More companies shed light on political spending (Reuters)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – More American companies are bending to shareholder pressure to reveal their spending to sway political campaigns despite court decisions allowing unfettered corporate cash in elections, according to a study released on Friday.

Colgate-Palmolive Co, IBM and Merck & Co are among the big names with the best grades from the Center for Political Accountability, a foundation-funded group that pushes companies to open up their books.

The landmark Citizens United ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010 ended most restrictions on campaign donations by corporations and unions, giving these groups the ability to write fat checks to back political causes.

But pressure has been building for years from shareholders of public firms to shed light on such spending. Proponents of disclosure argue that getting involved in politics poses big risks for a company's reputation and brand.

Target Corp learned that lesson the hard way, when it gave $150,000 in 2010 to a Minnesota business group that backed a Republican candidate for governor who was a staunch opponent of gay marriage.

Potential shareholder ire "has got the attention of companies because now there is greater recognition that political spending poses real risks," said Bruce Freed, president of the Center for Political Accountability. "Are they there yet? No. But the direction is important."

The candidate ultimately lost the race but Target was forced to defend itself from shareholders and some in the public, who threatened a boycott.

Shareholders have had increasing success in pushing companies to open up about their donations. Of the 33 resolutions at major companies that made it to a shareholder vote in 2011, the average support was about 34 percent, according to the Center. Several years back, support of such resolutions was about 10 percent.

Three-fifths of the Standard & Poor's 100 companies are now reporting direct corporate spending, while 43 companies report some information about political spending through third parties like trade groups, the survey found.

Before the Citizens United ruling, companies could spend $5,000 from their employee-funded political action committees on a candidate per election. Now, there are no limits.

Citizens United and other legal rulings will help make the 2012 presidential election the costliest ever, with a price tag of $6 billion or more, according to some independent estimates.

SECRET FUNDS

Some well-known corporations say they would not risk their brand by giving to a group with an overly political agenda.

"Most companies are worried about alienating consumers," said Wesley Bizzell, assistant general counsel of tobacco conglomerate Altria, which scored in the top tier in the survey.

Under Citizens United, pro-business trade groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other tax-exempt entities won new powers to spend unlimited pools of cash without disclosing donors.

Corporate America has a ways to go in detailing this funding, Freed and other activists said.

"All of the secret money is being laundered through tax- exempt groups, which means, if a corporation is going to agree to disclose its political activities, to be effective, it must include the money it gives to trade associations," said Fred Wertheimer, a veteran campaign finance lawyer and president of Democracy 21, which promotes campaign finance reform.

The use of funds from undisclosed sources rose to $135 million in the 2010 elections, up from about $76 million in 2008, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

IBM, for example, requires that the money it gives to the Chamber not be for political activity such as advertising.

But most companies do not put such restrictions on the funds to these organizations.

"There is a lot of latitude for organizations to have it both ways." said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

(Editing by Philip Barbara)

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U.S. to shed light on Guatemala syphilis experiment (Reuters)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. presidential commission will release on Monday its key findings on a government research project that deliberately infected Guatemalan prison inmates and mental patients with syphilis in the 1940s.

The conclusions have consequences for U.S. diplomacy and will impact the ethical discussion surrounding how new drugs are tested on patients, as manufacturers increasingly conduct clinical trials abroad.

The United States formally apologized last year for the experiment, which was meant to test the drug penicillin, after it was uncovered decades later by a college professor.

Guatemala condemned it as a crime against humanity and said last year it would consider taking the case to an international court. Victims of the study are suing the U.S. government.

President Barack Obama's Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues has conducted its own investigation and will discuss its key findings at 1 p.m. (1700 GMT) in Washington on Monday, followed by recommendations on Tuesday on protecting research participants from unethical treatment. More detailed findings will be presented to Obama in September, with a final report due in December.

"They will have a chance to do a richer investigation and we'll have a richer picture of what happened," said Wellesley College professor Susan Reverby, whose research revealed the previously unpublished records of the Guatemalan experiment.

"It's too easy to say, 'Oh, we'd never do anything like that,'" she told Reuters. "(At the time,) they thought they were doing good science, these were decent people, not monsters, and therefore we really need to think about what we're doing now that's going to look horrible in 20 years."

In a November 2010 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the directors of the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rejected the possibility that such unethical practices could happen now, at least for government-affiliated studies.

But the bioethics community is less convinced.

"Too often people become absorbed with the merit of a scientific question and can lose sight of the ethics in answering it," said Mary Faith Marshall, a professor at the University of Minnesota's Center for Bioethics.

"Possibly, if you broaden the scope ... to private industry, you'll see things that are even worse," she said.

INFORMED CONSENT

Protections for research participants may not work in some foreign countries where subjects are poor and illiterate, making their informed consent hard to trust, said Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.

"Peer review in corrupt countries doesn't mean very much," he added.

In a more recent incident, Pfizer Inc's 200-patient trial of antibiotic Trovan during a 1996 meningitis outbreak in Kano, Nigeria, triggered a decade-long legal battle after 11 children died and the company was accused of not obtaining adequate prior consent. Pfizer settled all outstanding lawsuits from the case in February.

