From the island nation known for the quality of its cigars comes some pretty big news today: Xinhua reports that Cuban medical authorities have released the first therapeutic vaccine for lung cancer. CimaVax-EGF is the result of a 25-year research project at Havana’s Center for Molecular Immunology, and it could make a life or death difference for those facing late-stage lung cancers, researchers there say.

CimaVax-EGF isn’t a vaccine in the preventative sense--that is, it doesn’t prevent lung cancer from taking hold in new patients. It’s based on a protein related to uncontrolled cell proliferation--that is, it doesn’t prevent cancer from existing in the first place but attacks the mechanism by which it does harm.

As such it can turn aggressive later-stage lung cancer into a manageable chronic disease by creating antibodies that do battle with the proteins that cause uncontrolled cell proliferation, researchers say. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy are still recommended as a primary means of destroying cancerous tissue, but for those showing no improvement the new vaccine could be a literal lifesaver.MORE

Oscar Pistorius will become the first amputee athlete to compete at the able-bodied World Championships, after being named in South Africa’s squad.

The 24-year-old double-amputee, who competes on carbon fibre legs, will race in the 400m and 4x400m relay

The event begins in Daegu, South Korea on 27 August.

Women’s 800m world champion Caster Semenya, who was cleared to run last year after an 11-month lay-off because of gender tests, is also in the squad.

Pistorius said: "I have dreamt for such a long time of competing in a major championships and this is a very proud moment in my life.

"It will be a great day for me when I set out on the track in Daegu and I hope to do my country proud.

"This will be the highest-profile and most prestigious able-bodied event which I have ever competed in, and I will face the highest-calibre of athletes from across the planet."

An International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) ban was overturned in 2008, allowing Pistorius to compete against able-bodied athletes.

The IAAF's ruling that his "blades" gave him an unfair advantage was overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Pistorius clocked a personal best time of 45.07 seconds in Italy last month to qualify just inside the cut-off time.

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For much of the Western world, physical pain ends with a simple pill. Yet more than half the world's countries have little to no access to morphine, the gold standard for treating medical pain.

Freedom from Pain shines a light on this under-reported story. "For a victim of police torture, they will usually sign a confession and the torture stops," says Diederik Lohman of Human Rights Watch in the film. "For someone who has cancer pain, that torturous experience continues for weeks, and sometimes months on end."

Unlike so many global health problems, pain treatment is not about money or a lack of drugs, since morphine costs pennies per dose and is easily made. The treatment of pain is complicated by many factors, including drug laws, bureaucratic rigidity and commercial disincentives.

In India, the first stop in the film and the world's largest grower of medicinal poppy for developed countries, there are severe restrictions to the use of morphine domestically. In 27 out of 28 states in India, narcotics laws are so strict that doctors fear prescribing it, and patients literally scream for relief. Drug companies have little incentive to manufacture morphine for the domestic market because of reporting requirements and small profit margins.

In the Ukraine, the film reveals that access to pain medication is halted by outdated, Soviet-style bureaucracy, arbitrary limits on doses, and a lack of oral morphine. As a result, many patients experience prolonged bouts of untreated pain, particularly in rural areas. In the Ukraine, we learn that Artur, a former decorated KGB colonel suffering from prostate cancer, sleeps with a gun under his pillow - his only way out, should he decide his pain is too great. MORE

Millions of individuals worldwide suffer from acute or chronic painwithout adequate access to pain medication. The problem is particularly acute in the developing world, as Time Magazinechronicled last year:

Whether you will have access to pain treatment depends largely upon where you live. Africa, which has most of the world’s AIDS victims, is a painkiller wasteland. In India, more than a million cancer and AIDS sufferers die each year in extreme pain as cumbersome regulations and paperwork make it nearly impossible to get prescription painkillers. (India produces much of the world’s legal opium, yet nearly all of it is exported to Western pharmaceutical companies.)

The geography of pain relief is so skewed that the seven richest countries consume 84% of the world’s supply of legal opiates, according to the International Narcotics Control Board, an independent agency that enforces U.N. conventions. For the estimated 10 million people who are suffering from untreated pain, relief is often found only on the black market, or in death

This gaping unmet need and global inequity is becoming the subject of various calls for change, by pain experts, by cancer treatment advocates, by international organizations, and by the human rights community. As Brent Foster explains in this podcast, the reasons behind the inequitable global distribution of pain medication are complex – like many intractable global social problems that get too little attention by policymakers.

