Jac Holzman on the future of music

The Internet is a killer of art--or at least that's how a couple of former rock 'n' roll gods see it.

John Mellencamp, known for such '80s hits as "Jack and Diane" and "Hurts So Good," last week said the Web is the most dangerous creation since the atomic bomb. Stevie Nicks, the Fleetwood Mac songstress, concluded in an interview this week that the "Internet has destroyed rock."

Jac Holzman, the man who discovered The Doors, founded Elektra Records, and nudged the big recording companies into adopting the compact disc, considers the Web and says: "I think the music industry has a bright future."

Wow, that's quite a contrast in views. The difference is Holzman has witnessed most of the industry-shaking technologies during his six decades in the music business--and he's not panicking.

This year, the 79-year-old celebrates Elektra's 60th anniversary, and at a life stage when Holzman's biggest trouble might be choosing the right 9-iron, he's helping to search for answers to the music industry's burning digital questions. He has said in the past that there were those in the record business who didn't think he was relevant any longer, but Holzman is back in the thick of it. Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. sought him out, hired him as a senior adviser, and sees value in the context Holzman can provide.

"I love the way Jac approaches the intersection of music and technology--through the lens of opportunity," Bronfman said.

At spotting opportunities, Holzman has a notable record. As a 19-year-old, Holzman started Elektra with $300 he received at his bar mitzvah. The label would later go to sign such acts as Queen, Judy Collins, The Stooges, and Jim Morrison. After Holzman sold Electra to Warner Communication (a forerunner of Warner Music Group and Warner Bros. Pictures), he became WCI's chief technology officer. In that role, he helped oversee some of the company's film and TV ventures.

"We met right around the time when Napster came together, and I said 'There are opportunities and there are potholes. How are you preparing for a digital future?' He said to me, 'Jac, I just want it to go away'."

--Jac Holzman

When Jack Valenti, the chief of the Motion Picture Association of America, was trying to kill video recorders and comparing them to the Boston Strangler, Holzman was steering WCI into the home-video market. With cable TV he recognized its potential early and contributed to the development of pay-per-view programming.

In music, Holzman saw the rise of the LP, 8-track tape, DAT, compact disc, MP3, and BitTorrent. After all that, new technologies don't spook him. On the contrary, he says many of these technologies helped make a lot of artists and industry people rich. When it comes to the Internet and digital distribution, Holzman is confident music labels can capitalize on them too. He says they really don't have a choice.

"I was having lunch with a very dear friend of mine [in the record business] sometime around 2000," Holzman said during an interview this week with CNET. "We met right around the time when Napster came together, and I said 'There are opportunities and there are potholes. How are you preparing for a digital future?' He said to me, 'Jac, I just want it to go away.' Well, you can't continue that conversation."

It's hard to imagine that anybody would want to put Holzman out to pasture. At a time when the industry is trying to make sense of the Internet, wouldn't it make sense to have people around who have a history at capitalizing on technological advances?

Holzman recounts the meeting where he introduced the compact disc to some of the label chiefs, including Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic Records, and Mo Ostin, who headed Warner Bros. Records. Holzman said that what eventually appealed most to some of the leaders was the money they could earn by reselling their catalogs in the new format. While the CD proved to be a financial boon, Holzman recognized much later that by selling the discs to the public, the record labels were essentially placing digital-master recordings into every home.

That proved to be a liability when CD burners arrived on the scene and enabled people to make high-quality, unauthorized copies to share with each other via the Web.

"I didn't see that coming," Holzman said mournfully. "I knew that CD burners were out there, but when companies began putting them in computers...that surprised me."

On Napster

If Holzman's advice to Bronfman sounds anything like the opinions he offered during our interview, here's what he might be whispering into the CEO's ear.

Holzman suggested that the big labels goofed when they sued Napster out of existence. At that point, the rise of the CD had left the industry without an effective way to sell individual songs. Before the CD, the 45-rpm vinyl disc was the perfect singles vehicle. The costs of manufacturing CDs, however, made that format more suited to selling full albums, according to Holzman.

