The video, uploaded by new YouTube user Dauphinish and caught first by IvyGate, looks like it could belong the vaunted secret society that counts three generations of Bushes as its members. Unfortunately, vaunted secret societies don’t really have publicists, so it’s hard to confirm. (Yalies, take a stab in comments?) There are gothic arches, dust, skull imagery, and a stray coffin lying around. Dauphinish has tracked his video with what can only be described as conspiracy theory electronica:

But here’s the rub: Though Dauphinish claims he is a 58-year-old Syrian, he sounds an awful lot like a certain Yale frosh who used to call himself the Dauphin. A Yale Daily News article from November 2007 says a mysterious Branford frosh—thought to be responsible for vandalism, death threats, and vehicular assault—”withdrew from the University for medical reasons.” This paragraph, however, becomes the money shot, in retrospect:

Those who considered the student a friend said he told them he had broken into the tomb of Skull and Bones and shown them video footage to prove it. He also showed them books he had stolen from Scroll and Key and had chalked the word “Dauphin” on walls throughout Yale’s campus.

The Dauphin’s identity was never confirmed or made public…

source: Disinfo.com

The Obama White House is also drunk with power and is seeking to expand the powers of government agencies to oversee and act out to affect Americans in ways that this country has never seen before.

What is the Office of Personnel and Management and why should you care?

The Office of Personnel Management, (OPM), is suppose to be an independent government agency that is charged with managing the civil service system of the federal government. If you are a federal employee then civil service laws, rules and regulations that are managed by OPM govern you. One of the main charges of OPM is to administer and oversee federal health care provided to all federal employees.

The Director of OPM is appointed directly by the president and confirmed by the Democratically controlled Senate. The current director of OPM is a fellow by the name of John Berry who, before becoming OPM director this past year, was director of the Smithsonian’s National Zoo. — You cannot make this stuff up.

Under the Democrats’ national health care scheme not only would OPM be charged with overseeing and administering federal employees health care but they will have the added charge of administering civilian federal health care as well. What does that mean? Basically, that Americans will be treated as “civil servants.” Are you starting to see the danger?

The more government seeks to control our lives the more Orwellian it gets. This “big brother” mentality that “government knows best” and that it is their mission to provide cradle to grave “care” of its citizens will doom America as we know it. Under such a system the individual becomes meaningless and the state becomes the entity upon which we are all forced to rely.

Most recently OPM made news when the Obama administration sought to use it as a tool upon which to consolidate power.

Under orders from the White House, it is being reported that OPM is on a mission to rid the executive branch bureaucracy of Bush-era personnel who are no longer political appointees and who have lawfully become civil servants.

It is not uncommon for some presidential political appointees to have the opportunity to become civil servants within the federal bureaucracy when they meet all the criteria for a federal civil service job.– Ordinarily, a political appointee serves “at the pleasure of the president” who originally appointed that person to a particular position. When the president’s term is up their job is up as well. But, when a political appointee becomes a civil servant they are considered full- time government employees and are subject to the rules and regulations governing all other federal employees. Civil service jobs are seen a non-political jobs and are not based on appointment. They are based on merit. Their employment continues until they retire, quit, or are removed from their position for cause. It should never be permissible to remove a civil servant based solely on their political affiliation.

The Obama administration has now ordered a purging of Republicans from federal government civil service.

The Office of Federal Personnel Management, (OPM), has become the “henchman” of the Obama administration. Following orders they have issued new rules — going back five years –wherein every employee hired, who previously had been a political appointee, will be terminated regardless of cause or poor performance.

It is clear what the intent of the Obama administration is by looking at the following statement made by John Berry the Director of OPM:

Beginning January 1, 2010, agencies must seek prior approval from OPM before they can appoint a current or recent political appointee to a competitive or non-political excepted service position at any level under the provisions of title 5, United States Code. OPM will review these proposed appointments to ensure they comply with merit system principles and applicable civil service laws. I have delegated decision-making authority over these matters to career Senior Executives at OPM to avoid any hint of political influence.

The memorandum specifically applies this change to all political appointees hired in the past 5 years and effectively works to freeze them out of their current jobs or make their lives so miserable by denying promotions, that they will quit before they are forced out.

It is outrageous that the Obama administration would politicize what is supposed to be a independent government agency and would become so vindictive and cold in their exercise of raw political power that they would take steps to eliminate people from their legitimate government employment, based solely on their political pedigree and not their job performance.

I served in the White House during the presidency of George W. Bush. When he took office, we knew that a fair amount of Clinton appointees were making the transition from political appointment positions to civil service positions and nothing was done to “root them out”. They were entitled to remain in their positions and were held to the same standard of job performance as any other civil service employee.

There is nothing worse than abuse of government power. It erodes the very fabric of our laws and respect for government institutions.

For an incoming administration to make a “witch hunt” one of its top priorities and to attempt to fire civil servants who they believe are Republican “sympathizers” is something you might have expected in the former Soviet Union or from the KGB. But it’s not something we expected to see in the United States led by the White House.

