Atorvastatin [Advertisement Withdrawn]
On 25 February 2008, Pfizer announced that it will voluntarily withdraw all advertisements for Lipitor featuring Dr. Robert Jarvik and will commit to ensuring greater clarity in the roles and responsibilities of its spokespeople in its consumer advertising and promotion. Dr. Jarvik is not a licensed physician and his use in advertisements was considered misleading. In addition, although he was shown rowing (and therefore implying that his heart was healthy) he in fact does not row and the advertisement employed a body double. Pfizer withdrew the advertisement as a result of the allegations.
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Meet Shawn Still, current state senator and former finance chairman of the Georgia GOP.
Charges: Violation of the Georgia RICO Act; impersonating a public officer; two counts of first-degree forgery; two counts of false statements and writings; criminal attempt to commit filing false documents.
These aren’t political operatives doing iffy things, nor are these people on the fringe of the party. This is the Republican party and it’s indistinguishable from the mafia.
You will also recall that this year, the Catholic church decreed the attempted ordination of women to be one of the most serious crimes a Catholic priest can commit, on a par with paedophilia, heresy and desecrating the Sacrament. Though they’ve been turning a blind eye to paedophilia for so long, I can’t see why they can’t let a few women scuttle into the priesthood on the sly.
The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man convicted of a crime I did not commit. I have been persecuted for twelve years for something I did not do. From God’s dust I came and to dust I will return, so the Earth shall become my throne.
Cameron Todd Willingham, Texas, and the death penalty : The New Yorker
Cameron Todd Willingham was executed by the people of Texas on February 17, 2004. What were you doing that day?
Willingham had asked that his parents and family not be present in the gallery during this process, but as he looked out he could see Stacy watching. The warden pushed a remote control, and sodium thiopental, a barbiturate, was pumped into Willingham’s body. Then came a second drug, pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes the diaphragm, making it impossible to breathe. Finally, a third drug, potassium chloride, filled his veins, until his heart stopped, at 6:20 P.M. On his death certificate, the cause was listed as “Homicide.”
In 2005, Texas established a government commission to investigate allegations of error and misconduct by forensic scientists. The first cases that are being reviewed by the commission are those of Willingham and Willis. In mid-August, the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler, who was hired by the commission, completed his investigation. In a scathing report, he concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire. He said that Vasquez’s approach seemed to deny “rational reasoning” and was more “characteristic of mystics or psychics.” What’s more, Beyler determined that the investigation violated, as he put it to me, “not only the standards of today but even of the time period.”
Please read this article in it’s entirety. Unfortunately, we, as a country, haven’t progressed much since the Salem Witch Trials.
(via jayparkinsonmd) (via soupsoup)
Texas executed an innocent man
Antonin Scalia once said that no one had ever been executed in the US for a crime they didn’t commit. Well, the Columbia Human Rights Law Review is devoting its entire spring issue to the case of Carlos DeLuna, who was executed by the state of Texas in 1989 for the murder of Wanda Lopez. Their investigation reveals that another Carlos, Carlos Hernandez, actually committed the murder.
Many other glaring discrepancies also stand out in the DeLuna case. He was put on death row largely on the eyewitness testimony of one man, Kevan Baker, who had seen the fight inside the Shamrock and watched the attacker flee the scene.
Yet when Baker was interviewed 20 years later, he said that he hadn’t been that sure about the identification as he had trouble telling one Hispanic person apart from another.
Then there was the crime-scene investigation. Detectives failed to carry out or bungled basic forensic procedures that might have revealed information about the killer. No blood samples were collected and tested for the culprit’s blood type.
Fingerprinting was so badly handled that no useable fingerprints were taken. None of the items found on the floor of the Shamrock - a cigarette stub, chewing gum, a button, comb and beer cans - were forensically examined for saliva or blood.
There was no scraping of the victim’s fingernails for traces of the attacker’s skin. When Liebman and his students studied digitally enhanced copies of crime scene photographs, they were amazed to find the footprint from a man’s shoe imprinted in a pool of Lopez’s blood on the floor - yet no effort was made to measure it.
“There it was,” says Liebman. “The murderer had left his calling card at the scene, but it was never used.”
Even the murder weapon, the knife, was not properly examined, though it was covered in blood and flesh.
Other photographs show Lopez’s blood splattered up to three feet high on the walls of the Shamrock counter. Yet when DeLuna’s clothes and shoes were tested for traces of blood, not a single microscopic drop was found. The prosecution said it must have been washed away by the rain.
Awful. See also Cameron Todd Willingham.
David Brooks has done it again. This time he wrote a column about how America’s class divisions are illustrated by the parable of the prodigal son: “We live in a divided society in which many of us in the middle- and upper-middle classes are like the older brother and many of the people who drop out of school, commit crimes and abandon their children are like the younger brother.” The point of his column was to exhort the “older brothers” not to be snobby moralists but to have compassion on the poor people who are like their “younger brothers.” Except that by making this blanket statement about why poor people are poor, Brooks becomes the snobby moralist he’s supposedly critiquing. There’s no way to make a legitimate analogy between the story of the prodigal son and the class divide in America. When rich kids spend their inheritance money on drugs and prostitutes, they get to run back home when they hit rock bottom and crash-land at Mom and Dad’s house.