cryptogon.com

…

The drug Trasylol was withdrawn in November at the request of the FDA after an observational study linked the medicine to kidney failure requiring dialysis and increased death of those patients.

It had been given to as many as a third of all heart bypass patients in the United States at the height of its use over a period of many years, according to the report.

Dr. Dennis Mangano, the study’s researcher, said during the program that 22,000 lives could have been saved if Trasylol had been taken off the market when he first published his study in January 2006, according to a CBS News report on its Web site ahead of a broadcast slated for next Sunday.

He said in the broadcast that Bayer failed to disclose to the FDA during an FDA advisory panel meeting in September 2006 — at which Mangano’s negative findings were discussed — that the German drugmaker had conducted its own research which confirmed the same dangers established by his study.

Maria DiBiase, who worked with the Austrian Consulate, was discovered in the complex’s rear courtyard by horrified UN staffers about 8 a.m., police said.

DiBiase, who lived in a dormitory on W. 34th St., apparently jumped after showing up for work at the UN early Sunday, police sources said.

Security guards and investigators placed yellow tape around her heavyset body and blocked some staff from leaving the building. Later, DiBiase’s body lay draped with a white sheet on the east side of the 39-story building overlooking the East River.

There were no apparent signs of foul play, but an investigation was ongoing, NYPD Detective Martin Speechley said.

DiBiase was remembered as a chatty and friendly woman who had an interest in computers, according to police and UN security officers at the scene.

It wasn’t the first death jump from the 55-year-old landmark.

In 1982, Johannes Raven, 57, a UN official who had just resigned from the Office of Financial Services and was reported to have been upset about his failing health, jumped from the 18th floor on the west side of the building.

It was unclear what job DiBiase held at the UN.

In a statement, UN spokeswoman Marie Okabe said, “A UN agency staff member died after falling from the 19th floor of the UN Secretariat Building.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The woman who died after falling from the U.N.’s Secretariat Building was a 44-year-old employee of the World Health Organization’s International Computing Center, a U.N. spokeswoman said Monday.

U.N. deputy spokeswoman Marie Okabe identified the woman who fell from the 19th floor Sunday as Maria Gabriela Di Biase.

Police and U.N. security officers, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media, said the woman had jumped from a window after showing up to work early in the morning.

Okabe said there was no suspicion of foul play. The police said they are still investigating. The official cause of death was to be determined by the medical examiner.

Di Biase, who has dual Uruguayan and Austrian nationalities, worked on the floor for the cooperative that provides computing and communication services to U.N. agencies. Employees would not discuss her death, though several recalled her as a friendly, likable woman.

The decision ends months of efforts to find a private sector rescuer for the stricken mortgage lender, which ran into trouble as a result of the international credit squeeze.

It means that neither of the two bids for the bank, from Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin consortium and Northern Rock’s management team, have been successful.

Both bidders tendered revised offers on Friday after the government threatened that the bank would be nationalised unless their proposals were improved.

The idle parent is a thrifty parent. We don’t work too hard and therefore we can’t expect to be rolling in cash. With thrift comes creativity. “Waste is unpoetic, thrift is creative,” as GK Chesterton wrote. With no money, you start to discover your own inner resources. You make things and draw. Put a pile of A4 paper on the kitchen table, along with a stapler, scissors, crayons and glue, and you’ll be amazed at what your children come up with. Forget digital gewgaws. Go analogue. It’s more fun and a lot cheaper. Put a bird feeder outside the kitchen window. Fun does not need to be expensive.

Researchers at Leeds University believe their findings could have important applications, notably in the management of disasters.

The team, led by Prof Jens Krause, conducted a series of experiments in which volunteers were told to walk randomly around a large hall without talking to each other. A select few were then given more detailed instructions.

The results published today show that it takes a minority of just 5 per cent of what they called “informed individuals” to influence the direction of a crowd of a minimum of 200 people. The remaining herd of 95 per cent follow without realising it.

“There are strong parallels with animal grouping behaviour,” says Prof Krause, who reports the work with John Dyer in the Animal Behaviour Journal, with colleagues at the Universities of Oxford and Wales Bangor.

“We’ve all been in situations where we get swept along by the crowd but what’s interesting about this research is that our participants ended up making a consensus decision despite the fact that they weren’t allowed to talk or gesture to one another.

“In most cases the participants didn’t realise they were being led by others.”

The work follows another study by Dr Simon Reader of Utrecht University that showed that most of us are happy to play follow-my-leader, even if we are trailing after someone who does not really know where they are going.