"With Napster, it would have been easy to proliferate singles," Holzman said. "You would have had no manufacturing costs. You would still have the value of the single as a calling card for albums and you could have sold [songs] for something like 79 cents, made it affordable. You would have had ability to count because all of the transactions went through a central server at Napster, unlike peer-to-peer where you bypassed servers. Now, would P2P still have happened? Yes it would. But we would have established a principle of being paid for digital music."

On fair use

Holzman agrees with some of the arguments made by Lawrence Lessig, the academic who has called for making copyright and trademark laws less restrictive.

"I think Lessig has some good ideas," Holzman said. "We have to be free enough with our music to permit people to adapt it for their own purposes and to create new works out of the building blocks of our music. I know that will drive most of my fellow record company people up the wall."

On ISPs

He said he thinks that the lawsuits filed against accused illegal file sharers by the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group representing the four largest music labels, was a mistake. He also believes, however, that artists and record companies deserve to be compensated.

"I think we need to be paid for our music," Holzman said. "I think we are entitled to something from the ISPs. They have been getting a free ride on our music for a long time."

If some former marquee acts are wringing their hands about the future of the music sector, Holzman said he's encouraged by signs that the top labels are beginning to get their digital feet under them.

"I don't think anybody is afraid anymore," Holzman said. "I'm looking at all the labels, and I know them all and I've sat down with all their digital guys. Everybody is embracing digital technology, but they're just trying to figure out how to make it work for them."

 Greg Sandoval @'cnet'

Covert Operations

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Scientists identify moves that make men irresistible on the dancefloor

 The enduring mystery of why men rarely flatter themselves when they take to the dancefloor may finally have been solved. A team of psychologists used video footage of men strutting their stuff to pinpoint the killer moves that separate good dancers from bad. Men who were judged to be good dancers had a varied repertoire and more moves that involved tilting and twisting the torso and neck.

But the majority of men displayed highly repetitive moves that used their arms and legs, but not the rest of their bodies.

"It's rare that someone is described as a good dancer if they are flinging their arms about but not much else," said Nick Neave, a psychologist at the University of Northumbria, who led the study.

"Think about a head banger. Their head movement has a large amplitude, but it's not changing direction or showing any kind of variability. That's a bad dancer. Or someone who is just twisting and turning left and right? That's a bad dancer too."

While features such as body shape and facial symmetry are well known indicators of healthy development, a person's dance moves may send out more subtle clues about their potential as a mate, Neave said.

Neave's team recruited 19 male volunteers aged between 18 and 35 and asked them to dance to a simple drum beat in front of a video camera for 30 seconds. To capture the dance moves, 38 infra-red reflectors were attached to their clothing. These produce bright spots that allow the movement of every limb and joint to be tracked and studied in detail.

The researchers used software to transfer each man's dance routine to an avatar on a computer screen. This ensured that the judges ranked the dancers according to their moves and not their height, looks or other physical features.

The dancers were judged by 37 straight women, also aged 18 to 35, who watched the avatar perform 15 seconds of each man's routine before ranking them on a scale of one to seven, where one was very bad dancing.

"The head, neck and upper body come out as the key features that are important for good dancing and that surprised us," said Neave, whose study is published in the journal Biology Letters. "When you see brilliant dancers, you'll see their bodies, heads and necks are all doing ever so slightly different things in time to the music."

Will Brown, a psychologist at the University of East London, said more work was needed to disentangle why dancing is attractive and its biological significance.

"When you have so much movement data from a relatively small sample of dancers, you might get chance associations between certain moves and dance attractiveness," he said.

"Flexing the trunk while dancing may be attractive, but we need to show it is indicative of a better quality male using an independent measure of biological quality."

Neave said his group is working through the results of blood tests on the men, which appear to show that the better dancers are healthier.

