British Tory leader calls official explanation for David Kelly’s death “extremely unlikely”

MPs have demanded an inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly  Photo: GETTY IMAGES

Former Tory leader Michael Howard backs inquest into Kelly death

The former Conservative leader Michael Howard has thrown his weight behind demands for a full inquest into the death of the government weapons expert Dr David Kelly.

Telegraph | Aug 14, 2010

His call came after a group of prominent experts described the official explanation for the scientist’s death seven years ago as “extremely unlikely”.

Lord Howard – who is now a Tory peer – said their intervention confirmed his belief that there should now be a proper inquest.

“In view of the growing number of relevant questions that have arisen and cast doubt on the conclusions reached by Lord Hutton, I believe it would now be appropriate for a full inquest to be held,” he told the Mail on Sunday.

“Recent evidence by the first police officer on the scene, together with new statements by doctors raise serious questions which should be considered.

“This has been on my mind for quite a while and recent events have crystallised my view.”

Dr Kelly’s body was found in woods near his Oxfordshire home in July 2003 after he was identified as the source of a BBC story claiming the Government “sexed up” its now notorious dossier on Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.

In the outcry that followed, Tony Blair appointed Lord Hutton to head a public inquiry into his death. Unusually, the then lord chancellor, Lord Falconer, ruled it should also act as an inquest.

Lord Hutton concluded that Dr Kelly took his own life and that the principal cause of death was “bleeding from incised wounds to his left wrist which Dr Kelly had inflicted on himself with the knife found beside his body”.

He also found that the scientist took an overdose of co-proxamol tablets – a painkiller commonly used for arthritis – and that he was suffering from an undiagnosed heart condition.

However in a letter to The Times, the eight experts insisted the conclusion was unsafe. They argued that a severed ulnar artery, the wound found to Dr Kelly’s wrist, was unlikely to be life-threatening unless an individual had a blood clotting deficiency.

The signatories included a former coroner, Michael Powers, a former deputy coroner, Margaret Bloom, and Julian Bion, a professor of intensive care medicine.

Lord Howard’s intervention comes as Attorney General Dominic Grieve and Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke are said to be exploring how best to allay concern over shortcomings in the official version of Dr Kelly’s death.

British occultist Aleister Crowley’s Italian villa to sell for €1.5 million

Aleister Crowley called himself The Great Beast and was thought to have been a spy for British intelligence.  Photo: GETTY IMAGES

A tumbledown building in the Italian countryside is to sell for €1.5 million (£1.2 million) because it once belonged to a British hedonist, writer and occultist who was dubbed “the wickedest man in the world”.

Telegraph | Aug 5, 2010

Nick Squires in Rome

The dilapidated, whitewashed Italian villa, set amid the hills of Sicily, was owned in the 1920s by Aleister Crowley, whose outrageous drug-taking, keen sexual appetite and interest in mysticism later made him a cult figure for the Beatles, David Bowie, Ozzie Osbourne and Iron Maiden.

The cottage, near the town of Cefalu in Sicily, contains explicit, erotic frescoes of men and women entwined together, painted by Cambridge-educated Crowley when he lived there in the early 1920s.

The frescoes, inspired by the work of Gauguin, also include naked devils, satyrs and serpents.

The estate agents that are selling the property, which has been abandoned for years and is overrun with bushes and long grass, have suggested that it should be turned into a museum devoted to Crowley’s extraordinary life.

He called the house the Abbey of Thelema and turned it into a kind of commune, where daily life revolved around yoga, adoration of the Sun and the study of his own mystical philosophical writings.

Eventually his libertine tastes so offended Mussolini’s fascists that they expelled him and his lovers from the country in April 1923.

Local people believe that the villa, which hosted orgies and experiments in free love that predated the hippy movement by decades, is cursed and refuse to go near it.

Crowley, who called himself The Great Beast, created a religious philosophy known as Thelema and is known for his mystical writings, including The Book of the Law, in which he set out the main tenets of Thelema.

He was also a keen chess player and mountaineer, taking part in the first British attempt to climb K2 in the Himalaya, in 1902.

He travelled widely in Europe, Asia and the Americas and was thought to have been a spy for British intelligence.

He died in a Sussex boarding house in 1947 at the age of 72.

Tylenol linked to asthma in teens

A new study shows that adolescents who take acetaminophen, better known as Tylenol, have a higher risk of asthma, allergic nasal conditions and the skin disorder eczema.

latimes.com | Aug 13, 2010

by Thomas H. Maugh II

A major new international study released Friday has found that adolescents who take acetaminophen, better known under the brand name Tylenol, have a higher risk of asthma, allergic nasal conditions and the skin disorder eczema. Those who took the common painkiller as infrequently as once a month had twice the normal risk of developing the disorders. Experts noted, however, that the study does not show that the drug causes the problems. In fact, some said, it is equally likely that the children were taking the drug because they were already suffering from asthma.

