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While I feel there is potential for a compound like this to provide symptomatic relief in MS and other disabilities/conditions, any chance there may have been for me to invest in this 'technology,' were quickly dashed by this comical PR (and by the results of some brief financial DD). Hear Ye! Hear Ye! Read all about it!:
Medical Marijuana Inc. Marijuana Extract Cannabidiol (CBD) Shows Therapeutic Benefit For Multiple Sclerosis (MS)
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Medical-Marijuana-Inc-bw-2122259253.html?x=0&.v=1
Press Release Source: Medical Marijuana Inc On Tuesday September 13, 2011, 8:30 am EDT
SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Medical Marijuana Inc (OTC:MJNA.ob - News) is pleased to announce that studies from foundations and universities around the world have proven Cannabidiol (CBD) as a therapeutic treatment for Multiple Sclerosis spasticity symptoms. Medical Marijuana Inc. through CannaBANK (www.mycannabank.com) has a patent pending on an extraction method in which they are able to extract Cannabidiol from Marijuana and Hemp. Cannabidiol extract is an easy way to improve currently accepted medical treatments efficacy. Cannabidiol (CBD) offers a feeling of clarity and greatly reduces anxiety without any of the psychoactive effects found from other properties within the Marijuana plant. It is imperative that this newly accepted legal substance be isolated from all other properties within the Marijuana plant to insure that all Multiple Sclerosis patients have access to its benefits.
“That’s what’s so amazing about our extract. It does not come with any of the psychoactive properties found within Marijuana. There is no ‘High’ feeling from Cannabidiol and it doesn’t even look like Marijuana! Drive with it in your car…. take it on the plane and feel comfortable knowing ITS LEGAL and it’s a nutritional necessity! For those of you in one of the 30 + States that don’t have access to Marijuana’s phenomenal medical attributes, YOU DO NOW! For those of you, who would not use Marijuana because of its stigma, be prepared to have a change of heart. This is something we should all be very excited about,” said Jared Berry, a CannaBANK Executive.
According to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society (www.nationalmssociety.org) MS affects 2.5 million people around the world. Many qualified companies are lining up in the hopes of a licensing agreement allowing them to use MJNA’s extraction process for a powerful solution to Multiple Sclerosis spasticity symptoms and, of course, a spike in profits. It won’t be long before a manufacturer and healthcare product distributor is chosen to help bring Cannabidiol to every Multiple Sclerosis patient.
“There is really no need for us to recreate the wheel. There are many dedicated, qualified companies that have developed great products. We are bringing this amazing compound to MS patients as soon as possible through established companies with distribution channels already in place,” Charlie Larsen, President of Medical Marijuana Inc., stated.
Resources and Abstracts:
United States National Library of Medicine (PubMed)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2793241/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18035205
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21449980
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16317825
haysaw: When a Democrat doesn't have an argument they resort to the race card
Why the hell are we at 10 cents????
I'm sure many if not most Democrats now wish they had voted Hillary in the primaries. I dislike her but she would have been a better President than Obama. He's been a disaster. And it will cost the Democrats big in 2012.
I think he's 'burned out.'
If only the dimwitted mgmt stooges at Corx could have put their candles out years ago, we may have had significantly better results.
Roche Signs First Alzheimer's Deal Of 2011 As Crucial Progress Awaited
September 7, 2011
http://seekingalpha.com/article/292047-roche-signs-first-alzheimer-s-deal-of-2011-as-crucial-progress-awaited?source=yahoo
The licensing deal announced Tuesday between Roche (RHHBY.PK) and Evotec (EVTCY.PK) is the first such transaction struck in Alzheimer’s disease so far this year – a flicker of partnering activity for a field of drug development that has famously struggled to make much headway in the last couple of years.
Like most of the products that have been partnered in this space recently, Evotec’s compound is very early stage, having only completed phase I studies (see table below). Next year is going to be hugely important for Alzheimer’s research with pivotal data due from two of the most advanced projects in the field; clinical progress will be required before bigger and later stage deals become more common.
Free radicals
Roche has paid $10m upfront for worldwide rights to EVT 302, a MAO-B inhibitor that the Swiss pharma giant will take into phase II next year. Double digit royalties on sales and further payments of up to $820m are pending on success.
The drug inhibits monoamine oxidase type B, an enzyme that breaks down dopamine in the brain and contributes to the production of free radicals. Free radicals are known to cause oxidative stress which are thought to contribute to the development of Alzheimer’s disease, thus inhibiting MAO-B may treat the symptoms of the disease.
On a conference call Tuesday, Werner Lanthaler, Evotec chief executive, said they do not believe the drug will be disease-modifying. “What we will be going for is slowing down the progression of Alzheimer’s symptoms,” he said.
Safety has derailed a number of MAO products in the past, but EVT 302 has so far managed to avoid one of the biggest drawbacks in using this approach, that of tyramine sensitivity, Evotec says.
Foods such as aged cheeses, cured meats, tofu and draught beer all contain high levels of tyramine, which is usually broken down by MAO; inhibiting this process causes blood pressure to rise and has in the past led to fatal hypertension. Mr Lanthaler said that the toxicity profile for the drug had been "as clean as it gets" and added there had been no evidence of drug-food interactions in the years that the drug had been in the clinic.
Worth pursuing
Still, the development of MAO-B inhibitors for Alzheimer’s has been somewhat chequered, although the agents are a proven approach to treat Parkinson’s disease, with Azilect and Zelapar on the market – Azilect sales reached $318m in 2010.
Indeed Roche had developed the most advanced MAO-B inhibitor so far, lazabemide, which generated decent efficacy data in a phase III trial but was ditched by the Swiss group back in 1999 due to concerns over renal safety. Teva (TEVA) had some success with another MAO-B candidate, ladostigil (TV-3326), but scrapped a phase IIa trial in 2007. Private Israeli company Avraham Pharmaceuticals now holds rights to the drug and is currently conducting a phase II trial.
Roche clearly considers it a mechanism worth pursuing, although the company is certainly hedging its bets with a broad Alzheimer’s research pipeline. With the licensing of EVT 302, it has seven active pipeline projects in the disease, most advanced of which are two beta amyloid antibodies, similar to Elan’s (ELN) bapineuzumab.
Crenezumab was licensed by Genentech from AC Immune in 2006, while gantenerumab is an in-house product. Trials of both candidates were initiated recently, with results not expected until 2014 or 2015.
Roche’s decision to exercise its option on Evotec’s compound could offer encouragement to BioTie Therapies, currently developing a couple of 5-HT6 antagonist candidates in phase I over which Roche still retains opt-in rights, rights that could be triggered after completion of these trials.
Roche's Alzheimer's Disease Pipeline Candidates
Status Product Pharmacological Class Originator
Phase II Crenezumab (RG7412) Anti-beta amyloid MAb AC Immune
Gantenerumab (RG1450) Anti-beta amyloid MAb Roche
Phase I SYN-114 (Roche holds option rights from BioTie Therapies) 5-HT6 (serotonin) antagonist Roche
SYN-120 (Roche holds option rights from BioTie Therapies) 5-HT6 (serotonin) antagonist Roche
RG1662 GABA A agonist Roche
EVT 302 MAOB inhibitor Roche
Pre-clinical Anti-BACE-1 Antibody Anti-beta-secretase-1 Antibody Roche
Research project Neurodegenerative Disease Project Alzheimer's disease agent Roche/Siena Biotech
ReS19-T Tau aggregation inhibitor reMYND
The table below shows that deal activity has ground to a halt this year, and it is certainly true that most Alzheimer’s research remains very early stage. Exactly what happens to trigger the disease and what causes the fatal degeneration is still unknown and multiple mechanisms of action are being tested.
Most are testing the amyloid-beta hypothesis – that the accumulation of A-beta plaques causes the degeneration - although tau tangles, RAGE modulators and gamma and beta secretase inhibitors are also being trialled, as well as several agents targeting neurotransmitters, like EVT 302, in an attempt to improve the cognition of patients (Therapeutic focus - What are plan B options if A-beta Alzheimer's hypothesis is void?, August 19, 2010).
Progress in any area will certainly trigger a scramble for assets given the huge commercial opportunity Alzheimer’s represents. However, few are hopeful of real breakthroughs anytime soon – only this week Moncef Slaoui, GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK) head of R&D, called for greater cooperation between companies and scientists to get a better grasp on this poorly understood disease, the Financial Times reported.
Arguably the biggest events on the horizon for the field are the release of phase III data from bapineuzumab, in which Elan, Pfizer (PFE) and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) all have a vested interest, and Eli Lilly’s (LLY) solanezumab - both anti-beta amyloid antibodies designed to block the build-up of what are assumed to be damaging plaques in the brain. Results should emerge towards the back end of next year and unfortunately few are anticipating success from what are considered the first test of this approach – many believe more effective antibodies are following behind.
However, the studies will provide important insight into whether Alzheimer’s research has been going in the right direction, and whether sorely needed disease modifying agents might be any closer to the market.
