[YEDG] 22 of DEC. Sunday Discussion,,,
박주하
hey everyone!
I attached 3 articles here. I hope to see you all this Sunday at JK coffee, our new venue.
See you then!
Serena,
Alcohol pricing
Mulled whines
People are drinking less but doing so more harmfully. Policymakers want higher prices—causing a headache for the booze industry
BY DAY tourists flock to Plaza de España in central Madrid to snap photos beside the sculpture of Miguel de Cervantes, author of “Don Quixote”. By night a newer facet of Spanish culture is on display: loitering groups of young people downing plastic bottles of whisky and vodka mixed with Fanta Lemon. The ground is littered with empties. Nearby, three young men help a friend vomiting on the pavement.
Such carousing was once rare in Spain. A Mediterranean drinking culture prevailed in which alcohol was taken only with food. That is changing. In Spain and many other rich countries, alcohol intake is becoming a bigger problem—for some groups. Overall, the global consumption of alcohol has been stable since 1990, according to the World Health Organisation. Around half of the planet’s population is teetotal. But those who drink alcohol do so more hazardously. Policymakers are looking for ways to address this. A new and much-watched experiment in Scotland, for example, involves setting a minimum price for each unit of alcohol.
Individual consumption peaked in Spain in 1975 but young people are increasingly indulging in the botellón, (literally “big bottle”): drinking outdoors to get drunk. In France, another country with traditionally moderate drinking patterns, a similar trend is emerging. In the past three years hospital admissions from alcohol abuse have risen 30% there, to 400,000 a year. Bingeing is so common that in July it gained an official name,beuverie express. Across much of the rich world, many people (not just the young) are drinking greater quantities in a single session.
Responsible drinkers pose little risk to others. But the growth in hazardous drinking habits has far-reaching implications. Deaths from the overuse of alcohol rose from 750,000 in 1990 to 2.5m in 2011, nearly 4% of all fatalities worldwide. Alcohol causes long-term ill-health, but even a single binge can end in hospital: in Britain, for example, such admissions doubled in 2003-10. It is not only drunks who suffer from their excess. Booze contributes to a third of all deaths on Europe’s roads each year and stokes abuse and violence. It features in almost all public-order offences in Ireland; up to 80% of Australian police work is alcohol- and drug-related; across the European Union, it is linked to 65% of domestic violence and 40% of murders. When lower output and higher social costs are taken into account, alcohol costs Europe and America hundreds of billions a year, up to 1.5% of GDP by some estimates.
The industry has introduced some modest schemes to encourage responsible drinking. Governments have stepped up education campaigns; most restrict the sale of alcohol in some regard, by licensing premises, setting opening hours and banning purchases by children. But all that is largely outweighed by another factor: health campaigners say that in many countries booze is simply too cheap.
Increasingly alcohol is drunk at home, rather than in bars or restaurants, and is often deeply discounted. In Britain and Ireland supermarkets frequently sell drinks at or below cost, to lure in customers: cheap strong cider means a Scotsman can reach his recommended weekly drinking limit of 21 units (210ml of pure alcohol)for just £4.62 ($7.50); an Irishwoman can buy her 14 units for €6.30 ($8.70). The trend is spreading. Walmart, an American chain, recently started selling beer almost at cost.
The cheaper the liquor, the more people drink. That is not just bar-room wisdom. A 2009 paper in Addiction, a public health journal, reviewed 112 distinct studies of changes in alcohol taxes and found an unambiguous link. This suggested that a 10% price rise in prices would cut consumption by around 5%.
Two groups are particularly price sensitive. Heavy drinkers tend to trade down and seek out cheaper booze to maintain their intake. They drink at home and are likely to die early of alcohol-related illness. Such topers account for a large share of consumption: in Scotland 80% of alcohol is drunk by 30% of boozers. A second category is young and underage merrymakers who often have low or minimal income. They cannot afford to drink as much when prices rise.
Most government initiatives on prices have been tentative. In 1998 Germany introduced a so-called “apple-juice law”: in places where booze is consumed, at least one alcohol-free beverage must cost less than the cheapest alcoholic one. This does not deal with domestic consumption, though, which accounts for most hazardous drinking. In 2014 Britain will introduce a ban on selling alcohol at below cost price, but this will affect less than 1% of all booze on sale, according to the Sheffield Alcohol Research Group, a British academic consortium. Alcohol duties in some tax-thirsty European countries have been rising for a decade but wine and cider are both taxed by volume, not just strength. That means a sweet wine with 6% alcohol bears the same tax as a riesling with 10%.
