From the NY Times‘ editorial page: The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ordered an overhaul of mental health care for veterans, who are killing themselves by the thousands each year because of what the court called the “unchecked incompetence” of the Department of Veterans Affairs. … delays in treating post-traumatic stress…

UPDATE:  Dominique Strauss-Kahn is “not in a position to run” the International Monetary Fund after his arrest over an alleged sexual assault, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has said.  May we remind Mr. Geithner that he was guilty of tax evasion, yet he runs the US Treasury, responsible for collecting taxes.  What was good for…

Partial meltdowns of three reactors and breaches of the containment vehicles are finally acknowledged by TEPCO on May 15.  From the WSJ: Substantial damage to the fuel cores at two additional reactors of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex has taken place, operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Sunday, further complicating the already daunting task of…

I attended the European Bioelectromagnetics meeting in Helsinki in September 2001, and discovered then that there were dueling bodies of evidence regarding whether electromagnetic fields from cell phones or other sources caused adverse health effects.  Things have not changed a lot since then, although the body of research has considerably expanded.  Because the research paid…

UPDATE:  I was reminded that a fellow named Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor (formerly of Blackwater/Xe) shot two Pakistanis on motorcyces to death in February.  President Obama claimed he was “our diplomat”and insisted Pakistan grant him immunity under the Vienna Convention on diplomatic immunity of 1961.  Davis had a car full of weapons, disguises and…

While the world waits for UK Attorney General Dominic Grieve to decide whether to hold an inquest into Dr. Kelly’s death, accruing information makes the suicide theory less and less tenable.  A helicopter, hired by Thames Valley police, landed at the scene 90 minutes after Kelly’s body was discovered, stayed 5 minutes, then left.  Another…

Take the Flu App Challenge! “Applications and technology make it easier to communicate critical information about the flu and its impact. We’re looking for an innovative use of technology to raise awareness of influenza and/or educate consumers on ways to prevent and treat the flu.” Software innovators, you have until May 27 to submit your…

The 2010-11 flu season is now over.  Where do we stand in terms of vaccination and deaths from flu? The influenza vaccine is said to have been a good match to the majority of strains that circulated during this flu season. One hundred two (102) pediatric deaths were reported to CDC from the entire US for the flu…

From the journal Health Affairs, the entire May issue focuses on the health effects of exposures to toxic chemicals in the environment.  From the Health Affairs blog: With growing evidence of the link between exposure to toxic chemicals and chronic diseases, especially in children, the United States needs to step up its efforts to protect…

Today a press conference was held to announce publication of a study of Vaccine Injury Compensation Program decisions– 83 were made in favor of children who developed autism after vaccination.  The peer-reviewed study by Mary Holland, Research Scholar and Director of the Graduate Legal Skills Program, NYU School of Law; Louis Conte, Robert Krakow, and…

Curious timing of anthrax letters arriving at DC schools.  Might they have been sent in support of the child vaccine trial?  From IBT: Nearly 30 schools in Washington DC have received envelopes containing a mysterious white powder and with ‘AL AQEDA-FBI’ written on them, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said on Thursday. Preliminary testing has…

Yesterday it was announced that the government would be purchasing 3.42 million doses of anthrax vaccine to add to the civilian anthrax vaccine stockpile.  This is on top of the military stockpile, and comes out of DHHS funds.  The purchase adds up to $101 million to the total contract for DHHS’ anthrax stockpile, now worth…

There was a lot of interest in my discussion of the benefit of knowing the ingredients in vaccines.  There was further interest in what these ingredients are.  I have therefore annotated a CDC-derived ingredient list for vaccines by highlighting those ingredients derived from animals or humans, and circling in red those ingredients obtained from a…

Appreciate the Washington Post giving us real numbers to improve our grasp of the deficit as we grapple with how to lower it (and in the near term, simply lower its growth rate). The nation’s unnerving descent into debt began a decade ago with a choice, not a crisis. In January 2001, with the budget…

