Swine flu may be less potent than first feared

Mike Stobbe and David B. Caruso
May 1, 2007 - Ap

.....

The swine flu outbreak that has alarmed the world for a week now appears less ominous, with the virus showing little staying power in the hardest-hit cities and scientists suggesting it lacks the genetic fortitude of past killer bugs.

President Barack Obama even voiced hope Friday that it may turn out to be no more harmful than the average seasonal flu.

In New York City, which has the most confirmed swine flu cases in the U.S. with 49, swine flu has not spread far beyond cases linked to one Catholic school. In Mexico, the epicenter of the outbreak, very few relatives of flu victims seem to have caught it.

A flu expert said he sees no reason to believe the virus is particularly lethal. And a federal scientist said the germ's genetic makeup lacks some traits seen in the deadly 1918 flu pandemic strain and the more recent killer bird flu.

Still, it was too soon to be certain what the swine flu virus will do. Experts say the only wise course is to prepare for the worst. But in a world that's been rattled by the specter of a global pandemic, glimmers of hope were more than welcome Friday.

"It may turn out that H1N1 runs its course like ordinary flus, in which case we will have prepared and we won't need all these preparations," Obama said, using the flu's scientific name.

The president stressed the government was still taking the virus very seriously, adding that even if this round turns out to be mild, the bug could return in a deadlier form during the next flu season.

New York officials said after a week of monitoring the disease that the city's outbreak gives little sign of spreading beyond a few pockets or getting more dangerous.

All but two of the city's confirmed cases so far involve people associated with the high school where the local outbreak began and where several students had recently returned from Mexico.

More than 1,000 students, parents and faculty there reported flu symptoms over just a few days last month. But since then, only a handful of new infections have been reported — only eight students since last Sunday.

Almost everyone who became ill before then are either recovering or already well. The school, which was closed this past week, is scheduled to reopen Monday. No new confirmed cases were identified in the city on Friday, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the outbreak in New York had so far proved to be "a relatively minor annoyance."

In Mexico, where swine flu has killed at least 16 people and the confirmed case count has surpassed 300, the health secretary said few of the relatives of 86 suspected swine flu patients had caught the virus. Only four of the 219 relatives surveyed turned up as probable cases.

As recently as Wednesday, Mexican authorities said there were 168 suspected swine flu deaths in the country and almost 2,500 suspected cases. The officials have stopped updating that number and say those totals may have even been inflated.

Mexico shut down all but essential government services and private businesses Friday, the start of a five-day shutdown that includes a holiday weekend. Authorities there will use the break to determine whether emergency measures can be eased.

In the Mexican capital, there were no reports of deaths overnight — the first time that has happened since the emergency was declared a week ago, said Mayor Marcelo Ebrard.

"This isn't to say we are lowering our guard or we think we no longer have problems," Ebrard said. "But we're moving in the right direction."

The U.S. case count rose to 155 on Friday, based on federal and state counts, although state laboratory operators believe the number is higher because they are not testing all suspected cases.

Worldwide, the total confirmed cases neared 600, although that number is also believed to be much larger. Besides the U.S. and Mexico, the virus has been detected in Canada, New Zealand, China, Israel and eight European nations.

There were still plenty of signs Friday of worldwide concern.

China decided to suspend flights from Mexico to Shanghai because of a case of swine flu confirmed in a flight from Mexico, China's state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.

And in Hong Kong, hundreds of hotel guests and workers were quarantined after a tourist from Mexico tested positive for swine flu, Asia's first confirmed case.

Evoking the 2003 SARS outbreak, workers in protective suits and masks wiped down tables, floors and windows. Guests at the hotel waved to photographers from their windows.

Scientists looking closely at the H1N1 virus itself have found some encouraging news, said Nancy Cox, flu chief at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Its genetic makeup doesn't show specific traits that showed up in the 1918 pandemic virus, which killed about 40 million to 50 million people worldwide.

"However, we know that there is a great deal that we do not understand about the virulence of the 1918 virus or other influenza viruses" that caused serious illnesses, Cox said. "So we are continuing to learn."

She told The Associated Press that the swine flu virus also lacked genetic traits associated with the virulence of the bird flu virus, which grabbed headlines a few years ago and has killed 250 people, mostly in Asia.

