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Washington, DC, United States (KaiserHealth) – Across the national airwaves and on the Republican campaign trail, the Massachusetts health law that many now call “Romneycare” is routinely trashed. Here’s Texas Governor Rick Perry in a debate last October.

“Romneycare has driven the cost of small business insurance premiums up by- percent over the national average in Massachusetts.” And from former Senator Rick Santorum last month we heard, “it (Romneycare) was the basis of Obamacare and it was an abject failure.”

So you might think this drubbing would rub off on Massachusetts residents, about two-thirds of whom have consistently endorsed the state’s coverage plan since it passed in 2006. Not so.

In the latest WBUR poll, 62 percent support the law and 33 percent oppose it. Steve Koczela is president of the Mass, Inc. polling group, which conducted the poll.

“Even with all the attention the Massachusetts law has gotten nationally,” said Koczela, “it really hasn’t driven down support among voters here in Massachusetts.”

The difference between national and local opinions about the law is part politics, part misinformation, and partly a difference of experience, says Robert Blendon, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School. Massachusetts residents are living with the law. Opinions outside the state are based on speculation.

“A substantial share of Americans believe that the national law will fail and they assume that the Massachusetts law, which in their minds is related to this, is not working well either,” Blendon said.

That’s the case, said Blendon, even when he presents evidence to audiences outside Massachusetts that a strong majority of residents in the Commonwealth are happy with the state law.

“People are convinced,” laughed Blendon, that “[the poll] can’t be right.”

In Massachusetts, most residents in the WBUR poll (68 percent), see former Governor Mitt Romney’s opposition to the national law as an effort to win votes in his presidential campaign. Only 25% see his opposition as a disagreement based on principle.

“Taking that, in concert with the level of influence people thought the state law had on the national law, at least suggests there’s some difficulty distancing yourself from what happened nationally to what happened here at home,” says pollster Koczela.

That dynamic may translate into problems for Republican Sen. Scott Brown, who, like Romney, supports the state law but hopes to repeal the national law.

Robert D’Ambrosio is one of the WBUR poll respondents who said he likes the state health care law and is not sure whom he supports in the Senate race. D’Ambrosio finds Brown’s position confusing.

“I don’t understand why he doesn’t bother the same with the national as he does with the state,” says D’Ambrosio, who lives in Malden, a suburb just north of Boston. “If you like one, how can you not like the other?”

Many residents polled say they want to know how Brown and the leading Democratic contender Elizabeth Warren would control health care costs. Paula Zindler from Cummington in western Massachusetts, is another undecided voter. She says the state law, which both Brown and Warren support, has forced up the cost of her health coverage.

“We had to switch to a different carrier, because my insurance, I was told, was inadequate,” explains Zindler. “So I either had to change my insurance or pay a fine, and I’m not happy with that.”

While health care is expected to be a key issue in the U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts, there are at least two major, yet to be determined, factors that will shape this debate. One is whether the US Supreme Court will let all or part of the federal Affordable Care Act stand. Two is who the Republican presidential nominee will be. But health care will also play into the standard practice of US political races, says Professor Blendon.

“Even though they (Brown and Warren) have a truce on how each side will describe each other, there will be an effort to put one far on the left and one far on the right and health care examples will be very prominent in that effort,” explains Blendon.

By “truce,” Blendon refers to the agreement Warren and Brown reached a few weeks ago to donate half the cost of any political ad funded by an outside organization to charity. Several residents in the WBUR poll praise this deal and say watching whether it holds will be one of the most interesting parts of this year’s Senate race.

– Provided by Kaiser Health News.

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Damascus, Syria David Rosenberg (The Medi – As the Arab League agreed to go to the United Nations Security Council early this week with a resolution calling for Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad to step down, Russia was reportedly doing a major arms deal with the beleaguered regime.

The $550 million agreement to sell 36 Yak-130 combat aircraft will not do anything to tip the balance in favor of the Al-Assad regime, which has been engaged in a 10-month conflict with anti-government opposition. But Russia is almost certainly providing arms Damascus needs to hold back the rebels as well as mounting a diplomatic defense of its friend at the U.N.

In a rare glimpse into the Russia-Syria arms trade, a ship loaded with ammunition from Russia was briefly detained in Cyprus earlier this month before continuing its journey unmolested to the Syrian port of Tartus. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has vowed that Russia will veto any sanctions as “unfair and counterproductive.”

“Syria is an important customer for the Russian military industry and the industry is quite keen to maintain the relationship,” Fyodor Lukyanov, editor-in-chief of the Moscow based foreign policy journal Russia in Global Affairs, told The Media Line. “Syria is one of the few remaining customers in the region and it hosts the only military base – a small one but still a base – that Russia still has outside its own borders.”