The expanded “portfolio” of OPM should worry all Americans. This little known agency will make the IRS look down right friendly if the Obama administration is successful in expanding their duties, powers and responsibilities.

Source: FoxNews.com

The notes, from Iran’s most sensitive military nuclear project, describe a four-year plan to test a neutron initiator, the component of a nuclear bomb that triggers an explosion. Foreign intelligence agencies date them to early 2007, four years after Iran was thought to have suspended its weapons programme.

An Asian intelligence source last week confirmed to The Times that his country also believed that weapons work was being carried out as recently as 2007 — specifically, work on a neutron initiator.

The technical document describes the use of a neutron source, uranium deuteride, which independent experts confirm has no possible civilian or military use other than in a nuclear weapon. Uranium deuteride is the material used in Pakistan’s bomb, from where Iran obtained its blueprint.

“Although Iran might claim that this work is for civil purposes, there is no civil application,” said David Albright, a physicist and president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, which has analysed hundreds of pages of documents related to the Iranian programme. “This is a very strong indicator of weapons work.”

The documents have been seen by intelligence agencies from several Western countries, including Britain. A senior source at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed that they had been passed to the UN’s nuclear watchdog.

A Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokeswoman said yesterday: “We do not comment on intelligence, but our concerns about Iran’s nuclear programme are clear. Obviously this document, if authentic, raises serious questions about Iran’s intentions.”

Responding to The Times’ findings, an Israeli government spokesperson said: “Israel is increasingly concerned about the state of the Iranian nuclear programme and the real intentions that may lie behind it.”

The revelation coincides with growing international concern about Iran’s nuclear programme. Tehran insists that it wants to build a civilian nuclear industry to generate power, but critics suspect that the regime is intent on diverting the technology to build an atomic bomb.

In September, Iran was forced to admit that it was constructing a secret uranium enrichment facility near the city of Qom. President Ahmadinejad then claimed that he wanted to build ten such sites. Over the weekend Manouchehr Mottaki, the Iranian Foreign Minister, said that Iran needed up to 15 nuclear power plants to meet its energy needs, despite the country’s huge oil and gas reserves.

Publication of the nuclear documents will increase pressure for tougher UN sanctions against Iran, which are due to be discussed this week. But the latest leaks in a long series of allegations against Iran will also be seized on by hawks in Israel and the US, who support a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities before the country can build its first warhead.

Mark Fitzpatrick, senior fellow for non-proliferation at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said: “The most shattering conclusion is that, if this was an effort that began in 2007, it could be a casus belli. If Iran is working on weapons, it means there is no diplomatic solution.”

The Times had the documents, which were originally written in Farsi, translated into English and had the translation separately verified by two Farsi speakers. While much of the language is technical, it is clear that the Iranians are intent on concealing their nuclear military work behind legitimate civilian research.

The fallout could be explosive, especially in Washington, where it is likely to invite questions about President Obama’s groundbreaking outreach to Iran. The papers provide the first evidence which suggests that Iran has pursued weapons studies after 2003 and may actively be doing so today — if the four-year plan continued as envisaged.

A 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate concluded that weapons work was suspended in 2003 and officials said with “moderate confidence” that it had not resumed by mid-2007. Britain, Germany and France, however, believe that weapons work had already resumed by then.

Western intelligence sources say that by 2003 Iran had already assembled the technical know-how it needed to build a bomb, but had yet to complete the necessary testing to be sure such a device would work. Iran also lacked sufficient fissile material to fuel a bomb and still does — although it is technically capable of producing weapons-grade uranium should its leaders take the political decision to do so.

The documents detail a plan for tests to determine whether the device works — without detonating an explosion leaving traces of uranium detectable by the outside world. If such traces were found, they would be taken as irreversible evidence of Iran’s intention to become a nuclear-armed power.

Experts say that, if the 2007 date is correct, the documents are the strongest indicator yet of a continuing nuclear weapons programme in Iran. Iran has long denied a military dimension to its nuclear programme, claiming its nuclear activities are solely focused on the production of energy for civilian use.

Mr Fitzpatrick said: “Is this the smoking gun? That’s the question people should be asking. It looks like the smoking gun. This is smoking uranium.”

Source: TimesOnline.co.uk

WASHINGTON — Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House e-mails from the administration of President George W. Bush and the Obama administration is searching for dozens more days’ worth of potentially lost e-mail from the Bush years, according to two groups that filed suit over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record keeping system.

The two private groups – Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive – said Monday they were settling the lawsuits they filed against the Executive Office of the President in 2007.

It will be years before the public sees any of the recovered e-mails because they will now go through the National Archives’ process for releasing presidential and agency records. Presidential records of the Bush administration won’t be available until 2014 at the earliest.