Even before Reverby's discovery, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was working on proposed changes, released in July, to its 1991 rules protecting human research subjects, which have been criticized for being too stifling for low-risk studies and too loose for high-risk research.

Reverby uncovered the Guatemala experiment after years of research into a medical study in Tuskegee, Alabama, where hundreds of black American men were deliberately left untreated for syphilis. The experiment lasted 40 years until 1972.

While studying the archives of Dr. John Cutler, a Public Health Service officer and a Tuskegee researcher, Reverby found boxes of medical records and notes from another, previously unknown study conducted between 1946 and 1948 in Guatemala.

Later confirmed by federal health agencies, her findings showed that the PHS, under a grant from the NIH to the Pan American Sanitary Bureau and in collaboration with several Guatemalan agencies, deliberately infected hundreds of people with the sexually transmitted diseases syphilis, gonorrhea and chancroid.

The patients were given antibiotic penicillin to determine its effectiveness in curing or preventing syphilis, an infection that can cause genital sores and rashes and, if left untreated, damage internal organs and cause paralysis, blindness or even death.

"They thought, 'we're in a war against disease and in war soldiers die,'" Reverby said. "Those who are on the cutting edge of the science are the ones that can easily fall."

Some 700 people were infected with syphilis. These included inmates exposed to infected prostitutes brought into prisons and male and female patients in a mental hospital. Some subjects had bacteria poured on scrapes made on their genitals, arms or faces.

Records show no documentation that syphilis study subjects gave informed consent or understood they were participating in research, according to a September 2010 report by the CDC.

Until his death in 2003, Cutler remained unapologetic about his research. The bioethics commission's findings are expected to put his work in historical context.

Guatemalan Vice President Dr. Rafael Espada planned to speak at Monday's event, but canceled those plans because of Hurricane Irene that hit the U.S. East Coast over the weekend.

"There is a great deal of skepticism and cynicism with which the U.S. is greeted in (Latin America)," said Larry Birns, director of the non-profit Council on Hemispheric Affairs. "This will reaffirm in the minds of average Latin Americans how dirty and loathe the United States is."

(Editing by Michele Gershberg and Eric Beech)

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Traffic light in Los Angeles (Reuters)

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A Los Angeles freeway shutdown dubbed "Carmageddon" that city leaders have warned about for weeks failed to slow morning traffic in the region on Saturday, but officials remained cautious.

The unprecedented weekend shutdown of a 10-mile stretch of the 405 Freeway could, in a worst-case scenario, delay motorists for hours on alternate routes with ripple effects on other major highways.

The shutdown will allow crews to demolish part of a bridge for a $1 billion freeway widening project.

Despite the worries about Carmageddon, a catchphrase description that has seized the motoring public's imagination, traffic flowed easily on freeways Saturday morning.

"We don't want to claim victory at the moment, but it appears as though people are heeding the call that we issued to stay away or stay home," said Dave Sotero, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. "But it's not over yet."

Work crews started to block on-ramps and connectors to the closed stretch of the 405 Freeway on Friday evening, and plans call for it to be reopened on Monday by 6 a.m.

Los Angeles is famous for its car culture and residents' heavy dependence on getting behind the wheel to drive to work and recreate, due to the city's relatively vast expanse and the meager public transit options in many areas.

As a result, the freeway shutdown had many residents in America's second-largest city worried. Some booked hotels to avoid getting caught in traffic while commuting for work over the weekend.

On a typical weekend, 500,000 vehicles file through the stretch of freeway that is closed for the project, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or Metro.

The freeway stretch passes through a canyon that connects the occasionally sweltering San Fernando Valley to the more temperate westside and its tony beach communities.

Businesses ranging from JetBlue Airways to a bagel shop have offered Carmageddon-themed deals. For JetBlue, the special was $4 flights between Long Beach Airport, at the south end of Los Angeles, and Bob Hope Airport 30 miles to the north in Burbank, allowing commuters to bypass the 405 Freeway.

Just as it has been on Saturday morning, traffic was light on Friday evening through much of Los Angeles, as onlookers near the 405 Freeway gazed at its eerily empty lanes.

"Los Angeles has done a great job tonight in staying home, staying out of their cars, avoiding the congestion," Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky told a local television news station in an interview near the freeway.

The $1 billion freeway widening project is expected to be completed in 2013, and the bridge demolition is just a small part of that undertaking.

On Friday evening, Rene Bernescut and his wife Irene watched the project from an overlook and took pictures.

Rene said he saw the freeway open in 1962, and he is not optimistic the widening project would fully relieve the traffic that clogs the canyon pass on a typical day.

"Two years from now, we'll be in the same condition," he said.

(Additional reporting by Jason Kandel; Editing by Jerry Norton)

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Shuttle lifts off for last time; `Light this fire' (AP)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Atlantis and four astronauts thundered into orbit Friday on NASA's last space shuttle voyage, writing the final chapter in a 30-year story of dazzling triumphs, shattering tragedy and, ultimately, unfulfilled expectations.

