January 22, 2007

KIDS!


Watch this story expand!!
Eli Lilly to support OBEcure Phase II trials

OBEcure’s OBE101 drug will be tested in Canada on schizophrenia patients
taking Eli Lilly’s anti-pyschotic drug Zyprexa.

Michal Yoshai-Horovits 22 Jan 07 14:11

Eli Lilly & Co. (NYSE:LLY) will support Phase II clinical trials by Bio-Light Israeli Life Sciences Investments Ltd. (TASE:BOLT) portfolio company OBEcure Ltd. The trial of OBEcure’s OBE101 drug will be conducted in Canada on 78 schizophrenia patients taking Eli Lilly’s anti-psychotic drug Zyprexa. Eli Lilly’s support for the trial could total a few hundred thousand dollars. OBEcure will allow Eli Lilly to review the results of the trial before publication.
The trial will examine the effectiveness of OBE101, compared with a similar drug, in preventing weight gain as a side effect of taking Zyprexa.


OBEcure’s anti-obesity drug, OBE101, is also about to undergo Phase II trials in the US, paralleling the joint trial with Eli Lilly in Canada. OBEcure adds that the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will conduct a clinical trial of OBE101’s operating mechanism on 80 patients during 2007.

Yesterday, OBEcure announced the appointment of Rodman and Renshaw to lead a private placement to finance the trial. Rodman and Renshaw will also serve as an underwriter for any possible future IPO by OBEcure.

Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly is one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. The company specializes in drugs for treating mental disorders. Its flagship product, Zyprexa, has $4.6 billion in sales a year, 30% of the company’s total sales. In the coming years, a number of competing drugs, with lesser weight gain side effect than Zyprexa, are due to enter the market. If OBE101 is effective in helping limit weight gain, Eli Lilly will be able to keep its leadership in the schizophrenic treatment market.
Okay, obesity and diabetes are NOT the problem, per se. It's what it does to the PANCREAS and HEART. What a sickening corporate game this is!!

January 21, 2007

It's Peak Oil Sunday; I found so much good stuff

What was there in the famous

"Report to the Club of Rome" ?

December 2003
website of the author : www.manicore.com
- contact the author : jean-marc@manicore.com
***

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2186#comments

Tutorial/discussion that is HARD CORE about oil/nuclear/coal and so on REALITY, folks.

Water Pollution in the Great Lakes .....


http://www.great-lakes.net/teach/pollution/water/water1.html


Introduction

Why so polluted?
Effects of water pollution
Dilution is NOT the solution!
Lake Erie: "We have met the enemy and he is us"
Further resources and references

The pollution of our waterways became a national issue in June of 1969, the day that the Cuyahoga River, flowing through Cleveland, Ohio, on its way to Lake Erie, caught on fire because it was so polluted. Although this was not the first time that the Cuyahoga River had been in flames, the 1969 fire caught the attention of the nation and the fight began for increased water pollution controls, which eventually led to the Great Lakes Water Quality Act and Clean Water Act in the 1970s.

*snip*

5 Lake Erie: "We have met the enemy and he is us"*


In the 1960s, Lake Erie was declared "dead," though, ironically, it was full of life -- just not the right kind.

Eutrophication had claimed Lake Erie and excessive algae became the dominant plant species, covering beaches in slimy moss and killing off native aquatic species by soaking up all of the oxygen.

The demise of Lake Erie even made it into a Dr. Seuss book, The Lorax.

Behold! If you STILL don't get it, then this article is for YOU.
We need to resolve the energy political scene,
we need spiritual renewal
and
we need to end the rich/poor divide
NOW
more than ever before ...
Behold the Rise of Energy-Based Fascism

(Part II)

By Michael T. Klare,
Tomdispatch. com

Posted on January 20, 2007, Printed on January 21, 2007
http://www.alternet .org/story/ 46839/
This is part II of Michael Klare's two-part series.
Go here to read part I.


Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and the author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency.
╘ 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet .org/story/ 46839/

January 03, 2007

More on what looks like a hopeless solution to the digital divide issue ...

So much for the 2006 elections, folks ...

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/01/03/the_digital_give_and_take.php



December 29, 2006

Year-end 2006, Darknet Assumptions = True


Way back in November 2002, a set of Microsoft's senior-most security engineers wrote a paper that has come to be known as "the Microsoft Darknet Paper" (the company never endorsed it -- this was independent scholarship by the engineers). The paper explained why DRM for popular entertainment content would never work, so long as three assumptions remained true:
1. Any widely distributed object will be available to a fraction of users in a form that permits copying.2. Users will copy objects if it is possible and interesting to do so.3. Users are connected by high-bandwidth channels.

As we ring in 2007, here are a few year-end stories that illustrate, yet again, that the Darknet Assumptions remain vividly, indisputably, true.

Assumption #1: AACS DRM Cracked by BackupHDDVD Tool? All it takes is one leak, and DRM always leaks.