Bob Stevens’ family’s attorney has filed papers disputing the role of Bruce Ivins (in a much delayed lawsuit against the federal government), regarding the wrongful death of Bob Stevens, a photo editor at the National Enquirer who died after exposure to an anthrax letter in 2001.  From the Palm Beach Post: Maureen Stevens’ attorneys originally…

From the Australian: THE drug regulator has told GPs to stop giving patients a second dose of a vaccine that protects against pneumococcal disease, after more than 80 Australians suffered severe reactions, including severe swelling and abcesses. The Therapeutic Goods Administration said it was investigating what could have caused 178 reports of reactions to the…

Half of combat veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq have filed for benefits since 2001.  From the Washington Post: The caseload at the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims has doubled in recent years, with the court deciding more than 600 cases per judge each year — far more than other federal appellate courts…. By…

This long piece meanders from the H1N1 pandemic and the billions spent to save us from a flu much less malign than usual, to the marketing of Tamiflu (a dangerous drug for influenza whose efficacy may be zero) to the problems with industry control of research on all drugs in our pharmacopeiea.  The points may…

Greg Gordon may not be as well-known as some investigative journalists, but he is one of the best in the business.  Greg has penned an incredible series on Goldman Sachs, detailing how the company bet against investment vehicles they had designed (to fail), for which he was a finalist for a Pulitzer last year.  [See…

From Reuters today: European regulators have recommended changes to the product label for GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK.L) pandemic flu vaccine Pandemrix to highlight the potential risk of narcolepsy in children or adolescents.  The decision is based on preliminary results of studies from Finland, Sweden and France suggesting a possible link between the vaccine and the rare sleeping…

UPDATE:  Both LD 941 and LD 694 made it out of committee and will be voted on by the entire legislature.–Meryl Meryl Nass, MD Mount Desert Island Hospital Bar Harbor, Maine 04609 April 9, 2011 Dear HHS Committee Member (Maine Legislature): I am writing with regard to LD 941 and the subject of mandatory vaccinations….

UPDATE:  Here is a list of vaccine ingredients posted by CDC.  I have annotated the list with yellow highlights for animal-derived materials, and annotated in red MRC-5 DNA and protein.  MRC-5 is a human fetal cell line derived from lung tissue. — Meryl Meryl Nass, MD Mount Desert Island Hospital Bar Harbor, Maine 04609 April…

In early January, Ireland’s Health Service Executive advised doctors to use the Pandemrix (GSK) brand of swine flu vaccine only in the event they ran out of seasonal flu vaccine.  This is the brand linked to narcolepsy cases. Apparently that warning was not sufficient.  On April 3 Ireland’s Health Service informed doctors that they would…

Still no news about narcolepsy or any other specific adverse effects from the US and Canada, who used the most  swine flu vaccines in 2009 and 2010.  So much for claims that the US put into effect special monitoring programs for this vaccine! Ireland is finding increased narcolepsy cases in the vaccinated 4-19 age group…

Noah Schactman has an extremely detailed, useful piece on the anthrax mailings in Wired.  Noah did his homework.  The 72 comments are also interesting. UPDATE:  Podcast with Noah here.  Extracts of the magazine story follow: In February 2003, anthrax became part of the rationale for invading Iraq. Colin Powell went to the United Nations Security…

From the BBC: A group of doctors campaigning for a full inquest for Dr David Kelly have appealed to Prime Minister David Cameron to intervene on their behalf… And, addressing the prime minister directly, they caution: “If an inquest is denied, despite all the evidence carefully provided to the attorney general, there is a real…

A group of psychiatrists [UPDATE:  See Dr. Jeffrey Kaye’s analysis of the panel composition] offered their forensic expertise in solving the anthrax criminal investigation, by using their insight into the criminal mind.  Somehow DC Judge Royce E. Lamberth blessed them, and FBI paid the $38,000  bill.  The group only had one suspect, whose confidential medical…

From San Diego’s station KPBS: SAN DIEGO — A KPBS investigation has found that nearly two out of three people diagnosed with whooping cough in San Diego County this year were fully immunized. California is in the midst of the worst whooping cough epidemic in 50 years. The numbers raise questions about how well the…