More convincing are the efforts of several Canadian provinces, which have a floor price for a unit of each type of alcohol: the stronger a drink, the more it costs. When this policy was introduced in British Columbia in 2002, with an average 10% price increase, an immediate, substantial and significant reduction in wholly alcohol-attributable deaths followed, says Tim Stockwell of the province’s University of Victoria. The longer-term effect is striking too. Over the 2002-09 period, figures show a 32% drop in such deaths. In Saskatchewan a similar price rise in 2010 was associated with an 8.4% drop in drinking.
Scotland is raising the bar. In May 2012 its devolved parliament passed an ambitious bill to introduce a minimum unit price of 50p. This would affect the price of 60% of booze on sale: a 70cl bottle of Tesco Value Vodka would rise by around £4.50, to around £13, but classy Smirnoff by only 13p, according to Scottish government calculations. The Scotch Whisky Association (SWA), a trade body, has challenged the legislation, which was due to come into force in 2013. It would breach European law and could affect exports, says its spokeswoman, Rosemary Gallagher. The SWA lost the case in Scotland’s highest civil court, but its appeal will be heard in February. If it loses again, it may appeal to London or to Europe.
Five continental wine-producing nations have joined the fight against Scotland’s law. Bulgaria, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain say it is illegal and could hurt their own drinks industries. Cheap plonk (mostly foreign) would suffer more than pricey whisky (mostly domestic), they say.
What happens in Scotland will affect policy elsewhere; other governments are watching the legal battle with interest. One house of the Swiss parliament has already voted for a minimum price though the other voted against. New Zealand is considering a bill. The British government pulled back from an earlier plan to introduce a nationwide floor price but may reconsider its policy if Scotland’s proves successful; some English councils are trying to introduce minimum pricing rules locally. The Irish cabinet is discussing a similar notion but awaits the Scots’ verdict.
For all their reputation as a nation of soaks, Scots actually constitute a small market. The SWA says its big concern is other countries introducing similar bills if the Scottish legislation goes ahead. The real fear is of “contagion”, agrees Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine: “Scotland shows Europe what is possible.” Just as bans on indoor smoking spread rapidly from country to country, the Scottish decision on the price of booze could raise drink prices all over the world. A sobering thought in the festive season.
Congressional NSA critics: review panel report gives 'momentum' for reform
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/19/nsa-critics-white-house-report-momentum-reform
Though critics concerned that panel did not adequately address how long telecoms ought to hold NSA’s desired call data
The chief congressional critics of the US National Security Agency said Thursday that a White House review panel report gave them momentum to end bulk domestic surveillance, but expressed reservations about one of the panel’s central proposals.
In an indication of the changing political landscape for the NSA, Representative James Sensenbrenner, the chief House sponsor of a bill preventing the agency from collecting US domestic phone data, said Thursday that “President Obama’s hand-picked panel” highlighted “the need to enact the USA Freedom Act.
But Sensenbrenner, in an interview with the Guardian, was wary of its recommendation that phone companies or other private parties should store communications data for the NSA to search.
"The administration has not yet made the case that increased data retention is necessary, but I welcome any proposals that serve our national security interests without undermining constitutional rights” Sensenbrenner said.
The report by the review group, released Wednesday afternoon, has been greeted warmly by skeptics of mass surveillance, particularly for its recommendations to add privacy advocates at the secret Fisa Court and for endorsing greater use of data encryption.
But as the review group’s recommendations help reshape the debate over bulk surveillance, all sides are girding for a fight over the extent to which any entity ought to hold Americans’ data – a fight likely to determine whether bulk domestic surveillance ends, or continues in a new form.
In line with the USA Freedom Act, the review group rejected a need for the government to hold citizens’ data in bulk, and held out as a solution the ability of the government “to obtain specific information relating to specific individuals or specific terrorist threats” when it can demonstrate to the secret surveillance court “that it has reasonable grounds to access such information.”
But the review group had less to say about a crucial detail: how long the telecoms ought to hold the NSA’s desired call data. It urged the government and the companies to “agree on a voluntary system” and relegated to a footnote a suggestion that two years would be the maximum appropriate period of time to hold the data.
Civil liberties groups who back the USA Freedom Act’s flat prohibition on bulk domestic phone data collection flatly rejected having the phone companies or other “private parties” hold the data for NSA to query.
Alexander Abdo of the ACLU said it would “simply repackage the bulk collection under private control.” Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said it was “still heinous, even if private company servers are holding the data instead of government data centers.” Kevin Bankston of the Open Technology Institute said it would amount to “bulk collection by proxy.”