Researchers will get a better idea of how dangerous this virus is over the next week to 10 days, said Peter Palese, a leading flu researcher with Mount Sinai Medical School in New York.

So far in the United States, he said, the virus appears to look and behave like the garden-variety flus that strike every winter. "There is no real reason to believe this is a more serious strain," he said.

Palese said many adults probably have immune systems primed to handle the virus because it is so similar to another common flu strain.

As for why the illness has predominantly affected children and teenagers in New York, Palese said older people probably have more antibodies from exposure to similar types of flu that help them fight off infection.

"The virus is so close," he said.

In the United States, most of the people with swine flu have been treated at home. Only nine people are known to have ended up in the hospital, though officials suspect there are more.

In Mexico, officials have voiced optimism for two days that the worst may be over. But Dr. Scott F. Dowell of the CDC said it's hard to know whether the outbreak is easing up in Mexico. "They're still seeing plenty of cases," Dowell said.

He said outbreaks in any given area might be relatively brief, so that they may seem to be ending in some areas that had a lot of illness a few weeks ago. But cases are occurring elsewhere, and national numbers in Mexico are not abating, he said.

A top Mexican medical officer questioned the World Health Organization's handling of the early signs of the swine flu scare, suggesting Thursday that a regional arm of the WHO had taken too long to notify WHO headquarters of about a unusually late rash of flu cases in Mexico.

The regional agency, however, provided a timeline to the AP suggesting it was Mexico that failed to respond to its request to alert other nations to the first hints of the outbreak.

The Mexican official, chief epidemiologist Dr. Miguel Angel Lezana, backtracked Friday, telling Radio Formula: "There was no delay by the Mexican authorities, nor was there any by the World Health Organization."

In the U.S., Obama said efforts were focused on identifying people who have the flu, getting medical help to the right places and providing clear advice to state and local officials and the public.

The president also said the U.S. government is working to produce a vaccine down the road, developing clear guidelines for school closings and trying to ensure businesses cooperate with workers who run out of sick leave.

He pointed out that regular seasonal flus kill about 36,000 people in the United States in an average year and send 200,000 to the hospital.

Zen Moment of the Weekend

MORE WAG
LESS BARK!

-bumper sticker

Poor Dick Cheney

Free at last from The Bunker and ready, as always, to do whatever it takes to protect the United States of America, he's seen the vital information that proves that waterboarding works, but, doggone it, the country went and elected this softy-brainiac guy who just doesn't "get it" the way George Bush did, and doesn't want to release it.

Obama's such a wuss, he's making it sound like America doesn't have the guts to torture people anymore.

What's a patriot to do?

It would be illegal to leak classified intelligence himself. Dick Cheney has too much respect for the rule of law to do something like that.

But waterboarding works. American lives are at stake. And Dick Cheney has the all the information we need.

Open your ears America! Are you so jaded you can no longer hear the patriot's call? He's begging us. The time has come.

Waterboard Dick!!!

- Bradley Whitford, Huffington Post

Paying the Price for Cheap Meat

Paying the Price for Cheap Meat

Modern factory farms have created a 'perfect storm' environment for powerful viruses

Johann Hari
May 1, 2009 - The Independent/UK

.....

A swelling number of scientists believe swine flu has not happened by accident. No: they argue that this global pandemic - and all the deaths we are about to see - is the direct result of our demand for cheap meat. So is the way we produce our food really making us sick as a pig?
At first glance, this seems wrong. All through history, viruses have mutated, and sometimes they have taken nasty forms that scythe through the human population. This is an inescapable reality we just have to live with, like earthquakes and tsunamis. But the scientific evidence increasingly suggests that we have unwittingly invented an artificial way to accelerate the evolution of these deadly viruses - and pump them out across the world. They are called factory farms. They manufacture low-cost flesh, with a side-dish of viruses to go.