As the West – now joined by the Arab League – presses the Syrian president ever harder, Russia has emerged as his most important ally. Iran also backs the Damascus regime, but Tehran itself faces growing diplomatic isolation over its nuclear program and doesn’t wield a Security Council veto. China is opposed to Syrian sanctions, too, but analysts say it is likely to follow whatever line Moscow adopts.

Russia’s warm ties with Syria, and more exactly the Al-Assad family regime that has ruled the country four decades, starts with arms sales but it goes much deeper.

In the final two decades of the Cold War era, when the Soviet Union was a superpower competing for global influence with the U.S., Syria was its staunchest ally in the Middle East. Bashar Al-Assad’s father and predecessor Hafez armed his troops with Soviet weapons and advanced Moscow’s interests in the region.

With the collapse of communism and with Syria’s deteriorating economy, the relationship is not what it once was. But Russia maintains a naval base at Tartus and the two governments share a distrust of the West and its motives.

Indeed, the view from Moscow of what is happening in Syria is very different than the one in Washington or Brussels. Where the West sees events in Syria as a popular uprising against a repressive regime, Russia shares Damascus’ take, which sees the rebellion as conspiracy by the Gulf countries to bring down an ally of their foe Iran.

“Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others see this as an opportunity, as a chance to push back Iranian influence,” Lukyanov said. “From Russia’s point of view, it’s part of a geopolitical struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia, where Syria is just a card.”

For policymakers in Moscow, the situation in Syria looks remarkably similar to the one in Libya last year, where another long-time friend, Muamar Al-Qaddafi, faced what was seen in the West as a popular rebellion against autocracy. Russia reluctantly agreed not to veto a U.N. decision to impose a no-fly zone over the country.

The resolution, as Russia’s leaders understood it, was to prevent Al-Qaddafi from killing civilians with aerial firepower. But the NATO forces that largely enforced the decision, Russians say, used it to level the playing field in the Libyan civil war to Al-Qaddafi’s disadvantage. Moscow lost a friend and customer for its arms and is now out of favor with the successor National Transitional Council.

Zvi Magen, a former Israeli ambassador to Russia, said Russia’s Syria policy is driven by memories of its Cold War rivalry with the U.S.

“There’s an element of business in the arms deals, but it’s mainly a political move to show the flag and to show support for Syria. It’s mainly a function of Russian relations with America than with the Syrian regime,” Magen told The Media Line.

For that reason – and because Moscow realizes that Al-Assad’s days are numbered – it may be prepared to make a deal with the U.S. over Syria, he added.

Nevertheless, analysts agree that the importance of the arms trade as a factor in Moscow’s calculations should not be overlooked. In an economy with few other industrial exports, Russia’s military industry is an important earner of foreign exchange and a powerful domestic political force.

The Voice of Russia radio’s website said in December without citing a source that Russian arms exports reached $11 billion last year, a three-fold increase from 2000. While the country’s biggest customers are India and China, the Middle East had been a growing market until the Arab Spring eliminated Al-Qaddafi and sanctions on Iran removed another customer. Syria alone, according to some estimates, accounted for 7 percent of all Russian arms sales in 2010.

A U.S. government study in 2009 estimated Russia’s share of the Middle East arms market grew to more than 15 percent in the 2005-2008 period, five percentage points more than in 2001-2004 as it offered more creative financing and payment options, counter-trade, offsets, debt-swapping, and, in some cases, licensing production locally.

Russia’s Interfax news agency reported in early December that Russia delivered $300 million of Yakhont anti-ship cruise missiles to Syria.

With numbers like that, it is no wonder that Sergey Chemezov, the head of the state arms export company Rosoboronexport, made clear he had no intention of halting business with Syria.

“There are no sanctions whatsoever regarding Syria,” he told Interfax on Wednesday. “If international sanctions are imposed by the U.N. Security Council, everything will change. And if there are no sanctions, why should we refuse to cooperate with this country? This is business after all.”

Nevertheless, Magen said, Russia is careful not to sell Damascus weapons like S-300 surface-to-air missiles that could alter the regional balance of power.

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United States (AHN) – For the fifth year, Somalia sits atop the most corrupt country list, as its politicians continue to come up with new ways to profit from the country’s misery.

Putting them at No.1 was the practice of setting up refugee camps to divert food donations they can then steal and sell on the black market.

Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index aims to measure the level of bribery, diverted aid, and stolen political power that enrich a country’s leaders at the expense of its citizens and overall economy.

The 2011 list contains familiar names and well as one newcomer.

