Sunday, April 28, 2019

Syrian opposition denounce 'terrorist' regime as talks in Kazakhstan end without deal

Hopes that Damascus and armed opposition would agree on a committee to draw up a new constitution are dashed again

Negotiations have been going on for more than a year to choose names for the 150-person committee in which each side will have 50 seats (AFP)

By Jonathan Steele in Nursultan, Kazakhstan-28 April 2019

Hopes that the Syrian government and the armed opposition would agree on a committee to draw up a new constitution for the war-torn country, a key component of any peace deal, have been dashed once again.

The disappointment came after delegates from both sides met separately with Geir Pedersen, the new UN envoy for Syria, in Kazakhstan's capital city last week within the framework of the so-called Astana process led by Russia, Turkey and Iran.

Astana was renamed Nursultan last month in honour of the country's retiring president, Nursultan Nazarbayev.

We have to make the final leap

- Aleksandr Lavrentiev, Putin's special envoy for Syria

Negotiations have been going on for more than a year to choose names for the 150-person committee in which each side will have 50 seats.

Fifty other members are to be chosen by the UN from Syrian civil society.

Syrian government intransigence is blocking a final agreement, Ahmad Toma, the leader of the opposition team, told Middle East Eye after the meeting ended here.

"Forty-four of the UN's 50 are agreed, but the regime wants to pick the last six names. They want more people than us. This is the obstacle," he said.

In a joint statement, officials from the Astana process's three guarantor nations, Russia, Turkey and Iran, accepted the failure.

They said they had held "detailed consultations in order to speed up work aimed at launching the constitutional committee as soon as possible" and the next effort would be made at talks with the UN in Geneva.

"We have to make the final leap," Aleksandr Lavrentiev, Russian President Vladimir Putin's special envoy for Syria, told a press conference on Friday after the two-day meeting.

'Biggest terrorist in Syria'

Western governments have been sceptical about the Astana process, which began in 2017 and which they fear is a way of detracting from the Geneva talks which have sputtered on for seven years.

In November, Staffan de Mistura, the outgoing UN envoy for Syria, described the failure of the last attempt at forming a constitutional committee as a "missed opportunity".

Five months later it is still not agreed, but many analysts believe the Geneva talks have also achieved very little.

Militants 'kill 22 Syrian government troops' in Aleppo as Putin warns on Idlib

Even when the committee is formed, there will be further scope for disputes over its agenda and voting mechanisms. Then there is substance.

Last week's meeting showed how wide the gap is between the two sides.

Although the government delegation, headed by Bashar Jaafari, Syria's representative to the UN in New York, and the opposition team sat in the same hall in Nursultan for the concluding plenary session, they did not talk face-to-face, either then or earlier, in the two days of meetings.

At separate press conferences there was no hint of compromise.

Toma said: "The regime is the biggest terrorist in Syria. How can we co-operate with such a regime?"

Meanwhile, Jaafari denounced people "who use phrases like 'the moderate opposition' and who said there were no terrorists in Syria".

Sochi disagreements

There were also major disagreements over Turkey's role in Syria.

Turkey has given aid and military backing to opposition forces in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib, one of the last areas which the Syrian government army, backed by Russian air power, has not yet regained.

Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan agreed in Sochi last year on a de-escalation mechanism under which a 15km-deep buffer zone between government and rebel forces would be established around Idlib and the main road to Damascus would be re-opened.

Syria's buffer zone: Rebels, Turks and civilians rush to implement the Sochi deal

Turkey would help to disarm militant groups, in particular Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an affiliate of al-Qaeda.

In return, the Syrian army would hold back on any ground offensive to retake the province.

The Russian-Turkish deal was also meant to promote prisoner exchanges.

Nine Syrian troops held by the rebels, and nine rebels held by the government, were swapped last week in a village south of al Bab, under the supervision of the UN and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent.

It was the third such exchange. Some 64 detainees were swapped in two earlier releases.

Turkish 'occupation'

But the de-escalation plan has not led to a decrease in HTS activity in Idlib.

On the contrary, in January the group clashed with other rebel forces and took control of most of the province where an estimated three million people live.

The Turkish side is occupying 6,000 square kilometres of territory in the north of Syria

- Bashar Jaafari, Syria's representative to the UN

Jaafari told the press conference: "Some 85 per cent of the terrorists in Idlib are HTS and who is behind them?

"Turkish intelligence and Turkish forces are behind them. The Turkish side is occupying 6,000 square kilometres of territory in the north of Syria.

"This is four times more than Israel is occupying in the Golan Heights."