The “Review Committee on the Functioning of the International Health Regulations (2005) and on Pandemic Influenza A (H1N1) 2009”  was charged with assessing the usefulness of existing International Health Regulations in light of the H1N1 swine flu pandemic, improving preparedness, and evaluating WHO’s response to the swine flu pandemic.  Thus much of its draft report…

Data suggest that children may have been hospitalized for post-swine flu vaccination seizures at a rate 2-6 times greater than their rate of hospitalization for swine flu disease.  Data are lacking on other post-vaccination side effects that might also occur.  I suggest you read this short BMJ piece by authors Peter Collignan, Peter Doshi and…

Professor David Salisbury, the Director of Immunisation for the UK Department of Health, wrote to colleagues/stakeholders on March 16 suggesting that routine pneumococcal immunisation in the over-65 age group be ended, and asking for their views before making a final decision on the program.  Ending routine vaccinations in the elderly is the recommendation of the…

UPDATE:  I just learned that in 2008 GSK obtained European regulatory approval to market a so-called “Prepandemic” Vaccine for H5N1 avian flu.  This virus is not circulating in humans.  The theory behind the vaccine is that if a bird flu virus emerged to cause a pandemic, the GSK vaccine is likely to be somewhat similar to it,…

An excellent piece was published by Agence France Presse.  The article below is by MARIA CHENG, The Associated Press-Washington Post, March 10, 2011: LONDON — An expert panel commissioned by the World Health Organization to investigate its handling of the swine flu pandemic has slammed mistakes made by the U.N. body and warned tens of…

UPDATE:  Australia has banned 4 flu vaccines and approved 2 for children under age ten, on March 11, 2011.  The 2011 flu vaccine in Australia has identical antigens as last year.  According to The Australian, up to 1 in 100 children under five vaccinated with the CSL vaccine last year suffered a seizure, more than the ninefold…

David Relman, vice chair of the National Academy of Science committee that reported on the FBI’s anthrax letters research last week, did some clearer speaking (compared to the committee report and his statements at the NAS press conference on 2/15) about the committee’s findings for a press release from Stanford University, where he is a…

WHO Statement on Narcolepsy and Vaccination 8 February 2011 Since August 2010, following widespread use of vaccines against influenza (H1N1) 2009, cases of narcolepsy, especially in children and adolescents, have been reported from at least 12 countries. Narcolepsy is a rare sleep disorder that causes a person to fall asleep suddenly and unexpectedly. The rates…

Steve Nissen et al. hit another homer; the authors examine why bad medical devices (those eventually recalled) were initially approved by FDA, and learn it was due to skirting the standard review process.  Does abbreviated review of products benefit the public in any way?  Shouldn’t this abbreviated approval process be eliminated for all but emergency…

Today the Washington Post called for an independent commission on the anthrax letters: RESOLUTION OF THE 2001 anthrax attacks continues to prove elusive. The Justice Department and the FBI identified Maryland scientist Bruce E. Ivins as having single-handedly carried out the attacks that killed five people and seriously sickened 17 others. The department was on…

Professor Paul Keim, an anthrax genetics expert at Northern Arizona University and FBI contractor, is claiming the NAS report supports the FBI’s case.  It doesn’t.  Please review the report and judge for yourself. The NAS report has many confusing aspects.  But it basically says: The FBI totally screwed up its data collection of anthrax samples,…

1.  The FBI’s anthrax letters investigation:  points to consider November 30, 2010   2.  My summary of unresolved issues in the anthrax letters case March 7, 2010   3.  Jean Duley emerges from undisclosed location after 18 months to bolster FBI’s case against Ivins March 6, 2010   4.  The FBI’s Anthrax Case/ NYT February…

Glenn Greenwald (Salon) talks about the origins of this story.  He covers the media response to the FBI’s case in 2008, when calls for an independent investigation came from … the editorial pages of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal).  Mainstream scientific sources were equally skeptical; Nature called for an independent investigation and…

From today’s Washington Post: FBI continues to claim Ivins misled them with his original anthrax sample, although NAS pointed out that the instructions for sample collection were ambiguous, and FBI failed to collect needed information about the specific procedures used by those submitting samples. FBI claims it had to meet a stiffer standard than The…

