation follows reports in the Monterey Herald that staff at the Presidio military base south of San Francisco had complained of not being able to access the Guardian’s UK site at all, and had only partial access to the US site, following publication of leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden.

    The Pentagon insisted the Department of Defense was not seeking to block the whole website, merely taking steps to restrict access to certain content.

    But a spokesman for the Army’s Network Enterprise Technology Command (Netcom) in Arizona confirmed that this was a widespread policy, likely to be affecting hundreds of defence facilities.

    #censure

  • V. V. Poutine se refuse à tondre le cochon : trop de soucis…

    Putin : NSA whistleblower #Snowden is in Moscow airport | World news | The Guardian
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/25/edward-snowden-moscow-vladimir-putin

    “Assange and Snowden consider themselves human rights activists and say they are fighting for the spread of information,” he said. "Ask yourself this: should you hand these people over so they will be put in prison?

    “In any case, I’d rather not deal with such questions, because anyway it’s like shearing a pig – lots of screams but little wool.”

    #meanwhile, il y a un cochon qui fait beaucoup de bruit pour un résultat pour l’instant nul…

  • Falling short: seven writers reflect on failure | Books | The Guardian
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/22/falling-short-writers-reflect-failure

    Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Anne Enright, Howard Jacobson, Will Self and Lionel Shriver reflect on their own disappointments in life, love and work

    #Diana_Athill #Margaret_Atwood #Julian_Barnes #Anne_Enright #Howard_Jacobson #Will_Self #Lionel_Shriver

  • GCHQ taps fibre-optic cables for secret access to world’s communications | UK news | guardian.co.uk
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa

    The Guardian understands that a total of 850,000 #NSA employees and US private contractors with top secret clearance had access to #GCHQ databases.

    The documents reveal that by last year GCHQ was handling 600m “telephone events” each day, had tapped more than 200 fibre-optic cables and was able to process data from at least 46 of them at a time.

    #surveillance #câbles #internet

  • Mali, Congo… Comment photographier un conflit ?

    Dans cet audio-slideshow (4’40), présenté sur le site de The Guardian le 10 juin 2013 (et qui fait partie d’une série intitulée “Photographs from the front line“), le photographe Joe Penney (Reuters), basé à Dakar, raconte son expérience – c’est la première fois qu’il couvre un “véritable” conflit – au Mali :

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/audioslideshow/2013/jun/10/photography-mali-conflict-joe-penney

    http://fotota.hypotheses.org/546

    #photo #photographie #conflit #guerre #Joe_Penney

  • GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians’ communications at G20 summits | UK news | The Guardian

    Marrant. Mais ils doivent savoir depuis longtemps qu’un email est aussi intime qu’une carte postale.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/16/gchq-intercepted-communications-g20-summits

    GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians’ communications at G20 summits

    Exclusive: phones were monitored and fake internet cafes set up to gather information from allies in London in 2009

  • Africa, let us help – just like in 1884 | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/10/african-hunger-help-g8-grab

    « Accords de partenariat » ? Entre la ploutocratie étrangère et l’"élite" compradore locale.

    That African farming needs investment and support is indisputable. But does it need land grabbing? Yes, according to the deals these countries have signed. Mozambique, where local farmers have already been evicted from large tracts of land, is now obliged to write new laws promoting what its agreement calls “partnerships” of this kind.

  • Scandale PRISM : Les espions américains comme chez eux en Europe | Presseurop.eu : actualités Europe, cartoons et revues de presse
    http://www.presseurop.eu/fr/content/article/3868671-les-espions-americains-comme-chez-eux-en-europe?xtor=RSS-9

    Révélée par The Guardian et The Washington Post, l’étendue de la cybersurveillance exercée par la NSA n’est qu’un aspect de l’intrusion des services de renseignement américains dans la vie privée des Européens. A laquelle les gouvernements ont bien du mal à s’opposer — quand ils n’y consentent pas carrément.

  • Yahoo, Google, Facebook et d’autres : une question de confiance- The Guardian
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jun/10/apple-google-giants-nsa-revelations

    Pour le Guardian, l’affaire des fuites autour du programme #prism de la NSA risque de provoquer une grave crise de confiance pour les sociétés d’internet impliquées. Si les utilisateurs acceptent - pas toujours très bien - que ces entreprises utilisent nos données pour faire de la publicité, le fait qu’elles transmettent des informations au gouvernement ou à l’administration fiscale aura bien plus de mal à passer, estime Viktor Mayer-Schonberger. Pour Greg Nojeim du Centre pour la démocratie et la (...)

