In India, growing clamour to criminalise rape within marriage

By Geeta Pandey
BBC News, Deli

IMAGE SOURCEGETTY IMAGES


In India, a society rooted in patriarchal traditions, marriages are sacrosanct and it is not a crime for a man to rape his wife.


But in recent weeks, courts have given conflicting rulings on marital rape, leading to renewed calls from campaigners to criminalise rape within marriage.


On Thursday, Justice NK Chandravanshi of the Chhattisgarh high court ruled that "sexual intercourse or any sexual act by a husband with his wife cannot be rape even if it was by force or against her wish".


The woman had accused her husband of "unnatural sex" and raping her with objects.


The judge said the man could be tried for unnatural sex, but cleared him of the much more serious offence of rape since Indian law does not recognise marital rape.


The ruling met with outrage on social media, including from gender researcher Kota Neelima who asked "when will courts consider the woman's side of the story?"


The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.View original tweet on Twitter


Many responded to her tweet saying the archaic rape laws must be amended - but there were many contrary voices too.


One wondered "what sort of a wife would complain of marital rape?"; another suggested "there must be something wrong with her character"; while a third said "only a wife who doesn't understand her duties would make such a claim".


It's not just social media, the contentious topic of marital rape also appears to have divided judiciary.


Just a few weeks back, the high court in the southern state of Kerala ruled that marital rape was "a good ground" to seek divorce.


"The husband's licentious disposition disregarding the autonomy of the wife is marital rape, albeit such conduct cannot be penalised, it falls in the frame of physical and mental cruelty," Justices A Muhamed Mustaque and Kauser Edappagath said in their 6 August order.


They explained that marital rape occurred when the husband believed that he owned his wife's body and added that "such a notion has no place in modern social jurisprudence".

In India, marriages are considered sacrosanct


The law that Justice Chandravanshi invoked is Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code.


The British colonial-era law, which has been in existence in India since 1860, mentions several "exemptions" - situations in which sex is not rape - and one of them is "by a man with his own wife" who's not a minor.


The idea is rooted in the belief that consent for sex is "implied" in marriage and that a wife cannot retract it later.


But it has increasingly been challenged across the world and over the years, more than 100 countries have outlawed marital rape. Britain too outlawed it in 1991, saying the "implied consent" could not be "seriously maintained" nowadays.


But despite a long and sustained campaign to criminalise it, India remains among 36 countries where the law remains in the statue book, leaving millions of women trapped in violent marriages.


According to a government survey, 31% of married women - almost one in three - have faced physical, sexual and emotional violence from their husbands.



"In my opinion," says Professor Upendra Baxi, emeritus professor of law at University of Warwick and Delhi, "this law must be struck down."


Over the years, he says, India has made some progress in addressing violence against women by bringing in laws against domestic violence and sexual harassment, but has done nothing about marital rape.

The Indian kitchen serving an unpalatable truth
India marital rape victims' lonely battle for justice
India 'fails' victims of abuse


In the 1980s, Prof Baxi was part of a group of eminent lawyers who had made several recommendations on amending rape laws to a committee of MPs.


"They accepted all our suggestions except the one on outlawing marital rape," he told the BBC.


Their subsequent attempts to get the authorities to criminalise marital rape also remained unsuccessful.


"We were told the time was not right," Prof Baxi said. "But there has to be equality in marriage and one side cannot be allowed to dominate the other. You cannot demand sexual service from your spouse."


The government has consistently argued that criminalising marital law could "destabilise" the institution of marriage and that it could be used by women to harass men.


But in recent years, many unhappy wives and lawyers have petitioned courts calling for the "offending law" to be struck down.


United Nations, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also raised concerns about India's refusal to do so.


Many judges too have admitted that they are hobbled by an archaic law that has no place in a modern society and called for the parliament to criminalise marital rape.

India is among 36 countries where marital rape is not illegal

The law is "a clear violation" of women's rights, and the immunity it provides to men is "unnatural" and the main reason behind the growing number of court cases, Ms Neelima says.


"India has a facade of being very modern, but scratch the surface and you see the real face. The woman remains the property of her husband. Rape is criminalised in India not because a woman's violated, but because she's the property of another man."


Ms Neelima says "one half of India that is male became free when India became an independent country in 1947, the other - female - half is yet to be free. Our hope lies in the judiciary".


It's encouraging that some courts have "admitted the unnaturalness of this immunity", she says. But these are "small wins, overrun by other contrary legal verdicts".


"This needs intervention, and it must change in our lifetime. The barriers are extra tall when it comes to marital rape," she says.


"This should have been sorted out way back. We are not fighting for the future generations, we are still fighting the wrongs of history. And this fight is critical."




Read more from Geeta Pandey on patriarchy within homes:

The women eating with their families for the first time
Calling your husband by name for the first time
The Indian women saying no to forced tattoos

DRC reviewing $6bn mining deal with Chinese investors

Reuters | August 27, 2021 | 

Felix Tshisekedi became DRC’s new president in January 2019. 

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC’s) government is reviewing its $6-billion “infrastructure-for-minerals” deal with Chinese investors as part of a broader examination of mining contracts, Finance Minister Nicolas Kazadi told Reuters.


President Felix Tshisekedi said in May that some mining contracts could be reviewed because of concerns they are not sufficiently benefiting Congo, which is the world’s largest producer of cobalt and Africa’s leading miner of copper.

His government announced this month it had formed a commission to reassess the reserves and resources at China Molybdenum’s massive Tenke Fungurume copper and cobalt mine in order to “fairly lay claim to (its) rights”.

CHINESE INVESTORS CONTROL ABOUT 70% OF CONGO’S MINING SECTOR

Kazadi said in an interview that the 2007 deal agreed with Chinese State-owned firms Sinohydro Corp and China Railway Group Limited was also being reviewed to ensure it is “fair” and “effective”.

Sinohydro and China Railway did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Elie Tshinguli, deputy director-general of the Sicomines copper and cobalt joint venture in Congo, majority-owned by Sinohydro and China Railway, did not respond to a request for comment.

Under the deal struck with the government of Tshisekedi’s predecessor, Joseph Kabila, Sinohydro and China Railway agreed to build roads and hospitals in exchange for a 68% stake in the Sicomines venture.

The deal formed a key part for Kabila’s development plan for the country, but critics say few of the promised infrastructure projects have been fully realized and have complained about a lack of transparency in the deal.

“We saw that there were some governance issues in the past,” said Kazadi. “We needed more clarity on the contract, the kind of finance that is behind (the) investment.”

He said the reviews were “not a matter of threatening any investors” and that the government was conducting the review “in close partnership with the Chinese themselves”.

Chinese investors control about 70% of Congo’s mining sector, according to Congo’s chamber of mines, after snapping up lucrative projects from Western companies in recent years.

After Tshisekedi announced the reviews in May, a move attributed by some analysts to Western pressure to go after Chinese companies, China’s ambassador to Congo warned the country “must not be a battlefield between major powers”.
IMF deal

Kazadi also said he expected the International Monetary Fund’s review next month of the $1.5-billion three-year programme that received final approval in July to confirm all the conditions had been met.

“There is no doubt that the review should be successful and will lead to a new disbursement in December,” he said, adding the next disbursement of just over $200 million would be used to bolster foreign currency reserves.

Meanwhile, the government plans to use half of the 1021.7 million Special Drawing Rights ($1.45 billion) – the IMF’s own currency – allocated to Congo to further shore up reserves, he said.

A big chunk of the remainder will be used to launch an investment fund aimed at diversifying Congo’s economy, he said. “It will implement new projects in new kinds of areas, like agriculture or energy production,” said Kazadi.