Former Bush White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said the 22 million e-mails already had been recovered while Bush was still in office and that misleading statements about the former administration’s work demonstrate “a continued anti-Bush agenda, nearly a year after a new president was sworn in.”

“The liberal groups CREW and National Security Archive litigate for sport, distort the facts and have consistently tried to create a spooky conspiracy out of standard IT issues,” Stanzel said in a statement.

The 22 million e-mails “would never have been found but for our lawsuits and pressure from Capitol Hill,” said Anne Weismann, chief counsel for CREW. “It was only then that they did this reanalysis and found as a result that there were 22 million e-mails that they were unable to account for before.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said the Bush administration had been dismissive of congressional requests that the administration recover the e-mails. Leahy said it was “another example of the Bush administration’s reflexive resistance to congressional oversight and the public’s right to know.”

The tally of missing e-mails, the additional searches and the settlement are the latest development in a political controversy that stemmed from the Bush White House’s failure to install a properly working electronic record keeping system. Two federal laws require the White House to preserve its records.

The two private organizations say there is not yet a final count on the extent of missing White House e-mail and there may never be a complete tally.Meredith Fuchs, general counsel to the National Security Archive, said “many poor choices were made during the Bush administration and there was little concern about the availability of e-mail records despite the fact that they were contending with regular subpoenas for records and had a legal obligation to preserve their records.”

“We may never discover the full story of what happened here,” said Melanie Sloan, CREW’s executive director. “It seems like they just didn’t want the e-mails preserved.”

Sloan said the latest count of misplaced e-mails “gives us confirmation that the Bush administration lied when they said no e-mails were missing.”

The two groups say the 22 million White House e-mails were previously mislabeled and effectively lost.

The government now can find and search 22 million more e-mails than it could in late 2005 and the settlement means that the Obama administration will restore 94 calendar days of e-mail from backup tape, said Kristen Lejnieks, an attorney representing the National Security Archive.

Stanzel, the former White House spokesman, said that the 94 days of e-mails to be recovered from back-up tapes consist of 61 calendar days already planned in the Bush era and an additional 33 days of recovery that the Obama White House have agreed to recover as part of the settlement of the court case.

Sheila Shadmand, another lawyer representing the National Security Archive, said the Obama administration is making a strong effort to clean up “the electronic data mess left behind by the prior administration.”

Records released as a result of the lawsuits reveal that the Bush White House was aware during the president’s first term in office that the e-mail system had serious archiving problems, which didn’t become publicly known until 2006, when federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald disclosed them during his criminal investigation of the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

A Microsoft Corp. document on the Bush White House’s e-mail problems states that Microsoft was called in to help find electronic messages in October 2003, more than two years before the problem surfaced publicly. October 2003 was the month that the Justice Department began gearing up its criminal investigation into who in the Bush administration leaked the identity of Plame, the wife of Bush administration war critic Joseph Wilson.

Source: HuffingtonPost.com ]]> http://www.the-winds-song.org/?feed=rss2&p=70 0 http://www.the-winds-song.org/?p=68 http://www.the-winds-song.org/?p=68#comments Wed, 16 Dec 2009 11:49:19 +0000 Rowen Windsong http://www.the-winds-song.org/?p=68 The mechanical doppelgangers are available for a limited time as part of a special New Year’s promotional sale at Sogo, Seibu, and Robinson’s department stores. They will be built by Japanese robotics firm Kokoro, which is perhaps best known for its line of Actroid receptionist humanoids.

In addition to providing the robot with the owner’s face, body, hair, eyes and eyelashes, Kokoro will model the robot’s facial expressions and upper body movements after the buyer. The robot’s speech will be based on recordings of the owner’s voice.

Orders will be accepted from January 1 to 3 at any of Japan’s 28 Sogo, Seibu, or Robinson’s department stores. Only two robot twins are available, but given the hefty price tag of 20.1 million yen ($223,000) each, the stores will likely be hard-pressed to find any takers. If more than two orders are received, the purchasers will be selected in a random drawing.

Source: PinkTentacle.com

The US House of Representatives on Friday passed a bill aimed at preventing a repeat of the financial crisis that shook the global economy in the fall of 2008. The sweeping measure would transform the regulatory landscape for banks and other financial firms.

Although it drew immediate praise from the Obama administration and consumer groups, some financial experts warn that the economy will remain exposed to the risk of bubbles, busts, and firms that are “too big to fail.”

The bill spans many markets and regulatory activities:

• Creates a financial stability council of regulators to identify financial firms that are so large or interconnected that their collapse would put the entire financial system at risk. These systematically risky firms will be subject to increased oversight, standards, and regulation.

• Gives the government new powers to dismantle large financial firms that fail. Investors in those firms would be exposed to losses during such a wind-down process. But, as regulators will also be trying to protect the economy from spillover effects, some critics of the plan say large firms might receive government assistance rather than bankruptcy-style restructuring.

• Creates a new consumer financial protection agency, aimed at preventing abusive or risky lending practices such as those seen during the subprime mortgage boom.