From the LA Times: … Rep. Rush D. Holt, a Democrat from New Jersey, the site of the postal box where the letters were mailed, reintroduced legislation Tuesday to establish an 11-member commission to study the anthrax attacks. “There are still questions to be answered and still lessons to be learned,” Holt said. “It would…

There is no getting away from the NAS report conclusions, as reported worldwide:  the science does not support FBI’s claims that Ivins was the anthrax perpetrator. See articles from the AFP, NPR, AP, Science, and a later WP article. The FBI responded that their case was based on a totality of the evidence, not just…

From Jerry Markon at the Washington Post: A panel of prominent scientists is casting new doubt on scientific evidence that was a key part of the FBI’s case against Bruce E. Ivins, the deceased Army scientist accused of carrying out the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks. The National Research Council, in a report issued Tuesday, questioned…

WHO noted that narcolepsy has never before been associated with vaccines.  When there is no prior association, odd diseases occuring in temporal relationship to vaccination are generally felt to be coincidental.  Therefore, they are not generally reported to voluntary reporting systems, like the US’ VAERS.  No data get collected, and it remains unknown whether vaccination…

UPDATE:  On Feb 8, WHO acknowledged that at least 12 countries were reporting cases of narcolepsy associated with swine flu vaccinations. From the Helsinki Times, what we already knew and blogged on in 2009 here, here, here, and here finally becomes public knowledge after a vaccine-related, serious illness is identified.  Governments that purchased pandemic swine…

Finland’s National Narcolepsy Task Force released its preliminary report today, and GSK’s swine flu vaccine is implicated.  From the Associated Press: The National Institute for Health and Welfare, which published the findings, said that 60 children and adolescents contracted narcolepsy in Finland in 2009 and 2010. Fifty-two of them — or almost 90 percent —…

Merck developed a clever scheme for marketing HPV vaccine:  it would lobby for laws that would add the vaccine to state Medicaid entitlements, require it be covered by private insurers and mandate the vaccine to attend school.  I know of two different approaches at the state level. In 2007 in Texas, Governor Perry simply issued…

From YLE: The Chief Medical Officer of Finland’s National Public Health Institute has conceded that children and young people should possibly not have been vaccinated against swine flu. Dr Terhi Kilpi told the Väli-Suomi newspaper group’s Sunday newspaper supplement that the vaccine perhaps should not have been given to 5-20 year-olds. Kilpi said that she…

It might not be murder, but there was definite hanky panky at the scene of David Kelly’s death.  Not only did the knife, the water bottle and the pill package on Dr. Kelly’s person lack any fingerprints.  Turns out his cell phone and a watch had also been wiped clean.  Since there were no gloves…

Autoimmune disorders encompass a large variety of illnesses, the fourth-largest general category of disease, it is said.  A rare lymphoma, or neoplastic disease of the immune system, has been associated with breast implants.  This article does not say the disease is autoimmune, and the mechanism by which the implant may lead to the disease is…

UPDATE:  This is a 2006 article.  Sorry. Too bad we have to get our science from the Mail, but in the era of Conflicts of Interest, maybe it isn’t so strange that we read about the flip side of pharmaceuticals from media outlets that don’t rely on pharmaceutical company advertising to survive. New American research…

From CBS News in September: … occasionally, vaccines cause injury or death. Very rarely, patients are left with what’s known as “encephalopathy”, the medical term for brain damage.  In fact, CBS News has found nearly 1,300 cases in which vaccine-related brain damage has been compensated in court over the past 20 years. The debate over…

Shades of Vietnam:  we had to destroy this village to save it.  And the  US plans to spend $1,000,000 to rebuild it.  Of course no civilians, only Taliban, were killed.  And we managed to save the pomegranite trees:  good aim, guys!  Read the WIRED story.  An American-led military unit pulverized an Afghan village in Kandahar’s…

The UK’s Telegraph is on a tear about flu vaccine.  Two weeks ago, the Telegraph complained that the UK government had dropped its flu vaccine advertising campaign.  Last year the UK spent 15 million pounds for swine flu vaccine ads.  But people are being vaccinated nonetheless: After earlier complaints that the failure to advertise flu…