1. Toward a Theory of the Imperialist State by Nikolai Bukharin

   https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1915/state.htm

   THE IMPERIALIST STATE AND FINANCE CAPITALISM 1) Reinforcing the role of state power. 2) The state and the production of products (the domain lands, forestry, state factories, state monopolies, “mixed enterprises,” state 

Tesla needs to perform delicate balancing act when it comes to lithium mining – expert

Valentina Ruiz Leotaud | August 29, 2021 

Elon Musk. (Image by Steve Jurvetson, Flickr).

Tesla’s promise to slash battery costs by 50% has led the carmaker to dabble into a whole new field of making its own battery cells and, therefore, looking into manufacturing cathodes and extracting associated raw materials.


But the risks linked to this new line of work mean that Tesla has to perform a delicate balancing act where it tends the increasing demand for electric vehicles and the fact that activists, car buyers, and investors want every step of the process of making an EV to be respectful towards the environment and affected communities.


“Tesla will need to demonstrate that its new approach to lithium mining does in fact have a lower environmental impact than other methods. Transparency — providing plenty of information in a timely and accurate way — will be critical to winning support,” Robin Bolton, executive head of sustainability at IsoMetrix, told MINING.COM.


AFTER SECURING ACCESS TO 10,000 ACRES OF LITHIUM-RICH CLAY DEPOSITS IN NEVADA A YEAR AGO, ELON MUSK’S COMPANY FILED THIS YEAR A NEW PATENT FOR THE “SELECTIVE EXTRACTION OF LITHIUM FROM CLAY MINERALS.”

After securing access to 10,000 acres of lithium-rich clay deposits in Nevada a year ago, Elon Musk’s company filed this year a new patent for the “selective extraction of lithium from clay minerals.”

The patent states that extracting lithium from ore using sodium chloride is an environmentally friendlier way to obtain the metal, compared to currently used techniques such as acid leaching. According to Tesla, it also allows for higher recoveries.

In parallel to these developments, the company signed a five-year raw materials pact with Piedmont Lithium (ASX: PLL), which should start supplying spodumene concentrate sometime between July 2022 and July 2023 from a North Carolina lithium mine and processing facilities under development. Tesla is to transform the chemical into lithium hydroxide – a key building block for EV batteries – at a plant it is building in Texas.
Manage, educate, get buy-in

But all these mining-related developments mean that Tesla needs to manage, educate, and get buy-in from all the stakeholders while broadening the scope of what is considered efficient and environmentally friendly in mining by looking at its entire supply chain.

For Robin Bolton, such a global yet detailed view at each stage of its production process is particularly important taking into account that one mining operation in Nevada – Lithium America’s Thacker Pass project – is already experiencing opposition due to environmental concerns.

“While this is a separate mining operation with a different technology than Tesla is talking about using, it’s important for Tesla to recognize that it faces the same risks,” Bolton said. “All mining operations should take the appropriate measures to ensure transparency from the start and engage communities and stakeholders throughout the process.”


IN BOLTON’S VIEW, THE MAIN ESG ISSUES FOR LITHIUM MINES HAVE TO DO WITH COLLECTING, MANAGING, AND REPORTING INFORMATION ABOUT ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS

In the executive’s view, the main ESG issues for lithium mines have to do with collecting, managing, and reporting information about environmental impacts. This means that if local communities, environmental action groups, and local legislators are not persuaded that the mining operation is a responsible one, their objections can easily shut down the project.

“Other considerations include community relations: identifying local stakeholders and engaging them in conversation,” Bolton said. “Building a process for providing transparency and accountability. Creating a central management system where data about ESG issues can be stored securely, accessed and actioned easily is very important. Being willing to listen to and engage with various stakeholder concerns and expectations will also help to build trust.”

Given that Musk is also securing access to raw materials outside the US – for example, through a deal with the Goro mine in New Caledonia -, Bolton says that it is important that Tesla adapts the details of its ESG strategy to the reality of each area where it has interests.

“Local communities have different priorities and demographics, and depending on the type of mining being done, they will be affected in different ways. It’s critical for Tesla’s approach to be tailored to the local, regional, and national conditions where each of its mines are located,” IsoMetrix’s head of sustainability said. “ESG software solutions often have seamless integrations with regulatory content databases that will highlight the relevant mining regulations in each applicable region to help companies like Tesla ensure their mines are operating in compliance with local laws.”

For Bolton, however, the best universal strategy to build confidence in any mining operation is to build a process for providing transparency and accountability for internal and external stakeholders, adhering to global international best practices.

ANOTHER BRE-X

How Afghanistan’s $1 trillion mining wealth sold the war

Frik Els | August 27, 2021 |

Skeleton with copper patina excavated from Mes Aynak archeological site.

 Image: Saving Mes Aynak (www.savingmesaynak.com)

After the fall of Kabul, US media regurgitates a 2010 New York Times frontpage story on Afghanistan’s mineral riches based on a secret Pentagon memo and a 1977 Soviet geologic map.


Search for Afghanistan minerals and you get dozens of articles written in the last few days quoting a magical $1 trillion number including gems like The Taliban are sitting on $1 trillion worth of minerals the world desperately needs (CNN), Afghanistan: Taliban to reap $1 trillion mineral wealth (Deutsche Welle), Biden Just Handed Afghanistan’s Mineral Wealth to China (Newsweek), China Eyes Afghanistan’s $1 Trillion of Minerals With Risky Bet on Taliban (Bloomberg) and so on.

All the one trillion dollar articles are derived from a breathless June 2010 New York Times front-page story and interview with General David H Petraeus during which the commander of US forces in Afghanistan referenced a US Dept of Defense “internal memo”.

The story of how “the vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists” by the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist James Risen’s opens with a bang (emphasis added):

“The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.”

“​​The previously unknown deposits including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.”

The tale of the $1 trillion treasure trove – which has more than a whiff of Indiana Jones about it as told by the New York Times – begins three years after the US invaded Afghanistan:

“In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan [sic] Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country.”

“Technoexport”

At first the American geologists only found hints of these huge big veins, but “they soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.”

How soon did the American geologists learn it was a Soviet study? Perhaps when they looked at the author page of the intriguing charts and data and saw this:

Abdullah, Sh., Chmyriov, V.M., Stazhilo-Alekseev, K.F, Dronov, V.I., Gannon, P.J., Lubemov, B.K., Kafarskiy, A.Kh. and Malyarov, E.P., 1977, Mineral resources of Afghanistan (2 ed.) 419 p. and Abdullah, Sh., Chmyriov, V.M. Map of mineral resources of Afghanistan V/O “Technoexport” USSR, scale: 1:500,000.

Contrary to the article, it was two years before the Soviet army invaded (hmm… what did Breshnev know about Afghan minerals and when did he know it?) and it was done under the auspices of the United Nations Development Programme (AFG/74/12).

Details. Let’s not get sidetracked.

Risen, also the recipient of the 2015 Ridenhour Courage Prize, continues:

“Armed with the old Russian charts, the United States Geological Survey began a series of aerial surveys of Afghanistan’s mineral resources in 2006 using advanced gravity and magnetic measuring equipment attached to an old Navy Orion P-3 aircraft that flew over about 70 percent of the country.”
The legend

If you have such advanced tech (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, SRTM, digital elevation model, DEM) why would you need Mineral resources of Afghanistan 2nd ed., and Technoexport?

The reason is printed on the legend of the map the USGS produced after the SRTM DEM survey:

“The geologic and mineral resource information shown on this map is derived from digitization of the original data from Abdullah and Chmyriov (1977) and Abdullah and others (1977).

“The classification of mineral deposit types is based on the authors’ interpretation of existing descriptive information (Abdullah and others, 1977) […] and on limited field investigations by the authors.”

Promising before, astonishing ASTER

“The data from those flights was so promising that in 2007, the geologists returned for an even more sophisticated study” the article continues:

“The handful of American geologists who pored over the new data said the results were astonishing.”

