Pharmaceutical companies putting health of world's poor at risk

India makes cheap medicines for poor people around the world. The EU, pharmaceutical firms and now the US are pressuring the 'pharmacy of the developing world' to change tack

Customers buy medicine at a pharmacy in Mumbai. Photograph: Kuni Takahashi/Getty Images

India is often called the pharmacy of the developing world, which is no great surprise as more than 50% of its $10bn annual generic medicine production is exported.

But the domestic drug industry behind India's role as global pharmacist stands to emerge rather poorly from the free trade agreement (FTA) that Europe is proposing for India. In late-stage negotiations over the terms of the long-awaited agreement, the EU is calling for intellectual property rights enforcement that goes well beyond India's obligations as a member of the World Trade Organisation and would make it all but impossible for generic drug manufacturers in the country to continue in their present structure.

This could delay the introduction of cheaper medicines in India and elsewhere at a time when the global financial crisis has already put the squeeze on life-saving medicines across the world (last year the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria cancelled its 11th funding round due to the crisis).

Yet protests on the streets of Delhi against the unfair terms of the EU-India FTA have been little noticed in the west, where such agreements are increasingly being promoted as a route out of domestic crises. For European leaders, they represent a foreign policy counterpart to calls for a growth pact at home. In a recent editorial, however, the former EU high representative for foreign and security policy, Javier Solana, all but admits that a similar agreement that Europe is tying up with Peru and Colombia may be "denying their weaker citizens [human] rights in favour of the interests of business".

In India, such fears are perilously close to being realised, because the EU-India FTA negotiations are not the only way in which the health of Indian citizens is coming under attack from Europe. In an effort to boost falling profit margins in the west, and to prise open more profitable markets elsewhere, European pharmaceutical companies are also chipping away at India's judicial system.

Next month, the supreme court of India will hear final arguments in a long-running case between Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis and the Indian government. Novartis is seeking extended intellectual property protection for a marginally modified anti-cancer drug, Glivec, for which the original patent has run out. This is a practice known asevergreening, seen by many as an unfair way for pharmaceutical companies to maintain artificially high drug prices in developing markets. That is certainly the view of the Indian government, which, in 2005, inserted a clause into its intellectual property law deliberately intended to prevent the practice.

That clause has proven to be a literal lifesaver many times since, and it ensured thatNovartis's original case was thrown out of court in 2006. But Novartis has filed new litigation in an attempt to breach India's legal defences. The final ruling is next month and there is every chance Novartis may succeed. If it does, other pharmaceutical companies will be able to impose higher prices on drugs in India too.

The Novartis case coincides with a third major assault on India's pharmaceutical industry: the final spear in a triple-pronged attack on its generic drug manufacturers by the west.

This involves the attempt by German pharmaceutical company Bayer to revoke the recent granting of a compulsory licence for an Indian firm, Natco Pharma. The licence was to produce a cheaper version of its anti-cancer drug Sorafenib. Bayer does not manufacture the drug in India, and imports in such small volumes that only a tiny fraction of potential patients could benefit. For its brand, Sorafenib, Bayer has charged Indian patients about $69,000 for a year of treatment, an unaffordable amount for most Indian households. Under the licence, Natco will sell the same medicine at 3% of this price, while paying a licence fee – and still make a profit.

But now Barack Obama's administration has weighed in on behalf of Bayer's battle for continued monopoly pricing. Testifying before the House of Representatives subcommittee on intellectual property on 27 June, the deputy director of the US Patent and Trademark Office said US officials are "constantly being there on the ground" pressuring the Indian government to desist from compulsory licensing.

It is not only Indian patients who stand to suffer from this triple-pronged attack. So, too, will charities such as Médecins Sans Frontières, which relies on Indian generic producers to supply 80% of the antiretrovirals it uses around the world. As MSF spokeswoman Leena Menghaney puts it, India is "literally the lifeline of patients in the developing world". In 2006, MSF launched an international campaign against Novartis, signed by half a million people, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the author John le Carré, to get Novartis to drop their pursuit of what the campaign argues is exploitation.

The campaign may not have reckoned on the scale of the assault under way, however. It is not only the pharmaceutical industry that needs to be addressed but the continued and ruthless lobbying by western politicians to secure the profitability of their own industries.

We ought to be asking why governments in the rich world still seem happy to checkmate the lives of poor people to save their political skins. And why the pharmaceutical industry sees India as such a threat. Could it be that they detect the whiff of real competition?