• Gives shareholders a “say on pay” for executives, an advisory vote including executive salaries and golden parachutes. It also enables regulators to ban inappropriate or imprudently risky compensation practices, and it requires financial firms to disclose incentive-based compensation structures.

• Regulates complex “derivative” investments, so that standardized transactions are traded on an exchange or electronic platform. Critics worry that this market, including “customized” derivatives that won’t be traded on exchanges, will have too little oversight.

• Requires hedge funds to register with the SEC and to be subject to systemic risk regulation by the financial stability regulator.

• Exposes the Federal Reserve to so-called “audits” by Congress, a move that finance experts say opens the door to limits on the Fed’s independence from politics.

To reach President Obama’s desk, the bill must be matched by one in the Senate, which has not yet moved its legislation toward a vote.

The bill comes at a time when Americans are deeply concerned about the economy and jobs – a situation that intertwines closely with banking policy. If lawmakers fail to improve regulation of the financial system, many experts say it could allow other big crises to occur – or restrain the economy’s growth during good times.

The concern was captured in a question Obama was asked during a town hall meeting last week.

“Are you confident that there have been enough safeguards put in place so that we don’t run over that cliff again with these irresponsible risky investments?” an audience member in Allentown, Pa., asked.

Obama used the opportunity to make the case for financial reforms, and said “if we get this package passed then we will have the safeguard in place to make sure this stuff doesn’t happen again.”

Economists are wary of saying that even a well-designed bill will prevent financial crises, which have occurred periodically before and after the modern era of central banking.

Simon Johnson, a finance expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recently praised Obama for pushing the idea of a new consumer protection agency for financial products. But, in recent testimony to the Congressional Oversight Panel on bank bailouts, he said Washington policymakers aren’t doing enough to rein in the economic and political power of large financial firms.

“The power of the financial sector [is based] on an ideology according to which the interests of big finance and the interests of the American people are naturally aligned,” he said. “This ideology is increasingly … dangerous to the economy.”

The huge bill has been a battleground for lawmakers and industry lobbyists, but supporters say it offers important new safeguards.

The measure “will guarantee we have new, tough rules for Wall Street to play by and will fully protect consumers, investors, and US taxpayers,” Rep. Dennis Moore (D) of Kansas said in a statement Friday.

Source: CSMonitor.com ]]> http://www.the-winds-song.org/?feed=rss2&p=66 1 http://www.the-winds-song.org/?p=64 http://www.the-winds-song.org/?p=64#comments Mon, 14 Dec 2009 06:32:56 +0000 Rowen Windsong http://www.the-winds-song.org/?p=64 Prescriptions for psychiatric drugs increased 50 percent with children in the US, and 73 percent among adults, from 1996 to 2006, according to a study in the May/June 2009 issue of the journal Health Affairs. Another study in the same issue of Health Affairs found spending for mental health care grew more than 30 percent over the same ten-year period, with almost all of the increase due to psychiatric drug costs.

On April 22, 2009, the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reported that in 2006 more money was spent on treating mental disorders in children aged 0 to 17 than for any other medical condition, with a total of $8.9 billion. By comparison, the cost of treating trauma-related disorders, including fractures, sprains, burns, and other physical injuries, was only $6.1 billion.

In 2008, psychiatric drug makers had overall sales in the US of $14.6 billion from antipsychotics, $9.6 billion off antidepressants, $11.3 billion from antiseizure drugs and $4.8 billion in sales of ADHD drugs, for a grand total of $40.3 billion.

The path to child drugging in the US started with providing adolescents with stimulants for ADHD in the early 80s. That was followed by Prozac in the late 80s, and in the mid-90s drug companies started claiming that ADHD kids really had bipolar disorder, coinciding with the marketing of epilepsy drugs as “mood stablizers” and the arrival of the new atypical antipsychotics.

Parents can now have their kids declared disabled due to mental illness and receive Social Security disability payments and free medical care, and schools can get more money for disabled kids. The bounty for the prescribing doctors and pharmacies is enormous and the CEOs of the drug companies are laughing all the way into early retirement.

Psychiatric Drugs Explained

During an interview with Street Spirit in August 2005, investigative journalist and author of “Mad in America,” Robert Whitaker, described the dangers of psychiatric drugs. “When you look at the research literature, you find a clear pattern of outcomes with all these drugs,” he said, “you see it with the antipsychotics, the antidepressants, the anti-anxiety drugs and the stimulants like Ritalin used to treat ADHD.”

“All these drugs may curb a target symptom slightly more effectively than a placebo does for a short period of time, say six weeks,” Whitaker said. However, what “you find with every class of these psychiatric drugs is a worsening of the target symptom of depression or psychosis or anxiety, over the long term, compared to placebo-treated patients.”

“So even on the target symptoms, there’s greater chronicity and greater severity of symptoms,” he reports, “And you see a fairly significant percentage of patients where new and more severe psychiatric symptoms are triggered by the drug itself.”

