Tuesday, Jul 01st
Last update03:06:18 AM GMT
Jack A. Abramoff, the once-powerful Republican super-lobbyist, was sentenced today to 48 months in prison for his role in a corruption scandal that rocked Congress and the Bush administration.
The sentence was far below the 121 months that Abramoff could have received under federal sentencing guidelines but more than either the Justice Department or his lawyers had requested.
TVNL Comment: Watch for the Presidential Pardon. Crime Pays!
Federal health authorities have asked the manufacturers of four widely used immunosuppressive drugs to bolster safety warnings on the risk of developing opportunistic fungal infections.
The drugs, Humira, Cimzia, Enbrel and Remicade, belong to a class of medications known as tumor necrosis factor alpha blockers (TNF-alpha blockers), which suppress the immune system and are approved to treat several conditions including rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile idiopathic arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, plaque psoriasis, ankylosing spondylitis and Crohn's disease.
Government crackdowns on journalists are a true threat to democracy. As the Republican National Convention meets in St. Paul, Minn., this week, police are systematically targeting journalists. I was arrested with my two colleagues, "Democracy Now!" producers Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar, while reporting on the first day of the RNC. I have been wrongly charged with a misdemeanor. My co-workers, who were simply reporting, may be charged with felony riot.
Before workers began moving mothballed equipment back into place, North Korea informed U.S. personnel at its Yongbyon nuclear plant it would start reassembling its nuclear facilities, a South Korean official said Thursday.
In an unprecedented change of posture, the New England Journal of Medicine has reversed itself on the issue of whether Vytorin causes cancer.
Vytorin is the controversial cholesterol lowering drug that is the center of a major advertising fraud that netted Merck and Schering-Plough over 10 billion dollars in sales in the past two years. Merck and Schering-Plough are facing congressional investigation, various state attorney general investigations, and plaintiff class action lawsuits. All the negative publicity has caused sales to fall off, yet the questionable drug is still a top seller for Merck and Schering-Plough in 2008.
Underneath the advertising fraud is a far more damaging prospect from the Big Pharma point of view, that the theory of lowering LDL cholesterol with drugs to prevent heart disease is itself a major fraud that has been perpetrated on the American public for the past decade. Indeed, while Vytorin is the most effective drug combination of all time in terms of lowering LDL, doing so does not produce cardiovascular health or reduce cardiovascular mortality.
But the government of Ecuador has decided, and Washington has apparently agreed, that one of the most important foreign outposts in the United States' war on drugs will close. The 450 U.S. Air Force personnel and contractors stationed at a military base that shares the airport's runway will be leaving next year.
TVNL Comment: The Washington Post, for no reason other than to brainwash Americans, placed a photo of Chavez in this article. He had nothing to do with the story but they managed to weave him in with a negative twist. The article reads like a sequitur when it gets to the comments about Chavez. They also gave the story a negative headline even though the U.S. agreed to leave. They were not kicked out, as the title suggest. This is a perfect example of establishment media control and propaganda.
A federal judge has ruled in New York that the government must either produce memos on waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods used by the CIA or explain why they should be kept secret.
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