“Even more striking, that study found that even when we are shown a faster route, we still prefer to stick with the old one and tell others to take the long road too.

Gun supplier Eric Thompson said his website, topglock.com, sold two empty magazines and a holster to Stephen Kazmierczak just 10 days before the 27-year-old launched a suicidal attack on an Illinois classroom.

Another of his sites, thegunstore.com, also sold a Walther .22-calibre handgun to Cho Seung-Hui, who killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus in April 2007.

The dealer said: “I’m still blown away by the coincidences. I’m shaking. I can’t believe somebody would order from us again and do this.”

Mr Thompson admitted the thought had crossed his mind that Kazmierczak found out about his site from the publicity it got after the Virginia Tech shootings.

The site saw an increase in traffic after that shooting, he said, adding that he had also received many phone calls and threats.

Kazmierczak carried a rifle and three handguns into the classroom, two of which were purchased legally on February 9 in Champaign, Illinois.

Iran hopes that its oil goods bourse can lead the way for a domestic downstream industry to match its upstream crude oil production, the country’s main foreign currency revenue winner.

‘We have been a good seller (of crude oil) and now we have a higher objective to have a share in the oil trade,’ Oil Minister Gholam Hossein Nozari told reporters.

Iran claims to rank second in the region after Saudi Arabia in terms of production of petrochemicals at 22 million tons a year.

But it has failed to gain a significant share in the world export market because of state control of its petrochemical industry and state subsidies.

‘The objective is to make transactions (of oil products) transparent, create competition and motives for investment,’ the oil minister added.

‘And so that we can reach out to international markets as a big oil producer as well as an oil trader,’ he added.

Iran plans to open a market for trading crude oil as part of the second phase of the nascent bourse at an unspecified future date.

‘The first phase should operate for a while and we should find out its strong and weak points in order to open the second phase. Because the second phase is more complicated,’ Nozari said.

The idea of establishing a market for oil and its by-products was first mooted a decade ago, and practical steps to prepare its creation were first taken in 2001.

But its opening has lagged over administrative procedures and long-delayed moves to liberalise the price of petrochemicals which have been under the government’s control.

The overall deal is worth between $850 million to $1 billion and could run as long as 10 years, said Thomas Bush, the FBI’s assistant director of the Criminal Justice Information Services Division.

“We are looking forward to this future effort,” Bush said.

Judy Marks, the president of Lockheed’s Transport and Security Solutions division, said, “We’re tremendously pleased to partner with the agency once again to deliver the next quantum leap in capability.”

Lockheed Martin built the FBI’s current fingerprint database. The new program is being billed as the Next Generation Identification — and is assailed by privacy advocates who say it should cause alarm among all Americans.

“It’s the beginning of the surveillance society where you can be tracked anywhere, any time and all your movements, and eventually all your activities will be tracked and noted and correlated,” Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Technology and Liberty Project, told CNN last month.

The FBI currently has 55 million sets of fingerprints on file. In coming years, officials want to use the new database to compare palm prints, scars, tattoos, iris eye patterns and facial shapes.

Lockheed is being tapped with expanding the database to include these new types of biometric information. The idea is to combine various pieces of information to positively identify someone.

“Fingerprints will still be the big player,” Bush told CNN.

And what struck me most forcefully from this analysis – aside from the usual, horrific litany of bank woes – was just how much trouble is quietly brewing in corners of the commodities world.

Never mind that oil prices are high; that problem is already well known and gallons of ink have been spilt debating that, along with the pressures in metals and mineral spheres.

Instead, what is really catching the attention of Goldman Sachs now is the outlook for agricultural prices. Or as Jeff Currie, head of commodities research at the US bank, says with disarming cheer: “We think we could go into crisis mode in many commodities sectors in the next 12 to 18 months?.?.?.?and I would argue that agriculture is key here.”

Now, to some readers of the Financial Times, that observation might seem odd. After all, inhabitants of the western world typically spend far more time worrying about the price of petrol for their car, rather than the price of wheat or corn. And when western investors do think about “commodity shock”, their reference point typically tends to be the 1970s oil crisis.

However, as Mr Currie observes, this is a dangerously blinkered view. Back in the 1970s, famine touched a much bigger proportion of the world’s population than the energy crisis, he says. And even today, rising food prices pack a powerful political punch in the developing (or partly-developed) world, to a degree that is sometimes underappreciated by the pampered west.

…