Whitaker told Street Spirit that the rate of Americans disabled by mental illness has skyrocketed since Prozac came on the market in 1987, and reports: (1) the number of mentally disabled people in the US has been increasing at a rate of 150,000 people per year since 1987, (2) that represents an increase of 410 new people per day and (3) the disability rate has continued to increase and one in every 50 Americans is disabled by mental illness.

The statistics above beg the question of how could this happen when the so-called new generation of “wonder drugs” arrived on the market during the exact same time period. The truth is, the “wonder drugs” cause most of the bizarre behaviors listed by doctors to warrant a mental illness disability.

Psychiatric Drug Goldmine

The CIA “World Factbook” estimate the world population to be about 6.8 billion and the US population to be a mere 307 million. In an April 2008 report, the market research firm Datamonitor reported that the “US dominates the ADHD market with a 94 percent market share.”

ADHD drug prices at a middle dose for 90 pills at DrugStore.com, are: Adderall $278, Concerta $412, Desoxyn $366, Strattera $464 and Vyvanse $385. Daytrana costs $437 for three boxes of 30 nine-hour patches.

The SSRI and SNRI antidepressants include GlaxoSmithKline’s Paxil and Wellbutrin, Pfizer’s Zoloft, Celexa and Lexapro from Forest Labs, Luvox by Solvay, Wyeth’s Effexor and Pristiq and Lilly’s Prozac and Cymbalta. The average price of these drugs is about $300 for 90 pills at DrugStore.com.

The prices for anticonvulsants can run as high as $929 for 180 tablets of Glaxo’s Lamictal, and $1170 for 180 tablets of Johnson & Johnson’s Topamax.

In 2008, the atypical antipsychotics took over the slot as the top revenue earners in the US, and include Seroquel by AstraZeneca; Risperdal and Invega marketed by Janssen, a division of J&J; Geodon by Pfizer; Abilify from Bristol-Myers Squibb; Novartis’ Clozaril and Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa. The average price on these drugs for 100 pills at DrugStore.com is about $1,000. Lilly also sells Symbyax, a drug with Zyprexa and Prozac combined, at a cost $1,564 for 90 capsules at DrugStore.com in May 2009.

The briefing material submitted to an FDA advisory panel in April 2009 reported that an estimated 25.9 million patients worldwide had been exposed to Seroquel since its launch in 1997 through July 31, 2007, in the US, and the second quarter of 2007 for countries outside the US. Of that number, an estimated nearly 15.9 million took Seroquel in the US, compared to only ten million patients in the rest of the world. In 2008, the US accounted for roughly $3 billion of Seroquel’s $4.5 billion in worldwide sales.

For the full-year of 2008, Eli Lilly reported worldwide Zyprexa sales of about $4.7 billion, with US sales of $2.2 billion and only $2.5 billion for the rest of the world.

FDA as Promotional Tool

On June 12, 2009, an FDA advisory panel gave the green light to expand the marketing of Zyprexa, Seroquel and Geodon for use with 13 to 17 year-olds diagnosed with schizophrenia and 10 to 17 year-olds diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The FDA usually follows its advisers’ recommendations.

“Such approval gives manufacturers a shield from liability – for illegally promoting the drugs for off-label use,” said Vera Hassner Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection.

“And such approval ensures increased use of these drugs,” she warned. “Manufacturers and mental health providers will profit while children’s physical and mental health will be sacrificed.”

“The body of evidence showing these drugs to be harmful is irrefutable,” she said, “it is documented in FDA’s postmarketing database, and in secret internal company documents uncovered during litigation.”

According to Dr. Stefan Kruszewski, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the atypicals increase the risk of obesity, type II diabetes, hypertension, heart attacks and stroke.

He said the drugs were marketed as safer and easier to tolerate than the older, cheaper antipsychotics because they would cause fewer neurological injuries like tardive dyskinesia and akathisia.

Those claims turned out to be totally false, he said, and “they continue to cause same neurological side-effects as the older antipsychotics.”

“Children are known to be compliant patients and that makes them a highly desirable market for drugs, especially when it pertains to large-profit-margin psychiatric drugs, which can be wrought with issues of non-compliance because of their horrendous side effect profiles,” according to a June 29, 2009 paper titled, “Drugging Our Children to Death,” in Health News Digest.com, by Gwen Olsen, who spent over a decade as a pharmaceutical sales rep, and authored the book, “Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher.”

Children are forced to take their drugs by doctors, parents and school personnel, she said. “So, children are the ideal patient-type because they represent refilled prescription compliance and ‘longevity.’”

“In other words,” Olsen noted, “they will be lifelong patients and repeat customers for Pharma!”

“The initiative to drug our children for profit has exceeded all common sense boundaries and is threatening the welfare of every American child,” she stated, and it “is up to each and every one of us to stop this madness!”

