Tag Archives: WorldNews

If Jeff Bezos wants to help-low income people why not just pay them better? | Marina Hyde

Giving money away that he will control gets him a get out of jail feee card for being rich and “caring.” But he does not care to pay well or share the his gains with those who did the work that gave him billions.

2560.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

The Amazon boss’s philanthropy fund flies in the face of the way he treats his workers. Yet he wants to be seen as a messiah

Always a pleasure to hear from rejected Paul Verhoeven villain Jeff Bezos, who this week announced an initiative designed to cast him as Earth’s first trillion-dollar sociopath. OK, I’ve paraphrased slightly. The Amazon boss has launched something called the Day One fund, which feels like the will-this-do title for the will-this-do initiative it is. Bezos has long been criticised for his glaring lack of a philanthropic arm, long after he became the richest man in modern history. A year ago Jeff seemed at such a loss as to how not to be an unmitigated arse that he was asking internet users for ideas. He seems to have ignored all the respondents who said, “Stop treating your workers like rubbish.”

Do you remember the beginning of Verhoeven’s Robocop, before things started to go really tits-up in increasingly automated future Detroit? There’s a company that basically does everything, called Omni Consumer Products. They begin providing services that might reasonably be imagined the job of the state. A movie ensues. Anyway, here we are. Fresh from announcing that Amazon’s getting into healthcare, Jeff has decided to help homeless people and low-income communities with donations and not-for-profit schools.

Continue reading…

Japan’s attempt to overturn commercial whaling ban fails

yes!!!!!

5904.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

Anti-whaling nations defeat proposals that would have allowed for the return of hunts

An attempt to overturn the decades-old global ban on commercial whaling has failed, to the relief of conservationists.

Anti-whaling nations defeated by a decisive margin proposals from the Japanese government that would have allowed for the return of whale hunts.

Continue reading…

Whaling vote: Australia tells Japan it has lost argument for killings

2500.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

Country’s commissioner makes impassioned case against a business that no longer has a ‘social licence’

There is no longer a “social licence” for countries to kill whales for profit, Australia has told the International Whaling Commission in Brazil.

In an impassioned intervention, Australia’s IWC commissioner, Dr Nick Gales, told the key meeting that Japan’s proposal to lift a 30-year ban on commercial whaling was a “business proposition” that Australians reject.

Continue reading…

‘Little Mussolinis’: EU chief angers Italy with comment on rise of far right

good on you!

3500.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

Pierre Moscovici, EU economics commissioner, told to ‘wash his mouth out’ by Italy’s deputy PM Matteo Salvini

The EU’s top economic official has voiced fears that “little Mussolinis” might be emerging in Europe, drawing a furious response from Italy’s far-right interior minister who accused him of insulting his country and Italians. 

Pierre Moscovici, a Frenchman who is the European Union’s economics affairs commissioner, said the current political situation, with populist, far-right forces on the rise in many nations, resembled the 1930s when Germany’s Adolf Hitler and Italian fascist chief Benito Mussolini were in power. 

Continue reading…

Top Official at Memorial Sloan Kettering Resigns After Failing to Disclose Industry Ties

one down, many more at other institutions should go as well.

by Charles Ornstein, ProPublica, and Katie Thomas, The New York Times

Dr. José Baselga, the chief medical officer of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, resigned on Thursday amid reports that he had failed to disclose millions of dollars in payments from health care companies in dozens of research articles.

The hospital’s chief executive, Dr. Craig B. Thompson, confirmed the resignation.

The revelations about Baselga’s disclosure lapses, reported by The New York Times and ProPublica last weekend, have rocked Memorial Sloan Kettering, one of the nation’s leading cancer centers, in recent days. Its top executives scrambled to contain the fallout, including urgent meetings of physician leaders and the executive committee of its board of directors.

Read the Original Story

Top Cancer Researcher Fails to Disclose Corporate Financial Ties in Major Research Journals

A senior official at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center has received millions of dollars in payments from companies that are involved in medical research. His omissions expose how weakly conflict-of-interest rules are enforced by journals.

Baselga could not be immediately reached for comment.

On Sunday, Thompson and Kathryn Martin, the hospital’s chief operating officer, sent a message to the staff instructing employees to “do a better job” of disclosing their relationships with the drug and health care industries.

“The matter of disclosure is serious,” the executives wrote.

Baselga, a prominent figure in the world of cancer research, omitted his financial ties to companies like the Swiss drugmaker Roche and several small biotech start-ups in prestigious medical publications like The New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet. He also failed to disclose any company affiliations in articles he published in the journal Cancer Discovery, for which he serves as one of two editors in chief.

All told, ProPublica and The Times, found that Baselga had failed to report any industry ties in 60 percent of the nearly 180 papers he had published since 2013. That figure increased each year — he did not disclose any relationships in 87 percent of the journal articles he co-authored last year.

In an interview and later statement, Baselga said he planned to correct his conflict-of-interest disclosures in 17 journal articles, including in The New England Journal and the Lancet. But he also contended that in dozens of other cases, no disclosure was required because the topics of the articles had little financial implication. He also said his failed disclosures were unintentional and should not reflect on the value of the research he conducted.

