More drug companies exposed for paying off doctors to illegally prescribe drugs

(NaturalNews) A new report conducted by ProPublica, Consumer Reports, and National Public Radio (NPR) digs even deeper down the rabbit hole of drug company fraud, exposing rampant off-label prescribing, drug company-funded speaking engagements, and illegal monetary and gift compensation programs -- all designed to push as many drugs on the public as possible.



According to the report, the drug industry has spent roughly $7 billion in the past three years to pay out settlements for such practices, many of which were brought forth by former drugcompany sales representatives that witnessed the activity. According to these whistle-blowers,drug companies routinely break the law to increase drug sales, even after they have signed compliance agreements promising to follow the law.



After the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves a drug for a specific use, drug companies often lavish doctors with gifts, fancy dinners, extravagant vacations, and cash to prescribe the drugs for other, non-approved uses. Big Pharma even uses doctors to tell other doctors to do the same thing, often hiring them to speak at seminars.



Angela Maher, a former sales representative for Ortho-McNeil Pharmaceutical, alleged in a lawsuit that the drug giant pushed an anti-seizure drug for 27 different off-label uses. She observed drug company executives paying off physicians to speak glowingly about the drug at conferences. And if the doctors failed to speak often enough about the drug during their speeches, they were nixed from future participation. Ortho-McNeil recently pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges and settled for $81 million.



Forest Laboratories recently pleaded guilty to felony and misdemeanor charges as well for paying physicians to allow company sales representatives to observe their practices and push them to prescribe Celexa and Lexapro, two antidepressant drugs. Company representatives also continued to pay doctors for prescribing the drugs, as long as increases in sales were enough to make it worthwhile.



Other companies implicated in similar activity include Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, which is now owned by Pfizer, Allergan, maker of Botox, Cephalon, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, and Merck.

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Mayan 2012 Doom Date Off By 50-100 Years!

(YahooNews) It's a good news/bad news situation for believers in the 2012 Mayan apocalypse. The good news is that the Mayan "Long Count" calendar may not end on Dec. 21, 2012 (and, by extension, the world may not end along with it). The bad news for prophecy believers? If the calendar doesn't end in December 2012, no one knows when it actually will - or if it has already.



A new critique, published as a chapter in the new textbook "Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World" (Oxbow Books, 2010), argues that the accepted conversions of dates from Mayan to the modern calendar may be off by as much as 50 or 100 years. That would throw the supposed and overhyped 2012 apocalypse off by decades and cast into doubt the dates of historical Mayan events. (The doomsday worries are based on the fact that the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, much as our year ends on Dec. 31.)



The Mayan calendar was converted to today's Gregorian calendar using a calculation called the GMT constant, named for the last initials of three early Mayanist researchers. Much of the work emphasized dates recovered from colonial documents that were written in the Mayan language in the Latin alphabet, according to the chapter's author, Gerardo Aldana, University of California, Santa Barbara professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies.



Later, the GMT constant was bolstered by American linguist and anthropologist Floyd Lounsbury, who used data in the Dresden Codex Venus Table, a Mayan calendar and almanac that charts dates relative to the movements of Venus.



"He took the position that his work removed the last obstacle to fully accepting the GMT constant," Aldana said in a statement. "Others took his work even further, suggesting that he had proven the GMT constant to be correct."



But according to Aldana, Lounsbury's evidence is far from irrefutable.



"If the Venus Table cannot be used to prove the FMT as Lounsbury suggests, its acceptance depends on the reliability of the corroborating data," he said. That historical data, he said, is less reliable than the Table itself, causing the argument for the GMT constant to fall "like a stack of cards."



Aldana doesn't have any answers as to what the correct calendar conversion might be, preferring to focus on why the current interpretation may be wrong. Looks like end-of-the-world theorists may need to find another ancient calendar on which to pin their apocalyptic hopes.

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Secret human RFID implanting how and why (video)

(Examiner) Among greatest violations of human rights and everything the United States stands for is secretly forcing RFID chips into humans without their knowledge or consent as James Walbert and an untold number of American children and adults are experiencing. In the Majestic Picture Productions documentary trailer below, a whistleblower explains how and why he was covertly implanted by a dentist.