Turkey ought to fulfil its obligations to help to de-escalate the tension in Idlib, he said. Instead, it was making the situation worse.

He accused Turkish forces of supplying chemical weapons to people in Idlib "in order to raise indignation and accuse the Syrian army in case of an assault to liberate Idlib. This is intellectual terrorism."

Toma, the leader of the opposition team, took the opposite line.

"We trust our neighbour and strategic partner, Turkey. They came at the invitation of Syrian people to protect people while the regime kills people," he said.

Speaking in Beijing on Saturday, Putin said that he could not rule out a full-scale assault against armed groups in Idlib but that it was not "expedient now" due to concerns over the area's civilian population.

"I don't rule it [a full-scale assault] out, but right now we and our Syrian friends consider that to be inadvisable given this humanitarian element," Putin told reporters in the Chinese capital.

United Golan condemnation

Russia's envoy, Aleksandr Lavrentiev, conceded that HTS now controls "90 per cent of Idlib".

In talks with the opposition, he said he urged them to break any contacts with HTS and regain control of the area.

Asked by MEE if he agreed with Jaafari's assessment that Turkey was not complying with the de-escalation deal, he expressed "disappointment".

'No country can rewrite history': Trump's Golan decision widely condemned

"It raises a lot of questions. Time passes and implementation is going very slowly," he added.

Meanwhile, the Russian envoy took issue with the administration of US President Donald Trump's flip-flopping on whether US forces will be withdrawn from eastern Syria.

Russia favoured a "stakeholders' dialogue," he said, in which the Syrian government and the Syrian Kurds should decide on the area's future, but without undermining Syria's territorial integrity.

In a rare meeting of minds, both the Syrian government and the opposition did at least find common ground at the meeting in condemning Trump's decision earlier this month to recognise Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied in 1967.

Global tightening cycle over, slower ride for growth ahead: Reuters Poll

FILE PHOTO: Shipping containers are seen at a port in Shanghai, China July 10, 2018. REUTERS/Aly Song

Shrutee Sarkar-APRIL 25, 2019

BENGALURU (Reuters) - Major central banks are done tightening policy, according to a majority of economists polled by Reuters, with the growth outlook wilting across developed and emerging economies along with scant prospects for a surge in inflation.

While that is largely reflected in bond markets, with major sovereign bond yields falling this year, global equities have rallied, and the S&P 500 index is near record highs after its best start this year in more than three decades.

One striking conclusion from the latest surveys of over 500 economists from around the world, covering more than 40 economies, was not just a toning down of the economic outlook, but a clear shift away from long-held optimistic views.

Although economists who answered an additional question were split on whether a deeper global economic downturn was more likely than a synchronized rebound, this year’s growth outlook was downgraded or left unchanged for 38 of the countries polled.

“The recent weakness of global growth will persist for much longer than is commonly assumed. A dovish turn by central banks and stimulus in China will not be enough to boost world GDP growth from its current slow pace,” noted Jennifer McKeown, head of global economics at Capital Economics.

“Disappointing economic performance will leave inflation very low and cause monetary policy to be loosened almost across the board. But we do not see this prompting any meaningful recovery until 2021.”

Global growth was forecast to average 3.4 percent this year, the lowest since polling began for 2019 almost two years ago. The most optimistic prediction was also more modest than at the start of the year.

The 2020 forecast held at 3.4 percent, the joint lowest since Reuters began polling on it.
However, the 2019 consensus was a touch higher than the International Monetary Fund’s latest view of 3.3 percent.
The risk of an escalation of the U.S.-China trade war and prospects of Britain exiting the European Union without a deal - two of the more prominent threats that initially drove the current slowdown - have eased.

Yet most major central banks have been hinting at a move away from hiking rates, and nearly 60 percent of more than 200 economists who answered a separate question said they were confident the global tightening cycle was over.

On Thursday, the Bank of Japan dispelled any doubt about its commitment to ultra-loose policies and Sweden’s central bank said a forecast interest rate hike would come slightly later than it had planned.
The U.S. Federal Reserve is done raising rates until at least the end of next year, with about a third of economists polled predicting at least one rate cut by then.

With euro zone economic growth and inflation prospects dimming, the European Central Bank may have missed its opportunity to raise rates before the next downturn.

“The ECB blames the euro zone weakness on a slowdown in China and concerns about the trade war.

The Fed, meanwhile, pointed the finger to Europe and China as the main drags on U.S. growth. But with everyone looking across the border for a scapegoat, someone must inevitably be watching the wrong space,” noted Elwin de Groot, head of macro strategy at Rabobank.