Alzheimer's Product Deal Count
Status on Deal 2011 (YTD) 2010 2009 2008 2007
Marketed - - 1 - 1
Filed - 3 3 - -
Phase III - - 3 3 -
Phase II - 1 3 1 -
Phase I 1 1 2 4 2
Pre-clinical - 5 4 6 3
Research project - 15 5 2 9
Total Product Deals 1 25 21 16 15
Disclosed Upfront Fees ($m) 10 289 542 455 -
Disclosed Total Deal Values ($m) 830 612 1,627 2,340 671
Ombow-Romney has some really excellent traits, ie. work ethic, principles, frugality, I just don't think his experience is diverse enough to lead this country. He'd be a great Treasury Secretary, though.
Your points are littered with such hyperbole that you should be indefinitely referred to as bigmouth. Marco Rubio for Pres.? You need to come home from blah blah land...
You seem to have a good handle on where things are now (sans the hyperbole), but how we got here, and how bad things are going to get, you have no clue.
Perhaps a Second American Revolution is our only salvation. The rest of the country vs. Washington DC.
Realist points of view make far more sense to me than left wing give me more drivel
These types of stories don't make the news unless someone has an agenda.
There are plenty of penny-stock traders also. Maybe it's a front-running 'penny-piker,' or a small group of them. The question is: Is it time to load-up, or unload?
Gold Coins: The Mystery of the Double Eagle
by Susan Berfield
Friday, August 26, 2011
http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/113398/double-eagle-gold-coins-mystery-businessweek
How did a Philadelphia family get hold of $40 million in gold coins, and why has the Secret Service been chasing them for 70 years?
The most valuable coin in the world sits in the lobby of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in lower Manhattan. It's Exhibit 18E, secured in a bulletproof glass case with an alarm system and an armed guard nearby. The 1933 Double Eagle, considered one of the rarest and most beautiful coins in America, has a face value of $20—and a market value of $7.6 million. It was among the last batch of gold coins ever minted by the U.S. government. The coins were never issued; most of the nearly 500,000 cast were melted down to bullion in 1937.
Most, but not all. Some of the coins slipped out of the Philadelphia Mint before then. No one knows for sure exactly how they got out or even how many got out. The U.S. Secret Service, responsible for protecting the nation's currency, has been pursuing them for nearly 70 years, through 13 Administrations and 12 different directors. The investigation has spanned three continents and involved some of the most famous coin collectors in the world, a confidential informant, a playboy king, and a sting operation at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan. It has inspired two novels, two nonfiction books, and a television documentary. And much of it has centered around a coin dealer, dead since 1990, whose shop is still open in South Philadelphia, run by his 82-year-old daughter.
"The 1933 Double Eagle is one of the most intriguing coins of all time," says Jay Brahin, an investment adviser who has been collecting coins since he was a kid in Philadelphia. "It's a freak. The coins shouldn't have been minted, but they were. They weren't meant to circulate, but some did. And why has the government pursued them so arduously? That's one of the mysteries."
The story begins just after the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt on Mar. 4, 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression. Thousands of banks had already gone under as people panicked and withdrew their gold and other deposits. As the gold supply—much of it kept at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York—dwindled, the country faced possible insolvency. On Apr. 5, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6102, which prohibited the hoarding of gold and required citizens to exchange their gold coins for paper currency.
It was Roosevelt's distant cousin, Theodore, who had commissioned the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to design a high-relief $20 gold coin in the early 1900s. Teddy Roosevelt wanted an American coin that matched the beauty of the ancient Greek ones, and Saint-Gaudens completed the work just before his death from cancer in 1907. On one side is an image of Liberty, a figure reminiscent of a Greek goddess, hair flowing, olive branch in her left hand, torch in her right. On the other is an eagle in midflight, the sun rising behind it.
The Mint had produced the Saint-Gaudens Double Eagles almost every year since 1907, and 1933 was no different. By May, as the gold recall was under way, the Mint finished pressing 445,500 of the coins. None were issued. Instead the coins, weighing nearly 15 tons, were put into 1,780 canvas bags and sealed behind three steel doors in Philadelphia Mint Vault F-Cage 1. Only two were thought to have been saved, and they were sent to the Smithsonian.
In January 1934, Congress passed the Gold Reserve Act, which allowed the President to nationalize, in effect, the gold held by the Federal Reserve and increase the price of an ounce. This in turn devalued the dollar, which was supposed to stimulate the troubled economy. The director of the Mint then ordered all the nation's gold coins to be melted into bars. The bars would be kept in the newly constructed Fort Knox. The task was enormous: It wasn't until early 1937 that the Philadelphia Mint sent its $50 million worth of coins, including the 1933 Double Eagles, to the furnace.
Around this time, a 41-year-old Philadelphia jeweler named Israel Switt offered several 1933 Double Eagles to some of the most prominent coin dealers and collectors of the day, according to Secret Service documents since made public. Switt sold one, now Exhibit 18E, to a Texas dealer who then sold it to King Farouk of Egypt for $1,575. A royal representative in the U.S. requested an export license for the coin and, unbeknownst to the Secret Service, the Secretary of the Treasury issued one on Feb. 29, 1944.
That same month, Stack's, the rare coin dealer in New York, announced an auction for another Double Eagle. It wasn't until early March, though, that the Secret Service heard about the sale and realized that some of the coins had been taken out of the Mint. King Farouk's Double Eagle had already been delivered to him in Cairo by diplomatic pouch. Agents confiscated the second coin before Stack's could sell it and launched the investigation that continues today. "The government has been fanatical about seizing and destroying these coins," says Robert W. Hoge, curator of North American coins and currency at the American Numismatic Society. "They're famous because the government has been seizing them since the 1940s."
The first phase of the Secret Service investigation would trace 10 1933 Double Eagles to Switt, a reclusive jeweler and coin dealer who, like so many in this story, believed the coins possessed talismanic powers. His only child, Joan Langbord, who worked with him until his death in 1990 at age 95, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that her father "could be obnoxious or irascible. If he didn't like you, he'd throw you out." His business philosophy, she said, was that "the customer was never right; he was always right."
"You must understand the Philadelphia thing," says Brahin. "I'm from there, so I can say this: The dealers were crafty, they would do anything to get an edge. If you don't know that, you don't have the right amount of cynicism to analyze the story."
In Switt's statement to the agents, his only official pronouncement about the coins, he said that he didn't have any records of where, when, or how he had obtained the Double Eagles. But he claimed that he did not buy them from any employees of the Mint.
Nonetheless, after a 10-month investigation, the Secret Service concluded that it was more likely than not that Switt was the fence for a corrupt Mint cashier. In 1945, the Justice Dept. wanted to press charges, but by then the statute of limitations had run out.
Seven years later, in 1952, King Farouk was deposed and sent into exile in Monaco. The generals leading the new Republic of Egypt decided to auction off his belongings, including his renowned gold coin collection. It contained 8,500 pieces; one was the 1933 Double Eagle. Sotheby's won the right to hold the auction in Cairo in February 1954. As soon as U.S. Treasury officials saw the catalog for the Palace Collection of Egypt, as it was called, they asked the Egyptians to pull the coin from the auction and return it to Washington. At the last minute, the Double Eagle in Lot 185 was withdrawn. Then it disappeared.
Four decades later, Stephen Fenton, the chairman of the British Numismatic Trade Assn. and a coin dealer himself, says he got hold of the 1933 Double Eagle by way of an Egyptian jeweler whose client had ties to the military. "I was buying quite a few coins out of the Farouk collection," Fenton says by phone from his London auction house, St. James. "This came along, and it was quite nice. It did have an aura."
Fenton bought the Double Eagle for $210,000 and arranged to sell it to an American dealer named Jasper Parrino for $850,000. On Feb. 7, 1996, Fenton flew from London to New York on the Concorde and checked into the Hilton. The next morning, he recalls, he tucked the coin into a plastic envelope, put it in his shirt pocket, pulled on a new black cashmere sweater, and hopped into a taxi to the Waldorf Astoria. "It was a routine deal," he says.
He went up to a corner suite on the 22nd floor and presented the coin to Parrino, who had already arranged to sell it to Jack Moore, a dealer from Texas, for $1.65 million. Moore had brought along a coin expert of his own. As this expert examined the coin, Fenton began to suspect trouble. "His hands were shaking quite a lot," says Fenton. "I thought he might try to steal it. I was afraid someone was going to come bursting into the room with guns. Well, they did."
Moore had contacted the Secret Service and helped them set up an undercover operation. Fenton and Parrino were thrown to the floor by gun-wielding agents who had been waiting in the room next door. "I had an out-of-body experience," says Fenton. "I felt like I was on top of the wardrobe watching. It was like a movie. Then the coin just vanished."