This even more sophisticated study used Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) data from Nasa’s flagship Terra satellite and the astonishing results are summarized in the USGS-Afghanistan Ministry of Mines Joint Mineral Resource Assessment Team Preliminary Assessment of Non-Fuel Mineral Resources of Afghanistan prepared in cooperation with the Afghanistan Geological Survey under the auspices of the US Agency for International Development, October 2007. (Download here)

One can understand that the New York Times would not want to confuse readers with mining jargon but what the paper calls “untapped mineral deposits far beyond any previously known reserves” the USGS report defines as “mean expected values of quantitative probabilistic estimates of undiscovered deposits”.

Close enough, it’s the New York Times.
Abdullah et al

That said, there were some pretty mean expected values gleaned from the ASTER and SRTM DEM non-discoveries and the report (the full 810 page study – Open-File Report 2007–1214 available on 1 CD-ROM and 1 DVD – appears now to be off limits to the public) outlines 34 orebodies across 27 metals and minerals.

However, of the 34 deposits outlined in the three-page summary, only four were newly identified: mercury, potash, asbestos and rare earth.

A further four were revised (upwards).

That is, revised from Abdullah, Sh., Chmyriov and others. Mineral resources of Afghanistan (2 ed.) 1977.

The 26 deposit estimates from the Soviet scientists were simply copied over and “further study recommended”.

Astonished but ignored

At this point in the article Risen injects some tension into the story:

“The results gathered dust for two more years, ignored by officials in both the American and Afghan governments.”

But the story doesn’t end in a dusty library in Kabul or the CD-ROM/DVD storeroom of the USGS:

“In 2009, a Pentagon task force that had created business development programs in Iraq was transferred to Afghanistan, and came upon the geological data.”

“Until then, no one besides the geologists had bothered to look at the information and no one had sought to translate the technical data to measure the potential economic value of the mineral deposits.”

“Soon, the Pentagon business development task force brought in teams of American mining experts to validate the survey’s findings, and then briefed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Mr. Karzai.”

In these three truly stupefying paragraphs Risen makes it sound that if it was not for the task force coming upon the data after they were transferred (no access to the USGS website from Iraq?) and more importantly, bothered, the world would never have found out about the value of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth.

Send in the Excel cavalry

The only reason the geologists – on who The New York Times heaps so much responsibility to give the article a patina of science – did not bother is because that’s not how mining works.

Not that it’s much of a bother to multiply tonnes and ounces of “probabilistic estimates of undiscovered deposits” with prices.

To the Abdullah et al copper deposits, the USGS report added 32 million contained tonnes (nice!) to bring overall Cu resources in the country to 60 million tonnes. That’s $453 billion right there at the average price for copper of $7,562/tonne in 2010.

Some 600,000 tonnes of cobalt ($27 billion at 2010 prices) and 724,000 tonnes of molybdenum ($18 billion) were also put in the copper basket and the 27 million tonnes of potash would’ve fetched just under $10 billion at 2010’s average price.
Rare earth as seen from space

The global trade in rare earths was before the WTO for arbitration in 2010 and not only were prices volatile (dysprosium went up 12-fold between 2008 and 2011), the 17 elements also trade at very different price points – samarium could be had for $3.40/kg in 2009 but europium would set you back $492/kg that year.

That would have made it more difficult to assign a dollar value to the 1.4 million tonnes of rare earths as seen from space. Although the Pentagon task force probably found a way.

The sulfur tonnage was upwardly adjusted to 5.5 million tonnes, but at a ruling price of some $50 a tonne it doesn’t really smell like money. Neither does the newly non-discovered graphite deposit – not too flaky at 1.05 million tonnes but worth only a billion in 2010.

SRTM DEM and ASTER also zoomed in on 13.4 million tonnes of Afghan asbestos. Asbestos fibre remains a thriving global trade and if you need to get to 12 zeros you can’t just leave it in the ground. At ruling prices of around $1,500 a tonne, that’s $20 billion someone other than the Afghans would have to cough up.

The world in a grain of sand

Only 2.7 tonnes or 86,743 troy ounces of gold were identified in 1977. The USGS recommended further study of the primary gold deposits but did associate 682 tonnes gold ($26.8 billion at the average 2010 gold price of $1,226 per troy ounce) and 9,067 tonnes of silver ($5.9 billion) with the igneous copper deposits.

If the gold non-discoveries seem like an underestimation consider that neither SRTM or ASTER added to the 36 million cubic metres of sand in the Soviet data. Sand is the world’s number one mining endeavour as per Yale School of the Environment and prices have long been on an upward trajectory.

Who knows? The task force probably found more sand, but the Pentagon would’ve realized the jokes write themselves if the New York Times article proclaimed that the US military – ten years into the occupation – discovered vast reserves of sand in Afghanistan.

Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got

Afghanistan’s endowment of lead, zinc, tin, tungsten, barite, talc, lazurite, fluorite, halite and celestite et cetera were not estimated by the USGS, and since the task force data is secret, only the Pentagon could put a price on those. Whether the task force incorporated the 32,000 tonnes of hot spring mercury in the $1 trillion would also remain a mystery.

Not that those treasures are needed – with iron ore 12 zeroes is more than doable.

The 2007 study did not add rocks to the 2.438 billion tonnes Abdullah et al found thirty years earlier, it didn’t have to – 62% Fe ore was trading at $120 in 2010 putting a price of $292 billion on Afghan steelmaking stuff.
Lithium nirvana

The task force did find ways to warm up the Soviet studies, which likely ignored lithium because commercialisation of the lithium-ion battery only happened more than a decade later. The 2007 USGS report also glossed over the world’s softest metal.

But the Pentagon and the New York Times saw an opportunity to show Afghanistan’s potential in the age of the smart phone and the laptop computer:

“An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.” (Blackberrys… chuckle – Ed.)

And the work was ongoing, according to the article:

“Just this month [June 2010], American geologists working with the Pentagon team have been conducting ground surveys on dry salt lakes in western Afghanistan where they believe there are large deposits of lithium.

“Pentagon officials said that their initial analysis at one location in Ghazni Province showed the potential for lithium deposits as large of [sic] those of Bolivia, which now has the world’s largest known lithium reserves.”

Finding lithium (15th most abundant element, although scarcer than rare earth) in a dry salt lake as large as those of Bolivia which measures 10,000 square kilometres? Maybe the Pentagon team just got lucky.

Besides if you calculate the value of lithium reserves the way the task force did – and how Elon Musk does it – Nevada also has as much of the battery metal as Afghanistan and Bolivia.

Round up to the nearest trillion

The transcript of a Pentagon press briefing a few days later is not accessible due to website maintenance, but contemporaneous reporting suggests the call did not add much besides clarifying that the $1 trillion was actually $908 billion, but then adding that “a lot of people think that is a conservative number”.

Officials also assured reporters that the task force (Task Force for Business and Stability Operations to give its full name which was never mentioned in the article) just used the USGS as a reference point to conduct more “detailed field work” or as The New York Times described it:

“For the geologists who are now scouring some of the most remote stretches of Afghanistan to complete the technical studies necessary before the international bidding process is begun, there is a growing sense that they are in the midst of one of the great discoveries of their careers.”

What the detailed field work and scouring entailed is never stated. And whatever technical studies were completed were never considered in any international bidding process and the “growing sense” of career making discoveries Risen thought he detected among the geologists is, not to put too fine a point on it, growing nonsense.

Scientific boots on the ground

The most well known copper deposit in Afghanistan is Mes Aynak, which translates to “little source of copper” in Pashto/Persian. Copper workings at Mes Aynak date back to the bronze age.

The scientists at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Science magazine in 2014 in an article titled “Mother of all lodes” wrote that after the USGS and the Pentagon “put scientific boots on the ground“ in Afghanistan they found a “vivid panoply of nonferrous mineral formations”.

Of these, Mes Aynak is surely the vividest.