Ian Sample @'The Guardian'

Mothership/Land

This Sucks

Meet Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center, the 50-member church in Gainesville, Florida. Gainesville is where I live. This hate monger has turned our wonderful community into a lightning rod for hate and ignorance. Saying his church has 50 members is a stretch as he's lost some in the past weeks. On top of that, he has 9 kids so his family actually makes up 20% or more of the congregation. There happens to be a home football game of 90K fans this Saturday, 9/11/10. The FBI, Homeland Security are in town, and all local law enforcement are on super high alert. We have been informed by Homeland Security that we will not be reimbursed for the exorbitant costs of all this extra security, so our already overstretched local resources will be put over the limit all in the name of his selfish hatred for Islam. On top of all that, the image of our wonderful community will be forever tarnished.
Since the start of this, I've heard people say, "He should be ignored." However, stories like this are like crack for the media, and sure enough, the story is now international. The media satellite trucks outside this church now outnumber the vehicles of its congregation. It sucks to say Gainesville has fallen victim to fear and loathing. 

Read more 

@'The Gainesville Sun'

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The Great Dismal

Mark Stewart on The Pop Group reunion

Mark’s a giant of a man. He’s one of those guys who has to stoop to get in rooms. He looks - to borrow his favourite word - like a clash of a 50s matinee idol, Reg Presley of The Troggs and an Easter Island Statue come angrily to life. His head’s velocity is too fast for anyone currently trapped in his orbit. I see Jim Sclavunous (Bad Seeds/Grinderman/occasional Quietus writer) afterwards and say that ideally I’d like to interview Stewart again because even though I liked him, maybe I'd caught him on a particularly manic day. Spending two hours with him was a bit like spending 20 hours trapped on a passenger jet that's full of children and constantly threatening to fall out of the sky. Jim smiles indulgently and says that he's always out there: "I've known Mark for years and he's always been far out on some distant cosmic plain that makes him hard to reach sometimes."

During the interview in The Griffin on Leonard Street, I feel like his brain is skimming on far ahead like a stone across a pond surface. I ask one thing and he answers some other question that I’ve not even dreamed up yet. He's like a chess grandmaster who has malfunctioned and found himself suddenly only able to play the moves that are the furthest ahead - ten steps into the future. These moves may make sense to him but don't always to those round him. There is much bright and probably brilliant talk occluded into partial uselessness by this. He reacts to everything around him. His face darts about changing expression constantly. He isn’t pulling focus and he’s omni-intent on the interview, my beard, the barwoman, his friends Andy Fraser of Some Friendly and Paul Smith of Blast First sat at the bar, the cold wave compilation being played on the stereo, his notes that he has written onto a sheet of paper in front of him, something else that he can see over my shoulder. He sneers loudly at nearly everything I say in about an hour and a half which can, and does, get slightly grating. Even if I had turned up totally unprepared, which I haven't, I still would have hit the mark with at least a third of the questions. He’s a nice guy though and an energizing presence. It’s sad he comes into this naturally presuming I’m on the opposite side to him. Part of him still acts as if it’s 1980 and the guy from the NME is here to stitch him up. In fact he constantly refers to me as being from the weekly (which I do write for) but he doesn’t hear when I tell him that the piece is for a more humble institution.

He admits himself that he's frozen in time in some ways: "I haven't changed since I was 14."...

Continue reading
John Doran @'The Quietus'

A virtual counter-revolution

The first internet boom, a decade and a half ago, resembled a religious movement. Omnipresent cyber-gurus, often framed by colourful PowerPoint presentations reminiscent of stained glass, prophesied a digital paradise in which not only would commerce be frictionless and growth exponential, but democracy would be direct and the nation-state would no longer exist. One, John-Perry Barlow, even penned “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”.