    #vieprivee #surveillance

  • Prism and Lebanon (#shameless_autopromo)
    http://angryarab.blogspot.fr/2013/06/prism-and-lebanon.html

    “I would really love to hear once more from some March 14th politician why it is so important for the Lebanese people to handle all of their telecommunication data to their Western friends. And why this had absolutely nothing to do with the spying programs of the USA…

    (Well, at least, it could be useful to remind us that opening all of Lebanon’s “telephone metadata” to the US was one of March 14th very important political demands these last years.)

    Yesterday in the Guardian (along with other “PRISM” revelations):
    Iran was the country where the largest amount of intelligence was gathered, with more than 14bn reports in that period, followed by 13.5bn from Pakistan. Jordan, one of America’s closest Arab allies, came third with 12.7bn, Egypt fourth with 7.6bn and India fifth with 6.3bn.” (thanks Nidal)

  • The houses built on China’s ’poisoned’ land | Environment | guardian.co.uk
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jun/06/houses-chinas-posioned-land

    Gao Shengke and Wang Kai have won the prize for Best Investigation atchinadialogue’s and The Guardian’s China Environmental Press Awards - 2013 for their investigation into contaminated earth in Chinese cities. Here is the first of their three-part series of reports.

    The excavators are rumbling and dust swirls all about at the second phase of the Kangquan New City construction project in Guanzhuang village, Chaoyang District, outside Beijing’s east fifth ring road.

    A 20-metre deep pit has been dug on the site. A foul stench rises from the pile of earth that has been removed. Until now, few people knew about the secret that was buried here.

    This plot of land was previously the site of a factory owned by the Ministry of Railways that made anti-corrosive railway sleepers. The plant was in operation for more than 30 years; many kinds of organic pollutants continuously seeped into the topsoil, deeper soil layers, and into the groundwater. Some seven or eight years ago, the factory was relocated and this plot of ground was left unused. In January 2011, the city administration decided to convert the land into a development for affordable housing and it was taken over by the Residential Construction Service Centre for Civil Servants to build low-cost housing for civil servants from all ministries.

    #pollution #contamination #logement #arnaque #santé

  • NSA whistleblower reveals identity, exposes US government’s “architecture of oppression” - World Socialist Web Site

    http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/06/10/snow-j10.html

    NSA whistleblower reveals identity, exposes US government’s “architecture of oppression”

    By Thomas Gaist
    10 June 2013

    Former CIA employee Edward Joseph Snowden announced on Sunday that he is the source of recent leaks to the Guardian and Washington Post exposing systematic police-state surveillance conducted under the Obama administration by the National Security Agency.

  • Mass Surveillance in America: A Timeline of Loosening Laws and Practices
    http://projects.propublica.org/graphics/surveillance-timeline

    1978 Surveillance court created
    After a post-Watergate Senate investigation documented abuses of government surveillance, Congress passes the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to regulate how the government can monitor suspected spies or terrorists in the U.S. The law establishes a secret court that issues warrants for electronic surveillance or physical searches of a “foreign power” or “agents of a foreign power” (broadly defined in the law). The government doesn’t have to demonstrate probable cause of a crime, just that the “purpose of the surveillance is to obtain foreign intelligence information.”

    The court’s sessions and opinions are classified. The only information we have is a yearly report to the Senate documenting the number of “applications” made by the government. Since 1978, the court has approved thousands of applications – and rejected just 11.

    Oct. 2001 Patriot Act passed
    In the wake of 9/11, Congress passes the sweeping USA Patriot Act. One provision, section 215, allows the FBI to ask the FISA court to compel the sharing of books, business documents, tax records, library check-out lists – actually, “any tangible thing” – as part of a foreign intelligence or international terrorism investigation. The required material can include purely domestic records.

    Oct. 2003 ‘Vacuum-cleaner surveillance’ of the Internet
    AT&T technician Mark Klein discovers what he believes to be newly installed NSA data-mining equipment in a “secret room” at a company facility in San Francisco. Klein, who several years later goes public with his story to support a lawsuit against the company, believes the equipment enables “vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the Internet – whether that be peoples’ e-mail, web surfing or any other data.”

    March 2004 Ashcroft hospital showdown
    In what would become one of the most famous moments of the Bush Administration, presidential aides Andrew Card and Alberto Gonzales show up at the hospital bed of John Ashcroft. Their purpose? To convince the seriously ill attorney general to sign off on the extension of a secret domestic spying program. Ashcroft refuses, believing the warrantless program to be illegal.

