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Mr Costa told the BBC that this year’s opium production could be reduced by a quarter, compared to last year’s yield.

He said the disease – a fungus – is thought to have infected about half of the country’s poppy crop. Afghanistan produces 92% of the world’s opium.

Mr Costa said opium prices had gone up by around 50% in the region.

That could have an impact on revenues for insurgent groups like the Taliban which have large stockpiles of opium, he added.

Mr Costa told the BBC that the disease was affecting poppies in the provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, the heartland of opium cultivation and the insurgency in Afghanistan.

He said some local farmers believed that Nato troops were responsible for the outbreak, but he said such fungi occur naturally every few years.

“I don’t see any reasons to believe something of that sort. Opium plants have been affected in Afghanistan on a periodic basis,” Mr Costa said.

Four years ago there was a similar infestation.

Publisher Karl Siegler calls it a clear case of “libel chill” by one of Canada’s largest mining companies.

The book, Imperial Canada Inc.: Legal Haven of Choice for the World’s Mining Industries, was to be published in spring 2010, but in February, the publisher and everyone else involved with the book got a threatening letter from Barrick lawyers.

Siegler described Imperial Canada as an examination of the political, legal and banking environment that has led 70 per cent of the world’s mining companies to register in Canada.
Defamation suit launched in Quebec

The letter gave Talonbooks seven days to hand over the manuscript of the book, which was in the process of being translated from French to English.

“We ignored it initially,” Siegler said in an interview Wednesday with CBC Radio’s Q cultural affairs show.

“As far as we were concerned, they had no right to demand or see copies of manuscripts that were in development prior to their public release. Anyone working on a book has a right to privacy and should not be subject to this kind of supervision.”

But after receiving a legal letter, the translators immediately stopped work on the book. Siegler consulted a lawyer, who told him if he proceeded with the book, he could face years in court fighting an opponent with very deep pockets.

“Everyone involved stood to lose millions of dollars,” Siegler said. “In the publisher’s case, we stood to lose not just the company but all of the titles we have in print, roughly 500 titles dating back to the 1960s, many of which are Canadian classics.”

Imperial Canada Inc. was inspired by a French-language book published in Quebec called Noir Canada: Pillage, corruption et criminalité en Afrique by the same lead author Alain Degneault.

Barrick Gold and another mining company, Banro, sued the authors and publishers of Noir Canada for $11 million claiming defamation for the book’s description of Canadian mining practices in Africa. That case is still before the courts and Canada Noir remains available in print in French only.

Siegler said he considered publishing a straight-up translation of Canada Noir but decided he wanted to examine a wider issue — the infrastructure that supports Canada’s mining industry.

“I’m not interested in the sensationalist aspects [of] what Canadian companies do around world. I’m interested the subtext,” he said.

He approached Degneault to write the book, suggesting he recruit a team of collaborators.
Libel accusation ‘appalling’: publisher

John Dixon, a spokesman for the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, said the case underscores the need for a change in Canadian libel laws, so that corporations cannot use the laws to protect themselves from public scrutiny.

“If we step back and consider whether or not it is really important for Canadians to understand the mining industry and the consequences of the conduct of those industries around the world, we can’t give corporations the same kind of protection [as we do private citizens],” Dixon said.

“We can’t let them have the uninhibited ability to sue if we’re going to get to the bottom of stuff like that. ”

But Vince Borg, vice-president of corporate communications at Barrick Gold, said the company is just defending its reputation.

“Discourse is a very good thing in democracy, but it has to be based on the facts,” Borg told CBC News.

“If I was about to publish a book about your criminal misdeeds, and you saw it on my website, would you not take action to protect your reputation?”

Siegler called this defence “appalling.”

“Here’s a man telling you that he’s seen on a website a book that he presumes is about to accuse him and the corporation he works for of criminal acts,” Siegler said. “There’s nothing on our website to indicate that anybody is going to accuse anyone of criminal acts.”

Jupiter’s appearance is usually dominated by two dark bands in its atmosphere – one in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern hemisphere.

But recent images taken by amateur astronomers show that the southern band – called the south equatorial belt – has disappeared.

The band was present at the end of 2009, right before Jupiter moved too close to the sun in the sky to be observed from Earth. When the planet emerged from the sun’s glare again in early April, its south equatorial belt was nowhere to be seen.

