Tuesday, Dec 09th
Last update07:43:52 AM GMT
Merck pulled Vioxx, a popular pain reliever widely used by arthritis patients, off the market in September, saying it was "putting patient safety first" but the Wall Street Journal reported earlier that company officials had fought for years to protect the highly profitable drug and to keep news of the health risks quiet.
About 20 million Americans had taken Vioxx by the time Merck withdrew it.
Jack Straw privately warned Tony Blair that an invasion of Iraq was legally dubious, questioned what such action would achieve, and challenged US claims about the threat from Saddam Hussein, it was revealed today .
Straw, foreign secretary at the time, gave what now seems prophetic advice in a letter marked "secret and personal", 10 days before Blair met George Bush at the US president's ranch in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002. That was nearly a year before the invasion.
The United States has published the names of 645 prisoners held at a controversial US-run prison in Afghanistan following a freedom of information lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Despite previous refusals to identify those held in the jail at Bagram, the ACLU received the list of names on Saturday after their request for documents related to the detention and treatment of prisoners at the base was partially accepted.
Eight years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq have etched indelible scars on the psyches of many of the nation's servicemen and women, and the U.S. military is losing a battle to stem an epidemic of suicides in its ranks.
Despite calls by top Pentagon officials for a sea change in attitudes about mental health, millions of dollars in new suicide prevention programming and thousands of hours spent helping soldiers suffering from what often are euphemistically dubbed "invisible wounds," the military is losing ground.
There are only two US media outlets that have reported on Cuba's response to the deadly 7.0 earthquake that hit Haiti. One was Fox News, which claimed, wrongly, that the Cubans were absent from the list of neighboring Caribbean countries providing aid. The other was the Christian Science Monitor (a respected news organization that recently shut down its print edition), which reported correctly that Cuba had dispatched 30 doctors to the stricken nation.
European Council officials investigating vaccine industry corruption and media frights that prompted governments worldwide to over-stock risky H1N1 vaccines and expensive drugs for the unusually mild "2009 swine flu pandemic" have a Special Reportonline in Medical Veritas to consider.
In a 2008 academic paper, President Barack Obama's appointee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs advocated "cognitive infiltration" of groups that advocate "conspiracy theories" like the ones surrounding 9/11.
Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, co-wrote an academic article entitled "Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures," in which he argued that the government should stealthily infiltrate groups that pose alternative theories on historical events via "chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine" those groups.
A simple eye test might be able to detect Alzheimer's and other diseases before symptoms develop, according to UK scientists. The technique uses fluorescent markers which attach to dying cells which can be seen in the retina and give an early indication of brain cell death.
The research has been carried out on mice, but human trials are planned.
It is true that Mikey is not on the federal government’s “no-fly” list, which includes about 2,500 people, less than 10 percent of them from the United States. But his name appears to be among some 13,500 on the larger “selectee” list, which sets off a high level of security screening.
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