To understand how this might happen, you have to compare two farms. My grandparents had a pig farm in the Swiss mountains, with around 20 swine at any one time. What happened there if, in the bowels of one of their pigs, a virus mutated and took on a deadlier form? At every stage, the virus would meet stiff resistance from the pigs' immune systems. They were living in fresh air, on the diet they evolved with, and without stress - so they had a robust ability to fight back. If the virus did take hold, it would travel only as far as the sick hog could walk. So if the virus would then have around 20 other pigs to spread and mutate in - before it would hit the end of its own evolutionary path, and die off. If it was a really lucky, plucky virus, it might make it to market - where it would come up against more healthy pigs living in small herds. It had little opportunity to fan out across a large population of pigs or evolve a strain that could be transmitted
to humans.

Now compare this to what happens when a virus evolves in a modern factory farm. In most swine farms today, 6,000 pigs are crammed snout-to-snout in tiny cages where they can barely move, and are fed for life on an artificial pulp, while living on top of cess-pools of their own stale faeces.

Instead of having just 20 pigs to experiment and evolve in, the virus now has a pool of thousands, constantly infecting and reinfecting each other. The virus can combine and recombine again and again. The ammonium from the waste they live above burns the pigs' respiratory tracts, making it easier yet for viruses to enter them. Better still, the pigs' immune systems are in free-fall. They are stressed, depressed, and permanently in panic, making them far easier to infect. There is no fresh air or sunlight to bolster their natural powers of resistance. They live in air thick with viral loads, and they are exposed every time they breathe in.

As Dr Michael Greger, director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at the Humane Society of the United States, explains: "Put all this together, and you have a perfect storm environment for these super-strains. If you wanted to create global pandemics, you'd build as many of these factory farms as possible. That's why the development of swine flu isn't a surprise to those in the public health community. In 2003, the American Public Health Association - the oldest and largest in world - called for a moratorium of factory farming because they saw something like this would happen. It may take something as serious as a pandemic to make us realise the real cost of factory farming."

Many of the detailed studies of factory farms that have been emerging in the past few years reinforce this argument. Dr Ellen Silbergeld is Professor of Environmental Health Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. She tells me that her detailed, on-the-ground studies led her to conclude that there is "very much" a link from factory farms to the new, more powerful forms of flu we are experiencing. "Instead of a virus only having one spin of the roulette wheel, it has thousands and thousands of spins, for no extra cost. It drives the evolution of new diseases."

Until yesterday, we could only speculate about the origins of the current H1N1 virus killing human beings - but now we know more. The Centre for Computational Biology at Columbia University has studied the virus and now believes that it is not a new emergence of a triple human-swine-bird flu virus. It is a slight variant on a virus we have seen before. We can see its family tree - and its daddy was a virus that evolved in the artificial breeding ground of a vast factory farm in North Carolina.

Did this strain evolve, too, in the same circumstances? Already, the evidence is suggestive, although far from conclusive. We know that the city where this swine flu first emerged - Perote, Mexico - contains a massive industrial pig farm, and houses 950,000 pigs. Dr Silbergeld adds: "Factory farms are not biosecure at all. People are going in and out all the time. If you stand a few miles down-wind from a factory farm, you can pick up the pathogens easily. And manure from these farms isn't always disposed of."

It's no coincidence that we have seen a sudden surge of new viruses in the past decade at precisely the moment when factory farming has intensified so dramatically. For example, between 1994 and 2001, the number of American pigs that live and die in vast industrial farms in the US spiked from 10 per cent to 72 per cent. Swine flu had been stable since 1918 - and then suddenly, in this period, went super-charged.

How much harm will we do to ourselves in the name of cheap meat? We know that bird flu developed in the world's vast poultry farms. And we know that pumping animal feed full of antibiotics in factory farms has given us a new strain of MRSA. It's a simple, horrible process. The only way to keep animals alive in such conditions is to pump their feed full of antibiotics. But this has triggered an arms race with bacteria, which start evolving to beat the antibiotics - and emerge as in the end as pumped-up, super-charged viruses invulnerable to our medical weapons. This system gave birth to a new kind of MRSA that now makes up 20 per cent of all human infections with the virus. Sir Liam Donaldson, the British government's Chief Medical Officer, warns: "Every inappropriate use in animals or agriculture [of antibiotics] is potentially a death warrant for a future patient."

Of course, agribusinesses is desperate to deny all this is happening: their bottom line depends on keeping this model on its shaky trotters. But once you factor in the cost of all these diseases and pandemics, cheap meat suddenly looks like an illusion.