Even though all this sounded Utopian when it was preached, it reflected online reality pretty accurately. The internet was a wide-open space, a new frontier. For the first time, anyone could communicate electronically with anyone else—globally and essentially free of charge. Anyone was able to create a website or an online shop, which could be reached from anywhere in the world using a simple piece of software called a browser, without asking anyone else for permission. The control of information, opinion and commerce by governments—or big companies, for that matter—indeed appeared to be a thing of the past. “You have no sovereignty where we gather,” Mr Barlow wrote.

The lofty discourse on “cyberspace” has long changed. Even the term now sounds passé. Today another overused celestial metaphor holds sway: the “cloud” is code for all kinds of digital services generated in warehouses packed with computers, called data centres, and distributed over the internet. Most of the talk, though, concerns more earthly matters: privacy, antitrust, Google’s woes in China, mobile applications, green information technology (IT). Only Apple’s latest iSomethings seem to inspire religious fervour, as they did again this week.

Again, this is a fair reflection of what is happening on the internet. Fifteen years after its first manifestation as a global, unifying network, it has entered its second phase: it appears to be balkanising, torn apart by three separate, but related forces...

Continue reading

@'The Economist'

What a surprise...

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Key witness will testify on News of the World phone hacking

 

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John Pilger:

Flying the flag, faking the news

Abuse in the Name of Treatment - Drug Detention Centers in Asia

According to estimations, there are hundreds of thousands of people kept in compulsory drug detention centers in Vietnam, China, Thailand and Laos. It is easy to get in to one of these centers. Some people enter voluntarily in the hope of kicking their drug habit, others are sent there by their families who pay for their “treatment”; but in some cities, it often happens that the military police just collect street children, drug users, sex workers and other groups on the street considered “deviant” by the authorities and detains them in a camp for years, without any due process or right of appeal. It’s easy to get in – but it’s hard to get out. Detainees are often forced to work for free, starved, beaten, tortured and raped – but they don’t get any treatment or rehabilitation. If they finally leave the camps, they feel more disintegrated from society than at any time before. The vast majority of detainees who leave the camps start to use drugs again or engage in other illegal activities. The governments of Laos, Cambodia and Thailand received millions of dollars from Western governments to build camps to treat drug addicts. Tax payers in donor countries had no idea what is happening in these camps before Human Rights Watch documented the widespread human rights abuses. One of the centers – Koh Kor – was closed thanks to human rights advocacy but there are still too many in operation. HCLU, along with international organizations such as UNAIDS or UNODC, is calling for the closure of these camps. We hope after watching our new movie more people will join us and put pressure on these governments to stop the abuse in the name of drug treatment.

If you want to learn more read the related reports of Human Rights Watch:

Sarosip @'DRUG reporter'

SFA!!!

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Bloody hell!!!

♪♫ Trentemøller - Even Though You're With Another Girl

HA!

@'Dangerous Minds'

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Phone-hacking inquiry was abandoned to avoid upsetting police

What the officer and the minister said about hacking ... and what they didn't

Statements by John Yates

 

Asked if there would be another investigation: "We have always said that if any new material, new evidence, was produced, we would consider it."

This precisely misses the point, which is that since 2006, Scotland Yard has been sitting on a mass of evidence which it has not investigated and not disclosed. It needs no new evidence to reopen an inquiry which was never completed in the first place.

Asked if the only reporter he talked to at the News of the World about the hacking allegations was the royal correspondent: "No. That is not the case."

This looks misleading. All of the available information confirms that Scotland Yard failed to interview any reporter or editor or manager from the News of the World other than the royal correspondent, Clive Goodman. And that includes failing to interview reporters who were explicitly identified in evidence as having handled intercepted voicemail messages.

Asked if the Met had talked to Sean Hoare, the former News of the World reporter who has said that Andy Coulson was aware of widespread hacking at the tabloid during the original investigation: "This is the first time we have heard of Mr Hoare or anything he's had to say. He wasn't part of the inquiry … We are surprised that the New York Times did not avail us of this information earlier than they did."

