Dilemma: Am I ethical using products from Smart

I was reading the article below and I found dilemma of what I have done. I have been a loyal costumer of Paseo (tissue brand produced by Sinar Mas)and Smart Telecom (3G mobile phone). Should I stop buying the Sinar Mas products?
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detik Finance : Sinar Mas: Hanya 20% Laporan Greenpeace yang Benar

PT Sinar Mas Agro Resources & Technology Tbk (Smart) mengakui ada beberapa hal yang benar dari laporan Greenpeace berjudul "Illegal Forest Clearance and RSPO Greenwash: Case Study of Sinar Mas".

Namun Smart mengaku hanya 20% yang benar, sementara 80% sisanya tidak tidak benar yang tidak berdasarkan fakta dan penelitian ilmiah.

"Laporan yang benar hanya 15-20%, sisanya ngawur atau terlalu digeneralisasi," kata Presiden Direktur PT Smart Tbk Daud Dharsono dalam acara konferensi pers, Rabu di kantor Gapki, Jakarta (16/12/2009).

Daud menambahkan ada beberapa hal yang memang diakui oleh pihak Smart yang sesuai dengan laporan Greenpeace namun kata dia lebih banyak yang tidak benarnya. Selain mengacu pada laporan Greenpeace pihak Unilever juga berpegang pada auditor Unilever.

"Laporan dari Greenpeace ada yang benar, tapi lebih banyak yang tidak benarnya. Tidak berdasarkan fakta dan data-data statistik," katanya.

Beberapa laporan Greenpeace yang tidak dibantah oleh Smart antara lain mengenai pembukaan lahan sawit puluhan ribu hektar, mengenai adanya pembebasan lahan yang belum terganti rugi, tapi sudah dibuka lahannya. Kesalahan estimasi dalam membuka lahan gambut dari estimasi masih dibawah ketebalan 3 meter namun kenyataannya melampaui dari 3 meter.

"Sebenarnya saat begitu ketahuan maka kita langsung mengambil langkah untuk melakukan perbaikan," katanya.

Sedangkan laporan yang disanggah oleh Smart terkait laporan Greenpeace antara lain tuduhan membuka area lahan di luar izin, perizinan yang terlalu cepat dan lain-lain. Sedangkan laporan auditor Unilever yang dibantah oleh Smart antaralain laporan adanya pembukaan lahan gambut 8000 hektar dengan kedalaman 12 meter, yang hanya mengacu pada 3 titik sampel dan lain-lain.

Seperti diketahui, Unilever akhirnya memutuskan kontrak pasokan CPO dari Sinar Mas senilai 20 juta poundsterling setelah mendapatkan laporan dari Greenpeace tentang sepak terjang Sinar Mas.

Namun Daud menjelaskan, Unilever tidak memutuskan kontrak seketika melainkan hanya menghentikan sementara hingga ada perbaikan dari Smart. Kontrak Smart dengan Unilever akan berakhir pada April 2010.

"Unilever yang menghentikan sementara minyak sawit dari PT Smart Tbk itu kami sayangkan dan sesalkan. Kami dari Smart bisa menerima keputusan tersebut itu keputusan manajemen Unilever, kita nggak bisa bilang apa-apa," katanya.

Namun ia menyesalkan langkah Unilever yang dinilai tergesa-gesa, karena seharusnya bisa dilakukan dialog mengingat kedua pihak sama-sama anggota Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).

"Makanya kami menyayangkan keputusan tersebut," katanya.

Ia menjelaskan penjualan CPO Smart ke Unilever dari periode Januari-September 2009 hanya senilai Rp 370 miliar atau setara US$ 35 juta atau sebanyak 47.000 ton. Sedangkan total penjualan PT Smart justru mencapai Rp 11 triliun.

Study: Looking young may mean living longer

Those baby-faced people now have another reason to be smug: a new Danish study says looking young apparently means a longer life.

Research published online Monday in the British medical journal BMJ suggests that people who look younger than their years also live longer.

In 2001, Danish researchers conducted physical and cognitive tests on more than 1,800 pairs of twins over aged 70, as well as taking photos of their faces. Three groups of people who didn't know the twins' real ages guessed how old they were. The researchers then tracked how long the twins survived over 7 years.

The experts found that people who looked younger than their actual age were far more likely to survive, even after they adjusted for other factors like gender and environment. The bigger the difference in perceived age within any twin pair, the more likely it was that the older-looking twin died first.

They also found a possible biological explanation: people who looked younger also tended to have longer telomeres, a key DNA component that is linked to aging. People with shorter telomeres are thought to age faster. In the Danish study, the more fresh-faced people had longer telomeres.

The authors said that perceived age, which is widely used by doctors as a general indicator of a patient's health, is a good biomarker of aging that predicts survival among people over age 70. (AP)

Australian scientists have discovered an octopus in Indonesia that collects coconut shells for shelter

Australian scientists have discovered an octopus in Indonesia that collects coconut shells for shelter — unusually sophisticated behavior that the researchers believe is the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal.

The scientists filmed the veined octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus, selecting halved coconut shells from the sea floor, emptying them out, carrying them under their bodies up to 65 feet (20 meters), and assembling two shells together to make a spherical hiding spot.

Julian Finn and Mark Norman of Museum Victoria in Melbourne observed the odd activity in four of the creatures during a series of dive trips to North Sulawesi and Bali in Indonesia between 1998 and 2008. Their findings were published Tuesday in the journal Current Biology.

"I was gobsmacked," said Finn, a research biologist at the museum who specializes in cephalopods. "I mean, I've seen a lot of octopuses hiding in shells, but I've never seen one that grabs it up and jogs across the sea floor. I was trying hard not to laugh."

Octopuses often use foreign objects as shelter. But the scientists found the veined octopus going a step further by preparing the shells, carrying them long distances and reassembling them as shelter elsewhere.

That's an example of tool use, which has never been recorded in invertebrates before, Finn said.

"What makes it different from a hermit crab is this octopus collects shells for later use, so when it's transporting it, it's not getting any protection from it," Finn said. "It's that collecting it to use it later that is unusual."

The researchers think the creatures probably once used shells in the same way. But once humans began cutting coconuts in half and discarding the shells into the ocean, the octopuses discovered an even better kind of shelter, Finn said.

The findings are significant, in that they reveal just how capable the creatures are of complex behavior, said Simon Robson, associate professor of tropical biology at James Cook University in Townsville.

"Octopuses have always stood out as appearing to be particularly intelligent invertebrates," Robson said. "They have a fairly well-developed sense of vision and they have a fairly intelligent brain. So I think it shows the behavioral capabilities that these organisms have."

There is always debate in the scientific community about how to define tool use in the animal kingdom, Robson said. The Australian researchers defined a tool as an object carried or maintained for future use. But other scientists could define it differently, which means it's difficult to say for certain whether this is the first evidence of such behavior in invertebrates, Robson said.

Still, the findings are interesting, he said.

"It's another example where we can think about how similar humans are to the rest of the world," Robson said. "We are just a continuum of the entire planet."

Snaptu: Persevering with Palin | Michael Jeffries

Smug and misplaced criticism of Sarah Palin feeds the resentment on which Palin and her followers thrive

Sarah Palin has the floor. Last Wednesday...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/dec/14/sarah-palin-republicans-2012

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Snaptu: Too big to succeed | Joseph Stiglitz

Too-big-to-fail institutions skew the financial sector and make another crisis more likely – their activities must be reined in

A global controversy...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/13/mervyn-king-banks-curbed

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