    The hospital showdown was first reported by the New York Times, but two years later Newsweek provided more detail, describing a program that sounds similar to the one the Guardian revealed this week. The NSA, Newsweek reported citing anonymous sources, collected without court approval vast quantities of phone and email metadata “with cooperation from some of the country’s largest telecommunications companies” from “tens of millions of average Americans.” The magazine says the program itself began in September 2001 and was shut down in March 2004 after the hospital incident. But Newsweek also raises the possibility that Bush may have found new justification to continue some of the activity.

    Dec. 2005 Warrantless wiretapping revealed
    The Times, over the objections of the Bush Administration, reveals that since 2002 the government “monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants.” The program involves actually listening in on phone calls and reading emails without seeking permission from the FISA Court.

    Jan. 2006 Bush defends wiretapping
    President Bush defends what he calls the “terrorist surveillance program” in a speech in Kansas. He says the program only looks at calls in which one end of the communication is overseas.

    March 2006 Patriot Act renewed
    The Senate and House pass legislation to renew the USA Patriot Act with broad bipartisan support and President Bush signs it into law. It includes a few new protections for records required to be produced under the controversial section 215.

    May 2006 Mass collection of call data revealed
    USA Today reports that the NSA has been collecting data since 2001 on phone records of “tens of millions of Americans” through three major phone companies, Verizon, AT&T, and BellSouth (though the companies level of involvement is later disputed.) The data collected does not include content of calls but rather data like phone numbers for analyzing communication patterns.

    As with the wiretapping program revealed by the Times, the NSA data collection occurs without warrants, according to USA Today. Unlike the wiretapping program, the NSA data collection was not limited to international communications.

    2006 Court authorizes collection of call data
    The mass data collection reported by the Guardian this week apparently was first authorized by the FISA court in 2006, though exactly when is not clear. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, said Thursday, “As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been in place for the past seven years.” Similarly, the Washington Post quoted an anonymous “expert in this aspect of the law” who said the document published by the Guardian appears to be a “routine renewal” of an order first issued in 2006.

    It’s not clear whether these orders represent court approval of the previously warrantless data collection that USA Today described.

    Jan. 2007 Bush admin says surveillance now operating with court approval
    Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announces that the FISA court has allowed the government to target international communications that start or end in the U.S., as long as one person is “a member or agent of al Qaeda or an associated terrorist organization.” Gonzalez says the government is ending the “terrorist surveillance program,” and bringing such cases under FISA approval.

    Aug. 2007 Congress expands surveillance powers
    The FISA court reportedly changes its stance and puts more limits on the Bush administration’s surveillance (the details of the court’s move are still not known.) In response, Congress quickly passes, and President Bush signs, a stopgap law, the Protect America Act.

    In many cases, the government can now get blanket surveillance warrants without naming specific individuals as targets. To do that, the government needs to show that they’re not intentionally targeting people in the U.S., even if domestic communications are swept up in the process.

    Sept. 2007 Prism begins

    The FBI and the NSA get access to user data from Microsoft under a top-secret program known as Prism, according to an NSA PowerPoint briefing published by the Washington Post and the Guardian this week. In subsequent years, the government reportedly gets data from eight other companies including Apple and Google. “The extent and nature of the data collected from each company varies,” according to the Guardian.

    July 2008 Congress renews broader surveillance powers
    Congress follows up the Protect America Act with another law, the FISA Amendments Act, extending the government’s expanded spying powers for another four years. The law now approaches the kind of warrantless wiretapping that occurred earlier in Bush administration. Senator Obama votes for the act.

    The act also gives immunity to telecom companies for their participation in warrantless wiretapping.

    April 2009 NSA ‘overcollects’
    The New York Times reports that for several months, the NSA had gotten ahold of domestic communications it wasn’t supposed to. The Times says it was likely the result of “technical problems in the NSA’s ability” to distinguish between domestic and overseas communications. The Justice Department says the problems have been resolved.

    Feb. 2010 Controversial Patriot Act provision extended
    President Obama signs a temporary one-year extension of elements of the Patriot Act that were set to expire — including Section 215, which grants the government broad powers to seize records.

    May 2011 Patriot Act renewed, again
    The House and Senate pass legislation to extend the overall Patriot Act. President Obama, who is in Europe as the law is set to expire, directs the bill to be signed with an “autopen” machine in his stead. It’s the first time in history a U.S. president has done so.