BBC News reports that “France pledges reform after diabetes drug scandal”:   Mr Bertrand said it was his duty to rebuild the system to protect the public French Health Minister Xavier Bertrand has promised a complete revamp of the country’s medical regulatory system.He was speaking after an official report said a diabetes drug which caused…

The BMJ, a medical journal that is more open to controversial subjects than most, just published an investigative piece and editorial claiming that Andrew Wakefield et al’s research on children with developmental and gastrointestinal disorders and the MMR vaccine was “fraud.” Wakefield’s original research paper was retracted last year by the Lancet, following a decision…

• Defects in newborns 11 times higher than normal • ‘War contaminants’ from 2004 attack could be cause  By Martin Chulov at the Guardian White phosphorous smoke screens are fired by the US army as part of an early morning patrol in November 2004 on the outskirts of Falluja, Iraq, in preparation for an offensive…

From an exclusive interview with the WSJ: BAGHDAD—Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ruled out the presence of any U.S. troops in Iraq after the end of 2011, saying his new government and the country’s security forces were capable of confronting any remaining threats to Iraq’s security, sovereignty and unity. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sat down for…

From Bryan Bender at the Globe: Former officers and specialists say the defense industry’s political might is getting a new boost from an accelerating flow of retired generals and admirals. The Department of Defense… runs an exclusive job service to teach soon-to-retire generals how to land jobs in the defense industry. And military firms routinely…

From Carol D. Leonnig and T.W. Farnam at the Washington Post: Numerous times this year, members of Congress have held fundraisers and collected big checks while they are taking critical steps to write new laws, despite warnings that such actions could create ethics problems. The campaign donations often came from contributors with major stakes riding…

Bill Quigley (Loyola University Law Professor) and Vince Warren (both associated with the Center for Constitutional Rights) discuss Obama’s newest Executive Order:  one designed to uproot the 5th Amendment’s requirement for due process and the 6th Amendment’s rights of the accused, including the right to a speedy trial.  Here is their report on Huffington Post:…

The Washington Post team of Dana Priest and William Arkin have again pushed the envelope on what the mainstream media report on US government surveillance of citizens.  I expect that, as happened congruent to Priest and Arkin’s stories on “Top Secret America” published last July, the Post will build a site with a linked set…

Reuters makes big news of a study showing that Glaxo’s swine flu vaccine (which contains ASO3 adjuvant) induced a stronger immune response than an unadjuvanted Baxter vaccine. This is nothing to crow about.  Everyone agrees that adjuvants boost the immune response; the question is how much increased autoimmune illness or other adverse events occur as…

Surge seen only in Sweden and Finland (Helsingen Sanomet)   Forty one children and young people in Finland who were vaccinated for the H1N1, or swine flu virus last winter have been diagnosed with narcolepsy. In addition, there have been a few cases of the disease in which there was no record of a swine…

Coleen Rowley, retired special agent and legal counsel for the Minneapolis field office of the FBI, and Bogdan Dzakovic, former special agent for the FAA’s security division, wrote this interesting piece:   Frustrated investigators might have chosen to leak information that their superiors bottled up, perhaps averting the terrorism attacks. If WikiLeaks had been around in…

Today, the Daily Mail publishes for the first time the legal document which could trigger a full coroner’s inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly. The document, formally known as a memorial was written by group of campaigning doctors who have been trying to secure an inquest since 2004. It lists the sequence of…

As I told the audience at the Anthrax Letters Seminar on November 29, Please remember that the FBI “owns” the narrative of this case.  It has released piecemeal findings, contradictory facts, and withheld a large amount of information from the public record…  Most important, the facts of this case (as opposed to what the FBI…

Calls for an inquest are made anew as lack of fingerprints on the two items supposedly used to commit suicide, (3 packs of ten Co-proxamol [Darvon plus Tylenol] tablets and a pruning knife) becomes public knowledge. Note that blood levels of Darvon and Tylenol were therapeutic, and did not support any overdose.  Why Kelly would…

