NYPD says cops won’t be sanctioned for altering Wikipedia entries
RT | March 17, 2015
Two veteran New York City cops discovered to have altered Wikipedia entries related to high-profile police brutality cases from police headquarters won’t be punished, according to the commissioner.
New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton made the announcement Monday and said the two officers – whose names will not be released – do not currently work in the police headquarters, and are assigned to two different units.
“Two officers, who have been identified, were using department equipment to access Wikipedia and make entries,” NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton told reporters. “I don’t anticipate any punishment, quite frankly.”
The officers might be reprimanded for using their employer’s computers for unrelated work and are expected to be spoken to by Internal Affairs Bureau investigators.
The Wikipedia alterations were made to entries concerning some of the city’s most controversial police brutality cases, including Eric Garner, Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo, all of whom were killed by officers.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said at the same press conference “city computers” are “supposed to be for city business. This was not authorized business.”
Most NYPD computers don’t allow access to the internet, an anonymous source told DNAinfo. Currently, the NYPD doesn’t have a policy specific to Wikipedia, but it is in the process of reviewing its social media rules. Police officials told local news source DNAinfo that they did not direct the changes made to Wikipedia.
Since Wikipedia is publicly accessed and edited by volunteers, it is not appropriate for NYPD officers to edit references they believe are inaccurate. Wikipedia users have removed some of the changes to the entries.
Capital New York reported Friday that as many as 85 IP addresses registered at NYPD headquarters have logged hundreds of edits to Wikipedia entries on victims of police brutality, dating back 10 years.
The NYPD only maintains records that can trace computer use for one year, but they were able to uncover that the two veterans had made alterations on the “Death of Eric Garner” page on Wikipedia shortly after a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo for his death.
Garner, who was placed in a chokehold, was killed by police last year during an arrest that was captured on video by an onlooker. One of the edits altered “Garner raised both his arms in the air” to “Garner flailed his arms about as he spoke.”
Lithuania drops CIA prison inquiry
‘No parliament support’
RT | March 14, 2015
The Lithuanian legislature decided against a new inquiry into a secret US torture facility in the country, despite a damning US Senate report released three months ago which indicated its existence.
“No new inquest will be considered, because there is no longer sufficient support for it among parliament members,” Loreta Grauziniene, speaker of the Lithuanian parliament, told Reuters on Friday.
Allegations that the CIA set up and ran a secret detention center near the country’s capital of Vilnius between 2004 and 2006 were investigated in 2009 and 2010 by a parliamentary committee. The inquiry concluded the CIA did operate flights in and out of Lithuania, and that there may have been as many as two secret facilities for what the CIA termed “enhanced interrogations.” The committee added that such information could not be confirmed because US officials refused to cooperate.
When a heavily redacted US Senate report on secret CIA prisons came out in December 2014, it did not identify any countries by name. However, the descriptions of the facility identified as ‘Violet’ closely matched the Lithuanian parliament’s original report. Arvydas Anusauskas, the lawmaker who led the inquiry, told the media that the Senate report had made a “convincing case” that prisoners had been held in Lithuania. Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevicius expressed hope that there would be another parliamentary inquiry, and that information would be “shared and exchanged” this time around.
Former president Valdas Adamkus, however, insisted to the local media that he would continue to believe “there were no prisons or prisoners in Lithuania” until he saw “documents before my eyes” proving him wrong.
No further explanation was given for Friday’s decision to drop the inquiry. It comes as hundreds of US troops and vehicles deploy to Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia as a “deterrent” to alleged Russian aggression.
Human rights groups have criticized Lithuania’s complicity in the CIA’s secret detention program, as well as its reluctance to investigate claims by Guantanamo Bay detainees Abu Zubaydah and Mustafa al-Hawsawi of being held and tortured at the CIA facility in the country.
Read more:
Not so magnificent 7: nations ‘busted’ in redacted CIA terror report
Over 100 US armored vehicles roll into Latvia, NATO flexes muscles in Europe
NYPD accused of editing Wikipedia pages for Eric Garner death, other scandals
RT | March 13, 2015
The New York Police Department is reviewing reports that computers connected to the NYPD’s own network edited the Wikipedia pages for some of the more infamous recent events to involve the force, including the choking death of Eric Garner.
Wikipedia articles pertaining to at least three individuals who died as a result of altercations with the NYPD, including Garner, were edited out of the department’s 1 Police Plaza headquarters, Capital New York reported Friday.