“One could speculate that the central banks are pointing the finger just because they have little confidence that their actions are effective.”

Growth forecasts for developed economies - including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Britain, Japan, Australia, the United States and Canada - for this year and next weakened.

It was not very different for emerging market economies, despite efforts from policymakers to boost sluggish growth.

Economic growth in major economies from Asia to Africa to Latin America was predicted to lose more momentum.

Although India is still expected to be the fastest-growing major economy, growth predictions were lowered compared with the previous poll.

“Looser fiscal and monetary policy should help to cushion the impact of weaker export demand on growth in emerging Asia. Nevertheless, regional growth this year is still likely to slow to its weakest rate in a decade,” added Capital Economics’ McKeown.

THE SPIES WHO CAME IN FROM THE CONTINENT

How Brexit could spell the end of Britain’s famed advantage in intelligence.

BY CALDER WALTON-ILLUSTRATIONS BY EIKO OJALAAPRIL 27, 2019

From John le Carré’s novels to the insatiable popular interest in James Bond, Britain has long enjoyed, and cultivated, an image of producing superior spies. This reputation is based on more than myth. For decades during and following World War II, the painstaking real-world work of British intelligence officers was one of the United Kingdom’s primary sources of power.

That power, and its underlying foundations, is now in jeopardy thanks to Brexit, which will have a cascading series of repercussions for British intelligence: It will shut Britain out of European Union institutions that have benefited British national security, and it may also jeopardize the special intelligence relationship with the United States, which may look to deepen relations with Brussels instead. But while Brexit may now be inevitable, there are still ways for the U.K. to avoid this outcome.

Britain’s intelligence services—MI5, which handles domestic security intelligence; MI6, which does foreign intelligence; and GCHQ, which focuses on signals intelligence (SIGINT)—have been touted at home and abroad as the Rolls-Royces of intelligence services. But they weren’t always. Declassified records show that, prior to World War II, British spy agencies were often more like rickety cars than luxury vehicles. MI5 and MI6 were established in 1909, and at the outbreak of World War I in 1914, both services had scant resources: MI5’s staff totaled 17, which included its office caretaker. The situation had scarcely improved by the start of World War II in 1939. A declassified in-house MI5 history shows that on the eve of the war, the agency’s counterespionage section had just two officers—with responsibilities for the entire British Empire and Commonwealth. MI5 and MI6 did not even know the name of the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr.
Of course, British intelligence went on to notch up unprecedented successes against the Axis. These victories largely owed to achievements at Bletchley Park, where British and Allied code-breakers cracked Germany’s notorious Enigma cipher machine, giving them greater intelligence about the Third Reich than almost any state has enjoyed about another government in history. (Some historians have suggested that British SIGINT collected at Bletchley Park may have shortened World War II by two years.)

BRITAIN’S INTELLIGENCE SERVICES HELPED LONDON PUNCH FAR ABOVE ITS WEIGHT—EVEN AS ITS HARD POWER DECLINED.

That success carried over into the postwar period, when Britain’s intelligence services helped London punch far above its weight—even as its hard power declined. In part, this was due to the British government’s successful management of international perceptions of its abilities. Whitehall cultivated an image of preeminent intelligence acumen by selectively releasing secrets about Bletchley Park and other astonishing wartime successes, such as MI5’s “double-cross system,” through which it managed to capture German spies in Britain and turn many of them into double agents. As Sir J.C. Masterman, the head of the double-cross system, succinctly put it: British intelligence “actively ran and controlled the German espionage system in this country.”

During the Cold War, British spooks managed to further burnish their reputation. GCHQ’s technical capabilities were first-rate, and Britain’s overseas territories proved useful for collecting SIGINT for the U.K. and the United States. Britain also pulled off some spectacular espionage and counterintelligence coups. During the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, when the world came closer to nuclear Armageddon than at any other point in history, information provided by Oleg Penkovsky—who was positioned deep inside Russian military intelligence and worked for both MI6 and the CIA—gave Washington crucial insights into the status of Soviet missiles in Cuba.
Penkovsky’s intelligence, codenamed “IRONBARK,” revealed, among other matters, how far Soviet missiles were from being operational and thus how much time Washington could spend diplomatically fencing with Moscow. Some years later, MI6 managed to recruit a senior KGB officer, Oleg Gordievsky, who became rezident (head of station) in London and secretly provided Britain and the United States with unique insights into the Soviet Union’s intentions and capabilities.