    March 2012 Senators warn cryptically of overreach
    In a letter to the attorney general, Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Mark Udall, D-Colo., write, “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details” of how the government has interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Because the program is classified, the senators offer no further details.

    July 2012 Court finds unconstitutional surveillance
    According to a declassified statement by Wyden, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held on at least one occasion that information collection carried out by the government was unconstitutional. But the details of that episode, including when it happened, have never been revealed.

    Dec. 2012 Broad powers again extended
    Congress extends the FISA Amendments Act another five years, and Obama signs it into law. Sens. Wyden and Jeff Merkley, both Oregon Democrats, offer amendments requiring more disclosure about the law’s impact. The proposals fail.

    April 2013 Verizon order issued
    As the Guardian revealed this week, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Judge Roger Vinson issues a secret court order directing Verizon Business Network Services to turn over “metadata” — including the time, duration and location of phone calls, though not what was said on the calls — to the NSA for all calls over the next three months. Verizon is ordered to deliver the records “on an ongoing daily basis.” The Wall Street Journal reports this week that AT&T and Sprint have similar arrangements.

    The Verizon order cites Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows the FBI to request a court order that requires a business to turn over “any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items)” relevant to an international spying or terrorism investigation. In 2012, the government asked for 212 such orders, and the court approved them all.

    June 2013 Congress and White House respond
    Following the publication of the Guardian’s story about the Verizon order, Sens. Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., the chair and vice of the Senate intelligence committee, hold a news conference to dismiss criticism of the order. “This is nothing particularly new,” Chambliss says. “This has been going on for seven years under the auspices of the FISA authority, and every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this.”

    Director of National Intelligence James Clapper acknowledges the collection of phone metadata but says the information acquired is “subject to strict restrictions on handling” and that “only a very small fraction of the records are ever reviewed.” Clapper alsoissues a statement saying that the collection under the Prism program was justified under the FISA Amendments of 2008, and that it is not “intentionally targeting” any American or person in the U.S.

    Statements from the tech companies reportedly taking part in the Prism program variously disavow knowledge of the program and merely state in broad terms they

  • LES CIBLES SECRÈTES DE BARACK OBAMA- http://www.parismatch.com/Actu/International/Les-cibles-secretes-de-Barack-Obama-517819

    Le Guardian publie en exclusivité un document ‘top secret’ très embarrassant pour la Maison Blanche : une directive signée par Barack Obama où figure une liste de cibles potentielle de #cyber-attaques contre des pays étrangers. Ce document de 18 pages daté du 20 octobre 2012, vante les mérites des « Offensive Cyber Effects Operations (OCEO) » susceptible d’offrir « les capacité uniques et non conventionnelles susceptibles de faire avancer les objectifs nationaux américains à travers le monde ».

    Obama orders US to draw up overseas target list for cyber-attacks | World news | guardian.co.uk
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/07/obama-china-targets-cyber-overseas

    Barack Obama has ordered his senior national security and intelligence officials to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for US cyber-attacks, a top secret presidential directive obtained by the Guardian reveals.

    The 18-page Presidential Policy Directive 20, issued in October last year but never published, states that what it calls Offensive Cyber Effects Operations (OCEO) “can offer unique and unconventional capabilities to advance US national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adversary or target and with potential effects ranging from subtle to severely damaging”.

    It says the government will “identify potential targets of national importance where OCEO can offer a favorable balance of effectiveness and risk as compared with other instruments of national power”.

    The directive also contemplates the possible use of cyber actions inside the US, though it specifies that no such domestic operations can be conducted without the prior order of the president, except in cases of emergency. 

    The aim of the document was “to put in place tools and a framework to enable government to make decisions” on cyber actions, a senior administration official told the Guardian.

    The administration published some declassified talking points from the directive in January 2013, but those did not mention the stepping up of America’s offensive capability and the drawing up of a target list.

    Obama’s move to establish a potentially aggressive cyber warfare doctrine will heighten fears over the increasing militarization of the internet.

    The directive’s publication comes as the president plans to confront his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at a summit in California on Friday over alleged Chinese attacks on western targets.

    Even before the publication of the directive, Beijing had hit back against US criticism, with a senior official claiming to have “mountains of data” on American cyber-attacks he claimed were every bit as serious as those China was accused of having carried out against the US.