Hoare is one of a dozen reporters who spoke to the New York Times about phone hacking under Andy Coulson. A dozen have also spoken to the Guardian. It is not clear why Scotland Yard detectives would need American reporters to introduce them to journalists in London. As stated above, they have chosen not to approach any serving or former reporters other than Clive Goodman.

Asked why the Met had not told people that their phones were targeted despite the fact that a police memo suggested that a "vast number" of mobile numbers had been hacked or potentially hacked: "I think there is a misunderstanding here, that just because your name features in a private investigator's files, that your phone has been hacked."

This misrepresents the memo, disclosed by the Guardian, in which, during the original inquiry, the Metropolitan Police told the Crown Prosecution Service unequivocally: "A vast number of unique voicemail numbers belonging to high-profile individuals (politicians, celebrities) have been identified as being accessed without authority."

It also fails to reflect the underlying failure by police to stick to their agreement with the director of public prosecutions to approach and warn "all potential victims". They warned a small number during the original inquiry, and a small number more after the Guardian revived the story last July. The mass of those whose names and/or personal details showed up in the police investigation have never been told.

Asked if John Prescott's phone was hacked: "I believe that there is no evidence that his phone was hacked. I made that very clear on a number of occasions."

This misses the point. Scotland Yard has no evidence on this matter, because it failed to investigate it. In August 2006, it seized material which showed that four months earlier, the deputy prime minister had been targeted by a man who specialised in intercepting voicemail. They could have warned Prescott and asked if he had noticed interference with his messages. They didn't. They could have gone to his mobile phone company for data that would have identified any caller who had attempted to access Prescott's voicemail. They didn't. That data is held for only 12 months, and has now been destroyed.

Statements by Theresa May

 

"That investigation has already been reviewed by the Metropolitan Police."

This is misleading. On the morning of 9 July last year, when the Guardian published its first major story on the affair, the Metropolitan commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, asked John Yates "to establish the facts". Less than 12 hours later, Yates announced that there was no basis for reopening the inquiry. Yates himself has repeatedly denied that what he conducted was a review.

"The Crown Prosecution Service had full access to all the evidence gathered."

The Guardian discovered that Scotland Yard failed to pass the Crown Prosecution Service an email, which they had found in Glenn Mulcaire's property, and which clearly identified two News of the World reporters handling voicemail that had been intercepted from the phone of Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association.

Scotland Yard has dismissed this accusation by insisting that the barrister who presented the case for the CPS "had access to all the material". What it does not say is that it took its own officers three months to go through it all; and moreover, the barrister himself has said that he does not remember seeing the crucial email.

"The police have made clear that during the investigation, there was early and regular consultation with the CPS, so that the lines of inquiry followed were likely to produce the best evidence."

That is not the story told by paperwork from the CPS, which shows the police persuading prosecutors to "ring-fence" evidence in order to conceal the identities of "sensitive" victims of the hacking.

"At the time the investigation took place, the Metropolitan Police made it clear that those who they believed had been intercepted were contacted by members of the Metropolitan Police."

This is incorrect. The police failed, for example, to contact Taylor's legal adviser, even though they had transcripts of voicemail taken from her phone; or Coulson himself, who had been hacked by his own private investigator, and in relation to whom the evidence was sufficiently clear that Scotland Yard contacted him within 24 hours of the story being revived last year. Scotland Yard still refuses to say how many it warned in 2006/7, how many it warned after the Guardian story, and how many others remain unwarned.

Nick Davies @'The Guardian'

Hitler vs. Dubstep

Team Murdoch on Ethics

♪♫ Pel Mel - No Word From China

While Bob is off on to Europe on his honeymoon with Carmen, Chuck has unearthed this wonderful band (who I didn't know of until now.) 

You can download a collection of some of their singles at 'That Striped Sunlight Sound'

HERE

Four Tet - Return to Plastic People (September 2010) AKA FACT mix 182

   

Download

HA!

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Instra:mental - Live at Audioriver Festival 2010, Poland

This one's for you Spaceboy!

 Thought I saw Rexy boy!!!