We always knew that factory farms were a scar on humanity's conscience - but now we fear they are a scar on our health. If we carry on like this, bird flu and swine flu will be just the beginning of a century of viral outbreaks. As we witness a global pandemic washing across the world, we need to shut down these virus factories - before they shut down even more human lives.

.....

Johann Hari is a columnist for the London Independent. He has reported from Iraq, Israel/Palestine, the Congo, the Central African Republic, Venezuela, Peru and the US, and his journalism has appeared in publications all over the world.

Occupying Hearts and Minds

Occupying Hearts and Minds

Dahr Jamail
30 April 2009 - truthout

.....

One of the definitions of the word "occupation" is: the action, state, or period of occupying or being occupied by military force. Throughout history, areas or countries occupied by military force have always resisted, and this resistance has caused the occupier to devise more suitable methods of subduing the population of the area being occupied.

The US military has sent shock troops, which also donned helmets and flak jackets - anthropologists, sociologists and social psychologists, with their own troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. By the end of 2007, American scholars in these fields were embedding with the military in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of a Pentagon program called Human Terrain System (HTS), which evolved shortly thereafter into a $40 million program that embedded four or five person groups of scholars in the aforementioned fields in all 26 US combat brigades that were busily occupying Iraq and Afghanistan.

Two years prior to this, the CIA had quietly started recruiting social scientists by advertising in academic journals, offering salaries of up to $400,000. The military's goals for the HTS was to have them gather and disseminate information about Iraqi and Afghani cultures. These embedded scholars, contracted through companies like CACI International, work in the project that is described by CACI as "designed to improve the gathering, understanding, operational application, and sharing of local population knowledge" among combat teams.

This new form of psychological warfare is deeply disturbing. Throughout my five years of reporting on the occupation of Iraq, when I've asked Iraqis what they feel the most damaging aspect of the occupation is, I have been told that the occupation is "shredding the fabric of Iraqi society and culture."

Anthropology, in particular, has been referred to through history as the "handmaiden of colonialism," thus putting anthropologists, at least those with a moral conscience, on guard against anything that smells like exploitation or oppression of their subjects. Roberto Gonzalez, an associate professor of anthropology at San Jose State University and leading member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, told Time magazine that the militarization of anthropology will cause the field to become "just another weapon ... not a tool for building bridges between peoples." Anthropology has core professional ethics standards that require voluntary, informed consent from subjects, and that anthropologists do no harm. How likely do you think these will be adhered to by the flack-jacket-wearing, gun-toting, embedded anthropologists working directly with regimental combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan?

In an article titled "When Anthropologists Become Counter-Insurgents," published in September 2007, and co-authored with David Price, author of the book "Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Abuse of American Anthropology in the Second World War," Gonzalez and Price wrote:

"Although proponents of this form of applied anthropology claim that culturally informed counter-insurgency work will save lives and win 'hearts and minds,' they have thus far not attempted to provide any evidence of this. Instead, there has been a flurry of non-critical newspaper accounts in publications including the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor that portray these HTS anthropologists as heroically serving their nation without bothering to report on the ethical complications of this work. Missing are discussions of anthropologists' ethical responsibilities to disclose who they are and what they are doing, to gain informed consent, and to not harm those they study. Portraying counter-insurgency operations as social work is naive and historically inaccurate.

"In fact, David Kipp of the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas describes HTS teams as a 'CORDS for the 21st Century'-a reference to the Pentagon's Vietnam-era Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support project. The most infamous product of the CORDS counter-insurgency effort was the Phoenix Program, in which CIA agents collected intelligence information used to 'neutralize' (read assassinate) suspected Viet Cong members. Between 1968 and 1972, more than 26,000 suspected Viet Cong were killed as a result, including many civilians.

"Kipp's comparison of HTS and CORDS begs a series of ethical questions which have gone unanswered. If anthropologists on HTS teams interview Afghans or Iraqis about the intimate details of their lives, what is to prevent combat teams from using the same data to one day 'neutralize' suspected insurgents? What would impede the transfer of data collected by social scientists to commanders planning offensive military campaigns? Where is the line that separates the professional anthropologist from the counter-insurgency technician? Although the answers to these questions are not clear, the history of anthropology should give us pause. During World War II and the Cold War, US military and intelligence agencies tended to use anthropologists' work to help accomplish immediate goals, and discarded all other information that was counter to their beliefs or institutional models."