Could Mes Aynak – which did go through a real world tender process – prove that the Pentagon was right all along and $1 trillion – a sum even quoted by the World Bank, responsible for drafting Afghanistan’s mining laws – is on the money?

After a bidding process that included Phelps Dodge (now part of Freeport McMoRan) and Canada’s Hunter Dickinson, state-owned Metallurgical Corporation of China and its minority partner Jiangxi Copper struck a $2.83 billion deal in 2007 for a 30-year lease at Mes Aynak. (Only $997,170,000,000 to go – Ed.)

A stretch

The nine bidders, selected in November 2006, had to rely on a dusty copy of Akocdzhanyan et al., 1974 V/O “Technoexport” Contract 55-184/17500 translated from the Russian.

In the tender information package about Mes Aynak compiled by the Afghanistan and British Geological Survey, the “systematic exploration” of the Soviet Geological Mission “Technoexport” is praised as “exceedingly thorough and well documented”. (Soviet geologist please let us know why it is called Technoexport – Ed.)

The work “included the drilling of several hundred exploration, geotechnical and hydrogeological boreholes, nine underground adits, 70 trenches, and geophysical and topographic surveys.” It was also carried out over 13 years and the geologists only pulled out when the Soviet army did in 1989.

That’s in contrast to the work of “a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists”, who, according to New York Times’ timeline, were busy for only about a year before the article, and were working in the fields of 24 deposits scattered across the entire country.

Whether the task force scouring the “remote stretches” of Afghanistan (Mes Aynak is only 30km (19mi) south of Kabul, btw) also included drillholes, trenches and adits is impossible to say. Rather than attracting international bidders and making careers, the Pentagon technical reports remain buried secrets.
Non-refundable deposit

The Mes Anyak deal was billed as the largest foreign investment in Afghanistan in its modern history.

Perplexingly, this May 2008 press release from Jiangxi Copper put the figure paid to the Afghan government for the mining rights not at $2.83 billion but $808 million, a figure not quoted in any media story.

There were also allegations that the then mines minister Mohammed Ibrahim Adel took some $30 million in bribes related to the tender. (It’s Afghanistan. Don’t get so hung up about missing dollars – Ed.)

The copper project, also the site of an ancient buddhist city, never got off the ground (neither has Hajigak iron ore, the only other deposit which had any prospect of becoming a mine).

MCC blamed the costs of building a smelter, power plant and railway and the steep royalties for halting work. Mention of Mes Aynak disappeared from Jiangxi’s annual reports after 2013 wherein the company blamed the “relocation of historical relics” as the reason for the delay in the project.

Now that the Taliban are in charge that could change – they do not exactly care for Buddhist statues.

Sitting around in pajamas

There was some criticism of the New York Times frontpage story at the time saying that it wasn’t the scoop it was made out to be because of Abdullah and others’ work in the 1970s the 2007 USGS study. Some questioned the timing of the article when the war was going badly in Afghanistan.

Risen was irked by the skepticism telling Yahoo News “bloggers” who are “sitting around in their pajamas” instead of doing real reporting — shouldn’t “deconstruct other people’s stories.” (Go put some pants on – Ed.)

Dean Baquet, who edited the piece and was the Washington bureau chief for the New York Times then (now executive editor) said Risen “is the last person the government would try to get to carry their water,” attributed the criticism to sour grapes for not getting the story first, and that the Pentagon holding a briefing was proof of the article’s newsworthiness.

Task Force for BS Ops

The Task Force for Business and Stability Operations (Task Force for BS Ops) also came under scrutiny – albeit only in 2016 – in a 136 page report by the RAND Corporation titled Lessons from the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations in Afghanistan.

To their credit (and I don’t know how much credit, I only know that the US military, air force and Secretary of Defense stuffed $147.1 million in RAND’s coffers in 2020) RAND said the $908 billion “is notional only; it does not reflect the value of commercially exploitable deposits. Therefore, it is misleading.” (p.22)

It also fell to the think tank to address the biggest elephant in the room full of elephants that was the New York Times story and Pentagon briefing:

“Challenges impede the extraction of this natural wealth. Security concerns aside, most of the mineral rich provinces lack road, rail, or electric power infrastructure, and the nascent mining industry would have to compete with agriculture, an economic mainstay, and municipalities for limited water supplies.”

Let x = x

The manner in which the task force and its teams of mining experts calculated (tonnes x price = x,xxx,xxx,xxx,xxx) the $1 trillion value – or $3 trillion as successive mines & petroleum ministers, and President Karzai was fond of quoting – is not the biggest problem with the New York Times story.

While the number has no real world meaning, it certainly attracts attention – by the paper’s own reporting it led to greater violence in Afghanistan.

To focus only on non-fuel resources in the article also smacks of marketing. Afghanistan also has vast oil and reserves but “No war for oil” protesters had grown in ranks seven years into the Iraq occupation and trotting out a crude message would likely have misfired.

$34,482.76

That all US and most international media outlets continue to parrot the $1 trillion tale a decade later also makes its propaganda value clear.

How easily the Western armchair media swallowed the story is inexcusable, but the way Afghans were duped into believing in their country’s mineral wealth seems cruel.

The New York Times followed up the big scoop a few days later with a piece headlined Afghan Officials Elated by Minerals Report:

“As they waited to hear Mr. Karzai’s spokesman, some Afghan reporters excitedly calculated among themselves how much each Afghan would theoretically get if the mineral treasure trove were divided equally.

“Assuming the $1 trillion valuation and Afghanistan’s population of 29 million, that would give each Afghan man, woman and child $34,482.76.”

If not in scope then in tenor, U.S. Identifies Vast Mineral Riches in Afghanistan was not dissimilar to the paper’s weapons of mass destruction coverage of a few years earlier.

At least the New York Times has taken some responsibility for boosting the case for the Iraq invasion.

But there’s been no such soul searching by the paper for cheerleading the extension of the US occupation of Afghanistan.

Ancient remains send warning message on current lead exposure in humans

MINING.COM Staff Writer | August 29, 2021 | 

Ancient skeleton. (Reference image by Shankar S., Flickr).

An international team of researchers discovered that as worldwide lead production began and increased, so too did the rates of lead absorption found in people who lived during those time periods—even those not remotely involved in lead production— simply by breathing the air around them.


The scientists reached this conclusion after examining human remains from a burial ground in central Italy that was in consecutive use for 12,000 years.

Lead extraction is believed to have begun several millennia ago. A big boost in lead production started 2,500 years ago with coin production, an uptick that reached its peak during the Roman Period before declining during the Middle Ages. Beginning 1,000 years ago, lead production was on the rise again, prompted by silver mining in Germany, then in the New World, and finally to meet the demands of the Industrial Revolution.

In a paper published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, the research group directed by Yigal Erel from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explains that while increases in lead production rates are noted in environmental archives, such as glaciers and sediments from lakes, lead concentrations in human bones and teeth seldom told the outside story of worldwide lead generation rates, until now.

THE LEVEL OF LEAD POLLUTION IN PEOPLE’S BONES OVER TIME CLOSELY MIMICKED THE RATE OF WORLDWIDE LEAD PRODUCTION

As part of their research, the scientists analyzed bone fragments from 130 people who lived in Rome, from as early as 12,000 years ago—well before the advent of metal production—until the 17th century. By looking into the elemental composition found in their bones, the researchers were able to compute the level of lead pollution over time, and showed that it closely mimicked the rate of global lead production.

“This documentation of lead pollution throughout human history indicates that, remarkably, much of the estimated dynamics in lead production is replicated in human exposure. Thus, lead pollution in humans has closely followed their rates of lead production,” Erel said in a media statement. “Simply put: the more lead we produce, the more people are likely to be absorbing it into their bodies. This has a highly toxic effect.”

According to Erel, these findings are cause for concern due to the ever-mounting demand for metals in the manufacturing of electronic devices.