Fenton faced criminal charges of "conspiring to convert to his own use and attempt to sell property of the United States." He hired a trial lawyer, Barry H. Berke of Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel, who was able to get those charges dropped fairly quickly. "Then it was a straight fight for the coin," says Fenton. "I thought: The government has two of them [in the Smithsonian]. Why do they want mine? The only people who think the pursuit of these coins is worthwhile is the government. Everyone else thinks the government should have better things to do with its time and money."
After five years of legal wrangling and just four days before the case was scheduled to go to trial in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Fenton and the Justice Dept. came to an unusual agreement: The coin would be auctioned off and the proceeds split between them. That was in late January 2001. The coin was taken from the Treasury vault at 7 World Trade Center and put in Fort Knox. Then came the terrorist attacks on September 11. "If the coin had been left where it was, it would have been destroyed," says Fenton.
In February 2002, the Mint announced the auction of the "fabled and elusive 1933 Double Eagle twenty dollar coin" at Sotheby's on July 30. "The storied coin has been the center of international numismatic intrigue for more than 70 years," said Mint Director Henrietta Holsman Fore in the press release. Afterward the coin would become the only 1933 Double Eagle "now or ever authorized for private ownership."
Then the publicity campaign began. Matt Lauer wore white cotton gloves to hold the coin on the Today show. The New York Times ran a large photo of it. Sotheby's, working with Stack's, produced a 56-page catalog titled The Golden Disk of 1933: Only One.
The Only One was displayed at the Long Beach Coin, Stamp & Collectibles Expo, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Sotheby's. "The Mint police and New York City police escorted it back and forth every day to a depository at West Point in an armored car," says David N. Redden, the auctioneer for Sotheby's. "It was fantastic. That made it look wildly important. The government treated it as a national treasure, which it is, in a way. It wasn't going to disappear on their watch. It had already disappeared once."
The auction took place at 6 p.m. in front of a standing-room-only crowd. The coin was in a bulletproof glass case to the right of the auctioneer. The Mint director was there. So were Fenton, Berke, and the assistant U.S. attorney. Redden opened the bidding at $2.5 million. Six minutes later his hammer went down: An anonymous buyer had purchased the 1933 Double Eagle for $6.6 million (a 15 percent buyer's premium brought the price to $7.59 million). It was nearly twice as much as anyone had ever paid for a coin.
Immediately afterward, Mint Director Fore held a ceremony on the auction floor to make the Double Eagle legal tender. "In order to monetize it, somebody had to pay $20," says Redden. "So I stepped down from the podium and gave her $20. The Mint makes a big distinction between coins that are monetized and those that are not. Two Double Eagles are in the Smithsonian, but they're not monetized. To the government, they're curiosities, not currency."
The buyer, who according to Redden is an American interested in no other coins but this one, never brought the Double Eagle home. He lent it to the American Numismatic Society, which has displayed the coin at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York ever since.
"I wanted to end with everybody happy, and everybody was. One of these coins is in the marketplace, and that's very important," says Fenton. "I was absolutely thrilled—and exhausted. It felt strange that it was all over."
Except it wasn't.
Two years after the auction, Joan Langbord and her son, Roy, an entertainment executive in Manhattan, called Berke, who had represented Fenton and the Farouk coin, with startling news: They said they had found 10 1933 Double Eagles. The coins had been wrapped in tissue and plastic, put in a gray paper bag from the department store John Wanamaker—which closed in 1995—and placed at the bottom of safe deposit box No. 442 at a Wachovia Bank in Philadelphia. Langbord had inherited the safe deposit box from her mother and said she had thought it contained only jewelry. No one in the family, she later testified, knew how the coins had gotten there. The Langbords, through Berke, declined to comment for this story, citing ongoing litigation.
According to legal documents, the Langbords, hoping they could make a deal similar to Fenton's, asked Berke to contact the Mint. On Sept. 15, 2004, Berke met with Mint attorneys at the Secret Service offices in Brooklyn to discuss the situation. A week later, Roy Langbord, accompanied by Berke, opened the safe deposit box and handed over the Double Eagles to the government for authentication. The coins did not come back.
In June 2005, Berke was summoned to meet the Mint's attorneys in Washington. There they informed him that the 1933 Double Eagles were indeed authentic. But this time the Mint refused to offer any monetary settlement. Instead, the lawyers said the government was keeping the coins, and that they were already in Fort Knox. Berke protested, unsuccessfully. In August 2005 the Mint issued a press release announcing it had "recovered" 10 more 1933 Double Eagles.
"I was surprised," says Sotheby's Redden. "It was a little awkward. The Double Eagle had been billed by the Mint as unique." And not just by the Mint but by Sotheby's, too. "I called the buyer, who said: 'Do I have to buy those, too?'"
He hasn't had the chance. For months the Langbords sought the return of the coins, compensation from the government of $40 million, or the initiation of forfeiture proceedings. The government insisted it was not required to do anything. In December 2006 the Langbords took the matter to the courts. Three years later, Judge Legrome Davis of the Federal District Court of Philadelphia ruled that the government had to show it had a right to keep the coins.
This July, eight years after the Langbords say they found the coins, the trial to get them back began at a Philadelphia courthouse, just blocks from the family store on Jewelers Row.
Joan Langbord, dressed simply in a tan pantsuit and costume jewelry, took the stand the morning of July 19. She was occasionally teary. She was also sharp-minded, plain-spoken, and slightly irritated. Describing the store, she said: "It looks like a junk shop. But expensive junk. It looks the way it did when my father ran it. His chair is still in the store." Only the first floor of the four-story building is open to those who walk in off the street.
Records introduced at the trial show she had visited the safe deposit box many times between 1996 and her discovery of the coins in 2003—including the day before the Sotheby's auction. She said she made the visits to select pieces of her mother's jewelry to sell to a longtime customer and that she never noticed the Wanamaker bag at the bottom. It was only when the box warped and had to be drilled open, she said, that she realized the coins were there. The safe deposit box was shown at the trial: It was about the size of a violin case.
After Langbord testified, the judge called for a lunch break, and she and her other son, David, went to the store. It's still called I. Switt & Ed Silver, though her name and that of her business partner are also in gold letters on the front door. She walked in briskly and got right on the phone about a business matter, pointedly ignoring visitors. The old wood and glass counters were filled with jewelry, silver candlesticks, watches, figurines. A cash register from the 1930s sat on another counter. Yellowing family photos hung askew on the wall next to a 2009 Philadelphia Inquirer article about the gold coins.
On day five of the trial, U.S. Mint officers brought the 10 Double Eagles into the courtroom. They had been hand carried by Mint police on a flight from Kentucky to Philadelphia and stored in a vault at the Philadelphia Mint overnight. The coins, spread out against a blue velvet background in a secured glass case, were placed in front of the jury. They walked slowly past the coins. Fifteen minutes later the Double Eagles were on their way back to Fort Knox.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jacqueline Romero argued that documents from the Philadelphia Mint and the Secret Service investigation of the 1940s showed that no 1933 Double Eagles legally left the Mint. And, she said, every single coin that had been found could be traced to Israel Switt. She also discussed the government's long pursuit of the coins: "Why do we care? We auctioned one off. You saw the certificate of monetization. We know how Fenton got his coin. He's not Israel Switt. The coins and bills you have in your wallets carry the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. It means something. The government protects its money from thieves and swindlers. We have to care on principle. If we don't, we are done. We are absolutely done."
Berke countered that the Mint records are nearly 80 years old and ill-kept, and all the witnesses interviewed by the Secret Service are dead. He also said that in the confused first weeks after Roosevelt asked people to return their gold, it was still possible to exchange bullion for coin at the Philadelphia Mint. This "window of opportunity" in the spring of 1933, he argued, could well have been how Switt obtained the Double Eagles. "The government desperately wants these coins," he said. "But the government can't always get what it wants."
After eight days of testimony, the jury found otherwise. The Langbords are expected to appeal the verdict. Meanwhile, more 1933 Double Eagle gold coins may still be hidden away. "There has always been talk of others," says Armen Vartian, the lawyer for the Professional Numismatists Guild. Hoge, the U.S. coin expert, says: "It's not impossible that more are out there. I haven't seen them. But it wouldn't surprise me."
Surprise! Surprise!
Pentagon under fire over war contracts
By Dan De Luce | AFP – 11 hrs ago
The Pentagon has wasted more than $30 billion on contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan due to shoddy management and a lack of competition, an independent inquiry said.
In its final report to Congress due to be released Wednesday, the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting warns that waste and fraud have undermined American diplomacy, fomented corruption in host countries and tarnished the US image abroad.
"Tens of billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted through poor planning, vague and shifting requirements, inadequate competition, substandard contract management and oversight, lax accountability, weak inter-agency coordination, and subpar performance or outright misconduct by some contractors and federal employees," the co-chairs of the panel, Christopher Shays and Michael Thibault, wrote in the Washington Post.
"Both government and contractors need to do better," said the commentary published Monday.
The report comes amid mounting pressure in Washington to scale back defense spending and waning public support for the Afghan mission after nearly a decade of war.
