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Tom Clements, Southeastern Nuclear Campaign Coordinator with Friends of the Earth in Columbia, South Carolina made the following statement about the importance of the release of the photos.

Drug gangs have targeted rehab clinics in the manufacturing city of Ciudad Juarez across from El Paso, Texas, accusing them of protecting dealers from rival gangs.

The attack was one of the deadliest in President Felipe Calderon’s three-year war against drug cartels, despite the presence of 10,000 troops and federal police in Ciudad Juarez who constantly patrol the city’s streets.

The suspected hitmen stormed their way into the drug and alcohol rehab clinic in Ciudad Juarez and forced patients into a line in a corridor before shooting them, the army and the El Diario newspaper said.

“Armed men shot at about 20 people, killing 17 of them and injuring three,” said army spokesman Enrique Torres.

In a separate attack on Wednesday, gunmen killed the deputy police chief in Calderon’s home state of Michoacan in western Mexico.

Jose Manuel Revueltas, appointed just two weeks ago, was intercepted by heavily armed men in two vehicles as he drove down a busy avenue in the state capital, Morelia, a few blocks from police headquarters, police said.

Revueltas, 38, and his two bodyguards died in the intense gunfire that also killed a man traveling on a bus.

Revueltas was a close aide of Michoacan’s leftist governor, Leonel Godoy. Calderon has placed a heavy military presence in the state.

Calderon has staked his presidency on crushing the cartels whose brazen fight for control of smuggling routes into the United States worries Washington and has killed more than 13,000 people since late 2006.

Mikhail Voitenko said he had been told to leave Moscow or face arrest.

The editor of Sovfracht, an online maritime journal, fled on Wednesday, saying he may not be able to return as his life would be in danger.

Eight men, mainly from Estonia, have been charged with hijacking and piracy over the case.

The men are suspected of seizing the ship and its 15-man Russian crew after raiding it disguised as police.

The alleged hijackers were taken to Russia after the ship was spotted 300 miles (480km) off the west coast of Africa on 16 August.

Secret shipment

Mr Voitenko – who was among the first to cast doubt on official explanations about the ship’s disappearance – told the BBC it was nonsense to suggest pirates had been involved.

Instead he suggested the ship may have been carrying a secret shipment of weapons as part of a private business deal by state officials.

Speaking to the BBC from Turkey, Mr Voitenko said he had received a threatening phone call from “serious people” whom he suggested may have been members of Russia’s intelligence agency, the FSB.

The caller told Mr Voitenko that those involved in the mysterious case of the Arctic Sea were very angry with him because he had spoken publicly, and were planning on taking action against him, he said.

“As long as I am out of Russia I feel safe,” Mr Voitenko told the BBC. “At least they won’t be able to get me back to Russia and convict [me].”

He also said Nato knew exactly what had happened to the Arctic Sea.

A Nato spokesman said the alliance had been in contact with Russia throughout the crisis, but would not say anything more.

The FSB refused to comment on the allegations.

Further inspection

Mystery continues to surround the ship’s disappearance, amid speculation the ship may have been intercepted by Mossad – Israel’s foreign intelligence service – in order to prevent a shipment of illegal arms to the Middle East.

The 4,000-tonne Maltese-flagged vessel vanished in July days after leaving Finland with an apparent cargo of timber worth $1.8m (£1.1m), destined for the Algerian port of Bejaia.

Observers have questioned why the alleged hijackers would risk seizing the Arctic Sea in one of Europe’s busiest shipping lanes for a relatively inexpensive cargo.

“It’s hard to do what’s right when everyone else around you is following management sales directive,” John Kopchinski told the BBC’s World Today.

Mr Kopchinski was awarded $50m (£31m) for helping expose Pfizer’s wrongdoing.

Pfizer is paying $2.3bn after promoting four drugs for conditions different to those for which they were approved.

…

Mr Kopchinski described how Pfizer’s 3,000 sales representatives were told to promote Bextra in areas of medicine where the use of the drug had not been studied.

“They tried to have orthopaedics use Bextra pre-surgery and post-surgery. Bextra hadn’t been studied in that area,” he said.

“If I were going into surgery I wouldn’t want to use a drug that had not been studied for that cause.”

He also described how they were told to push the dosage up when promoting the drug to physicians, in some cases up to eight times the recommended dosage.

The emergency designation protects schools and health care providers against liability claims related to their participation in school-based vaccine clinics this fall for both the seasonal flu and the H1N1 flu. “Maine has been proactive in its response to this new flu,” Baldacci said in announcing the proclamation. “But as the school year begins, we must continue our vigilance, which will require a responsible and aggressive vaccination and public education campaign. It’s our goal that every person in the state has access to vaccines for the seasonal and H1N1 flu.”

In accordance with recommendations from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, officials in Maine are encouraging public schools to offer on-site immunization clinics for all children, including infants over 6 months and preschoolers as well as children who are home-schooled. Participating schools will offer the seasonal influenza vaccine as soon as possible, and many also will offer the new H1N1 vaccine when it becomes available.