Such feats turned intelligence into a force multiplier for Britain during the Cold War, helping it retain a seat at the high table of international affairs despite its declining economic and military power. GCHQ worked so closely with the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) that they essentially functioned as two sides of the same massive, trans-Atlantic, SIGINT collection machine. This interagency relationship gave London political leverage in Washington. Records at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, for example, show instances of British intelligence officials being given access to Washington’s most senior policymakers, including Henry Kissinger, and even attending and briefing National Security Council meetings, in ways unimaginable for officials of any other countries.

From left: Code-breakers at Bletchley Park in 1942, the MI6 agent Oleg Penkovsky and his tools of the trade in 1963, and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB officer-turned-British spy, seen in disguise in 1990.(SSPL/SOVFOTO/DAVID LEVENSON/UIG/BETTMANN ARCHIVE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

Files declassified nearly 20 years ago show that in the 1960s, Britain’s highest intelligence assessment body, the Joint Intelligence Committee, advised successive prime ministers that joining Europe was essential to Britain’s strategic future: Doing so was the only way the country could escape its economic doldrums and safeguard its special relationship with Washington, which viewed the U.K. as more valuable within Europe than without. According to records at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the United States saw London as a like-minded, trusted ally, one that literally spoke the same language and that could exert influence over Europe’s more troublesome members. After joining in 1973, Britain also gained a say in major European decisions—which proved useful for the United States in matters including military strategy and trade.

THE UNITED STATES SAW LONDON AS A LIKE-MINDED, TRUSTED ALLY, ONE THAT LITERALLY SPOKE THE SAME LANGUAGE AND THAT COULD EXERT INFLUENCE OVER EUROPE’S MORE TROUBLESOME MEMBERS.

If the U.K. now leaves the EU, there are good reasons to suppose that Washington will come to view London as less strategically important. U.S. officials are likely to start asking whether the United States really needs Britain anymore or whether it would be better off strengthening its intelligence relations with the EU.

Supporters of Brexit correctly point out that after joining Europe, Britain’s intelligence agencies have continued working with EU members on a bilateral basis, not with the EU as a whole—so leaving the union shouldn’t make any difference. But that optimistic view discounts the real impact Brexit will have on British national security. The U.K. has benefited from membership in EU bodies such as Europol and the Schengen Information System, which provide it with information on terrorism, human trafficking, and other serious crimes. The British police and MI5 used such data to track down the Russian officers who tried to assassinate a former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal, in Salisbury in 2018. If the U.K. leaves the EU, however, Britain would lose access to such information—one reason that prior to the 2016 Brexit referendum, former British intelligence heads publicly warned that quitting the union would damage the country’s security. Since then, the messy exit process has only heightened their concerns because it’s increasingly doubtful that Britain, amid the present diplomatic rancor, will be able to salvage comparative alternative arrangements with the EU.

Following Brexit, the intelligence services will have to adapt. One area offers the most promise: the cyber-realm. GCHQ is already a world leader in digital intelligence. Edward Snowden’s unauthorized disclosures in 2013 showed how closely GCHQ works with the NSA, exploiting internet platforms to collect intelligence. Although its role was largely overlooked, GCHQ was apparently the first to identify and warn U.S. intelligence about a Russian hacking group, Fancy Bear, which broke into U.S. Democratic National Committee emails in 2016.

Britain would be wise to double down on its comparative advantage in digital technologies; indeed, it seems to already be doing so. GCHQ and Britain’s new National Cyber Security Centre have been undertaking recruitment and training drives for cyber-expertise, as has MI6. The latter indicates that old-fashioned human espionage—MI6’s territory—will be important even in the new digital realm: Recruiting well-placed agents inside foreign cybergroups will be a key way to unlock their secrets.

Britain’s National Cyber Security Strategy for 2016-2021 publicly acknowledged for the first time that the country has offensive hacking capabilities. A likely future area of growth for British intelligence will be to enhance these capabilities and carry out cyberattacks on state and nonstate threats, like Israel and America’s alleged Stuxnet virus attack, uncovered in 2010, targeting Iran’s nuclear program. History shows that Britain’s spies are extraordinarily good at turning dismal disadvantages, as they had at the start of World War II, into staggering successes. Cyberwarfare offers that opportunity again—especially since it doesn’t require conventional military power, which has been difficult for Britain to pay for in its prolonged era of austerity.

ANOTHER AREA OF FUTURE GROWTH FOR BRITISH INTELLIGENCE WILL LIKELY BE COVERT ACTION WITH A FOCUS ON DEFENDING AGAINST DISINFORMATION.