“The close relationship between lead production rates and lead concentrations in humans in the past, suggests that without proper regulation we will continue to experience the damaging health impacts of toxic metals contamination,” Erel said.

The researcher warned that while those most directly affected by these dangers are people with the highest exposure to lead, namely miners and employees in recycling facilities, lead can be found throughout everyone’s daily lives in the form of batteries and the new generation of solar panels that deteriorate over time and release their toxicity into the air and the soil from which crops are grown.

“Any expanded use of metals should go hand in hand with industrial hygiene, ideally safe metal recycling and increased environmental and toxicological consideration in the selection of metals for industrial use,” Erel said.

Extinction Rebellion activists glued to Science Museum site in Shell protest


Demonstrators attach themselves to railings in reaction to museum taking funding from oil firm for Our Future Planet show

Doctors, scientists and members of the climate campaign group addressed the crowd about the effect fossil fuels are having on the planet. Photograph: Vickie Flores/EPA
YES THAT IS A PINK FLAMINGO FROM ALICE IN WONDERLAND, CROQUET WITH THE RED QUEEN

Kevin Rawlinson and agency
Sun 29 Aug 2021 20.09 BST

Extinction Rebellion protesters have glued and locked themselves to the railings inside the Science Museum, in a protest against the oil firm Shell’s sponsorship of an exhibition about greenhouse gases.

Five people have put their arms through the railings and glued their hands together so that they are not damaging the museum’s property. Six have deadlocked their necks against the railings. Some are scientists dressed in lab coats, while others are in clothes with Extinction Rebellion logos.

Earlier, protesters were escorted by police and members of the museum security team as they moved through the ground floor of the museum in South Kensington while about 200 supporters, including the Olympic sailor Laura Baldwin, gathered outside.

They chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, sponsor Shell has got to go” as those outside sang “No more petrol, no more diesel, funding fossil fuels is evil”, waved flags and banners, played drums and blew whistles.

Doctors, scientists and members of the climate campaign group addressed the crowd about the effect that fossil fuels are having on the planet. A 12-foot model of a pink dodo – the bird driven to extinction in the 17th century – was erected by protesters.


Curbs on protests in policing bill breach human rights laws, MPs and peers say

A group called Silent Rebellion sat outside in silence and appeared to meditate near the entrance to the museum.

Protesters staged a “die-in” on half of the ramp that leads to the museum’s entrance. Members of security at the museum urged them to keep one side of the ramp free for wheelchairs and pushchairs, which the protesters were doing.

By 7pm some protesters had begun to leave the museum, and about 70 people were left inside the foyer.

Meanwhile, a blockade was set up outside the adjacent Natural History Museum, with hundreds of protesters and supporters stopping traffic at the junction of Cromwell Road and Exhibition Road. A large blue van was parked on Cromwell Road and a man was on top of it holding an Extinction Rebellion banner. Police also blocked off the junction with a police van and a number of officers.

Outside, Baldwin gave a speech to the protesters outlining her reasons for joining the movement in 2019. She said: “Learning about the dire situation, the dire state of our beautiful planet, broke my heart.

“It filled my heart with dread and fear for my child’s future. As a desperately protective mother, I refuse to accept my son’s life as collateral damage for the few to continue economic growth, business as usual, as long as mother nature will allow it.

“As well as continuing to apply pressure to the government, which we must do through non-violent direct action, we need to also dream about how our future world could look.”

Extinction Rebellion has criticised the Science Museum for taking funding from Shell for the Our Future Planet exhibition, which began on 19 May and runs until September.

The climate activist Greta Thunberg has also hit out at Shell’s sponsorship after previous reports said the museum had signed a gagging clause over the funding of the exhibition. The exhibition explores the technologies being developed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Dr Charlie Gardner, an associate senior lecturer in conservation science at the University of Kent and a member of Scientists for Extinction Rebellion, said: “We find it unacceptable that a scientific institution, a great cultural institution such as the Science Museum, should be taking money, dirty money, from an oil company.

“The fact that Shell are able to sponsor this exhibition allows them to paint themselves as part of the solution to climate change, whereas they are, of course, at the heart of the problem.”A Shell spokesperson said: “Our target is to become a net zero emissions energy business by 2050, in step with society. Shell works with our customers to identify the best paths to decarbonisation; we seek to avoid, reduce and only then mitigate any remaining emissions.”

Rising electricity demand is keeping coal alive

Renewables aren’t growing fast enough

By Justine Calma@justcalma Aug 25, 2021, 

Wind turbines in front of a coal-fired power plant on the outskirts of the new city area of Yumen, Gansu province, China, on Wednesday, March 31, 2021. Wind turbines in front of a coal-fired power plant on the outskirts of the new city area of Yumen, Gansu province, China, on Wednesday, March 31, 2021.

As people ventured out from their pandemic cocoons this year, they gobbled up more electricity than they did before COVID-19 shut the world down. But there still isn’t enough clean energy to meet rising demand, so coal is making a comeback. Global electricity demand climbed 5 percent above pre-pandemic levels in the first six months of 2021, according to an analysis published today by London think tank Ember. Electricity grids turned to more coal to meet that demand, and power sector carbon pollution rose 5 percent compared to the first half of 2019.

“WE ARE BUILDING BACK BADLY”

“Catapulting emissions in 2021 should send alarm bells across the world. We are not building back better, we are building back badly,” Dave Jones, global program lead at Ember, said in a statement today. “The electricity transition is happening but with little urgency: emissions are going in the wrong direction.”

China drove 90 percent of the rise in electricity demand and most of the uptick in coal. While China is already the biggest carbon emitter in the world, that’s been mitigated by the fact that its per capita emissions are less than half that of the US, which is currently the second biggest climate polluter. But China’s per capita electricity demand is also rising rapidly, Ember’s report shows. That highlights how important it will be for the planet for China to get its emissions in check.

None of the 63 countries Ember analyzed, which account for 87 percent of the global electricity production, saw a “green recovery” in the first half of 2021. Ember’s criteria for “green recovery” included lower power sector emissions and higher electricity demand, a sign that more electricity was being generated by clean energy sources like solar and wind. Some countries like the US had slightly cleaner power sectors compared to 2019 as electricity demand stayed relatively flat, but their emissions are expected to rise again with demand.

Renewable energy did have a growth spurt in the early part of 2021. Together, wind and solar generated more than a tenth of the world’s electricity — doubling their share in 2015 and surpassing nuclear power plants for the first time this year. But solar panels and wind turbines were still only able to meet 57 percent of the rise in electricity demand, leaving coal — the dirtiest-burning fossil fuel — to provide the rest.

A CLEAN POWER SECTOR IS ONE OF THE MOST CRUCIAL STEPS

A clean power sector is one of the most crucial steps to achieving global climate goals. Countries are working together under the framework of the Paris climate agreement to limit global warming to about 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures, which could significantly limit the damage we’re already beginning to see as a result of climate change.

Planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector need to fall by 57 percent this decade to meet that goal, regardless of a rise in electricity demand, according to a recent analysis by the International Energy Agency. Much of that reduction could come from completely cutting out coal — but the Ember analysis shows that the opposite is happening.

In the future, clean power grids could also translate to clean transportation, housing, and building sectors. All-electric vehicles, homes, and buildings are one way city planners and policymakers have sought to bring down greenhouse gas emissions. But the power sector has a long way to go to provide them all with carbon pollution-free energy.

During the height of the pandemic last year, carbon dioxide emissions fell across the board for electricity, transportation, and other energy-hungry industries. That clearly hasn’t been enough to stave off climate change-fueled disasters like worsening droughts, explosive wildfires, record-smashing heatwaves, and severe storms. Moving forward, CO2 cuts will have to come from intentional changes to how the world does business — not because a pandemic put things on pause.