However, a significant (and solvable) aspect of the problem is simply the relationship of supply to demand: the need for analgesics like morphine far outweighs the available supply. In part, this is due to the fact that such analgesics are produced from opium, the sap of the poppy. Since the same plant extract can also be used to produce heroin, a significant amount of political effort is now being expended worldwide to actually inhibit, rather than encourage, opoid production. This fuels shortages of analgesics.MORE

annaham

Technology has come to the aid of people with disabilities, thanks to the ingenuity of university students whose gadgets, soon to go on view at i-CREATe 2011, could help bridge gaps in their communication with other people and enable them to do their daily chores on their own.
i-CREATe stands for International Convention for Rehabilitation Engineering & Assistive Technology, and it is being organised by the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec) with cooperation from the Singapore-based Therapeutic, Assistive & Rehabilitative Technology Centre.

The exhibition will feature cutting-edge technology and innovations that are the result of research projects focussing on people with disabilities, such as impaired hearing and eyesight, undertaken by students in Thailand and overseas. There will also be workshops and seminars.

One highlight is the Student Design Challenge forum that will showcase, among others, communication software, a sign-language translator, a brain-controlled wheelchair, and a universal standing wheelchair for children with cerebral palsy.

The communication software is called CPEeK-Up (pronounced "speak up") and was developed by Kasetsart University's Faculty of Engineering. It combines automatic speech synthesis, Bluetooth technology and self-designed hardware to simulate communication assistance that serves as an intermediary between interlocutors. This software connects to a phone via Bluetooth and the designed hardware, and conveys speech signals to a PC. Handicapped people can engage in conversation using then text-based interface. The system then synthesises speech and sends it to the person the user is conversing with.MORE

But the iniquity of capitalism goes deeper than its injustice as a political economy, its amoral ingenuity in technical prowess or its rapacious relationship to the natural world. However lissome its face or benign its manner, capitalism compels us to be greedy, callous and petty. It takes what the Greeks called pleonexia—an endless hunger for more and more—and transforms it from a tawdry and dangerous vice into the central virtue of the system. The sanctity of “growth” in capitalist culture stems from this moral alchemy, as does the elevation of market competition into a model of human affairs.

The truth is that people matter more than money. While most everyone would agree with that statement, few of us direct our lives guided by the principle.
benchamp

Conscripting us into an economic war, capitalism turns us into soldiers of fortune, steeled against casualties and collateral damage, ransacking the earth to fill the shelves and banks with plunder. Capitalism stands condemned most profoundly not by its maldistribution of wealth or its ecological despoliation but by its systematic cultivation of people inclined toward injustice and predation. And I think we on the left need to start dismissing as utterly irrelevant the standard apologetic riposte: the material prosperity and technological achievement generated by capitalist enterprise. No amount of goods can compensate for the damage wrought on human nature by the deliberate nurturance of our vilest qualities. The desecration of the values we claim to hold most dear is the primary reason we should want to abolish, not reinvent, capitalism.MOR

As if we needed any more evidence that the United States is fast becoming a Corporate Police State (i.e., systematically deploying police power to protect narrow corporate interests), make sure to check out this jaw-dropping story that broke in Canada late Friday. It details how the British Columbia Supreme Court uncovered what it says is a massive collusion between computer giant Cisco and U.S. law enforcement -- a collusion that seems designed to use criminal prosecution to stop a whistle-blower's antitrust case against a powerful politically connected corporation.
The machinations in this case are complicated, but the basics go like this: Ex-Cisco exec Peter Alfred-Adekeye filed a whistle-blower suit against his former employer Cisco in civil court -- a suit that could compel the company to pay millions in damages for allegedly "forcing customers to buy maintenance contracts," according to the Vancouver Sun.MORE

synecdochic

This is (probably part of the reason) why LiveJournal has been under DDoS attack in the last few weeks:

