Saturday, 26 November 2011
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Dr Meryl Nass MD
Infectious Disease News has posted a report of a paper, "H1N1 pandemic less severe among adults with history of flu." The paper suggests that people with preexisting antibodies to different H1N1 strains had more immunity to swine flu H1N1 than those without. Getting a flu infection (whether or not you actually get sick... since the majority of people with influenza infections show few if any symptoms) leaves you with long-lived antibodies, and many more of them, than someone has who got vaccine. And they protect against similar strains, which flu vaccine usually fails to do. This might explain the data from Canada and Hong Kong (that I have blogged about several times) which showed that receiving flu vaccine in 2008 led to almost double the likelihood of getting sick from swine flu in 2009.
Dr Meryl Nass MD
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Daily Mail Reporter, Daily Mail
YLE.fi
Carlos Jenkins, Daily Health Report
Associated Press
ABC News
James Murdoch has resigned as a director of the companies which publish The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun, documents filed with Companies House show. He stepped down from the boards of News Group Newspapers (NGN), publisher of The Sun, and Times Newspapers Ltd (TNL), which publishes The Times and The Sunday Times, in September. News Group Newspapers was the publisher of the now-defunct News of the World and could be the subject of legal actions arising from the investigation into phone hacking. Mr Murdoch, 38, who resigned the posts after taking up a new position in New York with News Corporation, remains chairman of News International, NGN and TNL's parent company. In Australia, police are investigating allegations that News Corporation's Australian arm offered a politician a "special relationship" and favourable coverage if he voted against changes to media laws. One Click Note: As of going to internet press, James Murdo ch is still a director of pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline where, irony of ironies, he sits on its corporate responsibility committee. One can but speculate on the role that Murdoch played during the mainstream media Swine Flu hysteria and the hyping of GSK's disastrous Pandemrix Flu vaccine that received wall-to-wall promotion coverage in the newspapers and media outlets that the Murdoch family control.
Kathy Marks & Adam Sherwin, The Independent
Raymond Gilmartin, CEO of Merck at the time of the transgressions.
Pharmaceutical manufacturer Merck continues to pay a steep price for its former money-making drug Vioxx, a painkiller that once earned the company more than $2 billion a year. The latest settlement for Merck originated with the U.S. Department of Justice, which got the company to pay $950 million in fines and penalties to settle multiple civil cases. The drug giant also pled guilty to a criminal charge over the marketing and sales of Vioxx. Merck pulled Vioxx off the market in 2004 after evidence showed the drug increased the risk of heart problems for patients. Merck also will pay $426 million to the federal government and $202 million to state Medicaid agencies to settle civil claims that its illegal marketing caused doctors to prescribe the pills and bill the government for Vioxx. No corporate executive was held liable for Merck’s conduct. “It’s just a cost of doing business until a pharmaceutical executive does a perp walk,” Erik Gordon, a pharmaceutical analyst and clinical assistant professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.
Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov
The Nature of the beast revealed. While I truly empathize with the victims of the use of force by police against Occupy protesters these past few weeks, the fact that these acts of abuse occurred has served a very useful purpose. For the first time in a long time, the role of police in a society that calls itself democratic is being questioned. As anyone who has been paying attention knows, in the past few weeks police have beaten, pepper-sprayed, shot rubber bullets and other projectiles, used concussion grenades and other wise attacked Occupiers, their supporters and journalists at protests across the United States. When that government feels it is under attack and believes that nothing but force will work to end those attacks, then it brings out the police and gives them free rein. As far as the US and the wave of protest occurring there goes, the State has a firm monopoly on violence.
Ron Jacobs, CounterPunch
Revolution?
I’ve been mulling over whether using the R-word is a bit melodramatic, or even irresponsible. In recent weeks I’ve increasingly suspected it isn’t, and now with this week’s report by the High Pay Commission, I’m convinced it is legitimate to use it. It was a friend who came from a background of inherited wealth who said to me many years ago‘If the landed and rich had had their wits about them and acted responsibly, we’d never have had communism and would have prevented pretty much all the revolutions.’ What R-word am I talking about? The word is ‘revolution’, and I fear we are getting dangerously close to the conditions in which social revolution becomes possible. We had rioting in the summer – count that as a warning that needs to be heeded before the cost to the top earners becomes genuinely and uncomfortably high.
Chris Bowens, Dale & Co
Since the City of London Corporation published its legal bundle over the weekend - an account of its case that naturally gives a rather one sided picture of Occupy London Stock Exchange and its camp at St Paul's Churchyard - there have been a series of stories in the media which give an account of the allegations in that bundle. We are not afraid of criticism and negative news stories are something we expect. In the usual scheme of things, we would see no need to make a particular comment on those stories. But sometimes you need to take a stand. The Evening Standard ran a front page story ("Needle bins at St Paul's camp to beat junkie health hazard") that we think oversteps the mark. Feeding prejudice and victimising vulnerable members of our society, as the tone and placement of this article did, is not a hallmark of quality journalism. We have always held that the best way of understanding what goes on at Occupy London is to come down and see for yourself. To that end, we invite members of the press to meet members of our welfare team and others across the camp including our health & safety and sanitation working groups, to ask the questions they feel need answering. Do contact the press team to book a one-to-one interview.
Press Release, Occupy London
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Occupy London
Occupy London
A tribunal in Malaysia, spearheaded by that nation’s former Prime Minister, yesterday found George Bush and Tony Blair guilty of “crimes against peace” and other war crimes for their 2003 aggressive attack on Iraq, as well as fabricating pretexts used to justify the attack. The seven-member Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal — which featured an American law professor as one of its chief prosecutors — has no formal enforcement power, but was modelled after a 1967 tribunal in Sweden and Denmark that found the U.S. guilty of a war of aggression in Vietnam. The tribunal ruled that Bush and Blair’s name should be entered in a register of war criminals, urged that they be recognized as such under the Rome Statute, and will also petition the International Criminal Court to proceed with binding charges. Here’s what I find striking about this. Virtually every Serious political and media elite in America, by definition, would scoff at this tribunal; few things are considered more fringe or ludicrous than the notion that George Bush and Tony Blair should be punished as war criminals just because they aggressively attacked another nation and caused the deaths of at least 150,000 innocent people and the displacement of millions more. But the only thing this Malaysian tribunal is doing is applying the clear principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal as enunciated by lead prosecutor and former U.S. Attorney General Robert Jackson in his Opening and Closing Statements at Nuremberg.
Glenn Greenwald, Salon
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