• Hans Lofgren is associate professor in politics at Deakin University, Melbourne. He is the editor of two forthcoming volumes (Palgrave Macmillan and Social Science Press) on pharmaceutical policy and access to medicines in India and the global south

The top 10 jokes from 2012 Edinburgh Fringe Festival

1) "You know who really gives kids a bad name? Posh and Becks." –Stewart Francis

2) "Last night me and my girlfriend watched three DVDs back to back. Luckily I was the one facing the telly." – Tim Vine

3) "I was raised as an only child, which really annoyed my sister." – Will Marsh

4) "You know you're working class when your TV is bigger than your book case." – Rob Beckett

5) "I'm good friends with 25 letters of the alphabet … I don't know Y." –Chris Turner

6) "I took part in the sun tanning Olympics - I just got Bronze." – Tim Vine

7) "Pornography is often frowned upon, but that's only because I'm concentrating." – George Ryegold

8) "I saw a documentary on how ships are kept together. Riveting!" –Stewart Francis

9) "I waited an hour for my starter so I complained: 'It's not rocket salad." – Lou Sanders

10) "My mum's so pessimistic, that if there was an Olympics for pessimism … she wouldn't fancy her chances." – Nish Kumar

Fixing Britain's work ethic is not the answer to this economic mess

It suits the Tory austerity narrative to blame 'idle' Britons for the recession rather than flaws in the modern labour market

• 
• • Gaby Hinsliff
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 August 2012 17.00 BST

A new book by five Tory MPs has accused Britons as being among the worst idlers in the world. Photograph: Erik Dreyer/Getty

Well, that didn't last long, did it? The victory parades have barely begun, and already the midsummer dream is rudely shattered. No more talk of herculean efforts to win gold, no more hammering of iron rings of fire, no more warm fuzzy feelings towards our national broadcaster.

No, it's back to being depicted as a nation of slack-jawed lummoxes incapable of a decent day's work, and to Iain Duncan Smith accusing the BBC's economics editor Stephanie Flanders of "peeing all over British industry", after she failed to greet falling unemployment figures with unquestioning wonderment. So much for the legacy.

In fairness to the five Tory MPs who first pricked the bubble, via leaked excerpts from their forthcoming book arguing that we're not the nation of champions we had giddily begun imagining but "among the worst idlers of the world", this wasn't quite the plan.

Perhaps provocative references in Britannia Unchained to people preferring "a lie in to hard work" will look less inflammatory in context, or at least in season (the book's due out in September, traditional month of noses back to grindstones and party conference tub-thumping). But still, the politics of idleness deserves unpicking.

Here's a test: does the word "idle", when used by politicians, instinctively set alarm bells ringing? If so, you're probably left of centre, because it's an indisputably Tory buzzword – reeking of Norman Tebbit's father getting on his bike and rightwing tabloids haranguing welfare "scroungers", stirring in leftwing breasts the old fear of attack on the vulnerable.

But if it's that word "vulnerable" which gets your hackles up then you're probably right of centre, because vulnerability is a Labour buzzword – reeking for you of excuses to do nothing, of lily-livered bleating about why the welfare state couldn't possibly be reformed which ultimately traps those it purports to protect. You probably cheered when Eric Pickles ditched the term "vulnerable families" (Whitehall speak for impoverished families with multiple social problems) for "problem families", saying it was time to stop making excuses. For the right, the word "vulnerable" smacks of victimhood, of ducking blame and not holding individuals accountable for their actions.

Because that's really the difference between "vulnerable" and "idle". The first suggests that being broke or desperate is at least partly to do with external circumstances, which may need help to overcome; the second suggests it's your own dumb fault. "Vulnerable" resonates for those who believe in the transformative power of the state; "idle" for those who believe in the power of individuals.

And what's giving the politics of idleness a new lease of life is the marriage of an ancient Tory belief – that anyone can haul themselves up by their bootstraps, that failure means you're not trying hard enough – with a newly fashionable argument about the decline of the decadent west and rise of the industrious east.

The young Tory turks are busy weaving a narrative not just of individual moral failing (too many workshy scroungers) but of national degeneration: a sense that we've been spoiled by years of easy money and need a collective kick up the backside. It's intimately connected to austerity politics, with its inference that only rich countries can afford to go this soft.

