In horror movies, the scariest moments usually come from the monster you can’t see. So the same goes for real life, or at least online life. Over the past few years, largely out of sight, governments have been clawing back freedoms on the internet, turning an invention that was designed to emancipate the individual into a tool for surveillance and control. In the next few months, this process is set to be enshrined internationally, amid plans to put cyberspace under the authority of a largely secretive and obscure UN agency.

If this succeeds, this will be an important boost to states’ plans to censor the web and to use it to monitor citizens. Virtually all governments are at it. Some are much worse than others. The introduction last month of a law in Russia creating a blacklist of websites that contain ‘extremist’ content was merely the latest example of an alarming trend. Authoritarian states have long seen cyberspace as the ultimate threat to their source of power.

They are given succour by self-styled democracies who seek to introduce legislation enhancing the rights of authorities and security agencies to snoop. The British government’s current draft communications bill would produce a system of blanket […]

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WASHINGTON — Over six frightening months, a deadly germ untreatable by most antibiotics spread in the nation’s leading research hospital. Pretty soon, a patient a week was catching the bug. Scientists at the National Institutes of Health locked down patients, cleaned with bleach, even ripped out plumbing - and still the germ persisted.

By the end, 18 people harbored the dangerous germ, and six died of bloodstream infections from it. Another five made it through the outbreak only to die from the diseases that brought them to NIH’s world-famous campus in the first place.

It took gene detectives teasing apart the bacteria’s DNA to solve the germ’s wily spread, a CSI-like saga with lessons for hospitals everywhere as they struggle to contain the growing threat of superbugs.

It all stemmed from a single patient carrying a fairly new superbug known as KPC - Klebsiella pneumoniae that resists treatment by one of the last lines of defense, antibiotics called carbapenems.

‘We never want this to happen again,’ said Tara Palmore, deputy hospital epidemiologist at the NIH Clinical Center.

Infections at health care facilities are one of the nation’s leading causes of preventable death, claiming an estimated 99,000 lives a year. They’re something of a silent killer, […]

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Next week, representatives from 118 of the world’s 192 states will gather in Tehran for the 16th Non-Aligned Movement summit.

Created in 1961, the NAM was a crucial platform for the Third World Project (whose history I detail in The Darker Nations). It was formed to purge the majority of the world from the toxic Cold War and from the maldevelopment pushed by the World Bank. After two decades of useful institution-building, the NAM was suffocated by the enforced debt crisis of the 1980s. It has since gasped along.

In the corners of the NAM meetings, delegates mutter about the arrogance of the North, particularly the US, whose track record over the past few decades has been pretty abysmal. Ronald Reagan’s dismissal of the problems of the South at the 1981 Cancun Summit on the North-South Dialogue still raises eyebrows, and George W Bush’s cowboy sensibility still earns a few chuckles. But apart from these cheap thrills, little of value comes out of the NAM. Until the last decade there have been few attempts to create an ideological and institutional alternative to neoliberalism or to unipolar imperialism.

With the arrival of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) in the past […]

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The use of antibiotics in young children might lead to a higher risk of obesity, and two new studies, one on mice and one on humans, conclude that changes of the intestinal bacteria caused by antibiotics could be responsible.

Taken together, the New York University researchers conclude that it might be necessary to broaden our concept of the causes of obesity and urge more caution in using antibiotics. Both studies focus on the early age, because that is when obesity begins, the scientists say.

The first study, published Wednesday in Nature, used mice to investigate the effects of low doses of antibiotic treatment. The researchers, led by Martin Blaser, thereby mimicked the treatment farm animals have been receiving in the United States in recent decades. Since the 1950s, low doses of antibiotics have been widely used as growth promoters in animals, reportedly increasing their size of by up to 10 percent.

‘People used antibiotics to treat infections, but then they were surprised that even in the absence of disease, this led to bigger animals,

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It’s hard to imagine a greater irony than our political press, obsessed as it is with process stories, dubiously sourced rumors and trivial fluff, lamenting the fact that we can’t have a ‘serious national debate.

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