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CO2 levels are at an all-time high — again


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Jagmeet Singh visits Laurentian University, decries lack of federal insolvency support

Federal NDP leader says schools like Laurentian are important to support culture, education in the north

Warren Schlote · CBC News · Posted: Aug 28, 2021 


NDP leader says if elected PM his government will forgive student debt and stop charging interest on student loans

Federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh visited the University of Sudbury Saturday morning for a campaign stop, criticizing the Liberal government for not doing more to support Laurentian University and promising to immediately remove the interest on federal student loans if elected.

An NDP press release said the party would also forgive up to $20,000 in student loan debt, double the amount of federal grants and not require graduates to repay the federal portion of their loans for five years.

The current federal grace period before repayment must start is six months after a student leaves school.

"In this pandemic, students have been really hard hit. And we want to make sure you know the New Democrats will be there for students," Singh said, announcing the plan on a terrace at the University of Sudbury, one of the federated schools at Laurentian University.

NDP promises to wipe out a lot of student debt as parties prepare for election

AUDIO New Democrats zoom in on Laurentian University and call for a moratorium on restructuring

'We need to be seen': Demonstrators protest devastating Laurentian University cuts

Singh said the Liberal government has earned $4 billion through student loan interest since taking power in 2015. A report on the Canada Student Loans Program in 2018-2019 cited $2.25 billion in federal interest revenue between 2016 and 2019.

The NDP announced its intention to waive student loan interest and forgive some debt in March of this year, well before the official campaign period began.

Jagmeet Singh promised at a Sudbury, Ont., campaign stop on Aug. 28 to forgive portions of federal student loans and eliminate interest on such financing.

 (Warren Schlote/CBC)

The 2021 budget passed by the current Parliament has already extended a pause on student and apprentice loan interest until March 31, 2023. The NDP pledge would make that move permanent.

Singh also said Laurentian University and its federated schools were crucial for the north, by helping northern students study closer to home. He said the current financial crisis at Laurentian and its federated universities might have been avoided if the Trudeau government "would have listened to the people who said, 'we want to save this university.'"
Competitive race for Sudbury riding

Many pundits cite the federal riding of Sudbury as one to watch this election, as the incumbent MP Paul Lefebvre has chosen not to run again. Vivian Lapointe is replacing him as the Liberal candidate.

Singh is the first federal leader to visit the riding this election. Sudbury NDP candidate Nadia Verrelli spoke first to introduce Singh and described the frustration she and her former Laurentian University colleagues felt when the university began restructuring.

Sudbury, Ont., resident Dan Scott attended the Aug. 28 event in support of Sudbury NDP candidate Nadia Verrelli. He said the NDP will get his support during the 2021 election. (Warren Schlote/CBC)

Verrelli said she did not feel support from the Liberal party as the crisis began, and she said NDP MPs forced an emergency debate in the House of Commons to demand action on the issue.

"It was the NDP that attended the SOS meetings and heard our stories. It was the NDP that worked with us and for us. And it will be the NDP that will continue to work for this community," she said.

Voter attends to support former colleague

Dan Scott of Sudbury, who works at Laurentian University, said he feels Verrelli brings a base of knowledge to her politics through her doctorate in political science. He said he would expect an NDP government to face fewer scandals than the many issues tied to the current Liberal government such as SNC-Lavalin and WE Charity.

"I have to believe that the NDP can do a better job of governing without taking those missteps and having a more honest relationship with Indigenous peoples, not taking them to court instead of giving them the benefits ... that they've won through previous court battles," he said.

Election day is Sept. 20, though there are advance poll dates and mail-in options available. Details are on the Elections Canada website.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Warren Schlote
Reporter
Warren Schlote is a reporter at CBC Sudbury. Connect with him via email at warren.schlote@cbc.ca, or on Twitter at @ReporterWarren.

Canada election: NDP puts Indigenous issues at forefront, attracts votes in the North

Aug 28, 2021

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh got a warm welcome when his campaign touched down in the northern Ontario riding of Kenora on Friday, where more than 40 per cent of voters are Indigenous. The visit was part of an effort by the New Democrats to campaign hard in Canada's northern regions, as the party tries to make gains with the Indigenous population critical to the vote. As David Akin reports, the party has already seen praise for putting Indigenous issues and leaders at the forefront of the election campaign.

Global News

 #CanadaElection #IndigenousIssues

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

What Links the Covaxin Scandal in Brazil and Kumbh Fake-Tests Scam in India?

30/08/2021

SHOBHAN SAXENA AND FLORENCIA COSTA

Francisco Maximiano, the president of Precisa Medicamentos, in front of the Senate panel, August 2021. Photo: Pedro França/Agência Senado

Brazil’s investigation into the Covaxin deal revealed that an MoU between Bharat Biotech and Precisa Medicamentos involved a third company: Envixia.

A supply agreement for Covaxin specifies a CIN for Envixia that is identical to that of an Indian firm owned by Anudesh Goyal.

The agreement reads like a rush job with no regard for good language, and it reveals a lot about Covaxingate.

Sao Paulo:In the very first agreement signed for initiating the process of exporting 20 million doses of Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin to Brazil, a middleman selected by the Hyderabad-based vaccine manufacturer used the unique corporate identification number of his Indian company even though the $300 million deal was meant to be with his UAE-registered entity.


Signed on November 10, 2020, the five-page “supply agreement” between Precisa Medicamentos of Brazil and Envixia – an offshore firm which claims it is registered in a free zone area of the United Arab Emirates – mentioned incorrect registration numbers for both the companies. It is also replete with glaring spelling and grammatical errors, just as in the two invoices raised by Madison Biotech of Singapore, which is another offshore firm under the scanner in the scandal known here as “Covaxingate”.

The deal is the subject of a probe by a parliamentary commission of inquiry (CPI) in Brazil.

The November 2020 pact was the initial step towards negotiations for the export of the Indian vaccine to Brazil’s ministry of health. Though Bharat Biotech was not a party to the agreement, it signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the two firms involved just 14 days later, based on the terms in the pact, for selling its high-priced vaccine to Brazil.

In the opening clause of the agreement between the Brazilian company and Envixia, which is introduced as an “authorized distributer (sic) of Bharat Biotech International Limited”, the registration number of Precisa Medicamentos, Ltd., “a company incorporate (sic) under the laws of Brazil”, is mentioned as “SP-CEP: 06696-069”. This number is actually the postal code of Avenida Portugal in São Paulo, where an office of the company is located. It does not match the company’s registration number issued by the Federal Revenue department of Brazil.

In the case of Envixia, the agreement included a false identity, which actually reveals more about the company and its involvement in another scam in India.

As per the agreement, Envixia is a company in Dubai. But a registration number given for it is actually the corporate identification number (CIN) issued by the Registrar of Companies (RoC), Gwalior, for Invex Health Private Limited – a firm headquartered in Neemuch, Madhya Pradesh, with another office in Thane, Mumbai.


In the supply agreement, which The Wire has seen, Envixia is described as a company “based out in Dubai (sic) and its associates” which are represented “through Anudesh Goyal (Director)”. A registration number for the company is specified as “U24290MP2018PTC047309”. This is the CIN of the Indian firm owned by Anudesh Goyal – who has been questioned in the Kumbh Mela fake tests scandal. The name and address of Invex Health doesn’t figure anywhere in the poorly-drafted agreement, which has two different spellings – “Envixia” and “Envexia” – for the Dubai firm throughout the contract.In the opening clause of the supply agreement, the registration numbers used for both the companies are incorrect and misleading.PIN IT

As both companies failed to respond to The Wire’s queries about the supply agreement, it is not clear who drafted the document, which looks like a rush job with little regard for language. Yet, it reveals a lot about the scandal.