Somalia is hard to beat when it comes to corruption, with the worst crimes being carried out by the Al-Shabaab movement, which controls large portions of the countryside and finances its operations partly through ransom money it demands as tribute from pirate gangs.

Somalia’s Transitional National Government isn’t much better. A recent U.N. report showed the government, led by President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, is most competent at stealing foreign aid.

Tied with Somalia as the most corrupt country is the sole newcomer North Korea. More information about business in the secretive country has come to light from executives doing business there and the tens of thousands of escapes who have made their way to Korea and China. Author Melanie Kilpatrick of the Hudson Institute, who has interviewed dozens of escapes for two years, describes North Korea as “the most corrupt place on earth.”

Also making the list is Myanmar, or Burma, for its rampant corruption of its military dominated government.

Next on the list are Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, all known for their country’s endemic corruption.

At No. 7 is Sudan, followed by Iraq, Haiti and Venezuela.

Venezuela has hovered in or close to the Top Ten for years thanks in part to the regime of Hugo Chavez who is known for padding the wallets of friends and relatives, and also turning a blind eye to the country’s drug trade. The U.S. State Department says of the South American oil rich country, “Money laundering and judicial corruption are major concerns.”

At the opposite end of the list, New Zealand holds the distinction of being the least corrupt nation, with Denmark close behind. The United States came in at No. 24.

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London, Britain, United Kingdom (IRIN) – It is not often a technology guru will say, “Forget the internet!” but Ken Banks, founder of Kiwanja.net [http://kiwanja.net/], advocates going back to basics – using mobile phones rather than the internet, and pretty basic phones at that.

While mobile phones are ubiquitous in Africa, the internet has nothing like the same penetration and is almost non-existent in rural areas. Says Banks: “For example, in Zimbabwe, there’s 2-3 percent internet penetration. If your amazing, whizzy mobile tool needs the internet, and you are looking to deploy it in Zimbabwe, you have lost 97 percent of people before you start.”

Dillon Dhanecha’s company, The Change Studio, was trying to distribute management tools and training through the internet, and admits it fell into exactly the trap Banks was describing. “We were developing short YouTube clips and so on, but I was in Rwanda a few weeks ago and trying to access our site from my Smartphone, and it just wasn’t happening.”

But there are plenty of options with even a not-very-smart phone: one of the pioneers was M-Pesa, designed as a tool for repaying microfinance loans. But Kenyans found all kinds of other uses; for instance, people afraid to carry large sums of cash while traveling would send it to themselves for collection at their destination. It was also key to the recent Kenyans for Kenya drought aid funding drive .

Tracking livestock

Another phone-based tool playing an important role in the drought-affected areas of East Africa is EpiCollect [ http://www.epicollect.net/ ], developed by Imperial College, London, which allows the geospatial collation of data collected by mobile phone. Kenyan vets are using it for disease surveillance, monitoring outbreaks, treatments, vaccinations and animal deaths.

Even where there is no mobile-phone signal, they can record data by phone and store it until it can be transferred to a computer, producing an interactive map pinpointing where each observation has been made, with additional information about locality, even photographs, available at the click of a mouse.

Nick Short, of the NGO VetAid, has been greatly impressed by the possibilities, and the fact that ministries of agriculture and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) can now track what is happening in real time.

“When I worked in Botswana,” he says, “We had an outbreak in the northwest of a disease called CBPP. It took us about two-and-a-half months to hear the disease was in the country. By the time we got there about 20,000 cows had died; we ended up killing 300,000 cattle.”

Short is also hoping its use during the current drought will help leverage assistance, helping potential donors pinpoint exactly where their money will be going. “Just watching the BBC is not good enough,” he says. “This way people will actually see the animals they are benefiting.”

Banks has developed an SMS-based tool, Frontline SMS, which will work with even the simplest phones. By connecting a standard mobile phone to a laptop, data can be received or transmitted wherever a basic phone signal is available, without any need for 3G or an internet connection. It is freely available to any not-for-profit organization.

In Afghanistan it has been used to send out security alerts to field workers. It tracks drug availability in clinics across East Africa, and house demolitions in Zimbabwe. Civil society groups in Nigeria have used it to collate information from their election observers, and it is used by a company distributing agricultural pumps in Kenya and Tanzania to keep in touch with farmers. Specialized versions are being developed for health and educational sectors, for NGOs working in law and microfinance, and for community radio stations.

Nay-sayers

But while the developers may be entranced by their tools, some dissenting voices were raised at the 1 September meeting in London. A Ghanaian lawyer, who declined to be named, said: “I find this depressing. Just monitoring is not sufficient; monitoring is just collecting data while people die.”