A 2010 update to Cochrane’s 2007 metaanalysis of the published clinical trial literature on influenza vaccinations found not a lot to recommend the vaccines.  Cochrane pointed out, “Healthy adults are presently targeted mainly in North America.”  The implication is that Europe, where most reviewers reside, is too smart to push mass flu shots on its…

The manufacturer of the only licensed anthrax vaccine (Emergent Biosolutions, a.k.a. Bioport) purchased the company from the state of Michigan in September 1998 immediately after the Army promised to indemnify the company (provide a free insurance policy) against claims for side effects, lack of efficacy and other potential problems. The language in the contract was…

This was my presentation to the University of California Institute on Global Conflicts and Cooperation seminar on the anthrax letters, Nov. 29, 2010 in Washington, D.C.  DVDs with the full video recording of the anthrax seminar can be purchased at cost ($12) from www.scientiapress.com. THE FBI’S ANTHRAX LETTERS INVESTIGATION:  POINTS TO CONSIDER MERYL NASS, MD…

From the war that never ends, has no endgame, in the country that destroys empires comes this little item courtesy of the NY Times.  We can’t even identify the enemy’s leaders to negotiate with!  But we can and do give them large chunks of money… KABUL, Afghanistan — For months, the secret talks unfolding between…

Like so much in today’s world of politics, there is no logic that can explain it.  Biodefense labs (whose value in the light of the risk they pose is questionable) are being built smack in the middle of large cities (Boston), in areas that flood (Galveston), and in the middle of a farming area dense…

From YLE print and TV in Finland: …  Thirty-seven children in Finland came down with narcolepsy soon after being injected with the vaccine against swine flu. Some of the children have sustained serious brain damage that has made it impossible for them to attend school. They suffer from symptoms including hallucinations, personality changes and cataplexy,…

Military tribunals (and places like Guantanama) for so-called terrorists transgress the 5th, 6th, 8th and 9th Amendments of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.   Goodbye to Habeas Corpus, Due Process and Geneva Convention protections, among others.  Olbermann provided amusing commentary.  But we can’t get convictions using real courts, real judges and real juries.  What a dilemma! …

Two articles, each reporting on a different study, found that uptake of subsequent doses of HPV vaccine, after the first, was poor.  Neither entertained the possibility that side effects might have something to do with this.  Maybe side effects had nothing to do with it.  But since vaccine effectiveness depends on 3 repeated doses, it…

Although a drug overdose was claimed to be a contributor to the death of Dr. David Kelly, a pharmacologist claims that Kelly did not have an elevated blood level of co-proxamol at the time of death.  This drug contained darvon and a “regular strength” tylenol, from which it would be very hard to overdose without…

From the BMJ blog comes this gratifying discussion of an important paper in the PLOS: … an important and fascinating paper in PloS Medicine shows how editors can be exposed to dramatic conflicts of interest.  The paper is suitably po faced, as is the accompanying editorial, but, as a blogger and ex-editor, I can spell out…

http://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/ The University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) and The UC Washington Center Cordially invite you to attend a seminar: The Anthrax Mailings Investigation Monday, November 29, 2010, 1:00 – 5:30 pm UC Washington Center, 1608 Rhode Island Ave. NW FBI has closed the 2001 anthrax mailings investigation.  The alleged preparer…

From Sydney Morning Herald and Medical Journal of Australia: The [following] editorial calls for the urgent establishment of a new national body to provide uniform monitoring and “active surveillance”, looking for adverse reaction cases in the community. “This is critical to ensure that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks,” Dr Gold said. Febrile convulsions…

“Similar to previous findings conducted in hospital healthcare workers and nurses, we confirmed that the willingness of community nurses to accept influenza A (H1N1) vaccination is low. Future studies that evaluate interventions to address nurses’ specific concerns or interventions that aim to raise the awareness among nurses on the importance of influenza A (H1N1) vaccination…

How “US Special Operations Forces are sabotaging the very strategy for reaching a political settlement that US officials claim to support” and murdering Taliban fighters who laid down their weapons and agreed to work with the government. Amy Goodman interviews the author on Democracy Now! here.

