Author: James Love

After attending the three day WTO Ministerial meeting in Geneva, I took the non-stop United Airlines Flight back to Washington, DC. On the airplane were a number of U.S. government officials including the head of USTR, Ambassador Ron Kirk. I had a chance to talk to Kirk about the secrecy of the ACTA agreement. He said the ACTA text would be made public, “when it is finished.” I told him it that was too late, and the public wanted the text out now, before it is too late to influence anything.

Continue Reading →

Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VI) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) have written to USTR, asking that the ACTA text be made public. The strongly worded letter was sent to Ambassador Ron Kirk, the head of the United States Trade Representative, an office of the White House.

The letter states:
Continue Reading →

As the U.S. considers health reform legislation, it is useful to review how countries rank in terms of life expectancy at birth.

From the 2009 UNDP Human Development Report statistical appendix:

Continue Reading →

On September 11, 2009, KEI submitted a FOIA request for the daily calendar of USTR head Ambassador Ron Kirk. On Friday afternoon, November 6, 2009, we received a response to that FOIA. This complements our earlier FOIA which covered his calendar from March 20 to May 1, 2009.

Continue Reading →

November 9, 2009

Senator Patrick Leahy, Chairman
Senator Jeff Sessions, Ranking Member
Senate Judiciary Committee

Senator Max Baucus, Chairman
Senator Chuck Grassley, Ranking Member
Senate Finance Committee

Representative John Conyers, Chairman
Representative Lamar Smith, Ranking Member
House Committee on the Judiciary

Representative Henry Waxman, Chairman,
Representative Joe Barton, Ranking Member
House Committee on Energy and Commerce

Representative Charles Rangel, Chairman
Representative Dave Camp, Ranking Member
House Committee on Ways and Means

Continue Reading →

ACTA is a beefed up version of the WTO TRIPS enforcement sections, without the balance and safeguards of the agreement as whole.

1. The ACTA has ignored or left out the safeguards in TRIPS Articles 1, 6, 7, 8, 40 and 44.2.
2. The ACTA has refashioned in a more restrictive and anti-consumer way Articles 41, 44.1, 45, 46,47, 50, most of Section 4, and Article 61.

Continue Reading →

KEI was asked to look at federal support for research and development on (Enbrel) etanercept.

A November 1, 2009 search of the NIH CRISP database reports 167 federal grants for research on etanercept.

Continue Reading →

Distributed earlier on Wikileaks, this is reportedly is an internal Sun document, discussing a strategy to migrate Oracle users to MySQL.

“Project Peter is an internal effort to assist Sun / MySQL customers in migrating from Oracle to MySQL by offering them a comprehensive solution that consists of Professional Services, Best Practices, and a set of approved third party migration tools and utilities that will enable them to move to MySQL in a way that is as easy as possible.”

Continue Reading →

USPTO has sent KEI a letter, rejecting our request for a fee waiver for processing a September 30, 2009, freedom of information Act (FOIA) request. The FOIA focused on these items:

Continue Reading →