The idea that developed nations have grown fat and lazy with prosperity, and that only the children of hungry tiger economies still understand the value of hard graft, is quietly embedding itself in political culture. Think Michael Gove raiding Singapore's education system for ideas on toughening up exams; or even the Indian steel magnate Ratan Tata, complaining last year that his company's western workers were overfond of their leisure and blaming "a certain comfort level that comes from a country that has had good times". (Tata is shortly to retire but says at 75 his life's work won't be done, a sentiment of which the Britannia Unchained quintet would doubtless approve.)

It's not clear yet exactly who these pampered slackers supposedly dragging Britain down are, beyond familiar vague complaints of a bloated public sector and kids "more interested in pop music and football" than in becoming lawyers. Perhaps inevitably, they exist now more in the realm of anecdote – the intern who thinks she's above making the coffee, young men scorning the menial jobs subsequently snapped up by immigrants – than hard fact.

And while Britain does, as the book's authors say, have unusually short average working hours, that's mainly because we have an unusually high percentage of part-timers, many of whom want fulltime work but can't find it. (Those working fulltime still do some of the longest hours in Europe.) Perhaps all those frantically juggling part-time mothers of small children – the ones who a generation ago wouldn't have worked at all – are to be deemed lazy? But there's a bigger problem with the politics of idleness than quibbling over definitions.

Hauling ourselves out of recession might indeed be as easy as demanding everyone pull their socks up, if declining GDP really was just a fancy name for indolence.

But the many dull technical reasons why value of output per worker might fall – from the shrinking of highly productive sectors like the City to the rise of self-employed freelances commanding a lower hourly rate than they did as staffers – aren't solved by simply clocking up more hours. Our challenges are not those of tiger economies, suggesting their recipe of working harder for longer for less won't necessarily work miracles here.

Yet for exploring this complicated new reality in her Newsnight report, Flanders was accused by the work and pensions secretary of "carping and moaning", running down an "incredibly robust" private sector. It's apparently fine to call individuals lazy, but not to suggest any flaw in modern labour markets.

And perhaps that's partly because doing the latter suggests we may be vulnerable (that word again) to global economic trends beyond our immediate control – trends not so easily reversed by the classic Tory formula now being touted for unleashing our inner tiger, namely slashing employment regulations and cutting benefits. Idle, or vulnerable? The story we believe about ourselves has wider implications than we think.

The recipe for happiness? An enduring marriage and an affair with lots of sex

By Catherine Hakim

7:00AM BST 20 Aug 2012

The setting is the quiet corner of an Italian restaurant in the City; the players are George, an IT specialist, and Zoe, who wears a pretty dress and a big smile; they drink an especially good bottle of wine and when they get to coffee he reaches over and kisses her on the mouth. She surprises him by kissing him back. To onlookers it might be the classic opening scene of a traditional romance.

Yet both parties are married to other people, whom they have no intention of leaving. Although they will go on to enjoy all the spoils of a relationship, from intimate phone calls to Christmas shopping trips and, of course, regular sex, this is understood from the outset. They are in fact launching into a “playfair”, a 21st-century affair in which would-be adulterers meet, via specialist dating websites, to enjoy the excitement of an illicit relationship without any of the domestic fallout.

Alongside the internet dating revolution, these “playfairs” are evidence of a potentially dramatic shift in British marriage. As dating websites open up a global shop window of sexual possibilities, as life expectancy continues to rise and we become increasingly sexually aware, how can we still take the crushing old rules of fidelity, that turn marriage into a prison, for granted? Why should we not be able to recapture the heady thrills of youth, while protecting a secure home life?

The time has come, alongside the technology, to redraw the rules of marriage for the 21st century. Just as the Pill opened up premarital sex in the Sixties, the internet is opening up a whole new culture of affairs among married people. Sex has become a major leisure activity of our time, accessible to everyone, married or not, rich and poor. It’s time to start honing our seduction skills and join the playground.

Yet it is the most puritanical nations, including Britain and America, that have traditionally resisted the notion of adultery most rigorously. Here, couples endure the challenges of child care, work pressures, mid‑life crisis and dwindling marital sex against a backdrop of repressive Anglo-Saxon hang‑ups about infidelity, seen always in pejorative terms such as “cheating”.

And they do so at a cost. Statistics confirm that British and American divorce rates are among the highest in the world. Around half of American first marriages end in divorce, closely followed by a third of first British marriages, floundering under unrealistic pressures, often celibate marital beds and drastic overreactions to infidelities.

I have always been baffled by the sour and rigid English view of affairs. Marital love and passion only rarely provide an equally rich source of the exalted feelings, transports of delight and misery associated with love and romance. Affairs are about excitement, being alive, seduction, flirtation, love, affection, sexual bliss, lust, caution, eroticism, fantasy, danger, adventure, exploration and the determined refusal to grow old gracefully.