This is not the first time the south equatorial belt has disappeared. It was absent in 1973 when NASA’s Pioneer 10 spacecraft took the first closeup images of the planet and also temporarily vanished in the early 1990s.

The bands may normally appear dark simply because pale, high-altitude clouds prevalent in other regions of the planet are missing there, revealing darker clouds below, says Glenn Orton of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “You’re looking into different layers of the cloud structures of the planet,” he told New Scientist.

According to this theory, the south equatorial belt disappears when whitish clouds form on top of it, blocking our view of the darker clouds. But it is not clear what causes these whitish clouds to form in the south equatorial belt at some times and not others, Orton says.

It was more than twice the $40-billion deficit that Wall Street economists surveyed by Reuters had forecast and was striking since April marks the filing deadline for individual income taxes that are the main source of government revenue.

Department officials said that in prior years, there was a surplus during April in 43 out of the past 56 years.

The government has now posted 19 consecutive monthly budget deficits, the longest string of shortfalls on record.

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Ever since the Times Square car bomb scare on May 1, the mayor’s been looking to build up New York’s camera network.

That means adding to the ring of steel in Times Square, similar to central London’s. The mayor said more NYPD surveillance cameras may prevent another terror scare.

London has 500,000 surveillance cameras, more than any other city in the world.

Bloomberg visited London’s mayor to see how these help Britain fight terror.

The move by the Federal Communications Commission grants cable and satellite providers the power to block consumers from viewing just-released movies in an analog format through a process known as Selectable Output Control. Hollywood requested SOC powers as a condition of allowing providers for the first time to release movies to their in-home customers while the film is in theaters.

The Motion Picture Association of America said its member studios would not authorize the early movie releases unless it won the ability to deploy Selectable Output Control. The reason: Analog video signals can easily be recorded, while digital video standards include a copy protection scheme that lets providers set a no-copy flag on the signal.

Digital rights group, Public Knowledge, said millions of older televisions, including 11 million HD sets, would be affected, a number the MPAA disputes. Owners of those devices would not have the luxury of being able to view the latest theater blockbuster at home through video on-demand services.

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The 17-page document (.pdf), “Experimentation Programs conducted by the Department of Defense That Had CIA Sponsorship or Participation and That Involved the Administration to Human Subjects of Drugs Intended for Mind-Control or Behavior-Modification Purposes,” was prepared in 1977 by the General Counsel of the Department of Defense and released on May 6 after a Freedom of Information Act request.

Most of the details have been revealed in earlier CIA papers. And if anything, the Pentagon’s recap is a reminder of how little the Department of Defense cops to knowing about the CIA projects.

Still, there are some tantalizing new details. Take the origins of MK-ULTRA, the notorious CIA program that dosed thousands of unwitting participants with hallucinogenic drugs.

Initially funded by the Navy, the project set out to study the effects of brain concussion. Soon after, scientists noted that a blow to the head prompted amnesia, leading to the pursuit of a drug-based technique to “induce brain concussion … without physical trauma.” Shortly thereafter, the project was transferred entirely to the CIA, because it involved “human experiments … not easily justifiable on medical-therapeutic grounds.”

Other programs, described briefly focused on mind control. MK-NAOMI was after “severely incapacitating and lethal materials … [and] gadgetry for their dissemination,” and MK-CHICKWIT was designed to “identify new drug developments in Europe and Asia,” and then “obtain samples.”

Edgewood Laboratories, where many of the programs were carried out, is also identified as having tested an incapacitating chemical on prisoners and military personnel without the agency’s approval. The drug, EA#3167, was “appl[ied] to the skin” of subjects using an adhesive tape.

Another program, MK-OFTEN, started as a study on dopamine. But the scope was soon expanded to evaluate ibogaine, a hallucinogen, and then several more drugs, in hopes of creating “new pharmacologically active drugs affecting the central nervous system [to] modify men’s behavior.”

And the Navy is reported to have “obtain[ed] heroin and marijuana” in an effort to develop speech-inducing drugs for use on defectors and prisoners of war. The drugs were eventually tested on 14 people: six volunteer research assistants, and eight unwitting Soviet defectors.

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The trillion-dollar program, to be underwritten largely by the 16 nations that use the euro and by the International Monetary Fund, represents a virtual discarding of Europe’s rule book.

Under the rescue unveiled early Monday, governments that broke the currency union’s spending restrictions are being offered a commitment of solidarity, with weak links such as Greece and Portugal supported by the creditworthiness of Germany’s strong economy.