Acetaminophen is widely viewed as a very safe drug—one reason why hospitals use it routinely as a painkiller instead of aspirin or ibuprofen. The major problem associated with it is liver damage caused by overdoses. Recently, however, there has been a growing drumbeat about possible dangers from the drug. One study, for example, found that acetaminophen increased the risk of hearing loss in men. And some others have hinted that the drug is linked to asthma in newborns whose mothers used the drug during pregnancy and in young children exposed to it.

The new findings were reported in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine by researchers in the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood. The team, headed by epidemiologist Richard Beasley of the Medical Research Institute in Wellington, New Zealand, gave written questionnaires to 322,959 13- and 14-year-olds in 50 countries exploring their use of acetaminophen, other drugs, and asthma symptoms. They were also shown a video containing five scenes of clinical asthma and asked whether they had experienced any symptoms similar to those shown. About 73% of the teens said they had used acetaminophen at least once in the previous year and 30% said they had used it monthly.

Taking into account maternal education, smoking, diet and siblings, the team found that those subjects who had used the drug at least once per year were 43% more likely to have asthma, while those who used it at least monthly were 2.5 times as likely to suffer from the condition. The risk of rhinoconjunctivitis (a severe nasal congestion) was 38% higher for those who used it once per year and 2.39 times as high for those who used it at least monthly. The comparable increases in risk for eczema were 31% and 99%, respectively.

Overall, the increased risk of asthma associated with acetaminophen was 41%, the authors found. That could, at least in part, explain why there has been an increase in the prevalence of asthma in the 50 years since the drug was introduced. Given the widespread use of the drug, it could also represent a large public health problem.

But—and it is a very big but—the study shows only an association, not causality. That could only be determined by a randomized clinical trial, which the authors recommend. Furthermore, the study relies on the recall of teenagers. Recall is notoriously inaccurate in adults, and it is probably worse in adolescents, clouding the results. For the time being then, you can probably continue to feel comfortable giving the drug to your children.

In a statement, McNeil Consumer Healthcare, which manufactures Tylenol, said that the drug “has over 50 years of clinical history to support its safety and effectiveness” and that no clinical trial has demonstrated that the drug causes asthma. The drug “is the preferred pain reliever for asthma sufferers,” the company said.

Genetically engineered “super-weeds” popping up in the wild

The discovery of canola in North Dakota raises concern that engineered plants could take over native species and cause hardy ‘superweeds’ to develop.

Los Angeles Times | Aug 13, 2010

By Rachel Bernstein

Genetic engineering has been hailed as a tool to produce crops that are left unharmed by weed-killing pesticides and that are more productive than their forebears. But critics have worried that modified plants might take over land used by native species and that increasingly hardy “superweeds” may develop. A new study supports some of these fears, detailing an abundance of genetically modified canola crops found outside cultivation in North Dakota.

The so-called feral canola is the first report of a genetically modified crop found in the wild in the U.S., although another genetically engineered plant designed for golf putting greens, creeping bentgrass, was found in Oregon in 2004. Feral modified canola has also shown up in the last decade in Canada, Germany, France, Britain, Japan and Australia.

In the U.S., 90% to 95% of commercially grown canola is genetically modified to be herbicide resistant; the researchers said that 80% of the wild canola identified in the most recent discovery had at least one of two herbicide-resistance genes.

Furthermore, a small number of the plants contained both genes, although plants containing both have never been commercially released. The combination’s existence suggests that engineered genes can be highly mobile and could potentially be transferred to pernicious weeds, although canola has few weedy relatives.

“The canola study is a signal that gene movement into the environment is a general phenomenon,” said Doug Gurian-Sherman, an agricultural biotechnology scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit organization that focuses on environmental issues.

This phenomenon means that the original benefit of the genetic engineering is ultimately lost, he says, forcing farmers to come up with new ways to control weeds — such as turning to the more toxic, longer-lasting herbicides used in the past.

“The effectiveness of the technology breaks down over time,” Gurian-Sherman said, “and as it moves forward to genes that can have a bigger impact on the environment, these gene-movement issues will be more and more important.”

The study’s researchers, who presented their research last week at the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting, were more measured in their response. “The first message is, don’t freak out, but let’s figure out what’s going on,” said Cynthia Sagers, the University of Arkansas ecologist who led the study. An obvious question is what will happen if, or when, these novel traits get into native species.

But one of the next steps, she said, is to investigate whether herbicide use is connected to the canola’s spread. The conventional wisdom is that these chemicals are used only on agricultural fields, where they kill weeds but leave the engineered crop unharmed — but it’s possible that the herbicides are also spreading beyond the farms, perhaps allowing the modified canola to survive where native plants can’t.

The finding and the unanswered questions take on added weight with researchers working to produce plants resistant to drought or disease. Such versions could produce hardier crops, but also increasingly dangerous weeds.

The concerns go beyond genetic engineering. Traditional breeding has recently produced drought-tolerant corn and sorghum; if these genes are introduced to weeds, the result would be the same, regardless of whether the source was genetic engineering or traditional breeding.

“Genetically engineered crops and non-genetically engineered crops tend to create the same classes of problems,” said UC Riverside plant geneticist Norm Ellstrand.