    En complément de http://seenthis.net/messages/146382

  • Also Revealed by #Verizon Leak: How the #NSA and FBI Lie With Numbers | Threat Level | Wired.com
    http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/nsa-numbers

    Thanks to the Guardian’s scoop, we now know definitively just how misleading these numbers are. You see, while the feds are required to disclose the number of orders they apply for and receive (almost always the same number, by the way), they aren’t required to say how many people are targeted in each order. So a single order issued to Verizon Business Solutions in April covered metadata for every phone call made by every customer. That’s from one order out of what will probably be about 200 reported in next year’s numbers.
    (...)
    #Leaks reveal the truth in small slices. In 2006, a technician at an AT&T switching center in San Francisco followed some fiber optic splices straight into an NSA wiretapping program parked on the backbones of the internet. Now someone with access to a single Patriot Act order served on Verizon Business Solutions leaked it to the Guardian, so today’s news is that the FBI and the NSA are engaged in wholesale spying on Verizon customers. But the whole pie is certainly bigger than that.

    #free_bradley

  • The Emperor of All Maladies : A Biography of Cancer (2010) - Siddhartha Mukherjee

    Siddhartha Mukherjee (born 1970) is an Indian-born American physician, scientist and author. This book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Guardian Prize

    Quelques notes sur ce #livre, qui est à mon avis plus une #histoire de la recherche sur le cancer qu’une “biographie du cancer”.

    – p. 48. Le médecin romain Claude Galien (d’origine grecque), en 160, écrivait que le cancer provenait de l’accumulation d’une des quatre humeurs, la bile noire ; dépression et cancer étaient ainsi reliés de façon intrinsèque (cf. "Mars" de Fritz Zorn).

    Only one other disease, replete with metaphors, would be attributed to an excess of this oily, viscous humor: depression. Indeed, melancholia, the medieval name for “depression,” would draw its name from the Greek melas, “black,” and khole, “bile.” Depression and cancer, the psychic and physical diseases of black bile, were thus intrinsically intertwined.) Galen proposed that cancer was “trapped” black bile—static bile unable to escape from a site and thus congealed into a matted mass.

    – p. 86 ; 1910. Paul Ehrlich montre que la chimie industrielle va permettre de trouver des médicaments :

    A gigantic factory, funded by Hoechst Chemical Works, was already being built to manufacture it for commercial use.
    Ehrlich’s successes with Trypan Red and compound 606 (which he named Salvarsan, from the word salvation) proved that diseases were just pathological locks waiting to be picked by the right molecules. The line of potentially curable illnesses now stretched endlessly before him. Ehrlich called his drugs “magic bullets” — bullets for their capacity to kill and magic for their specificity. It was a phrase with an ancient, alchemic ring that would sound insistently through the future of oncology.

    – p. 99 ; 1948, grâce à Sidney Farber et Mary Lasker (la mère de toutes les “ligues contre le cancer”), le cancer devient une cause « médiatique » :

    The campaign against cancer, Farber learned, was much like a political campaign: it needed icons, mascots, images, slogans—the strategies of advertising as much as the tools of science. For any illness to rise to political prominence, it needed to be marketed, just as a political campaign needed marketing. A disease needed to be transformed politically before it could be transformed scientifically

    – p. 119 ; l’aboutissement du projet Manhattan transforme la manière de penser la recherche ; le modèle de Vannevar Bush (donner la liberté aux chercheurs de se consacrer à la recherche fondamentale) semble subitement dépassé :

    On August 7, 1945, the morning after the Hiroshima bombing, the New York Times gushed about the extraordinary success of the project: “University professors who are opposed to organizing, planning and directing research after the manner of industrial laboratories . . . have something to think about now. A most important piece of research was conducted on behalf of the Army in precisely the means adopted in industrial laboratories. End result: an invention was given to the world in three years, which it would have taken perhaps half-a-century to develop if we had to rely on prima-donna research scientists who work alone. . . . A problem was stated, it was solved by teamwork, by planning, by competent direction, and not by the mere desire to satisfy curiosity.”
    The congratulatory tone of that editorial captured a general sentiment about science that had swept through the nation.

    (Bien entendu c’est un leurre, car l’application technologique n’a pu fonctionner que sur une base scientifique fondamentale non dirigée.)