Assumption #2: 2.6 billion blank CDs were sold in 2006, as compared to 588 million CDs of recorded music, says the Philadelphia Inquirer. By the end of 2006, Apple will have sold a total of approximately 80 million iPods. Audio and video features are now a standard feature on hard-drive enclosures and in network attached storage (NAS) solutions; in fact, inexpensive routers and NAS enclosures now include Bit Torrent clients, so that the downloading can continue, even when your computer is turned off.

Assumption #3: A year-end review of trends in file-sharing, courtesy of Seattle Weekly, explains that users aren't just relying on P2P networks anymore, thanks to sharity blogs, YouTube (now downloadable, thanks to software tools), MySpace (again, downloadable), CD-Rs, and wireless sharing (ala Zune). And, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, 78% of Amercian Internet users now have high-speed connections at home, up from 65% in 2005.

Posted by Fred von Lohmann at 03:04 PM Intellectual Property Permalink Technorati

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/

January 02, 2007

(s): , , , , , Local Area(s):

December 30, 2006 at 20:14:40

New Year's Resolutions for Big Pharma
by Martha Rosenberg

It was another year of fighting black boxes, sweet talking juries and burying incriminating clinical data for Big Pharma.

But before its reputation is completely gone--How many pharmaceutical salesmen does it take to change a light bulb?

It doesn't need to be changed; it just needs a new name and formulation before the patent runs out--

Big Pharma could make the following New Year's resolutions.

1.We will instruct our reps not to waltz into doctors' offices ahead of patients many of whom are--hello!--not feeling well and have been waiting a long time. We will admonish them to stop high fiving after a sale and using verbs like "aced " and "got over big time." They will never call the doctor "dude."

2.We will stop pushing schizophrenic drugs like Seroquel and Zyprexa to the depressed, anxious, moody, confused, aged and people we can convince are bipolar through alarmist ad campaigns. ("Are you sure you don't have racing thoughts?") We will admit they are dangerous drugs with serious weight gain, hyperglycemia and diabetes side effects that we tried to bury until the New York Times outed us.

3.We will stop selling depression to people with simple life problems--"Tired of your commute? Weather got you down? You might be depressed!"-- to boost SSRI sales. We will admit they are dangerous drugs that can cause--not prevent--suicide in all age groups except the old who we have on Seroquel and Zyprexa, anyway. (see above)

4.We will stop trying to resuscitate HRT---"it's good for women between 49 and 49 1/2 with intact uteruses and no history of heart disease or bringing lawsuits"--and admit we perpetrated a 40 year lethal hoax and should be keeping Bernie, Skilling and Fastow company at Club Fed. We will acknowledge the other "females" HRT harmed and release mares and their foals from Premarin farms immediately.

5. We will stop trying to replace the HRT market by conducting osteoporosis scare campaigns starring Sally Field and Cheryl Ladd and admit bisphosphonates by stopping bone remodeling can cause--not prevent--fractures (see SSRIs, HRT) We will further admit bisphosphonates can cause jaw death, a painful and deadly side effect we weren't going to mention until loudmouth dentists spoke out. (Thanks a lot, buddies.)

6.We will stop marketing the newer sleeping pills like Ambien as "safe" and "nonaddictive" and admit they are the club drug of choice across the nation and a leading cause of traffic accidents and air travelers who don't know which side of the ocean they're on. We will withdraw our application to start selling Ambien to children and ask ourselves what were we THINKING?

7.We'll stop relying on agricultural antibiotics for the bulk of our revenues and admit they are causing antibiotic resistance in our own pills and focusing attention on our failure to create new antibiotics in the last decade. We will further admit they enable factory farming conditions so sickening you don't want to look at them before eating.

8.We will stop exploiting childhood behavior problem with antidepressants, antipsychotics, "mood stabilizers" and other pediatric straightjackets. Despite the fact that our demographic data tell us "get them at 5 keep 'em for life," we admit we are creating a generation that will be ready for rehab by middle school. ("Remember when were straight-- in the second grade?")

9.We will stop financially inducing doctors to attach their names to journal articles we have written which promote our drugs, bash our competitors and just happen to address the main areas of concerns prescribers have. Not only does it fool no one, we've been busted twice by JAMA.

10.We will stop paying the FDA to fast track our drugs. Even though early approval means a quick killing in sales, the lack of follow-up clinical data can produce other "quick killings" we don't need. After all, Vioxx didn't cause heart attacks in monkeys.11.We will replace our salesmen, psychologists and integrative marketers with biologists and chemists. Sure they cost more-- but instead of coming up with new drug names when a patent is running out and new diseases to sell Americans from their TV sets ("Hey Doc do you think I have this?") they can come up with new drugs. What a concept!

Martha Rosenberg is staff cartoonist for the Evanston Roundtable.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_martha_r_061230_new_year_s_resolutio.htm

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