The US military increasingly has turned to private companies since the September 11, 2001 attacks, with the contractor workforce at times surpassing 260,000 people -- a roughly one-to-one ratio with troops deployed.
But the commission found that the United States went to war in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in 2003 without sufficiently preparing to handle the "enormous scale and numbers of contracts."
As a result, "America is over-relying on contractors," they said.
The commission chiefs also warned that another $30 billion or more could be wasted if the Iraqi or Afghan "governments are unable or unwilling to sustain US-funded projects after our involvement ends."
The Pentagon said previous inquiries had pointed out problems with contracting and the department had enacted a number of reforms as a result.
"We are well aware of some of the deficiencies over the years in how we've worked contracts," spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan told reporters.
"We have worked hard over those years to try to correct those deficiencies when we've come across them," said Lapan.
The department will review the report to look for any additional measures to prevent waste, he added.
Among the examples cited by the commission was a $40 million prison built in Iraq that the Baghdad government "did not want and that was never finished," Shays and Thibault wrote.
In Afghanistan, the United States spent $300 million on a power plant in Kabul that the Afghan government cannot afford to sustain and lacks the technical experts to run, the panel found.
Another report out Monday found the Pentagon has almost tripled funding for no-bid contracts since the attacks of September 11, 2001, from $50 billion in 2001 to $140 billion in 2010.
The lack of competition in contracting has resulted in waste, lower quality services and fraud, according to the investigative report by the non-profit Center for Public Integrity.
In one case, a Tucson-based company, Applied Energetics, won over $50 million in funding for a futuristic "lightning weapon" that is supposed to detonate roadside bombs, even though it had failed some tests.
In August, the Marine Corps canceled the latest $3 million proposed contract after a commander in Afghanistan decided the weapon would not provide what his unit needed.
The Defense Department often justifies no-bid contracts by saying there is only one legitimate supplier of certain goods, that there is "an unusual and compelling urgency" or that holding a competition would undermine national security, the report said.
During his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama vowed to rein in contracting and after his election, he issued a memorandum calling for more competition. But the report found that Pentagon no-bid contracts have continued to increase.
The Pentagon said no-bid contracts were sometimes necessary to rush sophisticated equipment to troops in combat.
"There have been many instances because of wartime needs where a long, lengthy competitive bid contract process does not serve the needs of the warfighters," Lapan said.
Too bad we can't reinvigorate the practice and force it on Glenn Beck :)
All kidding aside, sometimes things are best left alone -- he's doing just fine 'outing' his own lunacy.
tobacco is a natural plant put on the planet by God
Panel reveals new details of 1940's experiment
By MIKE STOBBE - AP Medical Writer | AP – 10 hrs ago
ATLANTA (AP) — A presidential panel on Monday disclosed shocking new details of U.S. medical experiments done in Guatemala in the 1940s, including a decision to re-infect a dying woman in a syphilis study.
The Guatemala experiments are already considered one of the darker episodes of medical research in U.S. history, but panel members say the new information indicates that the researchers were unusually unethical, even when placed into the historical context of a different era.
"The researchers put their own medical advancement first and human decency a far second," said Anita Allen, a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.
From 1946-48, the U.S. Public Health Service and the Pan American Sanitary Bureau worked with several Guatemalan government agencies to do medical research — paid for by the U.S. government — that involved deliberately exposing people to sexually transmitted diseases.
The researchers apparently were trying to see if penicillin, then relatively new, could prevent infections in the 1,300 people exposed to syphilis, gonorrhea or chancroid. Those infected included soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners and mental patients with syphilis.
The commission revealed Monday that only about 700 of those infected received some sort of treatment. Also, 83 people died, although it's not clear if the deaths were directly due to the experiments.
The research came up with no useful medical information, according to some experts. It was hidden for decades but came to light last year, after a Wellesley College medical historian discovered records among the papers of Dr. John Cutler, who led the experiments.
President Barack Obama called Guatemala's president, Alvaro Colom, to apologize. He also ordered his bioethics commission to review the Guatemala experiments. That work is nearly done. Though the final report is not due until next month, commission members discussed some of the findings at a meeting Monday in Washington.
They revealed that some of the experiments were more shocking than was previously known.
For example, seven women with epilepsy, who were housed at Guatemala's Asilo de Alienados (Home for the Insane), were injected with syphilis below the back of the skull, a risky procedure. The researchers thought the new infection might somehow help cure epilepsy. The women each got bacterial meningitis, probably as a result of the unsterile injections, but were treated.
Perhaps the most disturbing details involved a female syphilis patient with an undisclosed terminal illness. The researchers, curious to see the impact of an additional infection, infected her with gonorrhea in her eyes and elsewhere. Six months later she died.
Dr. Amy Gutmann, head of the commission, described the case as "chillingly egregious."
During that time, other researchers were also using people as human guinea pigs, in some cases infecting them with illnesses. Studies weren't as regulated then, and the planning-on-the-fly feel of Cutler's work was not unique, some experts have noted.
But panel members concluded that the Guatemala research was bad even by the standards of the time. They compared the work to a 1943 experiment by Cutler and others in which prison inmates were infected with gonorrhea in Terre Haute, Ind. The inmates were volunteers who were told what was involved in the study and gave their consent. The Guatemalan participants — or many of them — received no such explanations and did not give informed consent, the commission said.
The commission is working on a second report examining federally funded international studies to make sure current research is being done ethically. That report is expected at the end of the year.
Meanwhile, the Guatemalan government has vowed to do its own investigation into the Cutler study. A spokesman for Vice President Rafael Espada said the report should be done by November.
___
Associated Press writer Sonia Perez in Guatemala City contributed to this report.
___
Commission Website: http://www.bioethics.gov/
Nicotine is a mood stabilizer, so the affects of it calming you would be normal. The dangers with tobacco, I believe, come from chronic and heavy use. That leads to hypertension, COPD, and/or a plethora of other lung and sympathetic ailments. Don't underestimate the effect on your willpower either, which could be equally destructive. If you can moderate it, go for it.
My one true regret in life is smoking cigarettes -- with one annotation: If it meant I wouldn't have my wife and kids, then I take it back.
Not as odd as doing a play-by-play on stock trading :)
Nice article partially related to the necessity of proper sleep:
A New Suspect in the Obesity Epidemic: Our Brains
The urge to eat too much is wired into our heads, in several complicated and overlapping ways. Tackling obesity may require bypassing the stomach and short-circuiting our brains.
http://discovermagazine.com/2011/jun/06-new-suspect-in-obesity-epidemic-our-brains
by Dan Hurley
From the June 2011 issue; published online August 23, 2011
10:19 p.m. on a Monday evening in October, I sat in a booth at Chevys Fresh Mex in Clifton, New Jersey, reviewing the latest research into the neurobiology of hunger and obesity. While I read I ate a shrimp and crab enchilada, consuming two-thirds of it, maybe less. With all this information in front of me, I thought, I had an edge over my brain’s wily efforts to thwart my months-long campaign to get under 190 pounds. But even as I was taking in a study about the powerful lure of guacamole and other salty, fatty foods, I experienced something extraordinary. That bowl of chips and salsa at the edge of the table? It was whispering to me: Just one more. You know you want us. Aren’t we delicious? In 10 minutes, all that was left of the chips, and my willpower, were crumbs.
I am not alone. An overabundance of chips, Baconator Double burgers, and Venti White Chocolate Mochas have aided a widespread epidemic of obesity in this country. Our waists are laying waste to our health and to our health-care economy: According to a study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2010, nine states had an obesity rate of at least 30 percent—compared with zero states some 10 years earlier—and the cost of treatment for obesity-related conditions had reached nearly 10 percent of total U.S. medical expenditure. So-called normal weight is no longer normal, with two-thirds of adults and one third of children and adolescents now classified as overweight or obese. Dubbed the “Age of Obesity and Inactivity” by the Journal of the American Medical Association, this runaway weight gain threatens to decrease average U.S. life span, reversing gains made over the past century by lowering risk factors from smoking, hypertension, and cholesterol. We all know what we should do—eat less, exercise more—but to no avail. An estimated 25 percent of American men and 43 percent of women attempt to lose weight each year; of those who succeed in their diets, between 5 and 20 percent (and it is closer to 5 percent) manage to keep it off for the long haul.
The urgent question is, why do our bodies seem to be fighting against our own good health? According to a growing number of neurobiologists, the fault lies not in our stomachs but in our heads. No matter how convincing our conscious plans and resolutions, they pale beside the brain’s power to goad us into noshing and hanging on to as much fat as we can. With that in mind, some scientists were hopeful that careful studies of the brain might uncover an all-powerful hormone that regulates food consumption or a single spot where the cortical equivalent of a neon sign blinks “Eat Heavy,” all the better to shut it off.