    – p. 130 ; 1995 : l’invention des premiers essais cliniques en cancéro, avec l’implication des médecins cliniciens

    As new drugs, combinations, and trials proliferated, [Gordon] Zubrod worried that institutions would be caught at cross-purposes, squabbling over patients and protocols when they should really be battling cancer. Burchenal in New York, Farber in Boston, James Holland at Roswell Park, and the two Emils at the NCI were all chomping at the bit to launch clinical trials. And since ALL was a rare disease, every patient was a precious resource for a leukemia trial. To avert conflicts, Zubrod proposed that a “consortium” of researchers be created to share patients, trials, data, and knowledge.
    The proposal changed the field. “Zubrod’s cooperative group model galvanized cancer medicine,” Robert Mayer (who would later become the chair of one of these groups) recalls. “For the first time, an academic oncologist felt as if he had a community. The cancer doctor was not the outcast anymore, not the man who prescribed poisons from some underground chamber in the hospital.” The first group meeting, chaired by Farber, was a resounding success. The researchers agreed to proceed with a series of common trials, called protocols, as soon as possible.
    Zubrod next set about organizing the process by which trials could be run. Cancer trials, he argued, had thus far been embarrassingly chaotic and disorganized. Oncologists needed to emulate the best trials in medicine.

    – p. 135 ; sur l’expression « war on cancer », cette citation :

    . . . But I do subscribe to the view that words have very powerful texts and subtexts. “War” has truly a unique status, “war” has a very special meaning. It means putting young men and women in situations where they might get killed or grievously wounded. It’s inappropriate to retain that metaphor for a scholarly activity in these times of actual war. The NIH is a community of scholars focused on generating knowledge to improve the public health. That’s a great activity. That’s not a war.
    —Samuel Broder, NCI director

    – p. 182 comment une maladie capture l’imagination en fonction des préoccupations de la société :

    AIDS loomed so large on the 1980s in part because this was a generation inherently haunted by its sexuality and freedom; SARS set off a panic about global spread and contagion at a time when globalism and social contagion were issues simmering nervously in the West. Every era casts illness in its own image. Society, like the ultimate psychosomatic patient, matches its medical afflictions to its psychological crises; when a disease touches such a visceral chord, it is often because that chord is already resonating.
    So it was with cancer. As the writer and philosopher Renata Salecl described it, “A radical change happened to the perception of the object of horror” in the 1970s, a progression from the external to the internal. In the 1950s, in the throes of the Cold War, Americans were preoccupied with the fear of annihilation from the outside: from bombs and warheads, from poisoned water reservoirs, communist armies, and invaders from outer space. The threat to society was perceived as external. Horror movies—the thermometers of anxiety in popular culture—featured alien invasions, parasitic occupations of the brain, and body snatching: It Came from Outer Space or The Man from Planet X.
    But by the early 1970s, the locus of anxiety—the “object of horror,” as Salecl describes it—had dramatically shifted from the outside to the inside. The rot, the horror—the biological decay and its concomitant spiritual decay—was now relocated within the corpus of society and, by extension, within the body of man. American society was still threatened, but this time, the threat came from inside. The names of horror films reflected the switch: The Exorcist; They Came from Within.
    Cancer epitomized this internal horror.

    – p. 198 ; à une période s’est développé ce qu’on appelait la « mastectomie radicale » de Halsted, une ablation non seulement du sein mais remontant le plus haut possible, jusqu’à la clavicule… l’idée qui avait amené à ce dogme était que, comme certaines patientes rechutaient ne guérissaient pas après une ablation, c’est qu’elle n’avait pas été suffisamment large ; aucune étude statistique n’avait démontré que cette boucherie apportait la moindre amélioration de la survie. En 1953, le chirurgien George Barney Crile se dit qu’il faut peut-être faire une analyse #statistique pour voir si réellement c’est efficace. Il se heurte alors au conservatisme de l’institution :

    No breast cancer trial, for instance, could have proceeded without the explicit blessing and participation of larger-than-life surgeons such as Haagensen and Urban. Yet these surgeons, all enraptured intellectual descendants of Halsted, were the least likely to sponsor a trial that might dispute the theory that they had so passionately advocated for decades. When critics wondered whether Haagensen had been biased in his evaluation by selecting only his best cases, he challenged surgeons to replicate his astounding success using their own alternative methods: “Go thou and do likewise.”
    Thus even Crile—a full forty years after Keynes’s discovery—couldn’t run a trial to dispute Halsted’s mastectomy. The hierarchical practice of medicine, its internal culture, its rituals of practice (“The Gospel[s] of the Surgical Profession,” as Crile mockingly called it), were ideally arranged to resist change and to perpetuate orthodoxy. Crile found himself pitted against his own department, against friends and colleagues. The very doctors that he would need to recruit to run such a trial were fervently, often viciously, opposed to it. “Power,” in the colloquial sense of the word, thus collided with “power” in the statistical sense. The surgeons who had so painstakingly created the world of radical surgery had absolutely no incentive to revolutionize it.
    It took a Philadelphia surgeon named Bernard Fisher to cut through that knot of surgical tradition.

