U.S. Drug Firm Penalized $300 Million for Criminal Actions

September 16th, 2010

Via: CBC:

A major U.S. drug company, Forest Pharmaceuticals, has agreed to plead guilty to three charges related to selling an unapproved drug, promoting an antidepressant to children and obstructing federal agents.

The company is facing fines and criminal penalties of over $300 million.

The charges date back more than 10 years when Forest was promoting its antidepressant, Celexa, for pediatric use when it was only approved for use in adults. Celexa is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. In some children and teens it’s been linked to suicide and suicidal thoughts.

Forest was also convicted of marketing its thyroid drug Levothroid without getting FDA approval. When the company was ordered to stop selling the drug in 2003, it increased production rather than scaling down. It also ignored a subsequent warning letter.

A new formulation of Levothroid is now on the market with full approval. In Canada it’s sold under the name Levothyroxine. The drug was approved by Health Canada in 2002.

The third count, a felony charge of obstruction, relates to false statements company employees made to federal inspectors during a 2003 FDA inspection at a Forest Pharmaceuticals plant.


McDonald’s Food Doesn’t Break Down Over Time?

September 16th, 2010

Update: Site Claims “No Animals or Insects Will Touch Them”

Via: Friendseat:

How to create your own Immortal Burger:

1. Buy some hamburgers from your favorite fast food restaurant: McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King (any place that serves hybridized, chemicalized, genetically altered, hormone/ pesticide-laden food) – BUT DON’T EAT THEM!

2. Put your hamburgers in a fairly dry location and let them sit for many, many years.

WARNING: Do not put your hamburgers in any sealed containers, like jars. The moisture needs to escape the food naturally, so letting them breathe in the open air works best.

3. And that’s it! You are now the proud owner of your own Burger Museum! After 6 or 7 days, you can display them proudly. No animals or insects will touch them – which makes me wonder why we would ever touch them!

—End Update—

How about ants? Will they touch that stuff? Rodents?

Salon says, nothing to see here, move along, but I’m not so sure.

Via: GrubStreet:

In the name of both art and science, New York photographer Sally Davies decided to buy a hamburger happy meal from McDonald’s, set it out on a table, and take a picture of it every day until it disintegrated. That was 137 days ago and the end is nowhere near: The fries look as fresh as the day they came out of the fryer, and the burger — minus a little patty shrinkage — is virtually unchanged. Davies plans to keep going with the project until something happens, but she’d better be ready for a long haul: A twelve-year-old McD’s burger surfaced a few years ago looking shockingly well-preserved.

More: McDonalds Happy Meal Project


Big Pharma’s Quackademic ‘Thought Leaders’

September 16th, 2010

Via: The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Perhaps the most remarkable recent exchange with a KOL emerged in an investigation of Joseph Biederman, a child psychiatrist at Harvard University. In a lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson, Biederman was accused of promising positive research results to the company in exchange for funding. A hint of Biederman’s self-opinion emerged in a deposition, where a lawyer asked him about his academic ranking.

Biederman: “To move in the ranks from one rank, for example, at Harvard, there is instructor, from instructor you move to assistant professor, from assistant professor you move to associate professor, from associate professor you move to full professor.”

Lawyer: “Full professor?”

Biederman: “Mm-hmm.”

Lawyer: “What rank are you?”

Biederman: “Full professor.”

Lawyer: “What’s after that?”

Biederman: “God.”

Lawyer: “Did you say God?”

Biederman: “Yeah.”

Related: 85% of Big Pharma’s New Drugs Are “Lemons” and Pose Health Risks to Users

Research Credit: JH


Green Shoots: U.S. Census Bureau Reports Highest Poverty Rate Since 1994: 14.3 Percent

September 16th, 2010

Via: NPR:

This morning, the U.S. Census Bureau released its annual report on income, poverty and health insurance in the U.S. The poverty rate in 2009 rose by 1.1 percent, to 14.3 percent.

According to the agency, “there were 43.6 million people in poverty in 2009, up from 39.8 million in 2008 — the third consecutive increase.”

What makes someone poor, or in bureaucratic-speak, what is the “poverty threshold”? The Census Bureau explains, using numbers from the Consumer Price Index. For a family of four, for example, the weighted average poverty threshold was $21,954.


Laws of Physics Vary Throughout the Universe, New Study Suggests

September 16th, 2010

Via: Science Daily:

A team of astrophysicists based in Australia and England has uncovered evidence that the laws of physics are different in different parts of the universe.

The team — from the University of New South Wales, Swinburne University of Technology and the University of Cambridge — has submitted a report of the discovery for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters. A preliminary version of the paper is currently under peer review.

The report describes how one of the supposed fundamental constants of Nature appears not to be constant after all. Instead, this ‘magic number’ known as the fine-structure constant — ‘alpha’ for short — appears to vary throughout the universe.

“After measuring alpha in around 300 distant galaxies, a consistency emerged: this magic number, which tells us the strength of electromagnetism, is not the same everywhere as it is here on Earth, and seems to vary continuously along a preferred axis through the universe,” Professor John Webb from the University of New South Wales said.