The retired Sacramento, California firefighter paramedic whistleblower's filmed testimony reinforces the 4-Part Examiner series, "Secretly forced brain implants," including dentistry involvement in the new wave of criminal activity targeting innocent people of integrity:

Secretly forced brain implants Pt 1: Explosive court case ... Aug 19, 2010 ... Please see the follow up article and add a comment after it: "Forced brain implant MRI scan image, medical and investigative reports. www.examiner.com/.../secretly-forced-brain-implants-explosive-court-case - Cached

Secretly forced brain implant Pt II: MRI scan image and reports of ... In Secretly forced brain implants Part I, information was provided about .. .. www.examiner.com/.../forced-brain-implant-mri-scan-image-medical-and-investigative-reports - Cached

Secretly forced brain implants Pt III: Ex-SS, FBI contractor ... Aug 26, 2010 ... Part II: Secretly forced brain implants: MRI scan image, mdical and investigative reports. Part III: Secretly forced brain implants: Top SS, www.examiner.com/.../top-ex-ss-fbi-agent-shocking-war-on-terror-secret-implanted-america-part-i

Secretly forced brain implants Pt IV: Intel expert on the doctors ... Aug 26, 2010 ... Part I: Secretly Forced brain implants: Explosive Court Case .... the fact that this was the means by which the 9/11 terrorists were funded. ... www.examiner.com/.../ex-ss-fbi-agent-on-rfid-implanted-walbert-and-many-others

"The RFID implantation done without people's consent to any human completly violates everything our government is suppose to be about, what democracy is suppose to be about," says the whistleblower..



"What this RFID technology does is -- it completely stalemates everything."



Highlighted in the 4-Part series is that the covertly forced RFID human implantation is the start of a life of mind control and torture-to-death of Targeted Individuals.



Any man, woman or child can be targeted for what is nothing less than Satanic motives, such as covering up human trafficking, as the whistlblower in the film opposed.

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Big Brother WILL snoop on your calls and clicks: Ministers resurrect plan to log all communication

(DailyMail) Hugely controversial ‘Big Brother’ plans to store details of every internet click, email and telephone call that we make are being revived by the Coalition, it emerged last night.



Police, security services and other public bodies would be able to find out which websites a person had visited, and when, where and to whom a text or call was made.



Security officials insist that monitoring communications data is vital in the fight against terrorism and serious organised crime.



But the plan – which was kicked into the long grass by Labour amid a public outcry – will put the Government on a collision course with civil liberties groups.



They argue it is a ‘snooper’s charter’ which will allow the state to spy on millions of innocent citizens.



So far ministers have insisted they want to provide a ‘correction in favour of liberty’ when it comes to the powers required to protect the public.



This is likely to include the scrapping or watering down of a raft of draconian laws introduced by the last government, such as so-called ‘Section 44’ stop and search without suspicion, and spying by Town Hall bureaucrats.



But ministers have been persuaded of the case to give the police and security officials enhanced rights to access the public’s communications.



Officials insist many terrorists no longer use traditional methods of communication, hatching plots in internet chatrooms or on social networking sites such as Facebook.



They can also speak over the internet, using Skype, and communicate through online computer games.



One official said communications data ‘provides evidence in court to secure convictions of those engaged in activities that cause serious harm’.



It has played a role in every major Security Service counter-terrorism operation and in 95 per cent of all serious organised crime investigations in recent years, sources said.



Firm plans will be published later this year on how the personal information – which does not include the contents of emails or text messages – should be stored.



Crucially, one option that has been ruled out is holding it all on a huge central government database.



The most likely scenario is that internet and telephone companies will be expected to store the details themselves. The authorities could then request access to the data as part of investigations.



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Major rabbi says non-Jews are donkeys, created to serve Jews

(Desertpeace) A major Jewish religious figure in Israel has likened non-Jews to donkeys and beasts of burden, saying the main reason for their very existence is to serve Jews.



Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual mentor of the religious fundamentalist party, Shas, which represents Middle Eastern Jews, reportedly said during a Sabbath homily earlier this week that “the sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews.”



Yosef is considered a major religious leader in Israel who enjoys the allegiance of hundreds of thousands of followers.



Shas is a chief coalition partner in the current Israeli government,



Yosef, also a former Chief Rabbi of Israel, was quoted by the right-wing newspaper, the Jerusalem Post, as saying that the basic function of a goy, a derogatory word for a gentile, was to serve Jews.