There is also evidence that the more permissive the attitudes of a country, the longer marriages last. In France an affair is dubbed an aventure, free of insinuations of betrayal. It is estimated that a quarter of men and women are enjoying casual flings and affairs at any one time. Indeed, the conventionality of affairs is displayed in the concept of le cinq à sept, the magical space between 5pm and 7pm when men see their mistresses.

In Japan a tradition of geishas has evolved into a modern society where sex is seen as a pleasure to be enjoyed. Japanese pornography is consumed openly, by women as well as men, on the metro and in other public places. Sex is everywhere and it is also clearly separated from marriage.

Meanwhile, Nordic countries are already way ahead of the game. Couples openly discuss “parallel relationships” within marriage. These range from affairs between work colleagues lasting years to holiday flings lasting a few days. Almost half of Finnish men and almost one third of Finnish women have had at least one significant parallel relationship. Yet marriage is a protected and respected institution in these countries, where families can function and flourish without compromise.

And let’s not ignore the past in drawing up a new 21st‑century road map of adultery. If the internet offers a direct line to affairs, with a proliferation of websites for adults seeking a sexual partner outside of their marriage, it is worth remembering that our richer ancestors practised their own privileged version. Emperors cavorted with courtesans, kings chose their wives for political manoeuvres and their mistresses for company, the aristocracy married for money and took lovers for pleasure.

So why have modern British couples resisted for so long and are they finally ready for this new 21st‑century approach to marriage? Inevitably there is the morality question. Even as religion has lost its influence, Britain has remained coy about openly embracing sex for pleasure, stubbornly conflating sexuality with procreation.

There is also the army of therapists and counsellors who continue to pedal their own secret agenda of enforced exclusive monogamy. This killjoy attitude frames affairs as deviant escapism and fantasies without merit for people who have failed to grow up. Counsellors form a kind of emotional and intellectual police intent on keeping the door to infidelity locked.

Meanwhile, British feminists have already missed the chance to find a new kind of modern sexual morality appropriate to the 21st century. In practice, Anglo-Saxon feminism never liberated itself from the Puritan morality that downplays or rejects all forms of pleasure as sinful.

But sex is no more a moral issue than eating a good meal. The fact that we eat most meals at home with spouses and partners does not preclude eating out in restaurants to sample different cuisines and ambiences, with friends or colleagues. Anyone rejecting a fresh approach to marriage and adultery, with a new set of rules to go with it, fails to recognise the benefits of a revitalised sex life outside the home.

Already two American economists, David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald, have attempted to measure happiness through sexual fulfilment in monetary terms. They estimated that increasing the frequency of sexual intercourse from once a month to at least once a week was equivalent to £32,000 a year in happiness. They also estimated that a lasting marriage provided the equivalent of £64,000 a year. If you add the two together, an affair providing lots of sex and an enduring marriage, that’s a recipe for a lot of happiness.

It is also a handsome sum when you consider how much longer people are living. In pre-industrial Britain marriages only lasted about 20 years, due to early death. Today, marriages can last 40 to 60 years. It is no coincidence that the peak ages for affairs in Britain and the United State is 45 for a woman and 55 for a man.

Of course, it would be misleading to suggest that married dating does not have a certain morality of its own. Just as there are rules for dating non-married people, a new set of rules is necessary to navigate the way through the secretive world of married dating on the internet.

For many interviewees that I spoke to, whose names have been changed, negotiating the new rules can be a fraught business. Married people have less spare time and are often more specific and cautious in their search. Amy liked a man in his advert, but was put off by his wearing a shabby grey cardigan under his suit jacket; Kate was delighted on meeting Benjamin, elegant, clever and amusing, until it emerged he was into very experimental sex; when Oliver met Scarlett at her house for a first date, a swinging party was already under way, which was not what he had in mind.

But regardless of who you meet, the first rule is “never in your own back yard”, where you are most exposed to discovery. This is one of the successes of the websites: they allow everyone to reach well beyond their own social circle. Both parties can quickly establish that they want the same thing and that they are equally committed to secrecy and discretion.

It is also a world away from the deeply unfair old-style “asymmetric” affairs, in which hapless wives would be left at home while older, richer husbands wooed younger, poorer women – often in the workplace – disparagingly referred to as a “bit on the side”.