After extensive research, the idea of a single, simple cure has been replaced by a much more nuanced view. The latest studies show that a multitude of systems in the brain act in concert to encourage eating. Targeting a single neuronal system is probably doomed to the same ill fate as the failed diets themselves. Because the brain has so many backup systems all geared toward the same thing—maximizing the body’s intake of calories—no single silver bullet will ever work.
“I call it the ‘hungry brain syndrome,’?” says Hans-Rudolf Berthoud, an expert in the neurobiology of nutrition at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The brain’s prime directive to eat and defend against the loss of fat emerged early in evolution, because just about every creature that ever trotted, crawled, swam, or floated was beset by the uncertainty of that next meal. “The system has evolved to defend against the slightest threat of weight loss, so you have to attack it from different directions at once.”
With the obesity epidemic raging, the race for countermeasures has kicked into high gear. Neuroscientists are still seeking hormones that inhibit hunger, but they have other tactics as well. One fruitful new avenue comes from the revelation that hunger, blood sugar, and weight gained per calorie consumed all ratchet up when our sleep is disrupted and our circadian rhythms—the 24-hour cycle responding to light and dark—thrown into disarray. All this is compounded by stress, which decreases metabolism while increasing the yen for high-calorie food. We might feel in sync with our high-tech world, but the obesity epidemic is a somber sign that our biology and lifestyles have diverged.
Seeking Silver Bullets, Shooting Blanks
The path forward seemed so simple back in 1995, when three papers in Science suggested a panacea for the overweight: A hormone that made animals shed pounds, rapidly losing body fat until they were slim. Based on the research, it seemed that doctors might soon be able to treat obesity the way they treat diabetes, with a simple metabolic drug.
Fat cells release that “diet” hormone—today named leptin, from the Greek leptos, meaning thin—to begin a journey across the blood-brain barrier to the hypothalamus, the pea-size structure above the pituitary gland. The hypothalamus serves as a kind of thermostat, setting not only body temperature but playing a key role in hunger, thirst, fatigue, and sleep cycles. Leptin signals the hypothalamus to reduce the sense of hunger so that we stop eating.
In early lab experiments, obese mice given extra leptin by injection seemed sated. They ate less, their body temperature increased, and their weight plummeted. Even normal-weight mice became skinnier when given injections of the hormone.
Once the pharmaceutical industry created a synthetic version of human leptin, clinical trials were begun. But when injected into hundreds of obese human volunteers, leptin’s effect was clinically insignificant. It soon became clear why. In humans, as in mice, fat cells of the obese already produced plenty of leptin—more in fact than those of their thin counterparts, since the level of leptin was directly proportional to the amount of fat. The early studies had worked largely because the test mice were, by experimental design, leptin-deficient. Subsequent experiments showed that in normal mice—as in humans—increases in leptin made little difference to the brain, which looked to low leptin levels as a signal to eat more, essentially disregarding the kind of high levels that had caused deficient mice to eat less. This made leptin a good drug for maintaining weight loss but not a great candidate for getting the pounds off up front.
Despite that disappointment, the discovery of leptin unleashed a scientific gold rush to find other molecules that could talk the brain into turning hunger off. By 1999 researchers from Japan’s National Cardiovascular Center Research Institute in Osaka had announced the discovery of ghrelin, a kind of antileptin that is released primarily by the gut rather than by fat cells. Ghrelin signals hunger rather than satiety to the hypothalamus. Then, in 2002, a team from the University of Washington found that ghrelin levels rise before a meal and fall immediately after. Ghrelin (from the Indo-European root for the word “grow”) increased hunger while jamming on the metabolic brakes to promote the body’s storage of fat.
So began another line of attack on obesity. Rather than turning leptin on, researchers began exploring ways to turn ghrelin off. Some of them began looking at animal models, but progress has been slow; the concept of a ghrelin “vaccine” has been floated, but clinical trials are still years off.
Seeking a better understanding of the hormone, University of Washington endocrinologist David Cummings compared ghrelin levels in people who had lost considerable amounts of weight through diet with those who shed pounds by means of gastric bypass surgery—a technique that reduces the capacity of the stomach and seems to damage its ghrelin- producing capacity as well. The results were remarkable. For dieters, the more weight lost, the greater the rise in ghrelin, as if the body were telling the brain to get hungry and regain that weight. By contrast, the big losers in the surgical group saw ghrelin levels fall to the floor. Surgical patients never felt increases in appetite and had an easier time maintaining their weight loss as a result. (A newer weight-loss surgery removes most of the ghrelin-producing cells outright.)
Based on such findings, a ghrelin-blocking drug called rimonabant was approved and sold in 32 countries, though not in the United States. It remained available as recently as 2008, even though it also increased the risk of depression and suicidal thinking; it has since been withdrawn everywhere. The verdict is still out on a newer generation of combination pharmaceuticals, including one that contains synthetic versions of leptin and the neurohormone amylin, known to help regulate appetite. In a six-month clinical trial, the combination therapy resulted in an average weight loss of 25 pounds, or 12.7 percent of body weight, with greater weight loss when continued for a full 52 weeks; those who stopped taking the drug midway regained most of their weight.
The Circadian Connection
The limited results from tackling the hypothalamus sent many scientists looking at the other gyres and gears driving obesity in the brain, especially in regions associated with sleep. The first big breakthrough came in 2005, when Science published a landmark paper on mice with a mutated version of the Clock gene, which plays a key role in the regulation of the body’s circadian rhythms. The mutant mice not only failed to follow the strict eat-by-night, sleep-by-day schedule of normally nocturnal mice, they also became overweight and developed diabetes. “There was a difference in weight gain based on when the food was eaten, whether during day or night,” says the study’s senior author, endocrinologist Joe Bass of Northwestern University. “That means the metabolic rate must differ under those two conditions.”
Could my late-night hours be the undoing of my weight-loss plans? Four days after my humiliating defeat by a bowl of tortilla chips, I met with Alex Keene, a postdoctoral researcher at New York University with a Matisse nude tattooed on his right forearm and a penchant for studying flies. His latest study asked whether a starved fly would take normal naps or sacrifice sleep to keep searching for food. He found that like humans (and most other creatures), flies have a neurological toggle between two fundamental yet incompatible drives: to eat or to sleep. “Flies only live a day or two when they’re starved,” Keene told me as we walked past graduate students peering at flies under microscopes. “If they decide to sleep through the night when they’re starved, it’s a bad decision on their part. So their brains are finely tuned to suppress their sleep when they don’t have food and to sleep well after a meal.”
For a major study published last year, Keene bred flies with dysfunctional mutations of the Clock gene and also of Cycle, another gene involved in circadian rhythms. He found that the genes together regulate the interaction between the two mutually exclusive behaviors, sleep and feeding, kicking in to suppress sleep when a fly is hungry.
Even when fed, flies without working versions of the Clock and Cycle genes tended to sleep poorly—about 30 percent as much as normal flies. ”It was as if they were starving right away,” Keene explains. Keene went even further, pinpointing where, amid the 100,000 or so neurons in the fly brain, the Clock gene acts to regulate the sleeping-feeding interaction: a region of just four to eight cells at the top of the fly brain.
“My father is an anthropologist,” Keene told me as we stood in the fly room, its air pungent with the corn meal and molasses the flies feed on. “It’s ironic, right? He looks at how culture determines behavior, while I look at how genes determine behavior. I used to get him so mad he’d storm out of the house.”
Perhaps it takes an anthropologist’s son to see that the excess availability of cheap, high-calorie chow cannot fully explain the magnitude and persistence of the problem in our culture. The rebellion against our inborn circadian rhythms wrought by a 24-hour lifestyle, lit by neon and fueled by caffeine, also bears part of the blame. The powerful effect of disordered sleep on metabolism has been seen not just in flies but also in humans. A 2009 study by Harvard University researchers showed that in just 10 days, three of eight healthy volunteers developed prediabetic blood-sugar levels when their sleep-wake schedule was gradually shifted out of alignment.
“It’s clear from these types of studies that the way we’re keeping the lights on until late at night, the way in which society demands that we stay active for so much longer, could well be contributing to aspects of the metabolic disease we’re seeing now,” says Steve Kay, a molecular geneticist at the University of California, San Diego.
These insights have fostered collaboration between once-diverse groups. “Physicians who specialized in obesity and diabetes for years are now discovering the importance of circadian effects,” Kay says. At the same time, “basic research scientists like me, who have been studying the circadian system for so many years, are now looking at its metabolic effects. When so many people’s research from so many areas starts to converge, you know we’re in the midst of a paradigm shift. This is the slow rumbling before the volcano blows.”
This past April, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) of the National Institutes of Health organized a first-ever national conference focused solely on how circadian rhythms affect metabolism. “What has become obvious over the past few years is that metabolism, all those pathways regulating how fats and carbohydrates are used, is affected by the circadian clock,” says biochemist Corinne Silva?, a program director at the NIDDK. Her goal is to find drugs that treat diabetes and obesity by targeting circadian pathways. “The mechanisms by which circadian rhythms are maintained and the cross talk with metabolic signaling are just beginning to be elucidated,” she says, but they should lead to novel therapeutic approaches in the years ahead.