“Non-Jews were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world-only to serve the People of Israel,” Yosef said in his weekly Saturday night sermon which was devoted to laws regarding actions non-Jews are permitted to perform on the Sabbath.



Yosef also reportedly said that the lives of non-Jews in Israel are preserved by God in order to prevent losses to Jews.



Yosef, widely considered a prominent Torah sage and authority on the interpretation of Talmud, a basic Jewish scripture, held a comparison between animals of burden and non-Jews.



“In Israel, death has no dominion over them…With gentiles, it will be like any person-They need to die, but God will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one’s donkey would die, they’d lose their money.



“This is his servant…That’s why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew.”



Yosef further elucidated his ideas about the servitude of gentiles to Jews, asking “why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap; and we will sit like an effendi and eat.”



“That is why gentiles were created.”



The concept of gentiles being infra-human beings or quasi-animals is well-established in Orthodox Judaism.



For example, rabbis affiliated with the Chabad movement, a supremacist but influential Jewish sect, teach openly that at the spiritual level, non-Jews have the status of animals.



Abraham Kook, the religious mentor of the settler movement, was quoted as saying that the difference between a Jew and a gentile was greater and deeper than the difference between humans and animals.



“The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews — all of them in all different levels — is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.”



Some of Kook’s manifestly racist ideas are taught in the Talmudic college, Merkaz H’arav, in Jerusalem. The college is named after Kook.



In his book, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, the late Israeli writer and intellectual Israel Shahak argued that whenever Orthodox rabbis use the word “human,” they normally didn’t refer to all humans, but only to Jews, since non-Jews are not considered humans according to Halacha of Jewish law.



A few years ago, a member of the Israeli Knesset, castigated Israeli soldiers for “treating human beings as if they were Arabs.” The Knesset member, Aryeh Eldad, was commenting on the evacuation by the Israeli army of a settler outpost in the West Bank.



Faced with the negative effect of certain Biblical and Talmudic teachings on inter-religious relations, some Christian leaders in Europe have called on the Jewish religious establishment to reform the traditional Halacha perceptions of non-Jews.



However, while the Reform and Conservative sects of Judaism, have related positively to such calls, most Orthodox Jews have totally rejected the calls, arguing that the Bible is God’s word which can’t be altered under any circumstances.



The Bible says that non-Jews living under Jewish rule must serve as “water carriers and wood hewers” for the master race.



In Joshua (9:27), we read ” That day, Joshua made the Gibeonites woodcutters and water carriers for the community and for the altar of the Lord at the Place the Lord would choose. And that is what they are to this days.”



Elsewhere in the Bible, Israelites are strongly urged to treat “strangers living in your midst” humanely “because you yourselves were strangers in Egypt.”



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Animal microchips linked to causing cancer

(NaturalNews) Many veterinarians recommend them, and most animal shelters require them. Identification microchips injected into the necks of cats and dogs are touted as useful in recovering lost pets because the devices store owner and medical information. But are they safe? A new lawsuit against Merck & Co., Inc., maker of the HomeAgain pet microchip, says they are not, noting that they can cause cancer to develop in pets.





Featured at www.ChipMeNot.org, a website launched to raise awareness about the harm caused to animals by microchips, the lawsuit alleges that Merck's HomeAgain pet microchip induces cancerous tumors in pets. According to the suit, the defendant's cat developed cancer after getting a chip implant, and according to reports, other animals have gotten cancer after getting chipped as well.



"Based on the alarming number of microchip-induced cancers we're discovering, I predict this lawsuit will be just the tip of the iceberg," said Dr. Katherine Albrecht, a consumer advocate and expert on side effects associated with implantable microchips. "Merck and organizations that advocate pet chipping should take this lawsuit seriously and start warning pet owners of the risk of microchip-induced cancer."



According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, potential health risks associated with implantable microchips include "adverse tissue reaction". Based on data from the British Small Animal Veterinary Association, this can include "swelling", "infection", "abscesses", and "tumors".