As part of its ongoing investigation into Covaxingate, The Wire had reported in July that Envixia could be a firm that probably doesn’t exist, and that Anudesh Goyal, who signed the MoU with Bharat Biotech, could be the same person who brokered the Kumbh Mela testing contracts, now being investigated by the Uttarakhand police. The Covaxin supply agreement, where the Envixia director used the Indian CIN instead of the business license issued by Dubai authorities, now establishes a link between the vaccine scandal in Brazil and the fake-tests scam in India.

Also read:

The CIN of a company is a 21-digit alphanumerical code that the RoC issues in different Indian states. The number is valid only for companies in India and can be used to check the status of a business entity on the master-data section of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs’ website. Per Union ministry data, the CIN mentioned in the Covaxin agreement was issued by the RoC of Gwalior to Invex Health, which has two directors: Anudesh Goyal and Neha Goyal. Till date, Anudesh Goyal had neither confirmed nor denied that he was the same person whose name appears in two different scandals. Bharat Biotech has not explained its relationship with Envixia and Anudesh Goyal either.

Multiple sources in Brazil and India have confirmed to The Wire that Goyal was present in several meetings between the three firms at Hyderabad. But despite several queries, including about the supply agreement, Covaxin manufacturer Bharat Biotech has kept mum about its dealings with the UAE firm and its director.

The publicly available data on Ministry of Corporate Affairs’ website shows the registration number used in the agreement belongs to Invex Health, whose director is Anudesh Goyal.PIN IT

An uneasy silence


Anudesh Goyal’s name popped up the first time in Brazil’s investigation into the Covaxin deal in July 2021, when it was revealed that the MoU between Bharat Biotech and Precisa Medicamentos, signed on November 24, 2020, had a third company in the middle: Envixia, with an office purportedly in the International Free Zone Authority of Fujairah, an emirate of the UAE. But the supply agreement, first obtained by O Globo newspaper, pushed the timeline of the case back by at least two weeks. It also revealed that the Dubai firm and Anudesh Goyal were key players in the proposed export of vaccine doses to Brazil.


Envixia, according to the agreement, was to receive payment for the vaccines directly from Brazil’s ministry of health, in Dubai – a known tax haven – and pass on a commission to Precisa Medicamentos. This is an extremely important revelation: the MoU and the main contract, signed later on February 23, 2021, are silent about the payment to the Brazilian firm. The Wire emailed both Anudesh Goyal and Precisa Medicamentos about the terms and conditions of their agreement, but they haven’t elicited responses yet.

In the supply agreement, signed by Goyal for Envixia and Francisco Maximiano for Precisa Medicamentos, the payment conditions had been put in black and white prior to the MoU’s signing with Bharat Biotech. Annexure I of the agreement says the Indian firm will raise an invoice with Envixia, which in turn will send an invoice to Brazil’s ministry of health.

“Envixia will pay Precisa’s commision (sic) after receipt of full payment from MOH [Brazil’s ministry of health],” the payment clause says. It is written in such jarring English that even the names of Covaxin and the Guarulhos Airport in São Paulo have been misspelt. The agreement also provided for a refundable advance payment, of $1 million, from Precisa Medicamentos to Envixia.

Also read:

From the time Envixia entered the picture in the vaccine scandal, its details have been rather sketchy. Now, the revelations in the supply agreement raise more doubts about the company’s existence. The supply agreement specifies Envixia as a Dubai-based firm – but the MoU lists the address of Envixia Pharmaceuticals LLC as “Kidnah, Block A, Plot 4, Fujairah, UAE”. This is actually the address of the International Free Zone Authority in Fujairah, which is not a part of Dubai. In the supply agreement, Goyal is mentioned as the director of Envixia, but in the MoU, his designation is general manager at the same company. The copy of the MoU submitted to the Brazilian ministry lacks the Fujairah registration number and the Envixia company stamp. It is now part of a folio of documents being examined by the Senate panel.

The timeline of the supply agreement and MoU and details about the roles of the three companies suggest that the Dubai firm was a key player in the deal from the beginning. The agreement signed on November 10, 2020, clearly suggests Envixia was scouting clients for Bharat Biotech International Limited (BBIL) – which was in the process of developing and selling its COVID-19 vaccine, Covaxin, around the world. “Envexia (sic) contacted Precisa for registration and distribution of their BBIL vaccines for Private and Government requirement in Brazil,” says clause #5 of the agreement. “Precisa [Medicamentos] agreed and willing to join hand (sic) for this business opportunity,” the next point goes.

The supply agreement’s signing was followed by a meeting at the ministry of health on November 20, 2020, joined in by three senior executives of Precisa Medicamentos, including Maximiano, and the top brass of the Indian firm. Four days later, on November 24, 2020, the tripartite MoU was signed by Maximiano, Goyal and V. Krishna Mohan, who was signing on behalf of Bharat Biotech. The MoU assigned five roles to the Brazilian firm, including “import and distribute the Covid-19 vaccine for both private sector and public sector”. For Envixia, the pact specified just one role: “Provide support for all activities related to registering and commercialising BBIL’s Covid-19 vaccine in Brazil”.

A dubious contract



As the supply agreement, followed by the MoU, mandated two firms – Precisa Medicamentos and Envixia – with handling the Brazil deal, independent observers have been raising serious questions about the legality of the $300-million contract, signed in Brasilia. Last week, Senator Simone Tebet, one of the main parliamentary committee investigators, questioned the legitimacy of Precisa Medicamentos as a representative of Bharat Biotech. In the MoU, Senator Tebet said, it was clear the Brazilian firm was “a mere importer and exclusive distributor” of Covaxin but not the only representative. “The company represents Bharat [Biotech] in some activities, but signing the contract is not among the roles assigned to it,” said Senator Tebet at a hearing. “Why was Precisa Medicamentos not authorised to sign the contract [by Bharat Biotech]?” she asked – alleging that the Brazilian firm had submitted forged documents to make itself eligible for signing the multi-million-dollar contract.

The Brazilian firm had submitted the MoU to the ministry of health as proof of its partnership with Bharat Biotech – but it had also produced a “power of attorney” from the Indian firm that allowed it to sign the contract as a representative of the Hyderabad-based firm. On July 23, the day Bharat Biotech terminated the MoU, the Indian vaccine-maker had accused its former partner of forging two important documents, including the power of attorney. An investigation by the Legislative Police at the CPI’s request has found evidence of “tampering and falsification” in the documents that Precisa Medicamentos delivered. Earlier, a probe into the documents’ authenticity, by the office of Comptroller General of Union, had reached the same conclusion without specifying who actually committed the forgery.

The payment clause, which is full of glaring spelling mistakes, reveals how the Dubai firm was to be paid directly by the Brazilian ministry of health.PIN IT

Precisa Medicamentos has claimed that Anudesh Goyal had sent the two documents with the signature of V. Krishna Mohan, a director of Bharat Biotech. Based on a forensic probe by an expert that the company hired, Precisa accused Goyal of creating the documents. On August 19, at his Senate hearing, Francisco Maximiano stayed mostly silent as senators bombarded him with difficult questions. He opened his mouth only to accuse Envixia, whom he called an “intermediary of Bharat Biotech”, of forging the documents. “I went to India [in July] to present to them the evidence and proof that we received these documents from Envixia, a partner of theirs and selected for the process by them,” said Maximiano, whose testimony didn’t go down well with the Senators. They are going to summon him back to the commission, which is probing the conduct of President Jair Bolsonaro’s government during the pandemic, which has claimed more than 5.7 lakh lives in Brazil.

The Senate panel is planning to submit its report by September 16. With allegations of corruption in the deal stinging top officials, including Bolsonaro, the report is expected to unleash a political storm in Brazil. Although the Brazilian government has terminated the Covaxin contract, it is still the top priority for the CPI, which is looking at Covaxingate as a “grand scheme of corruption”.

With all the paperwork in the deal being probed for fraud, there is serious trouble ahead for the main players in Covaxingate.

Shobhan Saxena and Florencia Costa are independent journalists based in São Paulo, Brazil.