Drug Makers Busted

Most all of the psychiatric drug companies have come under investigation over the past several years for promoting their drugs for off-label use, especially with children. However, the fines they end up paying are trivial compared to the profits earned through the illegal marketing campaigns.

In September 2007, Bristol-Myers Squibb entered into a $515 million civil settlement with the US Department of Justice for illegally marketing drugs, including Abilify, for off-label uses. In the first six months of 2009, Abilify had sales of $1.9 billion. In 2008, the salary and compensation package of Bristol-Myers’ CEO, James Cornelius, was $23,150,236, according to the AFL-CIO’s Executive PayWatch Database.

On January 29, 2009, Paxil and Wellbutrin maker, GlaxoSmithKline, announced that it would record a legal charge in the fourth quarter of 2008 of $400 million relating to an ongoing investigation initiated by the US attorney’s office in Colorado into the US marketing and promotional practices for several products for the period 1997 to 2004. The government inquired about alleged off-label marketing as well as medical education programs for doctors, “other speaker events, special issue boards, advisory boards, speaker training programmes, clinical studies, and related grants, fees, travel and entertainment,” according to a Glaxo annual report.

In January 2009, Eli Lilly settled with the DOJ and more than 30 states for $1.4 billion over the off-label marketing of Zyprexa. The agreement included a $615 million fine for a federal criminal charge. But $1.4 billion was chump change considering that Zyprexa was still Lilly’s best seller in 2008, with sales of $4.69 billion. Lilly also has paid over $1 billion to settle lawsuits filed by Zyprexa patients. In the first six months of 2009, Zyprexa sales were $1.5 billion. In 2008, Lilly’s CEO, John Lechleiter, had a pay package worth $12,856,882

In September 2009, the DOJ reached a $2.3 billion settlement with Pfizer related to the off-label promotion of several drugs, including the psychiatric drugs, Geodon, Zoloft and Lyrica, in the largest health-care fraud settlement in history. But even though Pfizer took the entire $2.3 billion as an earnings charge for the fourth quarter of 2008, the drug maker was still able to post a fourth quarter profit of $268 million. Pfizer’s CEO in 2008, Jeffrey Kindler, had a salary and pay package of $15,547,600.

Johnson & Johnson is also dealing with the DOJ and state-level investigations into the off-label marketing of Risperdal. The company’s latest SEC filing lists nine subpoenas received by the company involving promotions of Risperdal, including one “seeking information regarding the Company’s financial relationship with several psychiatrists.” In the first six months of 2009, Risperdal earned $660 million. J&J’s CEO, William Weldon, had a pay package worth $29,127,432 in 2008.

AstraZeneca’s third quarter SEC filing lists a $520 million tentative settlement agreement with the US attorney’s office in Philadelphia to resolve allegations related to the off-label marketing of Seroquel. At “least 34 states are pursuing separate investigations of AstraZeneca’s marketing practices as part of a joint investigation and others may be conducting their own probes,” according to Ed Silverman on Pharmalot.

“A half a billion dollar one-time settlement is just a small cost of doing business for a company that sold $17 billion worth of the offending drug in the last five years,” Dr. Roy Poses points out on the Health Care Renewal web site. In 2008 alone, Seroquel had world-wide sales of more than $4.4 billion.

As of July 13, 2009, AstraZeneca was also defending approximately 10,381 served or answered personal injury lawsuits and approximately 19,391 plaintiff groups involving Seroquel, according to SEC filings. Some of the cases also include claims against other drug makers such as Eli Lilly, Janssen Pharmaceutica and/or Bristol-Myers Squibb, the filing notes.

On September 23, 2009, Shire Pharmaceuticals received a subpoena from the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General in coordination with the US attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, seeking production of documents related to the sales and marketing of Adderall XR, Daytrana and Vyvanse, according to Shire’s third quarter report for 2009.

In a November 6, 2009, SEC filing, Abbott Labs said the federal prosecutor for the Western District of Virginia was conducting an investigation for the US Justice Department of whether the company’s sales and marketing of Depakote violated civil or criminal laws, including the Federal False Claims Act and an anti-kickback statute related to reimbursement by Medicare and Medicaid programs to third parties.

In 2008, Depakote had sales of $1.36 billion and Abbott CEO, Miles White, had a salary and compensation package of $28,253,387.

In February 2009, the DOJ unsealed a lawsuit alleging that Forest Laboratories marketed the antidepressants Celexa and Lexapro for unapproved uses in children, and paid kickbacks to induce doctors to promote the drugs, including Dr. Jeffrey Bostic at Harvard University. In its latest SEC filing, Forest disclosed that it reached an agreement in principle in May 2009 to settle the civil aspects of US federal and state probes. “Penalties in the civil settlement are covered by a $170 million reserve Forest created in April,” according to a November 9 report by Dow Jones.