“The implications for our current understanding of science are profound. If the laws of physics turn out to be merely ‘local by-laws’, it might be that whilst our observable part of the universe favours the existence of life and human beings, other far more distant regions may exist where different laws preclude the formation of life, at least as we know it.”

“If our results are correct, clearly we shall need new physical theories to satisfactorily describe them.”


Recovery: Foreclosures Rise; Repossessions Set Record

September 16th, 2010

Via: CNBC:

US foreclosure activity rose in August from the previous month, and banks and lenders took ownership from homeowners at a record pace, according to a new report released Thursday.

Bank repossessions, often the final step in the foreclosure process after a home fails to sell at auction, increased about 2 percent from the month before to 95,364, a record high. At the same the number of properties that received default notices—the first step in the foreclosure process—decreased 1 percent from a month ago and fell 30 percent from a year ago, a sign that lenders are focusing on their backlog of foreclosure inventory before tackling new distressed loans, according to foreclosure listing website RealtyTrac, which released the report.


Banner Image: Not Photoshop

September 16th, 2010

Some questions have been coming in with regard to the current banner image. No, I didn’t make that in Photoshop. Yes, that’s marijuana.

Via: Boston Globe – Big Picture – Reuters:

Cpl Ryan Belgrave with the Canadian Army’s 1st Battalion, The Royal Canadian Regiment Battle Group, walks through a field of marijuana plants during a patrol near the village of Salavat, in the Panjway district west of Kandahar on August 4, 2010. (REUTERS/Bob Strong)


DIY, Small Scale Algae Production

September 16th, 2010

Via: Shareable:

Microscopic spinning orbs and spirals of green goo are the answers to our planet’s energy crisis and arable land shortage. At least that’s what Aaron Baum, a 40-year-old Harvard graduate and Stanford PhD, has concluded.

And Baum should know. After a mid-life crisis of sorts, he spent months researching the types of science that would most benefit the world and concluded that algae are it. Now, he wants to share his passion with the public by creating communities of people with their own algae farms. Imagine that – you can have a personal algae tank that provides fresh, ultra-nutritious food on a year-round basis.

More: The Algae Lab


Twitter Feed Working Again

September 16th, 2010

A reader let me know that Cryptogon’s Twitter feed has been broken for the last couple of weeks. (Shows you how much I deal with Twitter.) It should be working again.


FBI Forwards Letters to Political Prisoners to Local Law Enforcement Agencies

September 15th, 2010

Via: IndyMedia:

Recently we began receiving documents in response to a FOIA request we filed with the FBI about Eric McDavid. The documents have uncovered a few alarming pieces of information, but one in particular we felt it necessary to share with the public as soon as possible. For years people have been speculating that writing political prisoners would result in a person being “put on a list.” Unfortunately, it seems that those speculations were not unfounded.

We have received perhaps hundreds of pages documenting Eric’s correspondence with other people. These letters are not just kept on file – the Sacramento County Main Jail forwarded all of these letters to the Sacramento FBI field office, which then forwarded them to local field offices around the country (and to law enforcement internationally) to warn the FBI in other cities of a “possible environmental/animal rights extremist” or “a possible anarchist extremist” in their community. Originally, the FBI’s communications included a statement that “Sacramento is forwarding this communication for information purposes only.” But later, they began including a much longer statement which read, in part: “this information has been determined to be of such a nature that some follow-up as to the possibility of criminal activity is warranted…” These statements were included no matter what was the content of the letter – often the documents include the statement that the letter was “benign in nature.”

It is unclear whether or not the FBI is still forwarding Eric’s correspondence to local field offices. We have not received any documents dated after his move to a federal facility. It is also unknown whether or not all correspondence with political prisoners is treated in the same manner. What we do know is that if a person sent Eric a letter to the Sacramento County Main Jail with their full name and address on it, the local FBI field office more than likely now has that information.

We are not sharing this information to raise alarm or spread fear. We have every intention of continuing to write political prisoners, and we urge others to do the same. That said, we hope to expose the FBI’s politically motivated investigations and, unlike the FBI, we believe people have a right to know when they have been spied on. This kind of government intrusion could cause the “chilling effect” so often thrown about in conversations about 1st amendment activities. But when we give in to those fears, political prisoners are the ones who suffer. And this is exactly what the government wants. The state is constantly trying to expand its reach by gathering information about social movements and those who participate in them. Instead of letting this new information scare us into silence, we should use it to make informed decisions about how we support and prioritize political prisoners. This kind of repression has implications for more than just people involved in “activism.” Millions of people are incarcerated in this country. It is possible that the government uses similar tactics to investigate other communities that they actively repress. Writing our friends, family members and comrades should not be a justified excuse for investigation – no matter who our friends are.

We are attaching three documents. The first is typical of the documents the FBI sent towards the beginning of Eric’s time at Sac County. The second is an example of what they sent to international law enforcement agencies. The final document is an example of the later version with the language about “follow up” being “warranted.”

If you would like to find out if the FBI has been collecting information on you, here is a website that explains how to request information under the freedom of information act.
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/press/information/topic.aspx?topic=how_to_FOIA

Research Credit: ottilie


« Previous Page — Next Page »