X

X

X

Alastair Campbell says:

campbellclaret ; Hope MPs don't confuse wood and trees in phonehacking. Coulson is trees. Wood is media culture. Cops part of the forest less than 20 seconds ago via web

No 10 aide Andy Coulson denies hacking claims

 

Former News of the World reporter Sean Hoare has alleged former editor Mr Coulson asked him to hack into phones, a claim Mr Coulson denies.

The Met said new material had emerged that would be considered by officers.

Shadow Home Secretary Alan Johnson has requested an urgent question in the House of Commons over the issue.

A spokesman for Mr Coulson said: "Andy Coulson has today told the Metropolitan Police that he is happy to voluntarily meet them following allegations made by Sean Hoare.

"Mr Coulson emphatically denies these allegations. He has, however, offered to talk to officers if the need arises and would welcome the opportunity to give his view on Mr Hoare's claims."

The News of the World's royal editor, Clive Goodman, was jailed for conspiracy to access phone messages in 2007, along with private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, but the paper insists it was an isolated case.

While critical of the conduct of the News of the World's journalists, the House of Commons Culture and Media Committee found no evidence that Mr Coulson either approved phone-hacking by his paper, or was aware it was taking place.

In 2009, the Metropolitan Police chose not to launch an investigation following the Guardian's claims that News of the World journalists were involved in widespread phone hacking of several thousand celebrities, sports stars and politicians.

Mr Coulson came under fresh pressure last week after former journalists told the New York Times that the practice of phone hacking was far more extensive than the newspaper acknowledged at the time.

In light of the new information, Met Police Assistant Commissioner John Yates told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "We've always said that if any new material or new evidence was produced then we would consider it.

"We've heard what Mr Hoare's had to say, we've been in touch with the New York Times for many months prior to the publication of the article, seeking any new material or new evidence that they had. They didn't produce any until they published this with Mr Hoare.

"It is new and we'll be considering it, and consulting with the Crown Prosecution Service before we do."

Mr Johnson will try to ask Home Secretary Theresa May in the Commons to explain what she intended to do in light of accusations that current members of the House may have had their phones tapped.

On Sunday she said there were no grounds for a public inquiry.

Mr Johnson said he wanted to know whether the practice was widespread at the News of the World, and whether every victim had been properly informed that they might have been hacked.

"I feel that as the home secretary last year, I was meticulous about not getting into the political ramifications of this given Andy Coulson's position with the then leader of the opposition, and that this should be based on evidence that came forward," he said.

"There's a whole host of evidence now that needs to be investigated and so I feel that is a job that needs to be completed. I'll be asking the current home secretary about that."

The Speaker has granted an urgent question from MP Tom Watson, which the home secretary will respond to.

Culture committee chairman John Whittingdale told the BBC he was against MPs reopening their inquiry into the claims.

He said the committee's previous investigation was as detailed as it could be at the time and it stood by its conclusions.

Click to play

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Home Affairs Select Committee chairman Keith Vaz said Mr Yates would be asked about the latest developments in the inquiry when he appears before it on another matter on Tuesday.

The prime minister's spokesman said David Cameron had full confidence in Mr Coulson, who continues to do his job.

The spokesman said: "We have a number of stories in the newspapers. These allegations have been denied."

As far as the prime minister was concerned nothing had changed said the spokesman, adding: "These matters have been gone over many times in the past."

Mr Hoare told the New York Times he was fired from the News of the World during a period when he was struggling with drink and drugs.

The News of the World has rejected "absolutely any suggestion there was a widespread culture of wrongdoing" at the newspaper.

@'BBC'

New Book Concludes - Chernobyl death toll: 985,000, mostly from cancer

This past April 26th marked the 24th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident. It came as the nuclear industry and pro-nuclear government officials in the United States and other nations were trying to "revive" nuclear power. And it followed the publication of a book, the most comprehensive study ever made, on the impacts of the Chernobyl disaster.

Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment was published by the New York Academy of Sciences.