In Keene’s view, the newfound link between sleep and obesity could be put to use right now. “People who are susceptible to diabetes or have weight issues might just get more sleep. I get only about six hours of sleep myself. I usually run in the middle of the night. I’m not a morning person,” the enviably thin, 29-year-old Keene states.
My visit to his fly room convinced me to try a new angle in my quest to get under 190 pounds: Rather than focus on how much food I put in my mouth, I would focus on when I eat. I decided I would no longer eat after 10 p.m.
The Pleasure Factor
Timing may be everything for some folks, but it wasn’t for me. No wonder: The brain has no shortage of techniques to goad us into eating. Another line of evidence suggests that the brains of overweight people are wired to feel more pleasure in response to food. Sleep deprived or not, they just enjoy eating more. To study such differences, clinical psychologist Eric Stice of the Oregon Research Institute mastered the delicate task of conducting fFMRI brain scans while people were eating. The food he chose to give the volunteers inside the tunnel-like scanners was a milk shake. And let the record show, it was a chocolate milk shake.
Obese adolescent girls, Stice found, showed greater activation compared with their lean peers in regions of the brain that encode the sensory experience of eating food—the so-called gustatory cortex and the somatosensory regions, archipelagoes of neurons that reach across different structures in the brain. At the same time, the obese girls sipping milk shakes showed decreased activation in the striatum, a region near the center of the brain that is studded with dopamine receptors and known to respond to stimuli associated with rewards. Stice wondered whether, even among normal-weight girls, such a pattern might predict an increased risk of overeating and weight gain.
To test his hypothesis, he followed a group of subjects over time, finding that those with reduced activation in the dorsal (rear) region of the striatum while sipping a milk shake were ultimately more likely to gain weight than those with normal activation. The most vulnerable of these girls were also more likely to have a DNA polymorphism—not a mutation, per se, but a rather routine genetic variation—in a dopamine receptor gene, causing reduced dopamine signaling in the striatum and placing them at higher risk. “Individuals may overeat,” Stice and his colleagues concluded, “to compensate for a hypofunctioning dorsal striatum, particularly those with genetic polymorphisms thought to attenuate dopamine signaling in this region.”
Stice was initially surprised by the results. “It’s totally weird,” he admits. “Those who experienced less pleasure were at increased risk for weight gain.” But his more recent studies have convinced him that the reduced pleasure is a result of years of overeating among the obese girls—the same phenomenon seen in drug addicts who require ever-greater amounts of their drug to feel the same reward. “Imagine a classroom of third graders, and everyone is skinny,” he says. “The people who initially find that milk shake most orgasmic will want more of it, but in so doing they cause neuroplastic changes that downregulate the reward circuitry, driving them to eat more and more to regain that same feeling they crave.”
Even among people of normal weight, individual differences in brain functioning can directly affect eating behaviors, according to a 2009 study by Michael Lowe, a research psychologist at Drexel University. He took fMRI brain scans of 19 people, all of them of normal weight. Nine of the volunteers reported following strict diets; the other 10 typically ate whenever and whatever they wanted. Lowe had all of them sip a milk shake immediately before getting scanned. The brains of the nondieters, he found, lit up just as one would expect, showing activations in areas associated with satiation and memory, as if saying, “Mmmm, that was good.” The chronic dieters showed activations in areas of the brain associated with desire and expectation of reward, however. If anything, the milk shake had made them hungrier.
“What we have shown is that these chronic dieters may actually have a reason to restrain themselves, because they are more susceptible than average to overeating,” Lowe says.
Yet inborn differences in hunger and desire, too, turn out to be only part of the weighting game. Eating behaviors are also linked to areas of the brain associated with self-control (such as the left superior frontal region) and visual attention (such as the right middle temporal region). A recent fMRI study led by Jeanne McCaffery, a psychologist at Brown Medical School, showed that successful weight losers had greater activation in those regions, compared with normal-weight people and obese people, when viewing images of food.
The effects of stress on eating behaviors also has a neurobiological basis, according to University of Pennsylvania neurobiologist Tracy Bale. She showed that neural pathways associated with stress link directly to areas of the brain associated with seeking rewards. “Few things are more rewarding evolutionarily than calorie-dense food,” Bale told me a few days after presenting a seminar on the subject at last fall’s Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego. “Under stress people don’t crave a salad; they crave something high-calorie. It’s because those stress pathways in the limbic system feed into the reward centers, and they drive reward-seeking behaviors. What that tells us is that in addition to drug companies’ trying to target appetite, they need to look at the reward centers. We’re not necessarily fat because we’re hungry but because we’re looking for something to deal with stress.”
Follow-up to story:
Second victim of New York naked slasher dies
3:25 p.m. EDT, August 25, 2011
NEW YORK, Aug 25 (Reuters) - A second person has died from
injuries sustained when a naked man went on a stabbing spree in
his New York apartment building after the East Coast earthquake,
police said on Thursday.
The nude killer hacked four victims with a 10-inch kitchen
knife after shouting that the temblor marked the end of the
world, according to the family of one of his victims.
The second fatality was identified as Yigao Chen, 60, who
died on Wednesday after suffering stab wounds to her chest,
neck and face, police said. Also killed was Ignacio
Reyes-Collazo, 81, who was stabbed in the head and chest.
Injured were his wife Margarita Reyes-Collazo, 75, and
Isabel Rivera, 85, who were recovering at New York City
hospitals, police said.
The accused slasher, Christian Falero, 23, awaited
arraignment on Thursday in the attack that occurred hours after
the 5.8 magnitude earthquake struck on Tuesday, rattling the
U.S. East Coast and sending tremors as far as Canada.
(Reporting by Ray Sanchez; Editing by Barbara Goldberg and
Cynthia Johnston)
Ombow isn't the only one losing it:
NY slasher attacked after shouting earthquake is end of world
Ray Sanchez
Reuters
5:24 p.m. EDT, August 24, 2011
NEW YORK, Aug 24 (Reuters) - A naked slasher attacked his
neighbors in a New York apartment building, killing one and
wounding four others after shouting that the East Coast
earthquake marked the end of the world, a victim's family said
on Wednesday.
Hours after the temblor shook his building in Washington
Heights on Tuesday, Christian Falero, 23, stripped naked and
banged on neighboring apartment doors, stabbing anyone who
answered, police said.
"He was shouting, 'The world is going to end! I want to
die!'" said Edwin Rivera, 65, whose 85-year-old mother was
stabbed eight times by the suspect. "He was saying the world
was ending because of the quake. The guy was bugging out."
Falero injured four people and killed Ignacio
Reyes-Collazo, 81, before stabbing himself, police said. He was
charged with murder and robbery.
Rivera, who lives down the hall from his mother, said he
saw the naked, knife-wielding suspect through his apartment
door peephole. He tried calling his mother, Isabel, but did not
reach her in time.
Isabel Rivera, who was cut in her face, chest and leg, was
in stable condition at Harlem Hospital, relatives said. She was
scheduled for surgery on Thursday.
"My grandmother tells me that the man with the knife said
the world was going to end and that he (was) ready to die,"
said the elderly victim's granddaughter Giovanna Rivera, 32,
who was visiting her at the hospital.
The stabbing spree occurred more than two hours after the
5.8 magnitude earthquake hit at 1:51 p.m., rattling the U.S.
East Coast and sent tremors as far as Canada.
Police said Reyes-Collazo died from stab wounds to his head
and chest. His wife, Margarita Reyes-Collazo, 75, was
recovering from stab wounds at a New York hospital.
Another victim, who was not identified, was hospitalized in
critical condition with stab wounds to the chest and eye.
A fourth victim, a 22-year-old woman who was punched in the
face outside building, was taken to Harlem Hospital in stable
condition.
(Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Cynthia Johnston)
No. There is no investor confidence in this mgmt team to do something productive with whatever money they get. Maybe another scientific breakthrough will change that, but then again, that logic failed us once already.
Northeasterners-Good luck with Irene. Stay as safe as possible. It looks like it's going to be awesome, but it won't be pretty.
How the George brothers made millions with pill mills
$40 million in cash, 56 overdosed customers in two years
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/health/fl-hk-george-pill-mill-20110824,0,6996283.story?page=1
By Bob LaMendola, Sun Sentinel
4:05 p.m. EDT, August 25, 2011
It was "the Candy Man" who schooled two bad-boy rich kids in 2007 on how to make a fortune. His advice? Start a pain clinic.
The unnamed physician, nicknamed by cops for his large volume of pill prescriptions, launched Wellington twins Jeffrey and Christopher George, then 27, to start a pill mill empire that raked in $40 million in two years in Broward and Palm Beach counties, officials say. On Tuesday, the Georges and 31 co-conspirators were arrested on charges ranging from murder to racketeering to fraud.
The brothers had sold 20 million pain pills by the time police and federal agents shut down their four clinics in March 2010, prosecutors said in a 123-page indictment.