For its part, the NSA has been publicly hinting for months that as long as the surveillance agency maintains access to a comprehensive database of domestic phone call information going back three to five years, it can live with that database existing outside of the NSA’s Fort Meade campus.
"I would love to give this hornet’s nest to someone else, to say ‘You get stung by this,’” General Keith Alexander, the outgoing director of the NSA, said in October. “But don’t drop it, because that’s our country, and if you do drop it, the chance that a terrorist attack gets through increases.”
On Capitol Hill, where fallout from the review group is unsettled as aides slogged through a lengthy report, pro-reform officials noted that the review group did not endorse the NSA’s call for years.
Now that both a federal judge, Richard Leon, and the review group have both doubted the necessity of bulk collection for stopping terrorist attacks, they argued that the NSA will have difficulty arguing that the companies ought to be required to store the data for as long as the agency wants, especially since the phone companies have not shown enthusiasm for the proposal.
Reform advocates, who have embraced the review group as a political success, were cautious about embracing the telecom-based proposal as a solution for bulk surveillance.
Senator Patrick Leahy, Sensenbrenner’s chief partner in the upper legislative chamber, said that he would hold a hearing in January with the review group to further assess its recommendations.
Senator Ron Wyden, a member of the intelligence committee who said the report in general provided “substantial, meaningful reforms,” indicated on Wednesday that he had concerns about having the companies hold the phone data for the NSA.
“Obviously, there’s going to be a lot of technical issues associated with telecoms having the information,” Wyden told the Guardian in an interview. “That’s going to take some time to work through.”
What the telecoms, NSA and privacy advocates agree on is that requiring the phone companies to hold the data is a complicated process, technologically and otherwise.
Currently, the phone companies typically store customer data for 18 months. The NSA wants the information kept for at least three years and ideally five, ostensibly to detect domestic communications pattern to known terrorist groups. Legislation would be necessary to compel the companies to store the data longer – which is both expensive and raises concerns about keeping the data secure.
The telecoms “would fight tooth and nail” against such a requirement, said a congressional aide, “unless there’s compensations.”
Companies as well keep their data in different file formats, complicating the ability for comprehensive and rapid searches. So far, the telecos have not embraced the proposal.
“A practical concern is that when you start saying you have to keep all this data, you open it up for access to divorce cases and down the line, everyone’s going to want a bite at the apple,” said Ross Schulman, a lobbyist with the Computer and Communications Industry Association.
At the same time, a powerful opponent of the USA Freedom Act, the chairman of the House intelligence committee, worried on Thursday that the review group might weaken US intelligence efforts.
“Though I am still studying the details, I have serious concerns with some of the report’s 46 recommendations,” said Rep. Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican, former FBI agent and staunch advocate of the NSA’s bulk collection.
"Any intelligence collection reforms must be careful to preserve important national security capabilities. I look forward to working with my colleagues in the Congress to enact meaningful reforms in the near future.”
Senator Dianne Feinstein, Rogers’ counterpart in the Senate, has yet to respond to the review group’s proposals. Feinstein, a California Democrat, is backing an alternative to the USA Freedom Act that would bolster the NSA’s powers to store communications data. Its prospects are less clear in the Senate now that the White House’s surveillance review panel rejected its major rationale.
The USA Freedom Act claims 132 co-sponsors in the House and Senate combined, a quarter of the Congress. Obama has yet to commit to either supporting or opposing it.
“The report sent over by the White House reaffirms what many of my colleagues and I have been saying since June – the NSA has gone too far,” Sensenbrenner said.
“All three branches of government have now said it is time to stop indiscriminately vacuuming up the data of innocent Americans. The report also agrees that the NSA’s bulk collection has come at a high cost to privacy without improving national security.”
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/19/obama-nsa-review-britain-debate-possible
Obama's NSA review gives the lie to Britain's timid platitudes: a debate is possible
What a relief. It is, after all, possible to discuss the operations of modern intelligence agencies without having to prove one's patriotism, be turned over by the police, summoned by politicians or visited by state-employed technicians with instructions to smash up one's computers.
The 300-page report into the Guardian's revelations about the US National Security Agency commissioned by President Obama and published this week is wide-ranging, informed and thoughtful. It leaps beyond the timid privacy-versus-national security platitudes which have stifled so much of the debate in the UK. It doesn't blame journalism for dragging the subject into the open: it celebrates it.
The five authors of the report are not hand-wringing liberals. They number one former CIA deputy director; a counter-terrorism adviser to George W Bush and his father; two former White House advisers; and a former dean of the Chicago law school. Not what the British prime minister would call "airy-fairy lah-di-dah" types.