Adding credence to the points made by Price and Gonzalez is the fact that one of the top ten US defense contractors, Science Applications International Corporation, which has been operating in Iraq since the beginning of the occupation, describes anthropology in its job advertisements as a "counter-insurgency related field."

Marcus Griffin, an anthropology professor, while preparing to deploy to Iraq at part of an HTS team, boasted on his blog, "I cut my hair in a high and tight style and look like a drill sergeant ... I shot very well with the M9 and M4 last week at the range ... Shooting well is important if you are a soldier regardless of whether or not your job requires you to carry a weapon."

Nevertheless, proponents of the program attempt to dismiss any ethical dilemma encountered by the embedded scholars. Montgomery McFate, a Navy anthropologist, described HTS as an effort to anthropologize the military, not militarizing anthropology, told Time, "The more unconventional the adversary, and the further from Western cultural norms, the more we need to understand the society and underlying cultural dynamics."

The program is nothing new, neither for the US empire nor other empires throughout history. As far as the US empire project is concerned, there were two programs from the Vietnam era that involved anthropologists.

Project Camelot, in 1965, organized by US Army intelligence, recruited anthropologists to assess the cultural causes of war and violence. Despite the misleadingly benign sounding name, the project used Chile as a trial run while the CIA was engineering the election of Eduardo Frei as president in 1964 to prevent the election of Socialist leader Salvador Allende.

The second program from that era, known as CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support), was formed to coordinate the US civil and military pacification programs in Vietnam. CORDS used anthropological data to map human terrain and identify individuals and groups that the military believed were sympathizers of the Vietcong, who were then targeted for assassination.

It is easy to imagine HTS teams in Iraq being used to exploit existing fault lines between Sunni and Shia, Kurd and Arab, and even differences within each group, in order to invoke the classic divide-to-conquer strategy. For example, the Sahwa (US-created and -backed Sunni militia) clashing with the US-backed Maliki government in Iraq is a classic example of Iraqis being effectively turned against one another so as not to unite against the occupier.

Another example would be the effective creation and exploitation of the myth of sectarianism in Iraq, which has lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and threatens to do so once again.

Documentary filmmaker Jason Coppola is directing and producing a film titled "Justify My War." In the film, an introspective Coppola explores the question of rationalization of the wars being waged by our government, from Wounded Knee to Fallujah. I asked Coppola for his perspective about the ongoing use of anthropologists by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"This seems to be the most powerful weapon against indigenous cultures today. Much more powerful than F-16s and M-1 tanks. We see how well it worked against our own indigenous culture. You need to know a people before you decide what can corrupt them, what can be used to confuse, divide and conquer them. The strongest defense against occupation is an undivided, culturally rooted people, but empires don't like that."

Commenting on experiences from his recent trip to Iraq, Coppola adds, "A country can rebuild itself after an invasion, but it is much more difficult to rebuild a culture after it has been invaded. I realized this seeing young girls walking the streets of Sadr City, on their way to school in their traditional hijab carrying their books in a backpack with a blond-haired, blue-eyed Barbie design on it. Confusion is sewn throughout the Iraq occupation, nobody trusts anybody. And as I looked up in Baghdad or Fallujah or Sadr City, and stared at 'Apache' helicopters flying overhead ... I couldn't help but to think - mission accomplished - certainly for the Apache people. But what about the Iraqis? We still don't know."

Price and Gonzalez, along with several other scholars, felt the problem serious enough to have formed the Network of Concerned Anthropologists and drafted a "Pledge of Non-Participation in Counter-Insurgency" to boycott anthropological work in counterinsurgency and direct combat support operations. They took their stand against "work that is covert, work that breaches relations of openness and trust with studied populations, and work that enables the occupation of one country by another."

Similarly, in October 2007, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association issued a statement that warned its members that activities such as involvement in the HTS program are likely to violate the code of ethics. As it should have, for it is impossible to imagine the lethality of a massive conventional military coupled with unconventional scholarship made into a weapon for use in combat, as it is in the ongoing US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

.....

Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of "Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq,". Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for eight months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last four years.

Bush Getting Even More Unpopular Out Of Office

Bush Getting Even More Unpopular Out Of Office

Megan Slack
04/30/09 - The Huffington Post

.....

A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that former President Bush's popularity has dropped since he left office.

When he left office in January, 31 percent of American's viewed him positively. That number has now dropped to 26 percent.

President Barack Obama, meanwhile, is more popular than the past two presidents at this point during their first terms.

According to the poll, 61 percent approve of Obama's job -- that's compared with George W. Bush's 56 percent and Bill Clinton's 52 percent at this same juncture in their presidencies.

Also, 64 percent view Obama favorably versus 23 percent who see him in a negative light -- once again, higher than Bush's and Clinton's scores on this question.

Additionally, 64 percent of Americans also "feel more hopeful about the direction of the country with Obama in office," and a full 59 percent feel he has accomplished a "great deal" or a "fair amount."

Press freedom declining around the world

Press freedom declining around the world: study

Apr 30, 2009 - Agence France Presse

.....

Press freedom declined around the world last year, deteriorating for the first time in every region, according to a study released by Freedom House.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), meanwhile, unveiled its list of "10 worst countries to be a blogger," naming Myanmar, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Tunisia, China, Turkmenistan and Egypt to its "dishonor roll."

Out of the 195 countries and territories covered in the Freedom House study, 70, or 36 percent, were rated "free," 61 (31 percent), were rated "partly free" and 64 (33 percent) were rated "not free."

Freedom House, which is funded by the US government and private groups and has been conducting an annual study of press freedom since 1980, said that 72 countries were rated free the previous year.

It said that while press freedom had declined in 2008 for the seventh year in a row, last year marked the first time it had deteriorated in every region.

"The journalism profession today is up against the ropes and fighting to stay alive, as pressures from governments, other powerful actors and the global economic crisis take an enormous toll," executive director Jennifer Windsor said.

Freedom House said gains in South Asia and Africa were "overshadowed by a campaign of intimidation targeting independent media, particularly in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East and North Africa."

It said Israel, Italy and Hong Kong slipped from free to partly free status in 2008.

Among the worst-rated states were Belarus, China, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Iran, Laos, Libya, Myanmar, North Korea, the Palestinian territories, Rwanda and Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe.

In Asia, Cambodia fell to not free status because of increased violence against journalists, while Hong Kong slipped to partly free as Beijing exerted growing influence over the media.

China's media environment remained "bleak" while media in Taiwan faced assault and growing government pressure.

"China should have had a better record in 2008 and upheld its promise to ensure press freedom during the Olympics, but instead it chose to remain the world's largest repressor of media freedom," said Karin Deutsch Karlekar, managing editor of the study.

South Asia saw improvement in Bangladesh, the Maldives and Pakistan while Sri Lanka and Afghanistan suffered setbacks.

Myanmar also got poor marks from the CPJ.

"With a military government that severely restricts Internet access and imprisons people for years for posting critical material, Burma is the worst place in the world to be a blogger," it said.

Freedom House said the biggest drop in press freedom occurred in Central and Eastern Europe with journalists murdered in Bulgaria and Croatia, assaulted in Bosnia and denied judicial protection in Russia.

The Middle East and North Africa continued to have the lowest level of press freedom.

Restrictions on journalists and official attempts to influence coverage during the Gaza conflict led to Israel's downgrading to partly free status.

Freedom House said press freedom fell in Senegal, Madagascar, Chad, South Africa, Tanzania and others in sub-Saharan Africa while Comoros, Sierra Leone, Angola and Liberia showed improvement.

It said Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Nicaragua registered major declines while Guyana regained its free rating and Haiti and Uruguay saw significant improvement. Mexico?s score dropped because of increased violence.

Western Europe boasted the highest level of press freedom although Italy slipped into the partly free category with free speech limited by courts and libel laws and concerns over the concentration of media ownership.

The reports from Freedom House, which was created in 1941 by Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of then US president Franklin Roosevelt, among others, and CPJ were released to coincide with World Press Freedom Day on Sunday.