If anything, married women are at an astonishing advantage in this 21st-century world of modern adultery, not least because of the disparity in sexual desire in modern marriages. Recent sex surveys all prove that the received wisdom about men wanting more sex than their wives is not an unfair stereotype but a fact. The gap in sexual desire between men and women is observed in every country and culture where such surveys have been carried out.

Unsurprisingly a sexless, or low-sex, marriage, in which couples have sex less than once a month, appears to be the most common root cause for married internet affairs. In Britain, according to the British sex survey of sexual lifestyles, couples aged up to 60 had sex around 10 times a month in the first two years of their relationship, with a sharp decline to an average of twice a month after six years together.

This puts women, entering the new online “meet-market” of married dating sites, in a dramatically stronger position. While dating websites for singles are dominated by women looking for “the one”, those for married people are dominated by men looking for a sexual adventure. The ratio is around one woman to every 13 men, giving the women the power to dictate terms, from dates at the most expensive restaurants and luxury gifts to financial rewards.

Take the case of Peter, a rich 62-year-old judge who lives in a beautiful historical country house with his lively wife. He regularly travelled into central London to sit as a judge in important commercial disputes. He also stayed in the same hotel, with views over the Thames. After several years of this routine he began to welcome the idea of a sexy girlfriend to entertain him during his weekday stays. He signed on to a dating website.

When he met his first date, Maya – beautiful and in her thirties – he could not believe his luck. They had a cheerful and flirty lunch, sitting in the sunshine. At the end, they discussed meeting again. Maya suggested a monthly fee for unlimited time with him at his convenience. Peter laughed, assuming she was joking. He considered an expensive dinner generous enough.

But as he worked his way through a similar series of first dates, that were also not followed up, he realised that Maya was right: a crucial rule in this modern world of adultery is that the women are able to call the shots, especially when the men are past their prime.

There are, however, as many success stories. Claire had been happily married all her life to a much older man. When the marriage became sexless she started a sexually rewarding affair with a younger man that lasted eight years. When her husband died, she remarried another kind, loyal and considerate man. But she sought out an affair again, on a dating website for married people, because she wanted the excitement of a lover who would always be a novelty. Already, for Claire and others like her, the new adultery is a way of life.

Crucially the globalisation of sexual cultures facilitated by the internet, where it is said sex in one shape or another constitutes half the traffic, has helped to bring far more varied and adventurous practices into closer view. As a result, we can no longer assume that our own perspective is the only one going, and that it is inevitable and “natural”.

On the contrary, the emphasis on sex as a leisure activity in consumer society allows people in celibate marriages to see their situation as something that can and should be remedied, instead of something to put up with. Websites make it easy and provide mass access to finding your own mistress or lover. Something that used to be a luxury of kings and millionaires is now open to all. Many get lucky, some go away empty-handed, but either way British marriage is finally taking a walk on the wild side.

'The New Rules: Internet Dating, Playfairs and Erotic Power’ by Catherine Hakim (Gibson Square Books) is available to pre-order for £9.99 plus £1.10 p&p from Telegraph Books. Call 0844 871 1515 or visitbooks.telegraph.co.uk.

The case for flexibility in the Pietersen saga

Sambit Bal in Cricinfo

Watching Test cricket live always makes me happy, and Lord's, where affection for Test cricket wafts through like a gentle fragrance, is always a treat. But though the cricket has been thoroughly absorbing, it has been hard to shake off a sense of sadness. The value of cricket diminishes when the best players are not on stage, and though England can win without Kevin Pietersen, cricket is undoubtedly poorer without him.

Poignantly, Jonny Bairstow, the man who took Pietersen's place in the team, provided the most compelling individual story of the match, passing a searing examination that tested not only his skills but also his character. As he battled though, fighting nerves, and a hostile reception from two of the quickest bowlers in the world, and his innings grew, what was on some people's minds became almost audible: Good riddance, KP.

Of course, it is never as simple as that. Life without Pietersen might be easier, but can it be better? Or can it even be as good? The last week was an extraordinary one for English cricket, but that is the question the administrators and selectors must ponder as they contemplate the future beyond this series. Pietersen polarises opinion, but there are no blacks and whites in this case: the challenge is to find the right shade of grey.

Unity and stability are two words that have been used a lot in the last few days to justify Pietersen's removal for the deciding Test of the series. The truth is that all success stories create their own buzzwords, and all buzzwords are somewhat exaggerated. England became the No. 1 Test team mainly because they managed to put together a bowling attack that was perfect in their conditions, and because their batsmen prospered not only at home but also in Australia.