    – p. 199 fin des années 1960 ; le #féminisme permet enfin pour la première fois au patient de s’ingérer dans la politique de santé :

    In Texas, Jane Roe (a pseudonym) sued the state for blocking her ability to abort her fetus at a medical clinic—launching the Roe v. Wade case on abortion and highlighting the complex nexus between the state, medical authority, and women’s bodies. Political feminism, in short, was birthing medical feminism—and the fact that one of the most common and most disfiguring operations performed on women’s bodies had never been formally tested in a trial stood out as even more starkly disturbing to a new generation of women. “Refuse to submit to a radical mastectomy,” Crile exhorted his patients in 1973.
    And refuse they did. Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring and a close friend of Crile’s, refused a radical mastectomy (in retrospect, she was right: her cancer had already spread to her bones and radical surgery would have been pointless). Betty Rollin and Rose Kushner also refused and soon joined Carson in challenging radical surgeons. Rollin and Kushner—both marvelous writers: provocative, down-to-earth, no-nonsense, witty—were particularly adept at challenging the bloated orthodoxy of surgery. They flooded newspapers and magazines with editorials and letters and appeared (often uninvited) at medical and surgical conferences, where they fearlessly heckled surgeons about their data and the fact that the radical mastectomy had never been put to a test.

    (…)

    “The clinician, no matter how venerable, must accept the fact that experience, voluminous as it might be, cannot be employed as a sensitive indicator of scientific validity,” [Bernard] Fisher wrote in an article. He was willing to have faith in divine wisdom, but not in Halsted as divine wisdom. “In God we trust,” he brusquely told a journalist. “All others [must] have data.

    (…)

    Between 1891 and 1981, in the nearly one hundred years of the radical mastectomy, an estimated five hundred thousand women underwent the procedure to “extirpate” cancer.

    – p. 204 ; l’arrivée du cisplatine, use molécule décrite en 1890, et testée par hasard sur le cancer en 1965 : "In 1973, the survival rate from metastatic testes cancer was less than 5 percent." Quelques années plus tard, les résultats sont miraculeux.

    – p. 270 ; chapitre hallucinant sur les fabricants de #tabac ; le combat judiciaire est passionnant, avec notamment :

    The tobacco industry had all but declared absolute victory: “Plaintiff attorneys can read the writing on the wall,” one report crowed, “they have no case.”
    Edell, however, refused to read any writing on any walls. He acknowledged openly that Rose Cipollone was aware of the risks of smoking. Yes, she had read the warning labels on cigarettes and the numerous magazine articles cut out so painstakingly by Tony Cipollone. Yet, unable to harness her habit, she had remained addicted. Cipollone was far from innocent, Edell conceded. But what mattered was not how much Rose Cipollone knew about tobacco risks; what mattered was what cigarette makers knew, and how much of the cancer risk they had revealed to consumers such as Rose.
    The argument took the tobacco companies by surprise. Edell’s insistence that he needed to know what cigarette makers knew about smoking risks allowed him to ask the courts for unprecedented access to the internal files of Philip Morris, Liggett, and Lorillard. Armed with powerful legal injunctions to investigate these private files, Edell unearthed a saga of epic perversity. Many of the cigarette makers had not only known about the cancer risks of tobacco and the potent addictive properties of nicotine, but had also actively tried to quash internal research that proved it. Document after document revealed frantic struggles within the industry to conceal risks, often leaving even its own employees feeling morally queasy.

    – p. 275 ;

    It is difficult for me to convey the range and depth of devastation that I witnessed in the cancer wards that could be directly attributed to cigarette smoking. (…) It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America—a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance’s link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety—one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars.

    – p. 316, années 1980 ; l’arrivée du sida et de malades qui prennent en mains la connaissance scientifique et parlent sur un pied d’égalité avec les médecins

    – p. 328, décembre 1999 : l’affaire Werner Bezwoda ; depuis les années 1980 la mode est à l’autogreffe de moelle osseuse. Ce chirurgien sud-africain, qui opère à Johannesburg, présente à chaque colloque des résultats fantastiques. L’industrie de transplantation engendrée par ces résultats engouffre 4 milliards de dollars. Mais des gens commencent à douter car leurs résultats ne sont pas si probants. Des enquêteurs sont envoyés pour vérifier — Bezwoda, qui n’opérait pratiquement que des femmes noires pauvres et illettrées, avait falsifié ses essais.