From Lew Weinstein’s blog The University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) and The UC Washington Center Cordially invite you to attend a seminar: The Anthrax Mailings Investigation Monday, November 29, 2010, 1:00 – 5:30 pm UC Washington Center, 1608 Rhode Island Ave. NW FBI has closed the 2001 anthrax mailings investigation. …

From Canadian Broadcasting:   “A computer failure caused a break in communication with 50 nuclear missiles at Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming during the weekend, military officials said Tuesday.”  The military did not see fit to inform the President until today, 3 days after the incident.  You didn’t really think Obama was running this…

How the newly released US military files reveal an instruction to ignore detainee abuse by Iraqi authorities; what that meant on the ground; and just how far up the chain of command the order went, from the Guardian.

Excerpts from the Australian: The Health Department has exposed drug company “inconsistencies” but ruled them out as the cause of fits in children given a flu vaccine. CSL’s world-first combination of seasonal and swine flu strains was suspended for the under-fives in April, after it triggered febrile convulsions in young children at nine times the…

Excerpts from Bloomberg: GlaxoSmithKline Plc agreed to pay $750 million to settle a U.S. government false-claims lawsuit over the sale of defective drugs. The affected drugs included the antidepressant Paxil CR and the diabetes treatment Avandamet. “We regret that we operated the Cidra facility in a manner that was inconsistent with current Good Manufacturing Practice…

From the Guardian: [UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg was] asked if there should be an inquiry into the role of British troops, [and] said: “I think anything that suggests that basic rules of war, conflict and engagement have been broken or that torture has been in any way condoned are extremely serious and need…

From the Bay Citizen: … An analysis of official death certificates on file at the State Department of Public Health reveals that more than 1,000 California veterans under 35 died between 2005 and 2008. That figure is three times higher than the number of California service members who were killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan…

From TodayOnLine: LONDON – The United Nations has called on United States President Barack Obama to order a full investigation of the involvement of US forces in human rights abuses in Iraq, after the massive leak of military documents by the WikiLeaks website. The intelligence logs show how the US authorities failed to investigate hundreds…

Why are we still turning Afghanistan into chopped liver?  Why are we spending our children’s blood, money we don’t have, and our reputation on Hamid Karzai and his country, which has been the destroyer of empires and may yet destroy ours?  What precisely is the treasure our leaders are seeking?  I feel like the USA…

From the October 20 Guardian (UK): Military contractors’ epic overcharging The government needs to know the true cost of the products it’s purchasing to avoid getting fleeced by unscrupulous suppliers A soldier being inoculated for anthrax in 2000. The Pentagon has paid the manufacturer of BioThrax $1.3bn, for a vaccine that an independent report calculates…

Tony Fauci (head of NIH’s NIAID), alsong with David Morens and Jeffrey Taubenberger, both renowned flu experts, have run the numbers and concluded that a majority of Americans are already immune to swine flu, either from last year’s vaccination (62 million) or a prior exposure.  Most of those exposed never got sick. In a paper…

UPDATE:  From the October 18 MailOnline: Ambulance chiefs face renewed pressure to explain the loss of a key medical record relating to the death of Dr David Kelly after the investigating police force said it had no record of ever having received the document. Bosses at South Central Ambulance NHS Trust were criticised last month…

More material has been released on the anthrax letters case by the Army: https://mrmc.amedd.army.mil/index.cfm?pageid=foia_reading_room.overview Contact for questions (the person overseeing the production) John P Mr CIV USA MEDCOM HQ Peterson   Also see:  http://www.newanthraxandalqaeda.com http://www.blurb.com/books/1443811 From: [redacted] To: [redacted] Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2007 12:30 PM To: Subject: Question about MRIID (UNCLASSIFIED) Classification: UNCLASSIFIED Caveats:…

People in Australia are waking up to the evidence that in some cases, vaccines cause more harm than good.  Furthermore, the longterm sequellae from a seizure are likely to be more serious than from flu.  From the Sydney Morning Herald Sept 18: PUBLIC health experts have called for an independent body to monitor drug safety…

From Charlie Savage at the NY Times: WASHINGTON – Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone. Essentially, officials want Congress to require all…