A list of participating schools is not yet available. Dr. Dora Anne Mills, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said Tuesday that many schools will partner with area health care providers such as hospitals, visiting nursing organizations, and health clinics for the actual administration of the injectable vaccines. But those providers may not have enough clinical staff to devote to giving the vaccines and will be looking to recruit recently retired nurses and other clinicians who are not their regular employees.

The emergency proclamation allows for those clinicians, once their credentials have been approved, to become temporary employees of the state, relieving provider agencies from the administrative burden and legal liabilities associated with hiring them directly.

Mills said a similar process was employed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita when Maine nurses and other providers worked with rescue and recovery teams on the Gulf Coast.

Schools are no more liable for injuries associated with the vaccine clinics than they would be for injuries incurred at a basketball game or other community event, Mills said. And while vaccine manufacturers are generally not liable for ill effects of the vaccines they produce, Mills said, the federal government does have a compensation fund for vaccine-related illnesses or injuries.

The study, the most comprehensive examination of wage-law violations in a decade, also found that 68 percent of the workers interviewed had experienced at least one pay-related violation in the previous work week.

“We were all surprised by the high prevalence rate,” said Ruth Milkman, one of the study’s authors and a sociology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the City University of New York. The study, to be released on Wednesday, was financed by the Ford, Joyce, Haynes and Russell Sage Foundations.

In surveying 4,387 workers in various low-wage industries, including apparel manufacturing, child care and discount retailing, the researchers found that the typical worker had lost $51 the previous week through wage violations, out of average weekly earnings of $339. That translates into a 15 percent loss in pay.

In a blog posting on Tuesday, Microsoft’s Deputy General Counsel Horacio Gutierrez said that a backlog of patent applications internationally was needed to tackle the 3.5 million pending patent applications around the world–including around 750,000 in the US.

“In today’s world of universal connectivity, global business and collaborative innovation, it is time for a world patent that is derived from a single patent application, examined and prosecuted by a single examining authority and litigated before a single judicial body,” said Guiterrez. “A harmonized, global patent system would resolve many of the criticisms leveled at national patent systems over unmanageable backlogs and interminable pendency periods.”

And House Foreign Affairs Committee member, Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.) vowed to hold hearings on the issue in the fall, saying: “The idea that American taxpayer dollars are ending up with the Taliban is a case for grave concern.”

U.S. officials confirmed that the preliminary investigation and the proposed hearings were sparked by a GlobalPost special report on the funding of the Taliban last month that uncovered a process that has been an open secret in Afghanistan for years among those in international aid organizations.

The report exposed that the Taliban takes a percentage of the billions of dollars in aid from U.S. and other international coalition members that goes to large organizations and their subcontractors for development projects, in exchange for protection in remote areas controlled by the insurgency.

“We are looking into this. We are always interested in fraud, waste and abuse,” said Dona Dinkler, the chief of staff for congressional affairs at USAID’s Office of Inspector General in Washington, D.C.

But, she added: “It’s a real hard thing to prove. Who is going to survive to testify about that? That is our challenge. But that doesn’t mean we stop trying. We want to get to the bottom of it.”

…

It sounds like the plot for the latest summer horror movie. Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush had been allowed a third term as president, had run and had won or stolen it, and that we were all now living (and dying) through it. With the Democrats in control of Congress but Bush still in the Oval Office, the media would certainly be talking endlessly about a mandate for bipartisanship and the importance of taking into account the concerns of Republicans. Can’t you just picture it?

There’s Dubya now, still rewriting laws via signing statements. Still creating and destroying laws with executive orders. And still violating laws at his whim. Imagine Bush continuing his policy of extraordinary rendition, sending prisoners off to other countries with grim interrogation reputations to be held and tortured. I can even picture him formalizing his policy of preventive detention, sprucing it up with some “due process” even as he permanently removes habeas corpus from our culture.

I picture this demonic president still swearing he doesn’t torture, still insisting that he wants to close Guantanamo, but assuring his subordinates that the commander-in-chief has the power to torture “if needed,” and maintaining a prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan that makes Guantanamo look like summer camp. I can imagine him continuing to keep secret his warrantless spying programs while protecting the corporations and government officials involved.

If Bush were in his third term, we would already have seen him propose, yet again, the largest military budget in the history of the world. We might well have seen him pretend he was including war funding in the standard budget, and then claim that one final supplemental war budget was still needed, immediately after which he would surely announce that yet another war supplemental bill would be needed down the road. And of course, he would have held onto his Secretary of Defense from his second term, Robert Gates, to run the Pentagon, keep our ongoing wars rolling along, and oversee the better part of our public budget.

Bush would undoubtedly be following through on the agreement he signed with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for all U.S. troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011 (except where he chose not to follow through). His generals would, in the meantime, be leaking word that the United States never intended to actually leave. He’d surely be maintaining current levels of troops in Iraq, while sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan and talking about a new “surge” there. He’d probably also be escalating the campaign he launched late in his second term to use drone aircraft to illegally and repeatedly strike into Pakistan’s tribal borderlands with Afghanistan.

