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	Colin Powell: Close Guantanamo Now by Washington Post & agencies   10 June 2007   This morning on NBC"s Meet the Press, Gen. Colin Powell strongly condemned the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, calling it "a major problem for America"s perception" and charging, "if it was up to me, I would close Guantanamo - not tomorrow, this afternoon."   He also called for an end to the military commission system the Bush administration has created to try Guantanamo detainees. "I would simply move them to the United States and put them into our federal legal system," Powell said. He scoffed at criticism that the detainees would have access to lawyers and the writ of habeas corpus: "So what? Let them. Isn"t that what our system"s all about?"   "Every morning I pick up a paper and some authoritarian figure, some person somewhere, is using Guantanamo to hide their own misdeeds," Powell said. We have shaken the belief that the world had in America"s justice system by keeping a place like Guantanamo open… We don"t need it, and it"s causing us far more damage than any good we get for it."   Powell also sounded off on conservatives, including Vice President Cheney, who oppose diplomacy with Syria and Iran, calling their view "short-sighted." Powell endorsed direct talks "not to solve a particular problem or crisis of the moment or the day, but just to have dialogue with people who are involved in this region in so many ways." Visit the related web page
	Nigeria sues Pfizer over child deaths by Joe Stephens Washington Post Nigeria   Washington. May 31, 2007   Nigerian officials have laid criminal charges against pharmaceutical giant Pfizer for its alleged role in the deaths of children who received an unapproved drug in a meningitis epidemic.   Authorities in Kano, Nigeria''s biggest state, filed eight charges this month related to the 1996 clinical trial, including counts of criminal conspiracy and voluntarily causing grievous harm.   They filed a civil lawsuit seeking more than $US2 billion ($A2.44 billion) in damages and restitution from Pfizer.   The move is a rare instance in which the developing world''s anger at multinational drug companies has boiled over into criminal charges. It stems from the clinical trial 10 years ago.   The Government alleges that Pfizer researchers chose 200 children from crowds at a makeshift epidemic camp in Kano and gave about half the untested antibiotic Trovan. Researchers gave the other children what the lawsuit described as a dangerously low dose of a comparison drug made by Hoffman-Laroche.   Officials said Pfizer''s actions resulted in the deaths of several children and left others deaf, paralysed, blind or brain-damaged.   The lawsuit said the researchers did not obtain consent from the children''s families, and knew Trovan to be an experimental drug that was unfit for human use. Parents were banned from the drug trial ward, and the company left no medical records in Nigeria.   It said Pfizer and its doctors behaved "in a manner so rash and negligent as to endanger human life".   Pfizer records obtained by The Washington Post showed five children died after being treated with Trovan, but there was no indication it was responsible for the deaths. Six children died while taking the comparison drug.   Suspicion stirred by news of the drug trial had been so intense in Kano, the lawsuit said, that parents last year refused to allow their children to be immunised against polio.   Pfizer said it believed it did nothing wrong, and children with meningitis had a high fatality rate. "It is indeed regrettable that, more than a decade after the meningitis epidemic in Kano, the Nigerian Government has taken legal action against Pfizer and others for an effort that provided significant benefit to some of Nigeria''s youngest citizens," it said.   "Pfizer continues to emphasise … that the 1996 Trovan clinical study was conducted with the full knowledge of the Nigerian Government and in a responsible and ethical way consistent with the company''s abiding commitment to patient safety. Any allegations in these lawsuits to the contrary are simply untrue".   The charges carry jail terms of up to seven years.
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