Forest also disclosed that the agreement “does not resolve the government’s ongoing investigation into potential criminal law violations” related to Celexa and Lexapro, and thyroid drug Levothroid, Dow Jones notes. In 2008, the salary and compensation for Forest CEO, Howard Solomon, was $6,565,324.

Over the past year and a half, a large number of so-called “Key Opinion Leaders” in the field of psychiatry have been exposed for not fully disclosing money received from many of the drug companies above through an investigation by the US Senate Finance Committee under the leadership of Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley.

The list so far includes Harvard University’s Joseph Biederman, Thomas Spencer and Timothy Wilens; Charles Nemeroff and Zackery Stowe from Emory; Melissa DelBello at the University of Cincinnati; Alan Schatzberg, president of the American Psychiatric Association from Stanford; Martin Keller at Brown University; Karen Wagner and Augustus John Rush from the University of Texas and Fred Goodwin, the former host of a radio show called “Infinite Minds,” broadcast by National Pubic Radio.

Fines as a Business Expense

The fraud settlements are “merely a cost of doing business to these pharmaceutical Goliaths and, in fact, caps their liability for these crimes,” said Alaskan attorney Jim Gottstein, the leader of the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights (PsychRights), a public interest law firm.

“Most importantly,” he noted, “these settlements have not stopped the practice of psychiatrists and other prescribers giving these drugs to children and youth and Medicaid continuing to pay for these fraudulent claims.”

“Because of the massive, harmful, increase in the psychiatric drugging of America’s children and youth, who are inherently forced, PsychRights has made addressing the problem a priority,” he said.

Gottstein conducted an investigation and determined that the vast majority of off-label psychotropic drug prescriptions for children and youth that are paid for by Medicaid constitute Medicaid fraud.

PsychRights now has a national “Medicaid Fraud Initiative Against Psychiatric Drugging of Children & Youth,” designed to address this problem by “having lawsuits brought against the doctors prescribing these harmful, ineffective drugs, their employers, and the pharmacies filling these prescriptions and submitting them to Medicaid for reimbursement,” according to its web site.

“Anyone who submits or causes claims to be submitted to Medicaid for drugs that are not for a ‘medically accepted indication’ is committing Medicaid Fraud,” said Gottstein, in a July 27, 2009 press release announcing the launch of the national campaign.

“Those guilty of this Medicaid Fraud include psychiatrists and other physicians prescribing these drugs, their employers, and pharmacies submitting the false claims to Medicaid,” he pointed out.

PsychRights estimates that over $2 billion in such fraudulent Medicaid claims are being paid by the government each year.

“Once one sues over specific offending prescriptions, all of such prescriptions can be brought in, which means that any psychiatrist on the losing end of such a lawsuit will almost certainly be bankrupted, because each offending prescription carries a penalty of between $5,500 and $11,000,” PsychRights explained.

It is hoped that once the doctors and pharmacies realize they are subject to financially ruinous Medicaid fraud judgments, the practice will be stopped or substantially reduced.

“Each prescriber may have a million dollars or few, at most, to lose, but the pharmacies’ financial exposure can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars and it is hoped this will attract attorneys to take these cases,” the web site noted.

In September and October 2009, Gottstein gave presentations on the initiative at the annual conferences of the National Association of Rights Protection and Advocacy and the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology in order to find people who are potentially interested and willing to pursue such cases.

“This was successful and we have at least a few such cases cooking,” he reported. “PsychRights stands ready to help people interested in bringing such suits.”

In late 2006, Gottstein won international fame by subpoenaing and releasing thousands of documents involving Eli Lilly’s illegal marketing of Zyprexa, which resulted in front page stories in The New York Times.

PsychRights also has an appeal pending on a lawsuit filed against the state of Alaska and responsible state officials seeking declaratory and injunctive relief that Alaskan children and youth on Medicaid have the right not to be administered psychotropic drugs unless and until a number of specific conditions are met. The lawsuit seeks to prohibit the state from paying for psychiatric drugs prescribed off-label to children and youth.

In responding to the lawsuit, the state claimed that they do have any control over or responsibility for the psychiatric drugging of children in their custody, or any responsibility under Medicaid, and moved for dismissal on the grounds that PsychRights does not have standing, or the right to bring the suit, because it was not harmed by the state’s actions.

The court agreed and dismissed the case. “We think the judge is wrong and have filed an appeal,” said Gottstein.

In May 2009, Gottstein sent letters to Sens. Charles Grassley and Herb Kohl and Reps. Henry Waxman, Bart Stupak, John Dingell and Barney Frank, describing the massive Medicaid fraud involved in the prescribing of psychiatric drugs to children in the US and asked for “assistance in stopping these illegal reimbursements.”

As of November 8, 2009, Gottstein reported, “I haven’t gotten as much as an acknowledgment of receipt from any of the members of Congress to whom I wrote.”

While pursuing causes on behalf of PsychRights, Gottstein donates all of his time on a pro bono basis.