THE SCIENCES

How Do We Address Information Overload in the Scholarly Literature?

WITH OVERLOADED ARTICLE

29/08/2021

CHRISTINE FERGUSON AND MARTIN FENNER
Representative image of a library. Photo: Renaud Camus/Flickr CC BY 2.0

Information overload is a common and old problem but the growth of preprints in the last five years presents us with a proximal example of the challenge.

The scholarly communication community is in a stage of “publish first, filter later”.

While preprints are lowering the cost of and delays to sharing information, filtering for relevant content is still at a relatively early stage.

Information overload is the difficulty in understanding an issue and effectively making decisions when one has too much information about that issue, and is generally associated with the excessive quantity of daily information
Wikipedia


Information overload is a common problem, and it is an old problem. It is not a problem of the Internet age, and it is not specific to scholarly literature, but the growth of preprints in the last five years presents us with a proximal example of the challenge.

We want to tackle this information overload problem and have some ideas on how to do this – presented at the end of this post. Are you willing to help? This post tells some of the back story of how preprints solve part of the problem – speedy access to academic information – yet add to the growing information that we need to filter to find results that we can build on. It is written to inspire the problem solvers in our community to step forward and help us to realise some practical solutions.

Using journals to find relevant information

In a classic presentation in 2008, the writer Clay Shirky argued that while information overload might be a problem as old as the 15th century when the printing press was invented by Gutenberg, the rise of the Internet for the first time had radically changed how we address this problem. Publishing used to be expensive, complicated and therefore risky, and this was addressed by only publishing content that was selected by the publisher to be “worth publishing”. Scientific publishing worked – and still works – in similar ways. One important change occurred with the dramatic growth of scientific publishing after World War II, when filtering by staff editors became unsustainable, and external peer review by academic experts slowly became the norm from the 1960s to the 1990s (for example, Nature in 1973 and The Lancet in 1976).

Clay Shirky coined the phrase “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure” in his 2008 presentation and made the point that publishing in the Internet age has become so cheap that publication no longer needs to be the critical filtering step, rather that filtering can happen after publication. We can see this pattern in many mainstream industries, from movies to online shopping, with organisations such as Netflix and Amazon investing heavily in recommender systems that substantially contribute to their revenues.

Cameron Neylon applied these considerations to scholarly communication and found the scholarly communication community at an early stage in the transition to “publish first, filter later”. Ten years later, his findings for the most part still hold true, as scholarly discovery services still for the most part focus on publications that have gone through a “filter” step by a scholarly publisher.


Preprints: an alternative to the ‘journal as a filter’

Preprints are the most visible implementation of the “publish first, filter later” approach. Preprints in some disciplines, including high-energy physics, astrophysics, mathematics, and computer science, increasingly became the norm in the last 25 years, and currently the majority of high-energy physics papers are first published as preprints on the arXiv. In the life sciences, the preprints server E-Biomed was proposed by NIH director Harold Varmus in 1999, but the project was killed after a few months, not least because of strong and vocal opposition by biomedical publishers and societies. Instead, PubMed Central launched in 2000 to host open access journal publications instead of preprints. After a delay of more than 15 years, preprints in the life sciences finally took off, and although they have grown considerably in number in the last five years, preprints still only represent a small fraction (6.4% in Figure 1) of all publications in biology:

Figure 1. Yearly preprints/all-papers in Microsoft Academic Graph, trend by domain, reproduced from Xie B, Shen Z, and Wang K 2021.PIN IT

The notion of “publish first, filter later” is now being promoted by a range of publishers who no longer penalise authors for publicising their submissions as preprints, but rather encourage submitting authors to post their manuscripts as preprints whilst these are being put through peer review by the journal. Some publishers are even more wedded to preprints as the publication of the future.

Coming back to the original problem, preprints now add to the journal articles that researchers are tasked with filtering. That information overload poses a problem was recognised in a survey of stakeholders (such as librarians, journalists, publishers, funders, research administrators, students, clinicians, and more) conducted last year by ASAPbio. The problem is exacerbated given the number of servers hosting relevant preprints – ASAPbio’s preprint platform directory lists 56 preprint servers that host potentially relevant material.

Filtering for relevant content

While preprints in general, and specifically in the life sciences, are lowering the cost of and delays to sharing information, filtering for relevant content is still at a relatively early stage. To go deeper into the details of how relevant preprints can be discovered, it is important to make the important distinction between
Discovering relevant preprints at any point in time independent of peer review status
Discovering relevant preprints that have undergone peer review
Discovering relevant preprints immediately (days) after posting

The first category includes discovery services that also include preprints as part of their content, including for example Europe PMC and Meta. Discovery strategies relevant for journal content can also be applied to preprints, e.g. search by keyword and/or author.

The second category focuses on peer-reviewed preprints, and is covered extensively elsewhere.


The third category is the focus of this post – discovery of relevant preprints of interest to a researcher right after their posting, which rules out traditional peer review. The following filter strategies are possible:
Filter by subject area, keyword or author name
Filter by personal publication history
Filter by attention immediately after publication: social media (Twitter, Mendeley, etc.) and usage stats

Filter by recommendations, e.g. from subject matter experts

These filters can of course also be combined. The particular challenge is that they must work almost immediately (within days) after the preprint has been posted. This assumes a high level of automation, and a focus on immediacy. A combination of filters 1 and 3 works well with this approach: the information required for filter 1 is available in the metadata (e.g. via Crossref) when the content is posted, and attention (filter 3) can be determined immediately after the preprint is posted – Twitter is widely used for sharing links to bioRxiv/medRxiv preprints, see examples in Figure 2. The Crossref Event Data service found 15,598 tweets for bioRxiv/medRxiv preprints the week starting June 7, 2021.

For filter 3, we’ve considered ‘bookmarking preprints in Mendeley’ but these cannot currently be tracked in open APIs such as the Crossref Event Data service. Usage stats are another alternative, but are currently not available via API in the early days after publication.

Another consideration is how to best inform researchers of these potentially relevant preprints. Given that cost and speed are the primary concerns, we consider the most appropriate approach to be dissemination of these filtering results via a regular (daily or weekly) RSS feed or newsletter.

In summary, realising a list of biomedical preprints that have been filtered by a minimal number of tweets in the days after posting, and broken down by subject area, is a good initial filtering strategy to identify relevant preprints immediately after they have been posted. Interested researchers can access a filtered corpus via newsletter.

Existing efforts that track discovery of relevant preprints right after their posting

A few examples

PreprintBot – new this year, “a bot that tweets preprints and comments from BioRxiv and MedRxiv”
PromPreprint – this has been running for a while; “A bot tweeting @biorxivpreprint publications reaching the top 10% Altmetric score within their first month after publication”
http://arxiv-sanity.com/toptwtr – this started as a new way to list all arXiv preprints, but they added social media data at some point
https://scirate.com – a free and open access scientific collaboration network that allows users to follow arXiv.org categories and see the highest ranked new papers
https://rxivist.org – a free and open website that enables users to identify preprints from bioRxiv and medRxiv based on download count or mentions on Twitter. One can, for example, pick the most tweeted preprints in the last 7 days – and this presents a list of preprints that may have been posted at any point since the servers began.

Our strategy for filtering life science preprints builds on these existing efforts but picks up only those preprints posted in the past week that have received tweets and proposes to use a newsletter as the primary communication channel. We propose to run this newsletter as a community experiment, where we iterate over the implementation based on researcher feedback on how helpful the newsletter is in addressing information overload. Other considerations: Can we focus more on who is tweeting rather than the number of tweets, or should we add an element of human curation? Can we filter life science preprints from additional servers?

Call to action

If you want to help to tackle the information overload problem in the life sciences then leave a comment below or DM us. If enough folk are interested in working with us, we could generate a community group under the auspices of ASAPbio to work on information overload.

This article was first published on ASAPbio.