Finding Soho

The Accidental Death of an Anarchist is no doubt one of my favorite plays and I often list Dario Fo as one of my favorite playwrights, but I haven't had occasion to think of Fo again until now. He is the author of an online petition that's going around at the moment. It's called 'Tell Barilla: where there is love, there is family'. Barilla is the world's largest pasta-maker. Its main proprietor, Guido Barilla, stated in a radio interview last Wednesday that he would never use same-sex families in the company's advertisements. He said that although he fully supported gay marriage, he found the idea (fact?) of same-sex couples raising children "complicated". He said his company stood for the fundamental importance of family in Italian society - the traditional (or "sacred") family. He threw in, for good measure, an implied challenge to gay customers to take their business elsewhere. Dario Fo writes in the petition that he starred in a

Some thoughts on the just-concluded Australian federal election. On episode after episode of Q&A before the election, participants asked why the media's political coverage seemed more engrossed with personality than with policy. In fact, even in the first episode of Q&A after the election a member of the audience asked rhetorically why the minor parties elected to the Senate were expected to have any serious policy platforms when the major parties lacked the same. This was a motif that ran through a lot of the (center-left) media's coverage. Several newspaper commentators remarked in the course of the election campaign that the major parties had turned it into a presidential contest. It was claimed that personality had taken precedence over policy. Seen in conjunction with the general 'despondency' and 'lack of interest' that purportedly characterized voter sentiment, these imputations, though justified, confused me quite a bit. I found it hard to und

A week or so ago, the Supreme Court of India, in a landmark case, ruled against the extension of copyright protections for pharmaceutical compositions that involve only minimal changes from their original patents. It used an important section in current intellectual property (IP) law to determine that slight deviations in the composition of drugs do not warrant new patent protections in the absence of any significant improvement in efficacy or change in overall constitution. The ruling was hailed as a much-need fillip in the fight for greater access to affordable medicines and celebrated by civil society activists and generic drug companies alike as an affirmation of the right of patients to seek affordable, life-saving alternatives to expensive drugs. Two perspectives emerged in the mainstream media after the landmark judgment: the pharmaceutical company involved in the litigation called the verdict an affront to innovation in medical research, while others, particularly groups repre