Another area of future growth for British intelligence will likely be covert action with a focus on defending against disinformation. A major challenge facing Western societies is the insidious growth of fake news promulgated online by authoritarian regimes such as China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Most countries still lack a strategy for dealing with such disinformation; Britain, however, has a useful model in its recent past. During the Cold War, the country’s shadowy anti-Soviet propaganda department, the Information Research Department, provided fact-based, rapid, and lucid responses to KGB forgeries. It provides a template for dealing with disinformation today; Britain would be wise to update the approach for the social media era.

Britain’s intelligence services could also start spying on the EU. No one on the outside knows how much of this, if any, the U.K. already does; so far, the records, if they exist, have yet to be declassified. But Britain has a long history of spying on its allies: British code-breakers intercepted and read U.S. communications before America entered both World War I and II. In recent decades, the extraordinary and wide-reaching political cooperation that EU membership necessarily entailed probably made British spying on Europe too risky—and vice versa. Once it departs the EU, however,
Britain would be free of such constraints. Indeed, since Brexit talks began, rumors have suggested that British intelligence has been targeting EU negotiators. Whether or not that’s true, it seems unlikely that following Brexit, both sides will descend into mutual feeding frenzies of espionage. Common external threats, especially Russia and China, and the chill of a new cold war, mean that British and EU agencies will have incentive to keep cooperating.

Brexit will force Britain’s intelligence services to answer uncomfortable questions they have not had to confront since World War II: What can they offer that others cannot? That Brexit is taking place at the same time as the cyber-revolution, however, offers opportunities for Britain to maintain some semblance of its current global power. Investing in digital intelligence offers London the best—and perhaps only—way out of the strategic intelligence quagmire Brexit has placed it in.

If we care about plastic waste, why won’t we stop drinking bottled water?

We have all seen the damage plastic waste is doing around the world – but sales of bottled water have continued to grow

Losing our bottle? Plastic waste on an Egyptian beach. Photograph: Jan-Otto/Getty Images

Simon Usborne-Sun 28 Apr 2019

For all the innovation and choice that define the food and drink industries, if you want to make money, you could do a lot worse than bung some water in a bottle and flog it. A litre of tap water, the stuff we have ingeniously piped into our homes, costs less than half a penny. A litre of bottled water can cost well over a pound, especially for something fancy that has been sucked through a mountain.

Yet the bottled water market is more buoyant than ever, defying the plastics backlash inspired by stricken albatrosses on the BBC’s Blue Planet, and a broader, growing sense that something has to change.

Sales in the UK were worth a record £558.4m in the year to last November, an increase of 7%, according to the latest figures from the market analyst Kantar. Separate data from the analysts Nielsen show that last year we guzzled more than 2.2bn litres of bottled water, including “take-home” and “on-the-go” products. That’s an annual rise in volume of 8.5%.

Imagine laying out half-litre bottles on the pitch at Wembley Stadium. You could fit 1.7m bottles on the grass, packed into a tight grid. Now imagine building up layers of bottles, covering the same area, to build a tower. To contain all the bottled water we buy each year, you would end up with a 514-metre skyscraper – 200 metres taller than the Shard.

Environmental campaigners are struggling to fathom why nations blessed with clean tap water grow only fonder of the bottle. “It’s very surprising to me,” says Sam Chetan-Walsh, a political adviser at Greenpeace and campaigner against ocean plastic. “Public awareness has never been higher, but the message is not quite reaching all the people it needs to.”

Where it is heard, the message is stark. As well as requiring oceans of fossil fuels to make and ship, single-use plastics of all types are polluting our cities and seas. Blue Planet II, broadcast in 2017, showed how albatrosses unwittingly feed plastic fragments to their chicks, ultimately killing them, and how even dolphin milk can become contaminated.

Campaigners cite the show as a watershed moment, and moves against various plastics have gathered pace, from shopping bags to straws and plastic-lined coffee cups. Chetan-Walsh argues that bottled water is different because the alternatives are so obvious. “If a product that is so nakedly unnecessary can exist, then the whole system is failing,” he says.

Hope is not entirely out of reach. That plastic skyscraper conceals attempts in the bottled water industry to change. If nothing else, the rate of growth has begun to ease (sales were up 7% in the year to November 2018, compared with 8% the previous year).

But even if large numbers of us are quitting bottled water because of care for the environment, others are taking it up. The introduction of the “sugar tax” on juices and fizzy drinks has pushed more people to bottled water, while health awareness has boosted its desirability. Kantar says tap water consumption is growing at roughly the same pace (we still drink almost three times as much tap water as bottled water).