Albrecht presented a paper on the subject called "Microchip-Induced Tumors in Laboratory Rodents and Dogs: A Review of the Literature 1990-2006" (http://www.chipmenot.org/pdfs/P074.pdf) at the June conference of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers that documents the increasing number of animals being harmed by microchips. Currently, there is no repository of data on adverse events associated with microchips in the U.S., but Albrecht organization, CASPIAN, is filling that void by compiling such information and making it available to the public.



To learn more about the dangers of animal microchips, visit: http://www.chipmenot.org/







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Pakistan intelligence services 'aided Mumbai terror attacks'

Militant arrested last year described dozens of meetings between ISI officers and senior Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives

(Guardian) Pakistan's powerful intelligence services were heavily involved in preparations for the Mumbai terrorist attacks of November 2008, according to classified Indian government documents obtained by the Guardian.



A 109-page report into the interrogation of key suspect David Headley, a Pakistani-American militant arrested last year and detained in the US, makes detailed claims of ISI support for the bombings.



Under questioning, Headley described dozens of meetings between officers of the main Pakistani military intelligence service, the ISI, and senior militants from the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) group responsible for the Mumbai attacks.



He claims a key motivation for the ISI in aiding the attacks was to bolster militant organisations with strong links to the Pakistani state and security establishment who were being marginalised by more extreme radical groups.



Headley, who undertook surveillance of the targets in Mumbai for the operation, claims that at least two of his missions were partly paid for by the ISI and that he regularly reported to the spy agency. However, the documents suggest that supervision of the militants by the ISI was often chaotic and that the most senior officers of the agency may have been unaware at least of the scale and ambition of the operation before it was launched.



More than 160 people were killed by militants from LeT who arrived by sea to attack luxury hotels, a Jewish centre, a café, a hospital and the main railway station in Mumbai, the Indian commercial capital. Casualties included citizens from 25 countries, including four Americans killed and seven Britons injured. The attacks dominated media for days and badly damaged already poor Indian-Pakistan relations.



European and American security services now fear that LeT, which has thousands of militants, runs dozens of training camps and has extensive logistic networks overseas, is moving from what has been a largely regional agenda – focused on the disputed Himalayan former princely state of Kashmir – to a global agenda involving strikes against the west or western interests. The documents suggest the fierce internal argument within the organisation over its strategic direction is being won by hardliners.



Headley, interviewed over 34 hours by Indian investigators in America in June, described how "a debate had begun among the terrorist outfits" and "a clash of ideology" leading to "splits".



"The aggression and commitment to jihad shown by several splinter groups in Afghanistan influenced many committed fighters to leave [LeT]," Headley said. "I understand this compelled the LeT to consider a spectacular terrorist strike in India."



Headley, who changed his name from Daood Gilani, told the investigators that the ISI hoped the Mumbai attack would slow or stop growing "integration" between groups active in Kashmir, with whom the agency had maintained a long relationship, and "Taliban-based outfits" in Pakistan and Afghanistan which were a threat to the Pakistani state.



"The ISI … had no ambiguity in understanding the necessity to strike India," Headley is reported to have said. The aim of the agency was "controlling further split in the Kashmir-based outfits, providing them a sense of achievement and shifting … the theatre of violence from the domestic soil of Pakistan to India."



Headley describes meeting once with a "Colonel Kamran" from the military intelligence service and having a series of meetings with a "Major Iqbal" and a "Major Sameer Ali". A fellow conspirator was handled by a Colonel Shah, he claims. Headley also alleges that he was given $25,000 by his ISI handler to finance one of eight surveillance missions in India.



However, Headley describes the ISI director general, Lt General Shuja Pasha, visiting a key senior militant from LeT in prison after the attacks in a bid "to understand" the operation, implying that, as many western security agencies suspect, the top ranks of the agency were unaware of at least the scale of the planned strike.



The Pakistani government has repeatedly denied any involvement of any security official in the Mumbai attacks. Last night, an ISI spokesman told the Guardian the accusations of the agency's involvement in the Mumbai attacks were "baseless".



LeT was banned in Pakistan in 2002. Jamat-ud Dawa, the social welfare wing of LeT, has been blacklisted in the wake of the Mumbai attacks although it continues to function.



The revelations could prove embarrassing to the US government as well as to the Pakistanis. Reports in American newspapers over the weekend claimed that Headley's wife had tried to alert American authorities to her husband's activities but had been ignored.



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