New Book: The Body Hunters

Independent journalist Sonia Shah's new book The Body Hunters describes "how the multinational pharmaceutical industry, in its quest to develop lucrative new drugs, has begun quietly exporting its clinical research business to the developing world, where ethical oversight is minimal, and desperate patients abundant. Faced with crumbling facilities, miniscule budgets and towering health crises, developing countries often encourage these very trials, even as they cause scarce resources to be diverted from providing care toward the business of servicing drug companies."

"If the history of human experimentation tells us anything, from the bloody vivisections of the first millenium to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, it is that the potential for abuse will fall heaviest on the poorest and most powerless among us."
www.soniashah.com/index.php

English Short title Catalogue (ESTC)

The British Library has made the ESTC available online. The ESTC lists over 460,000 items held in the British Library and over 2,000 other libraries, that were published between 1473 and 1800. Items are mainly (but not exclusively) in English. This is still very much a work in progress so new records are being added all the time.
http://estc.bl.uk

The Book As Place

Paula Berinstein explores experiments in "networked books" and their potential in The Searcher:
www.infotoday.com/searcher/nov06/Berinstein.shtml

Oaxaco
Mainstream media coverage of what is happening in Oaxaco ranges from non-existent to confused and confusing. Narco News Bulletin has clearly demonstrated the important role played by the alternative press with regular updates of news from the barricades:
www.narconews.com/