Saturday, Jan 10th
Last update09:31:43 AM GMT
2010 will go down as the year the diet pill Meridia and pain pill Darvon were withdrawn from the market and the heart-attack associated diabetes drug Avandia was severely restricted.
But it was also the year the Justice Department filed the first criminal, not civil, charges against a drug company executive. Lauren Stevens, a former VP and assistant general counsel at GlaxoSmithKline, hid some 1,000 instances of GSK-paid doctors illegally promoting Wellbutrin to other doctors, say authorities.
The Environmental Protection Agency took the unusual step of revoking a permit Thursday for the country's largest surface mine, a setback for the controversial practice of "mountaintop removal" that helps produce 10 percent of the nation's coal.
The 2,300-acre operation at the Mingo Logan Coal Co.'s Spruce No. 1 coal mine in West Virginia has been mired in litigation since 1998.
Banks repossessed a record one million US homes in 2010, and could surpass that number this year, figures show. Foreclosure tracker RealtyTrac said about five million homeowners were at least two months behind on their mortgage payments.
Foreclosures are likely to remain numerous while unemployment remains stubbornly high, the group said. Among the worst hit states were Nevada, Arizona, Florida and California, once at the heart of the housing boom.
British scientists have developed genetically modified (GM) chickens that cannot transmit bird flu infections -- a step that in future could reduce the risk of avian flu spreading and causing deadly epidemics in humans.
Scientists from Cambridge and Edinburgh universities said that while the transgenic chickens still got sick and died when they were exposed to H5N1 bird flu, they didn't transmit the virus to other chickens they came into contact with.
...Urging Both Scientists and Journalists to Do More Thorough Research Into Vaccines and Autism.
Last week, an article in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), written by a freelance newspaper reporter, Brian Deer, created a media firestorm in the United States. In his article, Brian Deer accuses Dr. Andrew Wakefield of deliberate fraud regarding his 1998 case series, which was published in the British journal, The Lancet. Dr. Wakefield reported that the children in his case series were suffering from a novel form of bowel disease and that parents reported a temporal link between the onset of symptoms and receipt of the MMR vaccine. Contrary to what has been reported in the media over the years, Dr. Wakefield never stated that the MMR vaccine caused autism. The full text of the original paper is available at www.generationrescue.org.
Thousands of gizzard shad fish have been washed up on Chicago's harbours while more than 100 dead birds have been found clustered on a California highway.
The two instances appear to be a continuation of the strange mass animal deaths that have struck in the past fortnight - in America and elsewhere.
The Federal Reserve was set up by bankers for bankers, and it has served them well. Out of the blue, it came up with $12.3 trillion in nearly interest-free credit to bail the banks out of a credit crunch they created. That same credit crisis has plunged state and local governments into insolvency, but the Fed has now delivered its ultimatum: there will be no “quantitative easing” for municipal governments.
On January 7, according to the Wall Street Journal, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke announced that the Fed had ruled out a central bank bailout of state and local governments. "We have no expectation or intention to get involved in state and local finance," he said in testimony before the Senate Budget Committee. The states "should not expect loans from the Fed."
A female reporter for the Qatar-based news channel was reportedly asked to remove articles of clothing, including her bra, while entering a Foreign Press Association event. The Foreign Press Association in Israel is threatening to boycott briefings held by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if security procedures are not changed immediately.
"In a democratic country, security services are not permitted to do as they please," the association said in a open statement. "For a government trying to usher in a new era of relations with the foreign media, this is a peculiar way to begin."
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin pushes back against the idea that heated political speech played a role in the Tucson shootings that killed six people and seriously wounded U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
In a forceful and unapologetic statement released early Wednesday, Sarah Palin dismissed critics who had suggested that the former Alaska governor's firearms-infused rhetoric contributed to the shootings in Tucson that killed six and wounded 14, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, contending they "incite the hatred and violence they purport to condemn."
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