After days of gloomy forecasts full of rain and heavy cloud cover, the spaceship lifted off at 11:29 a.m. — just 2 1/2 minutes late — and embarked on the 135th shuttle mission. The crowd of spectators was estimated at nearly 1 million.

"Let's light this fire one more time," Commander Christopher Ferguson said just before taking flight.

The shuttle was visible for 42 seconds before disappearing into the clouds.

It will be at least three years — possibly five or more — before astronauts are launched again from U.S. soil, and so this final journey of the shuttle era packed in crowds and roused emotions on a scale not seen since the Apollo moon shots. NASA has set of long-term goal of flying to an asteroid and eventually Mars.

"Take a deep breath. Enjoy a little time here with your families again. But we've got a lot of work to do. We've got another program that we've got to get under way," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told the launch control team after Atlantis reached orbit. He added: "We know what we're doing. We know how to get there. We've just got to convince everybody else that we know what we're doing."

Atlantis' crew will deliver a year's worth of critical supplies to the International Space Station and return with as much trash as possible. The spaceship is scheduled to come home on July 20 after 12 days in orbit.

The four experienced space fliers rode Atlantis from the same launch pad used more than a generation ago by the Apollo astronauts. NASA waived its own weather rules in the final minutes of the countdown to allow the launch to go forward. In the end, though, the liftoff was delayed not by the weather but by the need to verify that the launch pad support equipment was retracted all the way.

The last-minute suspense was fitting in a way, since Florida's famously stormy weather delayed numerous shuttle missions almost from the start of the program and was a major reason spaceflight never became routine, as NASA had hoped for.

Spectators jammed Cape Canaveral and surrounding towns for the emotional farewell. Kennedy Space Center itself was packed with shuttle workers, astronauts and 45,000 invited guests.

NASA's original shuttle pilot, Robert Crippen, now 73, was among the VIPs. He flew Columbia, along with Apollo 16 moonwalker John Young, on the inaugural test flight in 1981. Other notables on the guest list: a dozen members of Congress, Cabinet members, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, four Kennedy family members, singers Jimmy Buffett and Gloria Estefan, and two former NASA chiefs.

"I'm a little bit sad about it, and a little bit wistful," said Jennifer Cardwell, 38, who came with her husband, John, and two young sons from Fairhope, Ala. "I've grown up with it."

The space shuttle was conceived even as the moon landings were under way, deemed essential for building a permanent space station. NASA brashly promised 50 flights a year — in other words, routine trips into space — and affordable service.

But the program suffered two tragic accidents that killed 14 astronauts and destroyed two shuttles, Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. NASA never managed more than nine flights in a single year. And the total tab was $196 billion, or $1.45 billion a flight.

Yet there have been some indisputable payoffs: The International Space Station would not exist if it were not for the shuttles, and the Hubble Space Telescope, thanks to repeated tuneups by astronauts, would be a blurry eye in the sky instead of the world's finest cosmic photographer.

The station is essentially completed, and thus the shuttle's original purpose accomplished. NASA says it is sacrificing the shuttles because there is not enough money to keep the expensive fleet going if the space agency is to aim for asteroids and Mars.

Thousands of shuttle workers will be laid off within days of Atlantis' return from its 33rd flight, on top of the thousands who already have lost their jobs. And the three remaining shuttles will become museum pieces.

After Atlantis took flight, NASA launch director Mike Leinbach choked up as he thanked the members of his control team, some of whom will be out of a job. "The definition of godspeed I like the best is 'have a prosperous journey,' and folks, from the bottom of my heart, good luck and godspeed," he said.

This day of reckoning has been coming since 2004, a year after the Columbia tragedy, when President George W. Bush announced the retirement of the shuttle and put NASA on a course back to the moon. President Barack Obama canceled the back-to-the-moon program in favor of trips to an asteroid and Mars.

But NASA has yet to work out the details of how it intends to get there, and has not even settled on a spacecraft design.

The space shuttle demonstrates America's leadership in space, and "for us to abandon that in favor of nothing is a mistake of strategic proportions," lamented former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, who led the agency from 2005 to 2008.

After Atlantis' lights-out flight, private rocket companies will take over the job of hauling supplies and astronauts to the space station. The first supply run is targeted for later this year, while the first trip with astronauts is projected to be years away.

Until those flights are up and running, American astronauts will be hitching rides to and from the space station via Russian Soyuz capsules, at more than $50 million per trip.

Russia will supply the rescue vessels for Ferguson and his crew if Atlantis ends up severely damaged in flight. But the Russian spaceships can carry only three people, including two crew members, and any rescue would require a series of back-and-forth trips. That is why only four astronauts are flying Atlantis, the smallest crew in decades.

When Atlantis returns, it will be put on display at the Kennedy Space Center. Discovery and Endeavour already are retired and being prepped for museums in suburban Washington and Los Angeles.

___

Associated Press writers Mitch Stacy in Titusville, Fla., and Seth Borenstein at Cape Canaveral contributed to this story.

Online:

NASA: http://1.usa.gov/9JytXVNASA:

(This version CORRECTS return date to July 20.)

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