Source: TruthOut.com

The traditional view is that before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th century there were no complex societies in the Amazon basin – in contrast to the Andes further west where the Incas built their cities. Now deforestation, increased air travel and satellite imagery are telling a different story.

“It’s never-ending,” says Denise Schaan of the Federal University of Pará in Belém, Brazil, who made many of the new discoveries from planes or by examining Google Earth images. “Every week we find new structures.” Some of them are square or rectangular, while others form concentric circles or complex geometric figures such as hexagons and octagons connected by avenues or roads. The researchers describe them all as geoglyphs.

Garden villages

Their discovery, in an area of northern Bolivia and western Brazil, follows other recent reports of vast sprawls of interconnected villages known as “garden cities” in north central Brazil, dating from around AD 1400. But the structures unearthed at the garden city sites are not as consistently similar or geometric as the geoglyphs, Schaan says.

“I firmly believe that the garden cities of Xingu and the geoglyphs were not directly related,” says Martti Pärssinen of the Finnish Cultural and Academic Institutes in Madrid, Spain, who works with Schaan. “Nevertheless, both discoveries demonstrate that [upland] areas of western Amazonia were heavily populated much before the European incursion.”

The geoglyphs are formed by ditches up to 11 metres wide and 1 to 2 metres deep. They range from 90 to 300 metres in diameter and are thought to date from around 2000 years ago up to the 13th century.

Human habitation

Excavations have unearthed ceramics, grinding stones and other signs of human habitation at some of the sites but not at others. This suggests that some had purely ceremonial roles, while others may also have been used for defence.

Unusually for defensive structures, however, earth was piled up outside the ditches, and they are also highly symmetrical. “When you think about defence you’re just building a wall or a trench,” says Schaan. “You don’t have to do calculations to make it so round or square.” Many of the structures are oriented to the north, and the team is investigating whether they might have had astronomical significance.

“Many of the great early civilisations had a riverine basis and the Amazon has long been underestimated and overlooked in that sense,” says Colin McEwan, head of the Americas section at the British Museum in London.

Successful societies

Though there is no evidence that the Amazonians built pyramids or invented written language as societies in ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia did, “in terms of a trend towards increasing social complexity and domestication of the landscape, this wasn’t just a pristine forest with isolated nomadic tribes”, McEwan adds. “These were substantive, sedentary and in the long term very successful cultures.”

While some Inca sites lie just 200 kilometres west of the geoglyphs, no Inca objects have been found at the new sites. Neither do they seem to have anything in common with Peru’s Nasca geoglyphs.

“I have no doubt that this is only scratching the surface,” says Alex Chepstow-Lusty of the French Institute for Andean Studies in Lima, Peru. “The scale of pre-Columbian societies in Amazonia is only slowly coming to light and we are going to be amazed at the numbers of people who lived there, but also in a highly sustainable fashion. Sadly, the economic development and forest clearance that is revealing these pre-Columbian settlement patterns is also the threat to having enough time to properly understand them.”

Journal reference: Antiquity, vol 83, p 1084

Source: NewScientist.com

Scientists from the University of San Diego, California, who conducted the research, believe that the information overload may be having a detrimental effect on our brains.

They claim that the strain of processing so much data means we are becoming disconnected from other people and developing shorter attention spans.

Roger Bohn, co-author of the study called How Much Information, said: “I think one thing is clear: our attention is being chopped into shorter intervals and that is probably not good for thinking deeper thoughts.”

Edward Hallowell, a New York psychiatrist and author specialising in attention deficit disorder, said: “Never before in human history have our brains had to process as much information as they do today.

“We have a generation of people who I call computer suckers because they are spending so much time in front of a computer screen or on their mobile phone or BlackBerry.

“They are so busy processing information from all directions they are losing the tendency to think and to feel.

“Much of what they are exposed to is superficial. People are sacrificing depth and feeling and becoming cut off and disconnected from other people.”

The study found that our daily word intake is equivalent to 34 gigabytes of information — enough to overload the typical laptop within a week.

The estimates are based on reading information, such as in emails, text messages, on the internet or in publications, as well as what we see and hear on the television and radio.

It estimates that the total amount of words “consumed” in the United States has more than doubled from 4,500 trillion in 1980 to 10,845 trillion in 2008. The estimates do not include people simply talking to one another.

Total information consumption from televisions, computers and other media was estimated at 3.6 zettabytes (3.6 million gigabytes) in 2008.

The traditional media of radio and television still dominate our consumption per day, with a total of 60 per cent of the hours, researchers found.

Experts believe that the information overload could prompt our brains to evolve in a new way.

Colin Blakemore, professor of neuroscience at the universities of Oxford and Warwick, told the Sunday Times: “One of the things we have learnt over the past 20 years is that the brain does have a capacity to grow and increase in size depending on how it is used.

“Perhaps the personal experience of having to deal with all of this information will cause new nerve cells to be born and create new nerve connections in the brain.”

Source: Telegraph.co.uk