It is authored by three noted scientists:

Russian biologist Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor to the Russian president;

Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, a biologist and ecologist in Belarus; and

Dr.Vassili Nesterenko, a physicist and at the time of the accident director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus.

Its editor is Dr. Janette Sherman, a physician and toxicologist long involved in studying the health impacts of radioactivity.

The book is solidly based -- on health data, radiological surveys and scientific reports -- some 5,000 in all.

It concludes that based on records now available, some 985,000 people died, mainly of cancer, as a result of the Chernobyl accident. That is between when the accident occurred in 1986 and 2004. More deaths, it projects, will follow.

The book explodes the claim of the International Atomic Energy Agency-- still on its website that the expected death toll from the Chernobyl accident will be 4,000. The IAEA, the new book shows, is under-estimating, to the extreme, the casualties of Chernobyl.

Alice Slater, representative in New York of the Nuclear Age Peace

Foundation, comments: "The tragic news uncovered by the comprehensive

new research that almost one million people died in the toxic aftermath of Chernobyl should be a wake-up call to people all over the world to petition their governments to put a halt to the current industry-driven

"nuclear renaissance.' Aided by a corrupt IAEA, the world has been subjected to a massive cover-up and deception about the true damages caused by Chernobyl."

Further worsening the situation, she said, has been "the collusive agreement between the IAEA and the World Health Organization in which the WHO is precluded from publishing any research on radiation effects without consultation with the IAEA." WHO, the public health arm of the UN, has supported the IAEA's claim that 4,000 will die as a result of the accident.

"How fortunate," said Ms. Slater, "that independent scientists have now revealed the horrific costs of the Chernobyl accident."

The book also scores the position of the IAEA, set up through the UN in 1957 "to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy," and its 1959 agreement with WHO. There is a "need to change," it says, the IAEA-WHO pact. It has muzzled the WHO, providing for the "hiding" from the "public of any information "unwanted" by the nuclear industry.

"An important lesson from the Chernobyl experience is that experts and organizations tied to the nuclear industry have dismissed and ignored the consequences of the catastrophe," it states.

The book details the spread of radioactive poisons following the explosion of Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear plant on April 26, 1986. These major releases only ended when the fire at the reactor was brought under control in mid-May. Emitted were "hundreds of millions of curies, a quantity hundreds of times larger than the fallout from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki." The most extensive fall-out occurred in regions closest to the plant--in the Ukraine (the reactor was 60 miles from Kiev in Ukraine), Belarus and Russia.

However, there was fallout all over the world as the winds kept changing direction "so the radioactive emissions" covered an enormous territory."

The radioactive poisons sent billowing from the plant into the air included Cesium-137, Plutonium, Iodine-131 and Strontium-90.

There is a breakdown by country, highlighted by maps, of where the radionuclides fell out. Beyond Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, the countries included Bulgaria, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The radiological measurements show that some 10% of Chernobyl poisons "fell on Asia"Huge areas" of eastern Turkey and central China "were highly contaminated," reports the book. Northwestern Japan was impacted, too.

Northern Africa was hit with "more than 5% of all Chernobyl releases."

The finding of Cesium-137 and both Plutonium-239 and Plutonium-240 "in accumulated Nile River sediment is evidence of significant Chernobyl contamination," it states.

"Areas of North America were contaminated from the first, most powerful explosion, which lifted a cloud of radionuclides to a height of more than 10 km. Some 1% of all Chernobyl nuclides," says the book, "fell on North America."

The consequences on public health are extensively analyzed. Medical records involving children--the young, their cells more rapidly multiplying, are especially affected by radioactivity--are considered. Before the accident, more than 80% of the children in the territories of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia extensively contaminated by Chernobyl "were healthy," the book reports, based on health data. But "today fewer than 20% are well."

There is an examination of genetic impacts with records reflecting an increase in "chromosomal aberrations" wherever there was fallout.