Each clinic made up to $50,000 a day. Employees carried the receipts to the bank in garbage bags. Their mother – who worked in a clinic and got arrested with her sons – kept about $4.5 million of their spare cash in two safes in the attic of her house on Primrose Lane in Wellington.
The George boys spent their riches on six-bedroom houses, a shopping plaza, four-figure Rolex and Patek Phillippe watches, boats and fast cars, such as Jeff George's yellow Lamborghini Murcielago.
Federal agents are moving to seize it all as well as $3.1 million left in their business accounts, but concede tens of millions are missing. Before their arrests, the twins had talked about stashing cash in Belize, the indictment says.
"They were swimming in money. Obscene," said one federal official who asked not to be named because he is involved in the case.
Money and death. Prosecutors said they traced 56 drug overdose deaths to George clinics.
Their chain of pain centers quickly became a blueprint that others copied to turn South Florida into a regional epicenter for the illicit trade in narcotic prescription drugs, prosecutors said.
The keys: Take only cash and credit cards to avoid state regulation of clinics that accept insurance. Cater to drug dealers from Kentucky and states with high rates of pain drug abuse. Sell each customer hundreds of pills a month. Pay doctors by the patient to encourage big volume.
Other clinics were following some of these tenets, but investigators say the Georges put them all together.
Before they met the Candy Man, the sons of prominent builder John Paul George had been in trouble. Jeff George was put on probation for dealing in stolen property, battery and resisting arrest with violence. Chris George was sentenced to eight months in jail in 2003 for possession with intent to deliver prescription drugs and steroids.
In 2006, Jeff George started selling steroids illegally via the Internet and muscle magazines through his South Beach Rejuvenation telemarketing firm, the indictment said.
He met the Candy Man and an unnamed clinic owner and learned about the profits to be made from selling pain pills, especially the cheap generic oxycodone, the indictment said. The brothers opened South Florida Pain Center in Wilton Manors in early 2008.
The center attacted throngs of rowdy, out-of-state addicts. The police began investigating. When the heat got too high, the Georges would move to different locations. At their peak, they had four clinics selling pills from West Palm Beach to Hallandale, officials say.
The Georges hired friends and family. The money was so great that employees could make $1,000 or more per week in "tips" from pill buyers eager to cut in line to see a doctor, the indictment said, and one clinic manager, Derik Nolan, made employees pay him a cut of the bribes to keep their jobs.
The brothers hired doctors through ads on Craig's List. On a wiretapped phone call, Chris George told a manager he had hired Jupiter physician Augusto Lizarazo, 70, even though he spoke with a heavy accent and had no experience with pain pills.
"You know what, people don't care as long as he's writing the scripts," Chris George said.
The doctors spent no more than a few minutes with each customer before writing prescriptions, the indictment said. The brothers gave them stamp pads so they could easily mark each script with identical dosages. They had staffers forge prescriptions so customers could get falsified MRIs to document their injuries.
To control the operation from top to bottom, officials said, the Georges set up one of their steroid telemarketers in a mobile MRI business that operated behind a strip club. It made $2 million.
Chris George financed two clinic staffers to start a pharmacy in Boca Raton and another in Orlando to fill their prescriptions and disguise the volume of pills being sold, the indictment said. Pills also financed two phony time-share companies that took $4.7 million from victims.
The brothers knew patients had died. In January 2010, the indictment said, Chris George complained on his cell phone to a manager about a new patient who had overdosed.
"Now I got this lawful [sic] death lawsuit for a patient that [Dr.] Jacob [Dreszer] killed… This f---ing idiot came in one time and f---ing died. First visit," Chris George said. "He couldn't handle pain management."
In late 2009, two Tennessee women were killed and a man critically injured as they drove away from a George clinic in Fort Lauderdale. Their car was hit by a train and oxycodone pills were strewn all over the scene, leading Chris George to berate the victims during a cell phone call.
"You got to be an idiot to get hit by a train," he told a manager.
"They showed a callous disregard for their patients, including not caring whether they lived or died," said Wifredo Ferrer, U.S. Attorney for South Florida.
Officials said the brothers used violence in their business.
They threatened operators of other clinics. They had staffers vandalize buildings and cars of competitors or people who opposed them.
The brothers and aides kidnapped and handcuffed a man they thought had stolen $50,000 from them, the indictment said. They threw him on the ground, and while trying to get him to talk, Jeff George fired a bullet next to his head, the indictment said.
When the indictment was released Tuesday, Chris George was in jail on charges of illegally having two shotguns and a handgun at his house in violation of his past felony conviction. He's being held without bond.
All those arrested this week are pleading not guilty and have not commented. In the past, the brothers' lawyers have said they were running a legitimate business for patients truly in pain, with commonly used dosages prescribed by licensed doctors.
"They made a profit," attorney James Eisenberg said last year. "They used that profit to buy a house. That's what we all do."
Authorities say this week's arrests on top of three other major busts, tougher state laws and continued police heat have slowed South Florida's pain clinics – but not stopped them.
"I think we're making significant advances," said Palm Beach State Attorney Michael McAuliffe. "I don't think we're quite to the end of the story yet."
blamendola@tribune.com or 954-356-4526
Shire: Searching the globe for innovative approaches to diseases
August 22nd, 2011
http://ebdgroup.com/partneringnews/2011/08/shire-searching-the-globe-for-innovative-approaches-to-diseases/
Six years after the acquisition of Transkaryotic Therapies (TKT), Shire has comfortably established a presence in the Boston area. The Human Genetic Therapies (HGT) division of Shire, built around the former TKT, has grown more than four-fold from 300 people and one product to over 1,500 staff and four products, and has recently added additional manufacturing capabilities at their Lexington, Massachusetts campus. Shire also has a specialty pharma division, with a US headquarters located in Wayne, Pennsylvania, and a regenerative medicine division headquartered in Westport, Connecticut.
Shire plans a strong showing at BioPharm America™ September 7–9 in downtown Boston as it continues its quest to evaluate opportunities to add products and technologies to feed a pipeline focused on products for the specialty physician and on orphan drugs for rare diseases with high unmet need.
“We are bringing a broad range of representatives to this event including senior management, business development specialists, scientific scouts and researchers,” said Deanna Petersen, VP for Business Development at Shire. “We are planning on many productive meetings.”
She said Shire is casting a wide net “looking for new and novel product opportunities that are in or near the clinic that could be complementary to our rare disease, specialty pharma or regenerative medicine businesses. We are also looking at technology platforms that have the potential to treat target diseases not currently accessible with Shire’s existing technologies,” she said.
“We are combing the world right now with scouts across the US, Europe, Japan, Singapore, Australia, Korea, India and China seeking novel products and technologies. Yet consistently we find one of the richest places for innovative science is here in our backyard, the Boston area. That is one of the reasons this meeting is so important to us,” said Petersen.
Shire has driven strong growth through licensing and acquisitions with a focus on specialty markets. Revenues increased 15% last year to USD 3.5 billion and core product sales jumped by 34% to USD 700 million.
Earlier this year, Shire bought the closely held Advanced BioHealing for USD 750 million, a move that was seen as a strong strategic fit, bringing a lead product for bioengineered skin to treat diabetic foot ulcers and sales of USD 146.7 million. Advanced BioHealing is the growth driver for Shire’s regenerative medicine business. The company is actively seeking further acquisitions and partnerships to reinforce its position in this space.
“We will be giving a partnering presentation at BioPharm America where we will highlight the top areas of interest for each of our divisions,” Petersen said, citing a transaction last year in Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD), “one of Shire HGT’s high priority disease areas.”
Last year at this time, Shire negotiated an exclusive license to take Acceleron’s ActRIIB molecules that modulate the growth of cells and tissues outside of North America. The agreement includes a collaboration to investigate ACE-031, the lead ActRIIB drug candidate for the treatment of patients with DMD.
“Rare diseases represent highly specialized markets with their own dynamics. This is a different ballgame and we know how to play it,” said Petersen. “Shire HGT seeks to be the world’s leader developing orphan drugs for rare diseases. We have a proven track record in successfully developing and commercializing orphan products around the globe. We are looking for opportunities to collaborate with biotech partners to bring new drugs for rare diseases to market as quickly as possible.
“A differentiating factor for Shire as a whole is that we remain quick and nimble. We can meet with a company, get an evaluation of the opportunity, determine our level of interest and move ahead in short order.
“This is a breath of fresh air for biotechs and it is something we consistently deliver on,” she said. “We are very patient focused. Our end goal is to get new drugs to help patients with unmet medical needs. There are so many people who need this help.”
I too have always liked Gino's. Once or twice I hit both (one after the other), just to try it out (sometimes those cravings on the drive from Delaware were...exaggerated).
I've been to Jim's on South Street also, and liked it. The article said Jim's was started by Joey's father in the 1940's.