Those journals, as well as professional societies like the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Association for Cancer Research, said they were conducting reviews of Baselga’s disclosure practices after inquiries from The Times and ProPublica. Baselga was president of the AACR in 2015 and 2016 and appears to have violated disclosure rules for reporting conflicts of interest during that period.

A spokeswoman for The New England Journal, Jennifer Zeis, said in an email Thursday that Baselga had submitted changes to his disclosures but that editors had questions for him before the articles could be corrected. A spokeswoman for the AACR said that organization was continuing to review Baselga’s disclosures.

Baselga, 59, is an expert in breast cancer research and played a key role in the development of Herceptin, which was developed by Genentech, a subsidiary of Roche. He came to Memorial Sloan Kettering in 2013 after serving as chief of hematology and oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Before that he was a leader at the Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology in Barcelona, Spain.

Get ProPublica’s Major Investigations by Email

Don’t miss out on our next investigation. Sign up now and get it straight to your inbox whenever we break news.

Medical journals and professional societies have imposed stricter rules about reporting relationships to industry after a series of scandals a decade ago in which prominent physicians failed to disclose payments from drug companies. But medical journals have said they don’t routinely fact-check authors’ disclosures, and much is left to the honor system.

Ethicists say that outside relationships with companies can shape the way studies are designed and medications are prescribed to patients, allowing bias to influence medical practice. Reporting those ties allows the public, other scientists and doctors to evaluate the research and weigh potential conflicts.

Baselga has extensive ties to a range of companies, including sitting on the board of the large pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb and serving as a director of Varian Medical Systems, which sells radiation equipment and for whom Memorial Sloan Kettering is a client.

Baselga has served on the boards of at least four other companies since 2013, and the positions required him to assume a fiduciary responsibility to protect the interests of those companies, even as he oversaw the cancer center’s medical operations. Baselga and Memorial Sloan Kettering have said the cancer center has put firewalls in place to prevent any conflicts.

Baselga received nearly $3.5 million in payments from drug, medical equipment and diagnostic companies from August 2013 through 2017, according to Open Payments, a federal database that tracks payments to physicians from health care companies. Most of that amount, about $3 million, involved a payment from Genentech for Baselga’s ownership interest in a company it acquired, Seragon Pharmaceuticals, in 2014.

But the $3.5 million in the Open Payments database does not include payments from companies that don’t have products approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Such companies are not required to report their payments under federal law.

For instance, Infinity Pharmaceuticals, a start-up with no approved drug, paid Baselga nearly $250,000 in cash and stock options for serving on its board from 2015 to 2017. He declined to disclose how much he received from such companies.

Baselga was one of the highest-paid staff members at Memorial Sloan Kettering, earning more than $1.5 million in 2016, the most recent year for which the nonprofit’s financial filings are available.

10308752.gif

Indulging Steve Bannon is just a form of liberal narcissism | Nesrine Malik

White supremacy and fascist flirtations are not ideas that need to be ‘exposed’. We just need to fight them. White supremacy and fascist flirtations are not ideas that need to be ‘exposed’. We just need to fight them. White supremacy and fascist flirtations are not ideas that need to be ‘exposed’. We just need to fight them.

4391.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

White supremacy and fascist flirtations are not ideas that need to be ‘exposed’. We just need to fight them

I grew up in the long shadow of a military coup. To be a child in a country where relatives and friends suddenly disappeared, were detained indefinitely without trial, or in some instances executed, was to grow up very quickly. But the most difficult thing to process was seeing those who had lost family to the government’s brutality scramble to make peace with its members, or even join it, once it became clear the military regime was staying. It’s still a depressing thing to return to Sudan and see men who I remember as a child returning from prison gaunt and hollowed out with starvation and torture, sit among the government’s ranks, fatted, safe, and soft with power.

But it taught me an important lesson: the fate some politicians fear most is not defeat, it is irrelevance. And as the Donald Trump administration functions largely like an African dictatorship, it has been a lesson that has been helpful in shedding light on the complicity of formerly moral Republicans, and in turn, the normalisation of Trump and his associates by liberals.

Continue reading…

Bob Woodward’s Fear sells more than 750,000 in first day

4800.jpg?width=300&quality=85&auto=forma

The veteran Washington reporter’s unflattering portrait of Trump White House gets ninth printing to meet extraordinary demand from US and beyond

Donald Trump may have dismissed Bob Woodward’s Fear as “a joke”, but readers are showing themselves to be keen to share in the comedy, with more than 750,000 copies of the White House exposé sold in American in just one day, according to its publisher.

Fear, which “depicts a White House awash in dysfunction, where the Lord of the Flies is the closest thing to an owner’s manual”, according to a review in the Guardian, was published on 11 September. Simon & Schuster said yesterday that it sold a combined total of more than 750,000 copies of the book on its first day on sale in the US. The publisher has now ordered a ninth printing, bringing the total number of hardbacks in print in America to more than 1.15m.

Continue reading…