This will continue through the "children of irradiated parents for as many as seven generations." So "the genetic consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe will impact hundreds of millions of people."As to deaths, the list of countries and consequences begins with Belarus. "For the period 1900-2000 cancer mortality in Belarus increased 40%," it states, again based on medical data and illuminated by tables in the book. "The increase was a maximum in the most highly contaminated Gomel Province and lower in the less contaminated Brest and Mogilev provinces." They include childhood cancers, thyroid cancer, leukemia and other cancers.

Considering health data of people in all nations impacted by the fallout, the "overall mortality for the period from April 1986 to the end of 2004 from the Chernobyl catastrophe was estimated as 985,000 additional deaths."

Further, "the concentrations" of some of the poisons, because they have radioactive half-lives ranging from 20,000 to 200,000 years, "will remain practically the same virtually forever."

The book also examines the impact on plants and animals. "Immediately after the catastrophe, the frequency of plant mutations in the contaminated territories increased sharply."

There are photographs of some of these plant mutations. "Chernobyl irradiation has caused many structural anomalies and tumorlike changes in many plant species and has led to genetic disorders, sometimes continuing for many years," it says. "Twenty-three years after the catastrophe it is still too early to know if the whole spectrum of plant radiogenic changes has been discerned. We are far from knowing all of the consequences for flora resulting from the catastrophe."

As to animals, the book notes "serious increases in morbidity and mortality that bear striking resemblance to changes in the public health of humans--increasing tumor rates, immunodeficiencies, and decreasing life expectancy."

In one study it is found that "survival rates of barn swallows in the most contaminated sites near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant are close to zero. In areas of moderate contamination, annual survival is less than 25%." Research is cited into ghastly abnormalities in barn swallows that do hatch: "two heads, two tails."

"In 1986," the book states, "the level of irradiation in plants and animals in Western Europe, North America, the Arctic, and eastern Asia were sometimes hundreds and even thousands of times above acceptable norms."

In its final chapter, the book declares that the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear plant "was the worst technogenic accident in history." And it examines "obstacles" to the reporting of the true consequences of Chernobyl with a special focus on "organizations associated with the nuclear industry" that "protect the industry first--not the public." Here, the IAEA and WHO are charged.

The book ends by quoting U.S. President John F. Kennedy's call in 1963 for an end of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons."The Chernobyl catastrophe," it declares, "demonstrates that the nuclear industry's willingness to risk the health of humanity and our environment with nuclear power plants will result, not only theoretically, but practically, in the same level of hazard as nuclear weapons."

Dr. Sherman, speaking of the IAEA's and WHO's dealing with the impacts of Chernobyl, commented: "It's like Dracula guarding the blood bank." The 1959 agreement under which WHO "is not to be independent of the IAEA" but must clear any information it obtains on issues involving radioactivity with the IAEA has put "the two in bed together."

Of her reflections on 14 months editing the book, she said: "Every single system that was studied -- whether human or wolves or livestock or fish or trees or mushrooms or bacteria -- all were changed, some of them irreversibly. The scope of the damage is stunning."

In his foreword, Dr. Dimitro Grodzinsky, chairman of the Ukranian National Commission on Radiation Protection, writes about how "apologists of nuclear power" sought to hide the real impacts of the Chernobyl disaster from the time when the accident occurred. The book "provides the largest and most complete collection of data concerning the negative consequences of Chernobyl on the health of people and the environment...The main conclusion of the book is that it is impossible and wrong "to forget Chernobyl.”

In the record of Big Lies, the claim of the IAEA-WHO that "only" 4,000 people will die as a result of the Chernobyl catastrophe is among the biggest. The Chernobyl accident is, as the new book documents, an ongoing global catastrophe.

And it is a clear call for no new nuclear power plants to be built and for the closing of the dangerous atomic machines now running -- and a switch to safe energy technologies, now available, led by solar and wind energy, that will not leave nearly a million people dead from one disaster. 

Karl Grossman @'Global Research'