In Delray Beach, there is a 'Big Al's' Philly style cheesesteak joint. It is good, but at $8-$9 for the amount you get, it's a bloody rip-off.
If I have to respond to every uninformed or mean-spirited comment you make, I won't have time for anything else.
May I answer that 'Jeopardy' style?:
The pot said to the kettle?
I don't think the absence of a deal is from lack of effort on Varney/Stoll's part
I'm talking about the nonsense you posted.
They've covered the bases looking for a resolution: and those bleacher seat viewers who prefer theorizing about sociopathy, shame themselves.
Heart attack kills Philly cheesesteak stand owner
By RON TODT - Associated Press | AP – 1 hr 58 mins ago
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Joey Vento, the owner of a landmark south Philadelphia cheesesteak stand who told customers to order in English, has died at age 71.
Vento's nephew Joseph Perno, a manager at Geno's Steaks, told The Associated Press that Vento had a massive heart attack and died Tuesday. He said family members had just gotten out of the hospital and wouldn't be making any immediate statements.
In November, Perno said Vento had been diagnosed with colorectal cancer a few months earlier and was to have surgery at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
Longtime friend Domenic Chiavaroli told the Philadelphia Daily News and The Philadelphia Inquirer that Vento had been at the cheesesteak stand Tuesday morning, as he was every morning before opening, but went home to Shamong, N.J., later in the day and told his wife that he wasn't feeling well.
"I've been coming here since 1967," Chiavaroli said. "Joe was a good guy. He always tried to help everybody."
According to Geno's website, Vento learned the cheesesteak business from his father, who had opened Jim's Steaks in the early 1940s. The site says Vento opened Geno's in 1966 "with $6 in his pocket, two boxes of steaks and some hot dogs."
He came up with the name after seeing a broken door in the back of his store upon which a neighborhood boy named Gino had painted his name, and he changed it to Geno's to not conflict with a food chain of the era, the site says. The south Philadelphia location, however, was a given, because "he figured that if he was going to sell a steak, he had to be where they were already eating them."
Geno's and its chief rival across the street, Pat's King of Steaks, have become the focus of an area described as "ground zero for cheesesteaks," a traditionally Italian community that has grown more diverse with an influx of immigrants from Asia and Latin America and is a popular tourist destination.
In June 2006, Vento and Geno's made headlines over two small signs posted at the shop stating, "This is AMERICA: WHEN ORDERING 'PLEASE SPEAK ENGLISH.'"
Vento said he posted the signs because of concerns over the debate on immigration reform and the increasing number of people who couldn't order in English.
Vento said he never refused service to anyone because he or she couldn't speak English, but critics argued that the signs discouraged customers of certain backgrounds from eating at the shop.
Amid extensive publicity, the city's Commission on Human Relations began looking into whether Vento was violating Philadelphia's ordinance banning discrimination in employment, public accommodation and housing on the basis of race, ethnicity or sexual orientation. The following year, the commission found probable cause against Geno's for discrimination.
The case then went to a public hearing, at which an attorney for the commission argued that the signs were about intimidation, not political speech. The matter then went to a three-member panel, which ruled 2-1 in March 2008 that the signs didn't violate the ordinance.
As Warren Buffett pointed out, a tech company's technology can quickly become obsolete
George brothers, 30 others arrested in pain clinic chain {(I can't wait 'til the Quentin Tarantino movie comes out!)}
Doctor charged with murder
By Bob LaMendola, Sun Sentinel
8:46 p.m. EDT, August 23, 2011
Law enforcement on Tuesday arrested twin brothers they called kingpins of South Florida's biggest pill mill network, along with 30 of their top lieutenants in a criminal operation that used kidnapping and gunfire to profit.
Jeffrey and Christopher George collected $40 million in two years peddling 20 million pain pills from their string of four clinics in Broward and Palm Beach counties, federal prosecutors and police said. They made millions more by selling illegal steroids over the Internet and phony time-shares from a boiler room, officials said.
The 32 people were arrested on multiple charges ranging from racketeering to fraud and illegal drug sales.
One of the George's pain clinic physicians was charged Tuesday with first-degree murder for prescribing 210 narcotic pain pills to a man who overdosed on the pills a few hours later. Jeffrey George was charged with second-degree murder in the same case.
Palm Beach State Attorney Michael McAuliffe called the murder charges against Dr. Gerald J. Klein and George a new attack on the illegal trade in prescription narcotic drugs.
"We looked at it not as a tragic accident but as a murder," McAuliffe said at a news conference in West Palm Beach. "We have sent a clear, unmistakable message … to pill mill operators."
The Palm Beach Gardens brothers, age 30, made so much money at their pain clinics – American Pain, Executive Pain, Hallandale Pain, East Coast Pain and earlier locations in Fort Lauderdale – that employees toted cash away in garbage bags, federal prosecutors said in the indictments.
The bust was the fourth major assault on South Florida pill mills, although all four of the George clinics were shut down in a March 2010 raid, and all or most of the 32 are out of the pain pill trade. Spearheading the effort is a federal-state-local task force based at a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency office in Weston.
The brothers opened the clinics in 2008 after making big money through their illegal steroid business, South Beach Rejuvenation. They staffed the offices with 13 doctors, who saw as many as 500 people a day. Officials said the vast majority of the patients were drug dealers, runners or addicts with no legitimate need for pain drugs.
Among the 13 doctors who were arrested, officials said Dr. Beau Boshers prescribed more than 1 million doses of the painkiller oxycodone over 20 months, Dr. Michael Aruta, 916,000, and Dr. Cynthia Cadet, 876,000. The doctors got paid per patient, and netted as much as $1.8 million a year.
To help justify the pill prescriptions, federal agents said the Georges set up a friend in a Boca Raton MRI company that issued phony test results. The company owned one mobile MRI unit that did business behind a strip club, they said.
The Georges also financed a Boca Raton friend and another person to start small pharmacies that sold pills to some pain clinic patients, agents said. They lined up a drug wholesale company that supplied more than a million narcotic pills to the clinics – even after being warned not to do so by the DEA, agents said.
The brothers and their staff threatened other clinic owners and roughed up a Jacksonville competitor, the indictment said. When they discovered someone trying to steal from them, the brothers kidnapped the man and Jeffrey George fired a bullet next to the man's head.
Using drug profits, the brothers set up a 100-employee telemarketing operation with an office in Boca Raton called American Marketing and International Marketing that bilked $4.7 million from 3,300 people trying to resell time-share units, the indictment said.
"We view this operation as a giant criminal enterprise," said Wifredo Ferrer, U.S. attorney for South Florida.
The government has filed court papers to seize an estimated $40 million worth of cash, cars, real estate and other assets from the George group. Agents have seized $13.7 million, including $4.3 million in the Wellington attic of Denice Haggerty, the brothers' mother.
Agents said they have been investigating the George operation for more than two years and arrested some of the defendants at their homes Tuesday. Others turned themselves in. About a dozen of the 32 made court appearances and pleaded not guilty on Tuesday, with more scheduled for Wednesday.
Attorney Fred Haddad, who represents Christopher George, said he had not seen the charges and declined to comment. George has been in prison on pending charges of illegal gun possession.
Jeffrey George and his attorney could not be contacted for comment. Klein and the other defendants could be located for comment.
The physicians arrested include Roni Dreszer, Patrick Graham, Daniel Hauser, Robert Meek, Vernon Artreidis, Augusto Lizarazo, Christine Chico-Blume, Joseph Castronuovo, Irwin Beretsky and Jacobo Dreszer.
I'm assuming all the essentially harmful oafs -- Varney, Stoll, Messinger, and the BOD -- are still present. Let's not forget about the blind in one eye guy also -- Dr. Perspective I believe he calls himself.
I remember OTEX back in the day (1999). I check on it every once in a while and notice it always seems to hold up. I believe they were a Canadian co. involved in telecom/conferencing software. Magic Software is another that I followed, albeit more closely, since the late 90's. Recently, I bought in the low 2'a and sold around $7 ps (I kept a portion just to ride, but then bought more just at about $4 1/2 ps). They are/were part of another company, called Formula Systems (Sym: FORTY ???). Anyway, they shot up into the 20's (in the '90's), announced a 3-for-1 split, then got hammered during the tech bubble. Part of their difficulties in those days was related to their acquisition of a Philly consulting firm, of which the transition, combined with the economic nosedive, proved disappointing. They have maintained relationships with big companies like IBM and SAP, have focused on the smaller to mid market companies (as far as enterprise software services), and their cloud software is landing them many contracts. All this was written from memory, so do your own due dude :)
God is punishing the Virginians :)
Not necessarily. But, once again, they have failed to terminate the appropriate people.
Well, since it is General Stock Ideas, I'll provide a rare one: Beware of Cortex. Make that two: MGIC (Magic Software) is very reasonably priced at the moment--speculative growth co. in the cloud which has been performing very well the last couple years.
Apparently, they are a less-glorified imitator :)
Better use some of that green to 'up' their lobbying efforts...