Unity and stability weren't of much use when their technique fell to pieces on turners in the subcontinent, and it was only a masterly innings from Pietersen that helped them draw level against Sri Lanka. Every team must aspire to having a healthy dressing room, for it can create an environment for achieving and savouring success in, but skills are much the greater pre-requisite. Success can be achieved without unity and stability but rarely without skills. Occasionally a team might punch above its weight with perseverance and spirit, as New Zealand have sometimes done, but rarely does a team achieve sustained excellence, let alone greatness, with those qualities alone.

I had the opportunity to have a long chat with Michael Holding, who rarely equivocates, last week, and without going into details it can be recorded that the dressing rooms of the great West Indian teams of the '70s and 80's were far from being oases of harmony. "We did," Holding said, "what was needed to win Test matches." Everyone knows those were teams that burst with greatness.

"Australianism" became the catchphrase for success when Australian teams built their aura of invincibility, but behind their very public mateyness was a team of strong individuals who didn't pretend to be friends once they stepped off the field. Shane Warne was quick to sympathise with Pietersen because he lived through his differences with his team-mates - and much more publicly, with his coach.

As long as Australia's reign lasted, the Australian method continued to be regarded as the template for breeding and sustaining excellence. The Australian system was hailed for creating tough, battle-ready cricketers, and the egalitarianism of Australian society was credited for instilling in them confidence and a reluctance to defer to those who ought to have been regarded as superior. And for years, as England's cricket team wallowed in misery, the English system was condemned as wretched and outdated.

But back-to-back Ashes defeats prompted the now-famous Argus review, which found that not all was well with the system. In fact, some of the recommendations mirrored those of the Schofield report, commissioned by the England board in 2007.

The point is that success creates its own stories, and over-analysing success can give birth to theories that somewhat obscure the simplest truths. Of course, individuals should never be greater than the team, but by the same measure it should never be forgotten that individuals make the team. It is true that a great player alone cannot make a great team, but the bigger truth is that there has never been a great team without great players.

The trouble with great players is that they often happen to be difficult characters. Some are narcissists, with an exaggerated sense of self-importance and entitlement. They can be highly strung and intense. Their single-minded drive towards excellence can make them insular and selfish. Because the game comes easy to many of them, they may be truant at practice. And because the money tends to chase them, they may be led to believe that they deserve even more of it than they get. They can present as much of a challenge to their own team off the field as they do to their opponents on it.

Good teams find ways to manage them. It starts with the recognition that special players often need special care, even if that means bending the rules, for at their best they can provide something so powerful and so breathtaking that it can transcend the team. A lot has been said about Pietersen's ego, but it is the need for that ego that powers him: it drives him to impose himself on a situation rather than submit to it; it allows him create his own reality-distortion field to bludgeon a hundred when lesser players would have fought for mere survival.

	Good teams recognise that special players often need special care, even if that means bending the rules, for at their best they can provide something so powerful and so breathtaking that it can transcend the team

In his last five Tests he has twice done what none of his team-mates would have had the daring, imagination and skill to even attempt. His hundred in Colombo came on the back of a spirit-destroying run of defeats and allowed England to return from Sri Lanka with their dignity salvaged. And without his hundred at Headingley, England would perhaps have come to Lord's with nothing to play for apart from pride.

Of course the Pietersen issue is complex. From the beginning, his relationship with the England national team has been based on mutual, but uneasy, convenience. The team has tolerated him, the fans have accepted him grudgingly, and the media has been ambivalent. Though he has turned more matches for England than Andrew Flintoff - whose folk-hero status was earned through only a handful of performances - did, Pietersen has remained the outsider, the genuineness of his display of hyper-loyalty to the English always in doubt, his faults always scrutinised with extra rigour.

A full season of the IPL over Tests for England? What was he thinking?

No one has emerged with credit from the happenings of the last ten days. Pietersen has been petulant, and his bosses have come across as petty. Pietersen has felt let down by his employers for betraying his confidence, and Andrew Strauss has felt let down by the apparently derogatory text messages sent by Pietersen.

The media, a section of it at least, has played a curious role. On Sunday more details emerged about Pietersen's alleged text messages to the South African players, with a specific Afrikaner word becoming the subject of delighted dissection in the media box. When do private messages become worthy of publication? Perhaps when they serve public or national interest. In this case, it's hard to imagine what interest is served beyond the prurient.

Strauss, by all accounts a decent man with a calm disposition, has every right to be aggrieved. But imagine how many friends each of us would have lost and how many of our colleagues would have turned against us if every unkind word we uttered about them in moments of pique had reached their ears.