Short disagreed: “Without these tools no one knows what is happening in remote areas, and if you don’t know what is happening, you can’t do anything about it… If there were an outbreak of disease, we wouldn’t know about it until it was too late, and the animals were already dead.”

Shewa Adeniji, director of a small NGO called Flourish International, which sponsors community clinics in Ghana, expressed wider concerns about Africa’s love-affair with the mobile phone. “There are glaring benefits, but it’s adding to poverty on the ground. You have people in Nigeria struggling to pay 1,000 naira for medical insurance, and yet they will buy 1,000 naira top-up for their phones. These are misplaced priorities and meanwhile the telecom companies are going to African countries to milk them of their money.”

Banks accepted there had been cases of people buying phone credit rather than food or sending their children to school but pointed out that building a transmission network, especially in rural areas, costs money. “If mobile phone [companies] didn’t make money, we wouldn’t have the network of coverage we have. And once the network is there, people can use it… The technology can be used to do both good and bad, and you can’t really control that. You can just as easily spread a hate message as a health message, but you just have to hope that people will use it in a positive way.”

eb/mw

– Provided by Integrated Regional Information Networks.

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Geneva, Switzerland (AHN) – Switzerland continues to lord over the world’s most competitive economies, according to a survey conducted by the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The country’s first-rate public infrastructure, efficient public institutions and greatly developed markets all helped anchor Switzerland into an admirable economy. It also has low unemployment and debt levels.

“Switzerland’s scientific research institutions are among the world’s best, and the strong collaboration between its academic and business sectors, combined with high company spending on R&D, ensures that much of this research is translated into marketable products and processes,” the WEF said.

Singapore and Sweden came next, at second and third respectively. The United States ranked fifth, falling for the third year in a row. The report noted the U.S. economy is extremely productive, with good universities, strong innovation, and a flexible workforce. However, the high levels of public debt and low levels of trust in political leaders conspired to pull down the country’s ranking.

The report further said that advanced economies have not grown considerably stronger in the race for profit and prosperity for the past seven years, while major emerging nations have made gains.

The survey was based on publicly available economic data and a survey of more than 14,000 business leaders in 142 economies.

Other countries highlighted in WEF’s 2011-2012 Global Competitiveness report include Sweden (3rd), Finland (4th), Germany (6th), the Netherlands (7th), Denmark (8th), Japan (9th), the United Kingdom (10th), Canada (12th), Israel (22nd), South Korea (24th), UAE (27th), Ireland (29th), Estonia (33rd), Czech Republic (38th), Bulgaria (74th), Philippines (75th), Russia (66th) and Greece (90th), among others.

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New York, NY, United States (AHN) – Last week, tech giant Apple Inc. was the apple of investors’ eyes when its market cap exceeded that of oil conglomerate Exxon Mobil. However, by the start of this week, Exxon took a bite out of Apple and regained the No.1 position.

The move by both companies in and out of the number one position brings to light what market cap is and means. Market cap is the total value of a company based on the company’s assets, earnings and future prospects. Moves in the stock market can change, alter and distort market cap based on volatility, market conditions and how quickly a stock trades.

As last week showed, maintaining a spot on the list of the 10 most valuable U.S.companies, or sitting on the apex, is not guaranteed and can change rapidly and frequently. Following, in order from top ranked to bottom, is the current list complied by research firm 24/7 Wall Street.

Exxon Mobil, Apple Inc., Microsoft, IBM, Chevron, Google, Berkshire Hathaway, Proctor & Gamble, Wal-Mart and Johnson & Johnson.

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China (AHN) – China will ban smoking in most indoor facilities, including hotels, restaurants, theaters, bars and railway stations beginning May 1.

The Ministry of Health law doesn’t specify penalties for people who violate the ban or for businesses that don’t meet the ban’s specifications.

The rule requires business owners to post no smoking signs, it prohibits cigarette vending machines in public places and it requires outdoor smoking areas to be out of the way of pedestrian walkways.

According to the Chinese news service Xinhua, about 300 million Chinese citizens are regular smokers. This leaves about 700 million people exposed to second-hand smoke.

The new rule does not prohibit smokers from lighting up at work.

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Middle East shares rallied, sending Dubai’s benchmark stock index up the most in more than a year, as protests in Saudi Arabia didn’t escalate, allaying concern that unrest in the Middle East would spread.

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Dubai shares advanced the most in a month, leading gains in the Middle East, on speculation recent declines triggered by unrest in the region were overdone. Bahrain’s benchmark stock index snapped a four-day drop.

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Middle East shares dropped, sending Dubai’s index down the most in eight months, as protests continued after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak appointed a vice president. Israeli stocks declined and bonds rose.

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