Pharmaceutical company Novartis is taking the Indian government to court. If the company wins, millions of people across the globe could have their sources of affordable medicines dry up.
Novartis was one of the 39 companies that took the South African government to court five years ago, in an effort to overturn the country's medicines act that was designed to bring drug prices down. Now Novartis is up to it again and is targeting India.
bq. Why can't you simply let the people of the Narmada valley drown? They are mere tribals and villagers - marginal people. Peripheral to our lives. The kind of farmers who commit suicides in high numbers and spoil our cocktail dinners. The kind who support naxalites. The type who demand reservations in jobs that rightly belong to the elite. The uncouth majority who can't distinguish a chardonnay from a chappal. The non-consumers, without disposable incomes. Many of them are mere freeloaders, demanding all kinds of rights when they do not even buy a bike or a computer to contibute to the glowing health of "our" economy. But for you, we would have happily underplayed them in our newspapers and TV news bulletins, like we ignored Medha Patkar and NBA activists for the first 8 days of their starvation but carried images of Modi's designer hunger strike in its first 8 minutes! Why did you have to play the spoilsport and draw attention to the issue? Why are you speaking of the Supreme Court, justice and equity? Grow up, Aamir, don't you know we are not a welfare state anymore?
!(alignleft)http://www.opendns.com/who/logo/opendns_logo_150.gif!
FYI: OpenDNS is great even if your living in a free country.
*DNS Servers*
Primary Nameserver: *208.67.222.222*
Secondary Nameserver: *208.67.220.220*
Everyone knows time and again the Indian Department of Telecommunication, DOT as we have all know sends a lists of URLs to be banned. Recently they had sent a list of URLs which contained a number of blogspot and geocities websites. This angered a number of bloggers.
Most ISP ban a website by playing around with the DNS entries, example when you try to go to banme.blogspot.com it translates to something like 72.14.219.191. The ISP generally changes this to point to something like 127.0.0.1, also know as home. Due to this you cannot access the website and all hell breaks lose.
Where was I when this happened! This was something great that took place, and I was busy programming and too busy partying to bother with things happening in the Indian Blogging World.
You may have seen full page ads of a guy in a glasses sporting a ponytail, and a big heading which generally goes as "Management Guru", or author of the management book "Counting your chickens before they are hatched" which apparently landed in the Humor section of FabMart. For some reason when ever I passed by a magazine running this advertisement, I just wanted to tear it up, or light it on fire.
Some where in October 2005, a blogger named Gaurav Sabnis posted a blog pointing to a article on a local newspaper targeting college and high school students, about how a management university IIPM is nothing they claim they are. Generally you find them advertising things like "Top 5 b-schools" in India, and other things like WiFi Towers and Free Laptops.
I had met Josh at one of the Video Blogger meets at Thirsty Bear in San Francisco. Even though we hung out for about 10 minutes outside (since I was having a smoke). I was highly impressed by him, and his point of view about things.
Today I landed up Jane Kim's website, and while casually surfing around I found out that Josh is in prison and without any charges. Josh was never convicted of a crime. The reason he is behind bars is because refused to testify or turn over unpublished video out-takes to a federal grand jury investigating a July, 2005 anti-G8 demonstration.
A lot of people have come in to support him financially and morally. I will be pretty soon forwarding this to some good friends at The Times of India and Daily News and Analysis India.
More information on: http://freejosh.pbwiki.com/
Technorati Tags: JoshWolf
The government of India is increasing the quota for backward classes from 22.5% to 49.5%. This means that over half of all the seats in colleges and universities will be reserved for backward classes. I am not against these classes, but I think seats should be given out on merit and not on which class one belongs to. This is not what I call equality. The government is only using this to capture the vote bank. Please do what ever you can to help us. Feel free to steal these buttons and use them on your blogs, homepage whatever. Also do not forget to sign the "petition":http://www.PetitionOnline.com/arb06/petition.html.
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