So as those charged with safeguarding the interest of English cricket ponder Pietersen's future in the national team, here's their case against him: He is greedy, not much of a team-man off the field, not liked much by his team-mates, has been indiscreet with his comments in public, perhaps doesn't like his captain much and been privately disrespectful of him, and has been seen drinking with the opposition. But is that enough to hang him?

Now let's examine the defence: There has never been any evidence of Pietersen giving anything less than his best on the field. He was crucified for not being able to resist the pull that brought him down at The Oval, but he played no differently at Headingley, where his innings was hailed as being among the best seen at the ground. He is not known to lead his young team-mates astray or to have plotted a rebellion in the ranks; and he has publicly apologised for some of his mistakes.

The whole squalid drama has produced no winners. And no conceivable good can emerge by dragging it further. Big players are often hard work and players don't need to be mates to fight for the common cause. We don't quite know what Stuart Broad, England's T20 captain thinks of Pietersen the man. But should that matter?

If Pietersen were never to play international cricket again, the loss would be greatest for the fans, to whom the administrators owe the biggest responsibility.

Why did Ecuador risk slighting UK, US, Sweden, over Assange?

by Narayan Lakshman in The Hindu

A 3am-standoff between British police and officials at the Ecuador embassy in Knightsbridge, London notwithstanding, Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Patiño underscored his government’s firm view on the case of Julian Assange when he announced on Thursday, “The government of Ecuador, true to its tradition of protecting those who seek refuge in its territory or on the premises of diplomatic missions, has decided to grant diplomatic asylum to citizen Assange.”

The Minister’s remarks came in the face of an unprecedented – some would say brazen – raid by the police to allegedly arrest Mr. Assange from the embassy, where he sought refuge on June 19, and extradite him to Sweden was said to be planned. Mr. Assange is not only formally sought by authorities in Sweden in a pending case against him, but along with his organisation he is held responsible for publishing thousands of confidential cables of the U.S. State Department.

One unanswered question on most observers’ minds at this time was why Ecuador has decided to grant political asylum to Mr. Assange especially when doing so would risk jeopardising its ties with nations that it considers important allies and trading partners, including the U.S., the U.K.,Sweden and Australia.

A host of possible justifications for the Ecuadorian action have been suggested, including notions that the country’s President, Rafael Correa, may be seeking to show himself a champion of free speech, or to embarrass the US, or to thrust himself onto the global stage as a fearless leader.

However as Mark Weisbrot of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research has argued, Mr.Correa “didn’t want this mess and it has been a lose-lose situation for him from the beginning,” given the escalation in tensions that he has suffered the US, UK and Sweden since Mr. Assange sought asylum at the embassy on June 19.

Mr. Weisbrot and others have pointed out that the U.S. is Ecuador's largest trading partner and has several times threatened to cut off trade preferences that support thousands of Ecuadorian jobs.

However what Ecuador’s own explanatory note on the decision to grant Mr. Assange asylum suggests is that Mr. Correa’s government made the decision based on a careful consideration of the facts in the case, including shortcomings in the procedures followed by the

prosecution regarding sexual assault charges that he faces in Sweden, and the balance of ethical considerations.

Of particular salience to Ecuador’s support for Mr. Assange is the fact that Mr. Assange’s legal team have on several occasions offered to provide Swedish authorities with access to Mr.Assange on the premises of Ecuador’s London embassy, in order for them to interrogate him and take formal statements for the case.

“This measure is perfect and legally possible. Sweden did not accept,” Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry noted, adding that the U.S. had similarly refused to clarify its position on the Assange case, “saying it is a bilateral matter between Ecuador and the United Kingdom.

Thus the facts that ultimately tilted Ecuador toward granting asylum to Mr. Assange included the consideration that “there is strong evidence of retaliation by the country or countries that produced the information disclosed by Mr. Assange, retaliation that may endanger their safety,integrity, and even his life.”

Ecuador's brave decision to provide asylum to Assange

This is what is called courage. This is the power of conviction. Even as the big bullies of global politics – US & UK – were trying to arm-twist Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, into submission, the South American leader showed how bold he was by giving asylum to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks who has changed the nature of journalism and the way the governments do their business – their dirty business.
 
Correa is a man of conviction. He has battled Ecuador’s robber barons – always backed by the US -- and the right-wing media on his way to the country’s presidency.  He represents that generation of South America's left-wing leaders who decline to give in to American pressure and refuse to be treated as America’s backyard.
 