So the plastic tide only creeps higher. The industry is quick to point out that all its bottles are recyclable. “But collection rates are, at the most generous estimates, 56%, so the actual recycling rate will be lower than that,” Chetan-Walsh says. And while bottles may be recyclable, very few are made of recycled plastic. Highland Spring launched recycled half-litre “eco” bottles alongside its standard bottles in January; Evian has vowed to use only recycled plastic across its range by 2025.

Chetan-Walsh believes in a ban on single-use bottles. Bans exist in some places. Glastonbury festival organisers announced that water bottles will not be sold this summer. San Francisco has banned them from city property and events. Last year, the UK parliament set out plans to ban single-use plastic from its estate.

Water bottlers, unsurprisingly, don’t support bans. But they raise concerns about health rather than bottom lines. Last month, the chief executive of Harrogate Water, James Cain, said that bans would “result in greater consumption of sugary drinks, adding to all the health dangers of obesity, diabetes and tooth decay”.

Kinvara Carey, general manager of the Natural Hydration Council, an association of the biggest bottled water manufacturers, cites a survey in which people were asked what they would do if bottled water were not available. “Forty-four per cent would buy another drink, which is not great, 14% would go without and 4.5% said they would find a fountain,” she says. “The choice is important.”

What if fountains were more numerous, and tap water more clearly available in cafes, restaurants and elsewhere? The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, is installing dozens of fountains in partnership with Thames Water. There are similar initiatives elsewhere. Before plastic and the marketing that made us think we needed bottled water in the first place, fountains were an urban fixture.

Greenpeace, among others, is also pushing for a “deposit return” scheme in which a levy on bottled water would be refunded to customers who returned the plastic for recycling.

Even if bottled water sales are growing slightly more slowly, the industry is racing to adapt to changing concerns and tastes. Flavoured water is booming: sales of the sparkling variety shot up by 20%, according to the latest Kantar data. Meanwhile, brands including Evian, as well as a range of startups, are selling high-end reusable bottles. And if you must fill them with tap water, why not add flavouring?

As the owner of multiple sugary drink brands – and Aquafina bottled water – PepsiCo is facing challenges on health and environmental fronts. Last year, the company bought SodaStream for $3.2bn (the drinks machines make tap water fizzy; you add flavours). It also launched Drinkfinity, a range of fancy bottles that work with tap water and flavour pods (think more lemongrass and spirulina than 7 Up). The bottle is reusable. The pods? Not so much, and, yes, they are made of plastic, although Pepsi invites users to post them back for recycling.

As is so often the case, ingenious marketing can trump reason; awareness is rarely enough. “There is always this kind of slip between concern, intent and changed behaviour,” says Giles Quick, an analyst at Kantar. “The best example is five a day. Almost everyone is aware of it, but something like 15% of us achieve it.” Unless a far-reaching bottle ban does come into force, it will be up to consumers to not only demand change – but to act themselves.

Why You Should Probably Never Drink Bottled Water Again

By Krista Watson-MAY 18, 2017

The bottled water industry is about as wasteful as they come. This billion dollar industry is taking something that is essentially free around the world, packaging it, and selling it for profit. And it gets worse.

Nestlé — the same company that brings you those delicious Toll House cookies — decided in May to open a new plant in the middle of the drought-stricken desert in Arizona.

This decision has raised many concerns and questions, the most obvious being “how can they bottle water in a desert?”

Many of the concerned groups are environmental activists. Nestle already faces backlash from groups angry about them bottling water in the San Bernardino Mountains, and a group in Oregon voted in favor of anti-bottling measures on a proposed anti-bottling measures.

Additionally, a petition was started on Change.org calling Nestlé Waters “irresponsible and unsustainable,” pointing out that Arizona has officially been in a drought for 17 years.

City officials concluded that there will be enough water for both Pure Life and the city’s tap, but environmentalists (and Global Citizens) aren’t convinced.

The bottled water industry is bad for the environment. Nearly 80 percent of plastic water bottles simply become litter in a landfill, creating 2 million tonsof plastic bottle waste every year. Here are 10 things you might not know about the bottled water industry.