If Bush were still “the decider” he’d be employing mercenaries like Blackwater and propagandists like the Rendon Group and he might even be expanding the number of private security contractors in Afghanistan. In fact, the whole executive branch would be packed with disreputable corporate executive types. You’d have somebody like John (“May I torture this one some more, please?”) Rizzo still serving, at least for a while, as general counsel at the CIA. The White House and Justice Department would be crawling with corporate cronies, people like John Brennan, Greg Craig, James Jones, and Eric Holder. Most of the top prosecutors hired at the Department of Justice for political purposes would still be on the job. And political prisoners, like former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and former top Democratic donor Paul Minor would still be abandoned to their fate.

In addition, the bank bailouts Bush and his economic team initiated in his second term would still be rolling along — with a similar crowd of people running the show. Ben Bernanke, for instance, would certainly have been reappointed to run the Fed. And Bush’s third term would have guaranteed that there would be none of the monkeying around with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that the Democrats proposed or promised in their losing presidential campaign. At this point in Bush’s third term, no significant new effort would have begun to restore Katrina-decimated New Orleans either.

If the Democrats in Congress attempted to pass any set of needed reforms like, to take an example, new healthcare legislation, Bush, the third termer, would have held secret meetings in the White House with insurance and drug company executives to devise a means to turn such proposals to their advantage. And he would have refused to release the visitor logs so that the American public would have no way of knowing just whom he’d been talking to.

During Bush’s second term, some of the lowest ranking torturers from Abu Ghraib were prosecuted as bad apples, while those officials responsible for the policies that led to Abu Ghraib remained untouched. If the public continued to push for justice for torturers during the early months of Bush’s third term, he would certainly have gone with another bad apple approach, perhaps targeting only low-ranking CIA interrogators and CIA contractors for prosecution. Bush would undoubtedly have decreed that any higher-ups would not be touched, that we should now be looking forward, not backward. And he would thereby have cemented in place the power of presidents to grant immunity for crimes they themselves authorized.

If Bush were in his third term, some of his first and second term secrets might, by now, have been forced out into the open by lawsuits, but what Americans actually read wouldn’t be significantly worse than what we’d already known. What documents saw the light of day would surely have had large portions of their pages redacted, and the vast bulk of documentation that might prove threatening would remain hidden from the public eye. Bush’s lawyers would be fighting in court, with ever grander claims of executive power, to keep his wrongdoing out of sight.

Now, here’s the funny part. This dark fantasy of a third Bush term is also an accurate portrait of Obama’s first term to date. In following Bush, Obama was given the opportunity either to restore the rule of law and the balance of powers or to firmly establish in place what were otherwise aberrant abuses of power. Thus far, President Obama has, in all the areas mentioned above, chosen the latter course. Everything described, from the continuation of crimes to the efforts to hide them away, from the corruption of corporate power to the assertion of the executive power to legislate, is Obama’s presidency in its first seven months.

Which doesn’t mean there aren’t differences in the two moments. For one thing, Democrats have now joined Republicans in approving expanded presidential powers and even — in the case of wars, military strikes, lawless detention and rendition, warrantless spying, and the obstruction of justice — presidential crimes. In addition, in the new Democratic era of goodwill, peace and justice movements have been strikingly defunded and, in some cases, even shut down. Many progressive groups now, in fact, take their signals from the president and his team, rather than bringing the public’s demands to his doorstep.

A subsidiary pleaded guilty to misbranding drugs “with the intent to defraud or mislead”.

Pfizer illegally promoted four drugs and caused false claims to be submitted to government healthcare programmes for uses that were not medically accepted.

US officials said Pfizer would have to enter a corporate integrity agreement.

It will be subject to additional public scrutiny by requiring it to make “detailed disclosures” on its website.

Pfizer’s general counsel said: “We regret certain actions taken in the past, but are proud of the action we’ve taken to strengthen our internal controls.”

“The size and seriousness of this resolution, including the huge criminal fine, reflect the seriousness and scope of Pfizer’s crimes,” said Mike Loucks, acting US attorney for the District of Massachusetts.

The company faces a criminal fine of $1.195bn and a subsidiary company of Pfizer – Pharmacia & Upjohn – will forfeit $105m, totalling a criminal resolution of $1.3bn.

The remaining $1bn fine was levied to resolve the allegations under the civil False Claims Act.

Four drugs

The civil settlement also relates to allegations that Pfizer paid bribes to healthcare providers to induce them to prescribe four named drugs. These are Bextra, an anti-inflammatory drug, Geodon, an anti-psychotic drug, Zyvox, an antibiotic and Lyrica, an epilepsy treatment.

The investigation was trigged by allegations made by six whistleblowers. They will receive $102m of the civil fines paid by Pfizer.

“Although these types of investigations are often long and complicated and require many resources to achieve positive results, the FBI will not be deterred from continuing to ensure that pharmaceutical companies conduct business in a lawful manner,” said Kevin Perkins, FBI assistant director, Criminal Investigative Division.

The pharmaceutical firm said earlier this year that it would pay the fine “to put issues that diminish trust behind us”.