In his interview with Julian Assange on his show on Russia Today (RT) television channel a few months ago, Correa was clear about what he thought of Washington. When Julian Assange asked him what do “the Ecuadorean people think about the US and its involvement in Latin America and in Ecuador?” Correa said: “Evo Morales (the Bolivian president) says, the ‘only country that can be sure never to have a coup d’etat is the United States because it hasn’t got a U.S. Embassy’.” Spot on!
 
Then he spoke about how the Americans funded and controlled the police in Ecuador – and hence its economy and politics. After coming to power, Correa cut that money trail, and that led to some anger in police units. “I’d like to say that one of the reasons that led to police discontent was the fact that we cut all the funding the U.S. Embassy provided to the police. Before and even after we took office, we took a while to correct this. Before, there were whole all police units, key units, fully funded by the U.S. Embassy whose offices in command were chosen by the U.S. ambassador and paid by the U.S. And so we have increased considerably the police pay…”
 
The Julian Assange Show – one of the best shows on television ever – was an eye opener. Even after Assange walked into the Ecuadorean embassy and stopped doing the show, RT continued following the story, though the WikiLeaks founder almost vanished from the screens of BBC and CNN. I have been following the Assange’s asylum drama on RT for months and now it’s clear to me what the western governments are really afraid of. Speaking on the channel in an interview on Wednesday, Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple Computers with Steve Jobs in 1976, said, “As far as WikiLeaks, I wish I knew more about the whole case. On the surface it sounds to me like something that’s good. The whistleblower blew the truth. The people found out what they the people had paid for. And the government says, ‘No, no, no. The people should not know what the people had paid for.”
 
Another big revelation came from Kevin Zeese, who has been running a campaign for Bradley Manning, the US army private who presumably leaked all the cables to Assange and is now rotting in a US prison. Speaking on RT, Zeese said the US calls Assange a “high-tech terrorist” because the “US is scared by the information disseminated by Assange, as it reveals corruption at all levels of the US government.”
 
“There is an embarrassment to the US Empire, but no one has been killed by this. There has been no undermining of US national security,” said Kevin Zeese, emphasizing that what really worries the government is that the public sees what the US does on a “day-to-day basis.”
 
Zeese is not the only one exposing the truth behind Britain’s “veiled threats” to storm the Ecuadorean embassy in London and hand over Assange to Sweden. The British call it their “binding obligation.” But their intention is highly suspicious. According to David Swanson, an author and activist, it is likely that if Assange was extradited to Sweden he would handed over to the US where he will be tried for espionage, given “the unusualness of the extradition with no charges in place.”
 
The threat to Assange’s freedom is real. According to an email from US-based intelligence company, Stratfor, leaked in February, US prosecutors had already issued a secret indictment against Assange. “Not for Pub. — We have a sealed indictment on Assange. Pls protect,” Stratfor official Fred Burton wrote in a January 26, 2011, email obtained by hacktivist group Anonymous.
 
Now, the question is if Assange can get out of the Ecuadorean embassy in London, get to the Heathrow and take a flight to Ecuador. It’s not easy. The British – in complete violation of international law – might arrest him the moment he steps out of the building. The Americans – in complete violation of international law – can scramble their fighter jets and force his plane to land in Guantanamo. They have already declared him a terrorist (That also makes terrorists of all journalists and newspapers who wrote and carried reports based on the leaked cables).
 
Taking out innocent people in the name of “war on terror” is America’s new business. Believe it or not, US President Barack Obama, the Nobel peace prize winner, personally has been signing death warrants for “terrorists”, who quite often turn out to be ordinary villagers, farmers, school children and women in the dusty valleys of Afghanistan. This is Dronophilia – killing people with a remote control, with a pilotless machine hovering over, with a missile that blows people to bits, and they don’t need to confirm if they got their ‘target’.
 
Ecuador has done the right thing by giving asylum to Assange. A small country has stood up to the big bullies of global politics even when the so-called giants of the new global order – India and China – have remained mute spectators to the whole drama. They have failed to speak for free speech, human rights and transparency in government affairs.  
 
Julian Assange exposed the crimes and dirty games the big powers play. So, they went after him. Now, Ecuador has given him shelter. They will for sure go after this small country now, for sure. This will be a good excuse to meddle into the internal affairs of South American again.
 
Ecuador has done a brave thing but now it needs to be careful. It needs to be very careful. The whole South American continent needs to be careful now…