The first case of bottled water sold dates back to Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1760s. Mineral water was bottled and sold by a spa for therapeutic uses.
For the first time ever, bottled water sales are going to surpass the sale of soda in the US.
Global consumption of bottled water increases by 10 percent every year. The slowest growth is in Europe, while the fastest growth is in North America.
The energy we waste bottling water would be enough to power 190,000 homes.
Food & Water Watch reported that more than half of bottled water comes from the tap.
Bottled water is no safer than tap water. In fact, 22 percent of bottled brands tested contained chemicals at levels above state health limits in at least one sample.
It takes three times more water to produce a plastic water bottle than it does to fill one.
The amount of oil used to make a year's worth of bottles could fill one million cars for a year.
Only one in five plastic bottles are recycled.
The bottled water industry made $13 billion in 2014, but it would only cost $10 billion to provide clean water to everyone in the world.

This $1,650 pill will tell your doctors whether you’ve taken it. Is it the future of medicine?

By Christopher Rowland-April 28 at 7:19 PM

When the Food and Drug Administration approved in late 2017 a schizophrenia pill that sends a signal to a patient’s doctor when ingested, it was seen not only as a major step forward for the disease but as a new frontier of Internet-connected medicine.

Patients who have schizophrenia often stop taking their medicine, triggering psychotic episodes that can have severe consequences. So the pill, a 16-year-old medication combined with a tiny microchip, would help doctors intervene before a patient went dangerously off course.

Seventeen months later, few patients use the medication, known as Abilify MyCite. Doctors and insurance companies say it is a case in which real-world limitations, as well as costs, outweigh the innovations that the medical industry can produce.

[Forget to take your medication? A new digital pill will alert you — and your doctor.]

In the case of schizophrenia patients, some doctors warn that Abilify MyCite could exacerbate the very delusions that the medication is designed to prevent.

“Patients who have a lot of paranoia might be uncomfortable with the idea of a medicine that is transmitting signals. The patient may be afraid to take it,’’ said Richmond psychiatrist James Levenson. “The science of this one is kind of ahead of the data.’’

The debate over Abilify MyCite underscores a dilemma American health care will increasingly face as the medical industry and Silicon Valley try to promote innovation. For decades, medicine has been effectively delivered through a few simple mechanisms: a pill, a cream, a nose spray, a needle.

But in the hopes of improving outcomes further, the industry is turning to an array of new technologies against one of the biggest, and most human, challenges in treating disease: getting people to take their medicine in a consistent way.

Companies are producing apps for substance abuse treatment, diabetes management, and heart and blood pressure monitoring at a rapid clip. Studies are underway for more digital pills to treat cancer, cardiovascular conditions and infectious disease.

And while many of these may pass regulatory hurdles that show they’re safe — especially at a time when the Trump administration has been leaning into medical innovation and pushing back against excessive regulation — doctors and insurers are not convinced that the technologies will so easily make the difference that the pharmaceutical industry is betting billions on.

“I think that these technologies have a lot of potential benefits, but it’s going to be a question of evidence — that they can demonstrate value to patients and payers,’’ said Scott Gottlieb, who stepped down this month as FDA commissioner, a job in which he made approval of leading technology a hallmark.

[With fitness trackers in the workplace, bosses can monitor your every step — and possibly more]

The first digital therapy to win FDA market clearance, Abilify MyCite’s sensor-embedded pill remains off the market because of physician and insurance industry reservations.

Now Maryland-based Otsuka Pharmaceutical, which makes the medication, may be able to jump-start its acceptance by offering it to mentally ill people who qualify for low-income government health insurance. Otsuka won approval from Virginia Medicaid authorities last month to begin coverage. The company also is starting a pilot program in Florida and is considering another in Oklahoma.

Otsuka considers itself a pioneer. Abilify is an older brand-name drug marketed by the company to treat schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses. Abilify MyCite adds the electronic tracking component and, at $1,650 a month, costs almost 30 times as much as a 30-day supply of generic Abilify at a Costco pharmacy.

Otsuka developed the treatment with Proteus Digital Health, a Silicon Valley company that markets the digital component. Proteus is pioneering its use in other therapies including cancer patients taking chemotherapy drugs.

After the daily antipsychotic pill is swallowed, a digital sensor the size of a grain of sand (and made of copper, magnesium and silicon, which Proteus says are all found in food) transmits a signal when it comes into contact with stomach acid. The signal is captured by a patch worn on the patient’s torso. The patch sends a signal to an app on the patient’s smartphone. The app uploads data to a secure website for viewing by doctors. Otsuka has won special federal approval to provide smartphones “with highly limited functionality’’ to people who can’t afford them.

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The goal is to solve a vexing problem: Schizophrenia patients often stop taking their medicine, triggering psychotic episodes that can have severe consequences. Abilify MyCite is supposed to help doctors keep track of which patients are staying on their medication. The app also allows patients to enter information about their mood.