Alexey Navalny's War on Russian Corruption


I remember -- back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Brad still owned LJ -- slowly noticing that LJ was becoming more and more prevalent in Russia and in the Russian political arena. We always thought it was slightly odd -- how did this site that had been originally designed for US college students turn into this juggernaut in Russia? -- but really incredibly awesome. Even when we'd started to get incredible numbers of support requests (and abuse requests, which were horribly worse, since 90% of support requests could be handled with an online translator and a FAQ, and while 90% of abuse requests could be handled with a FAQ too, first you had to read and evaluate the content being reported, and online translation is a shitty way to figure out if a ToS violation was present, and we only had one translator who could only give us a few hours a week, and and and), which slowly piled up into an unmanageable stack of stuff I just couldn't handle without outside help that wasn't always available, making my numbers look like shit, I was always conscious of the fact that on the other side of the world, the website I was helping to run was, essentially, the only free press of an entire country.

The word for "blog" in the Russian language is literally 'ЖЖ' -- the abbreviation for Живой Журнал, or LiveJournal. (Although the automatic translators tended to render it as 'Alive Magazine', which always amused me.) The president of Russia keeps an LJ. (Or a ЖЖ.) There's pretty much no doubt in my mind that the Russian-language market for LJ is what kept LJ from being shut down by Six Apart after acquisition -- 6A had a history of buying companies for the intellectual property and the people who worked there, using that intellectual property and the employees for other projects they had in mind, and shutting down the property once they'd sucked out everything they wanted it for. The fact that Russian-language LJ was so strong meant they could sell the whole thing to SUP, which gave them a different method of disposal.

So, people who grumble about "the Russians" taking over LJ should remember that in Russia, LiveJournal isn't just the top blogging platform, it's theblogging platform. It is Russia's free press. It is the tool being used to fight corruption and advance the cause of democracy. And, more practically to LJ users, the Russian-speaking sector of LJ is the reason LJ is still there at all.
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Russian DDoS warfare: 2007 - 2011

Frank, LiveJournal's mascot, has now more reasons to cry. Screenshot of LiveJournal website.

The possibility of an attack on LiveJournal was predictable. In January 2010, when I was asked by Ivan Sigal, GV Executive Director, what were the most probable DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) targets in Russia, I called LiveJournal the most endangered platform. Usage and seriousness of DDoS, the universal online weapon used both for commercial extortions and political assaults, are increasing every year. Russia, in this context, is famous not only for having a long history of suppressing dissent, but also for being a country with one of the widest and cheapest markets for DDoS services.

Noticeable political DDoS attacks have been happening in Russia since 2007. Before the attack on LiveJournal, the targets were either independent or semi-independent media (novayagazeta.ru, kommersant.ru, vedomosti.ru being the most known cases), and pro-democracy political parties (mosyabloko.ru was attacked in 2007). 2011 has been marked by political DDoS, too. In the beginning of February 2011, the website [ru] of a small but vocalLibertarian Party of Russia was ‘DDoS-ed‘ [ru] by its virtual spoiler ‘Party of Liberty‘ [ru].

Things changed in 2011. On February 25, for the first time in the RuNet history, the website of the United Russia' party was attacked [ru]. A Ukraine-based information technology specialist has registered a website with a provocative name putinvzrivaetdoma.org ['Putin Blows Up Houses,' a reference to the conspiracy theory behind 1999 appartment bombings in Russia [ru] and installed LOIC (Low Orbital Ion Cannon, a weapon of choice of the Anonymous hacker group), an open-source tool for crowdsourced DDoS. For several hours, United Russia's website was unaccessible.

Commercials attacks are a grim reality for many websites as well - they are being organized on a daily basis, and their owners are being extorted [ru]. According to the latest research [ru] by Russian cybersecurity company Group IB, 35 percent of DDoS attacks are conducted by Russian (or, to be more precise, russophone) hackers.

 

Versions behind the attack

In these conditions, anonymous and relatively cheap DDoS attacks are more efficient than legal prosecution or physical harrassment of bloggers. Combined with human bots that spin “hot” topics, this tactic helps authorities deny any evident fact of cyber censorship. Other evidence of the political origin of these attacks is the fact that before LiveJournal, an anti-corruption website rospil.info had been attacked by infamous Darkness/Optima botnet (the name of the network of infected computers). These and other details of the attack were published by the independent analysis [ru] at Kaspersky Lab, a cyber security company.MORE