It's official. The drug industry's chief lobbyists — the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America — raised and spent at least $101.2 million in 2009 on advocacy efforts during the contentious health care overhaul debate, according to tax documents the group filed last month.
Former PhRMA CEO Billy Tauzin tells Shots the lobby used the money — special contributions from member companies — for broadcast and print ads, grassroots and direct lobbying, polling and consulting. Tauzin, who has a two-year contract to advise PhRMA's new leader, recently opened his own DC-based lobbying shop with his son Tom.
The Federal Reserve offers details on the loans it gave to banks and others at the height of the financial crisis. One program alone doled out nearly $9 trillion. The Federal Reserve has lifted its veil of secrecy regarding special lending programs during the financial crisis, responding to a mandate from Congress by revealing the specifics of transactions with firms like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.
It's a cosmic embarrassment of riches – the universe appears to hold three times the number of stars many astronomers might have estimated only a year ago. That's the implication a pair of scientists has drawn after measuring eight huge elliptical galaxies that they selected from two vast galaxy clusters located between 53 million to 321 million light-years from Earth.
The US State Department has directed its staff around the world not to surf the WikiLeaks website, according to employees. The ban is in response to WikiLeaks' decision to published classified material, including US diplomatic cables. It’s not clear when the policy first began but it joins a similar order by the US Department of Defense put in place since the leaking of Iraq and Afghanistan war documents earlier this year.
NASA has sent the internet into a frenzy after it announced an "The discovery could prove the theory of "shadow" creatures which exist in tandem with our own and in hostile environments previously thought uninhabitable.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Wednesday afternoon that the Obama administration will not allow offshore oil drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico or off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts as part of the next five-year drilling plan, reversing two key policy changes President Obama announced in late March.
Last month, BP increased by $8 billion the financial provisions it was taking for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill; the company's shares rose. Better-than- expected underlying profits and upbeat comments from new Chief Executive Bob Dudley were taken by the market as a sign the company had turned the corner and would soon return to pumping out steadily rising dividends.
The length of a man's fingers can provide clues to his risk of prostate cancer, according to new research. A British Journal of Cancer study found men whose index finger was longer than their ring finger were significantly less likely to develop the disease.
espite an incredible outpouring of public opposition to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) "Food Safety Modernization Act", or S. 510, the Senate voted 73 to 25 to pass the bill anyway. And data presented by Maplight.org, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization, shows that big industry groups and large food producers spent millions of dollars buying off Congressmen to garner support for it.