The approval led to debate among psychiatrists about the ethics of invasive monitoring for patients whose mental competency at times may be borderline. They raised questions about patients’ autonomy, data privacy and ability to navigate the technical challenges of the system.

But proponents say the medical need is so great that Abilify MyCite deserves a close look.

Virginia state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds (D-Bath), who chairs a special mental health committee in the legislature, said he had not heard of the therapy until contacted by The Washington Post. But he said in an interview that he was intrigued by a technology that could help people like his mentally ill son, Austin “Gus’’ Deeds, 24, who slashed Deeds on the face in 2013 before taking his own life. Deeds said his son had stopped taking medication nearly a year beforehand.

“There is a need for people who are caregivers to make sure the person’s taking the medicine,’’ Deeds said. “The other side of it is the civil liberty issue for the person who is sick.’’

Gus Deeds thought his medications “made him less of who he was. It dumbed down his personality,’’ Deeds said. But, he added, “a person does not have the right to destroy their life, or the life of others.’’

He said he did not have an opinion on whether Virginia Medicaid should add Abilify MyCite to its list of approved prescription drugs.

Otsuka emphasizes that no patient will be asked to use Abilify MyCite without showing a clear desire to do so. Schizophrenia patients who have paranoid feelings about ingesting a digital pill are unlikely candidates for the drug, the company said.

“It’s unlike a pharmaceutical launch where you proactively blitz all the states. We’re not doing that,’’ said John Bardi, Otsuka’s vice president for public affairs and digital business development. “It’s really about patients who want to improve their treatment goals. If they have any concerns, it’s probably not the right solution for them.’’

Otsuka executives recently gave a presentation about the drug to the Virginia chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a patient advocacy group, said Rhonda Thissen, the chapter’s executive director. She praised its goal of keeping patients on their medication but said it raises many perplexing questions.

“There is the Big Brother factor in all of this,’’ she said. “My concern as an advocate is many people with schizophrenia are low income and on Medicaid. Is there a cost-benefit analysis that would indicate . . . the increased cost would be worth it?’’

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The wave in digital medicine is raising similar value questions across the spectrum. With FDA approvals in hand, medical tech companies are looking for doctors and health-care networks to help them prove in the real world that their new products are worth the extra expense. These include manufacturers of smartphone apps for opioid addiction and diabetes, as well as an asthma inhaler that transmits data each time it is used. The FDA also has approved a program that uses artificial intelligence to help doctors spot strokes with increased speed.

Executives and analysts say the digital health marketplace is a bewildering Wild West to most consumers and physicians. In 2017, 318,000 mobile health apps were available worldwide, according to a government review; the majority have not been subject to rigorous FDA review.

In cases where software is paired with drugs and devices or it guides medical decision-making, the FDA has stepped in. It has cleared functions that require a prescription, such as Abilify MyCite, and those that don’t, such as Apple Watch’s latest heart monitoring functions.

Yet even FDA approval does not confer cost-effectiveness. Insurance companies are reluctant to offer coverage at this early stage, specialists said, particularly when trials that formed the basis of FDA clearance involved relatively few patients.

“There could be a series of unintended consequences. You have to be cautious with something that is so novel that is being brought out,’’ said a health insurance executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal coverage deliberations.

Aside from the fraught ethical questions, the FDA’s approval stopped far short of proving that Abilify MyCite meets its clinical goal. The only thing the agency approved was that the digital pill transmitted its signal and that most patients can manage the smartphone app. The product’s label explicitly states that the FDA did not establish whether it would help patients continue taking their medicine.

The South Florida Behavioral Health Network, which coordinates state payments to mental health treatment centers, has agreed to begin paying for the treatment.

Patients often do not reliably report whether they have been taking their medication; Abilify MyCite will give doctors data to help them make important decisions about care, said John Newcomer, president and chief executive of the network.

“If this is framed as yet another useful tool in the tool kit, to help you get back in control of your life, this ends up being an empowering thing for patients,’’ Newcomer said. “It’s another way to get them on the road to recovery.’’

Specialists who closely follow these advances say that consumers and doctors are in for a wave of such digital therapies and that it inevitably will be confusing.

“I think you’re seeing some growing pains,’’ said Steven Chan, a physician with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in Palo Alto, Calif., who has expertise in telemedicine and health technology.

“The FDA is trying to find ways to make a legitimate space but also a space where pharmaceutical manufacturers can innovate, to find new ways to deliver care.’’