Six months ago the British cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, was in the Guardian's London office telling us there had been "enough" debate on the matter of what intelligence agencies got up to. But here are Obama's experts revelling in the debate; exploring the tensions between privacy and national security, yes – but going much further, discussing cryptology; civil liberties; the right of citizens and governments to be informed; relationships with other countries; and the potential damage that unconstrained espionage can cause to trade, commerce and the digital economy.
Only 10 weeks ago British spy chiefs were doing their best to ventilate their "cease and desist" rhetoric on journalists – implying they had no right to venture into their territory. A distinguished former editor wrote a rather shameful article wholeheartedly agreeing: "If MI5 warns that this is not in the public interest," ran the headline, "who am I to disbelieve them?"
Obama's panel of experts profoundly disagree: "It will not do for the press to be fearful, intimidated or cowed by government officials," they write. "If they are, it is 'We the People' who will suffer. Part of the responsibility of our free press is to ferret out and expose information that government officials would prefer to keep secret when such secrecy is unwarranted."
And so – informed initially by journalism, not by anything that congressional oversight or the courts have brought into the open – Obama's panel set down to write a report which calls for more than 40 changes in the way the NSA collects, stores and analyses information; how it deals more openly with Congress, the courts and the public; and how it relates to tech companies, foreign governments and the internet itself.
The report followed on from two other notable consequences – this week alone – from the reporting of the Guardian and others of material leaked by Edward Snowden.
On Monday, a federal judge ruled that the NSA's intrusions into private lives using"almost-Orwellian technology" were almost certainly unconstitutional. Judge Richard Leon said: "I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary invasion' than this systematic and hi-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen." On Tuesday, Obama met the chief executives of some of the biggest tech companies in the world, alarmed at the potential damage to their companies by the revelations of the extent to which the NSA was exploiting – and even weakening – their platforms and software.
To this litany of intelligence matters brought into the light by dogged journalists (and lawyers – and a tiny number of MPs, including Andrew Tyrie) one could add yesterday's Gibson report, which confirmed there are many troubling questions – much reported on by the Guardian's Ian Cobain – about the rendition and torture of terrorism suspects.
The cabinet secretary could not, in other words, have been more wrong. Far from there having been "enough" debate, the debate has just begun. It has been raging around Europe and much of the rest of the world – in parliaments, the press and among the people.
It is certain that Leon will not be the only judge to be weighing up these matters: there are numerous lawsuits coming down the slipway in the US, Britain and Europe. In Congress there are no fewer than three bills aimed at reforming the scope and behaviour of the NSA, one of them drafted by three members of the senate committee which oversees the intelligence agencies. The author of the Patriot Act, Jim Sensenbrenner, is among those appalled to see the uses to which the agencies put the legislation he designed.
In the UK the picture has been rather different. Westminster, the BBC and much of the press have shown little appetite in examining or discussing the Snowden revelations, a state of affairs that has certainly suited a nervous Whitehall and Downing Street.
But just as the Snowden documents have shown the umbilical links between the US and UK intelligence agencies, so it will be impossible for Congress and Obama to discuss and reform the NSA without it impacting on the workings of GCHQ, MI5 and MI6.
At present everything is being loaded on the plate of the modestly resourced intelligence and security committee, chaired by Sir Malcolm Rifkind. To Rifkind it now falls to complete the investigation into rendition and torture. His committee must, single-handedly, annually audit the £2bn workings of the three UK agencies. And he must also head up his own mini-version of what the Obama review panel has just published. The ISC will, in the course of this, mark its own homework by considering the effectiveness of … the ISC.
In contrast with their American counterparts on the senate oversight committee, not a single member of the ISC has yet murmured any significant disquiet about the existing arrangements for oversight, nor the workings, legal framework or behaviour of the UK agencies. It will be interesting to see if they come up with anything as imaginative as Obama's panel – a special presidential adviser on privacy, for example, or the establishment of a civil liberties and privacy protection board.
This muted debate about our liberties – and the rather obvious attempts to inhibit, if not actually intimidate, newspapers – have puzzled Americans, Europeans and others who were brought up to regard the UK as being the cradle of free speech and an unfettered press. In a 1935 essay, Liberty in England, EM Forster wrote: "The fact that our rulerspretend to like freedom is an advantage." But he also wrote about the "psychological censorship [rather than the exercise of the law] which impairs the human heritage".
It remains to be seen whether Obama endorses his panel's (not especially radical) recommendations. But it is, as I say, a relief to see these things openly discussed.
jiyoen park
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