It has cancelled all entertainment programmes and replaced them with a message reading: “In a sign of protest against the attempt to change illegally the management of NTV there will only be information programmes.” The final onslaught by the government on NTV has been surprisingly crude. It took place as Mr Putin was giving his annual speech about the state of the country.Alfred Kokh and Boris Jordan, the men now seeking to run NTV, were active players in controversial privatisation deals in the mid-1990s. Even Gennady Seleznyov, the Duma speaker who normally co-operates with the Kremlin, said: “I had not expected the NTV shareholders ­ I mean those representing Gazprom ­ to make such an inept decision and to appoint rogues like Jordan and Kokh.” Mr Gorbachev described the new board as “impostors” and said nobody should have contact with them.Mr Putin has sought to distance himself from the struggle, claiming it is a commercial dispute, but, given the hierarchical structure of Russian government, he must have known about the final assault on the television network.It is unclear how the dispute will be affected by Mr Turner’s agreement to buy Mr Gusinsky’s shares in Media-Most, the holding company that has hitherto controlled NTV, Ekho Moskvy radio and a number of newspapers and magazines Mr Turner has promised to maintain NTV’s independence.. Soon after moving to Fallon, in Nevada, Laura White’s husband Michael started developing skin lesions on his arms. Soon after moving to Fallon, in Nevada, Laura White’s husband Michael started developing skin lesions on his arms. As his condition worsened over the course of a week ­ it got so bad that it began to resemble psoriasis ­ the couple suspected that it might have something to do with the water supply.
They had previously lived in the countryside outside the town, and knew that the water extracted from their private well there was so salty it killed their plants and made it almost intolerable to take a shower.

What they did not know at the time was that Fallon and the surrounding area has the highest concentration of arsenic in its drinking water of anywhere in the US; twice as high, in fact, as the federal government’s long-standing legal limit, and 10 times higher than the safety levels mandated in most of Europe.Lesions like Michael White’s can be a precursor to chronic rashes, liver spots and full-blown skin or bladder cancer ­ all well-documented symptoms of arsenic poisoning. In his case, he followed his hunch, switched to bottled water, and the problem with his arms subsided. The city has since sent out a number of fliers alerting its citizens to the problem with its water. But his wife, for one, is far from reassured.Laura White wants to know why children are still given tap water in Fallon’s elementary schools (her two, aged seven and five, are under strict instructions not to touch it and take juice to school instead). She wants to know why the city fathers have bitterly resisted pressure to install a treatment facility and clean up the water supply.

She also cannot understand why President Bush has just scrapped new federal standards for arsenic in drinking water ­ one of the more controversial environmental moves of his administration.She also has urgent questions about a cluster of leukaemia cases that have broken out in Fallon, affecting 12 children. She wonders, given the official attitude to arsenic and the profusion of industrial, military and mining interests in this part of northern Nevada, what other poisons might be out there that she hasn’t been warned about. “We just got done watching that film Erin Brockovich, and it sounds exactly like Fallon,” Laura said on the porch of her modest home, children hanging off her and toys strewn across the scrawny yard, in a scene reminiscent of the movie (which, of course, depicts a different water-poisoning scandal in rural California) “The city acts like it doesn’t care. I want out of here bad.”But it is not just isolated residents like Laura White who have raised the alarm over Fallon. Toxicologists and environmental activists have long been urging the federal government to intervene here and in hundreds of other afflicted communities across the States. (Some, like Fallon, have naturally occurring arsenic; others have inherited the problem from nearby mining ventures.) In the wake of the arsenic poisoning disaster in Bangladesh, in which thousands of people encouraged by a UN programme to dig their own water wells fell chronically ill, the National Academy of Sciences issued a comprehensive report in 1999 describing arsenic as a major health hazard, and suggesting that a concentration like Fallon’s could result in as many as two extra cancer cases for every 100 residents. In the dying days of the Clinton administration, new rules were at last issued, tightening the legally acceptable level of arsenic in drinking water from 50 parts per billion to the European standard of 10 parts per billion.