    – p. 358, on croise Peter Duesberg, et ses recherches sur le Rous sarcoma virus (RSV). (Il deviendra plus tard l’inspirateur des négationnistes du lien entre VIH et sida.)

    – p. 378, portrait de Thad Dryja, un collectionneur obsessionnel de tumeurs, qui va jusqu’à appeler les patients chez eux pour savoir s’ils ont d’autres membres de la famille touchés par le rétinoblastome, et n’hésite pas à prendre l’avion pour aller récupérer les tumeurs. Cela lui permettra de mettre en route toute la recherche sur la génétique du cancer.

    – p. 388-389, une description minutieuse de la manière dont les mutations s’accumulent, conduisant progressivement au cancer. (“Let us begin with a normal cell…”)

    – p. 418 ; l’histoire de l’herceptine chez Genentech, la recherche privée, les #brevets, le hiatus entre la recherche fondamentale et appliquée. Et là aussi l’arrivée des patients-militants, notamment Barbara Bradfield.

    – p. 436 ; l’invention du Gleevec (Glivec) chez Ciba-Geigy (aujourd’hui Novartis), là encore, l’industriel ne voit pas l’intérêt de développer le médicament (les essais lui coûtant 100 M$), et le chercheur, Peter Drucker, doit se battre pour qu’il existe. On connaît la suite (hello l’Inde).

    #cancer #recherche #santé #militer

  • NSA has direct access to tech giants’ systems for user data, secret files reveal | World news | The Guardian
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data

    The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of #Google, #Facebook, #Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

    The #NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

    The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims “collection directly from the servers” of major US service providers.

    On s’en doutait, sacrément. On a la preuve, désormais. Mails fouillés, chats espionnés, conversation sous contrôle. Tout est en place.

    #surveillance #nsa #flicage #données

  • Verizon order : #NSA collecting phone records of millions of Americans daily | The Guardian
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order

    The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

    The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

    #surveillance (non pas que ça soit franchement nouveau comme info, sur le fond, mais bon…)

  • The night the refugee boat sank: victims tell their stories

    On 24 June 2012 a boat carrying refugees on the 6,000-mile journey from Pakistan to Australia sank with the loss of 94 lives. The Guardian spoke to the survivors and tells the story of international criminal networks and a web of corruption across the far east. Their accounts reveal the plight of desperate refugees forced to pay exorbitant sums

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/03/night-refugee-boat-sank-victims

    #accident #bateau #migration #asile #Pakistan #Australia #tragédie #mer #corruption #réseaux #business #réfugiés

  • Michael Douglas attribue son #cancer de la #gorge à la pratique du #cunnilingus | Un acteur à la #langue bien pendue
    http://www.sudouest.fr/2013/06/03/michael-douglas-attribue-son-cancer-de-la-gorge-a-la-pratique-du-cunnilingu

    « Sans entrer dans le détail, ce cancer très spécifique est causé par le virus du papillome humain (VPH) et provient (de la pratique) du cunnilingus », explique-t-il.

    « Je m’inquiétais pour savoir si les soucis causés par l’incarcération de mon fils n’auraient pas contribué à déclencher le cancer, mais non, en fait c’est dû à une maladie sexuellement transmissible », affirme-t-il. "Et si vous l’attrapez (le cancer), le cunnilingus est aussi le meilleur moyen de le soigner", a ajouté l’acteur dont le fils, Cameron purge une peine de 10 ans de prison pour possession de drogue et trafic.

  • Risk of death from surgery greater at the weekend, study finds | Society | The Guardian
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/may/28/death-risk-higher-nhs-fridays

    The research, published on the British Medical Journal’s website, found that the risk of death within 30 days of a planned operation increased every day of the week after Monday.

    “Compared with Monday, the adjusted odds of death [taking into account case mix] for all elective surgical procedures was 44% higher, and 82% higher, if the procedures were carried out on Friday or at the weekend respectively,” according to the team, which was led by Paul Aylin, a clinical reader in epidemiology and public health at Imperial College London.

    http://www.bmj.com/highwire/filestream/647445/field_highwire_fragment_image_m/0/F1.medium.gif
    Adjusted odds of death and 95% confidence intervals by day of procedure in English hospitals for 2008-9 to 2010-11

    L’étude dans le BMJ http://www.bmj.com/content/346/bmj.f2424

    Le résultat était connu pour l’ensemble des admissions à l’hôpital le week-end. Il s’agit ici d’une étude sur les opérations programmées à l’avance afin d’éliminer les différents facteurs qui pourraient introduire un biais de sélection pour les opérations du week-end.