According to publicly available records of the online encyclopedia’s revision history, computers connected to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses traced back by the paper to NYPD headquarters edited — and sometimes attempted to delete — entries on alleged instances of police brutality and articles critical of the force’s conduct.
Along with a page on Garner — the Staten Island man who died last July after being placed in a chokehold by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo — Wikipedia articles detailing no fewer than two others deaths involving the Big Apple’s boys in blue were altered by computers connected to the agency’s complex in downtown Manhattan, Kelly Weill reported for Capital New York this week.
Wikipedia pages for the NYPD’s so-called “stop-and-frisk” tactic, as well as recent scandals that have tarnished the force — such as the 2013 incident in which an undercover cop was caught up in a group beating on the West Side Highway — were edited from headquarters, Capital New York reported, along with the pages for Garner, Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo. Bell died in 2006 after undercover NYPD officers fired 50 times him and two other men, all unarmed, and Diallo was killed in 1999 when a cop mistook his wallet for a gun and opened fire.
Last December, someone connected through the NYPD’s network made multiple edits to the “Death of Eric Garner” page on Wikipedia, Weill reported, within hours of a grand jury’s decision not to charge NYPD Officer Pantaleo in the man’s death. “Garner raised both his arms in the air” was changed to “Garner flailed his arms about as he spoke,” Weill wrote, and “Use of the chokehold has been prohibited” was changed to “Use of the chokehold is legal, but has been prohibited.”
“Instances of the word ‘chokehold’ were replaced twice, once to ‘chokehold or headlock,’ and once to ‘respiratory distress,’” Weill reported, both times from the NYPD network.
With regards to the Bell shooting article, a user connected to the NYPD network initiated an effort to have the entry nixed altogether by filing a complaint on the website’s internal “Articles for deletion” page.
“He [Bell] was in the news for about two months, and now no one except Al Sharpton cares anymore. The police shoot people every day, and times with a lot more than 50 bullets. This incident is more news than notable,” the user wrote.
In 2006, according to Weill, a user of the NYPD network deleted 1,502 characters from the “scandals and corruption” section of Wikipedia’s “New York City Police Department” article. Two years later, another computer connected to the network deleted the entire “Allegations of police misconduct and the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB)” and “Other incidents” sections from the main NYPD page.
Weill, an intern with Capital New York, wrote that there are more than 15,000 IP addresses registered to the NYPD, and information about them can easily be found online for free. A simple computer script programed in Python ran those addresses through Wikipedia, she said, and then flagged instances in which edits were made.
“The matter is under internal review,” NYPD spokeswoman Det. Cheryl Crispin told Capital New York in an email.
Read more – Grand jury doesn’t indict NYPD officer accused in chokehold death
Iraqi govt coalition party calls for probe into killing of 22 soldiers, blames US-led airstrikes
RT | March 13, 2015
Iraqi authorities are being urged to investigate the killing of 22 Iraqi soldiers in the western province of Anbar in what they claim was a US-led airstrike. The government coalition party, which urges the probe, says the findings should be made public.
The soldiers were killed on Wednesday when an airplane bombed the HQ of an army company near Ramadi, a city in central Iraq, about 110 kilometers west of Baghdad, an Iraqi military officer and a police source said, as cited by Reuters.
“The aviation of international coalition repeatedly carried out air strikes on the positions of the national militia forces and the armed forces, who are leading a fierce war against terrorists of ISIL [also formerly known ISIS, currently the Islamic State (IS)],” said a statement from Al-Moaten bloc, a member party in the government coalition.
No one has yet admitted responsibility for the deaths. Iraqi forces have blamed the killing of 22 soldiers on the US-led coalition. A military source told Reuters that a missile was launched from a foreign aircraft. However, coalition spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Gilleran said that the alliance fired the only strike in the province and it didn’t result in any “friendly casualties.”
US military officials also told Reuters on condition of anonymity that Iraqi security force planes were operating in targeted area and that US are discussing with Iraqi the reports of a friendly fire incident among Iraqi forces.
The head of the Anbar provincial council, Sabah Karhout, has suggested that the blast was caused by explosives planted in an underground tunnel beneath the military headquarters.
According to one of US officials, the strike was 33 kilometers from the site where Iraqi soldiers were killed.
In the meantime, Iraqi officials deny that their country forces were responsible for that friendly fire. “We don’t have any Iraqi war planes carrying out combat duties in Anbar,” an Iraqi military source said.
Kevork Almassian, an academic and political analyst focusing on the Middle East, told RT that he“ doesn’t buy the reports” that the attack in Anbar province was not carried out by the coalition or was carried out by mistake against the Iraqi forces.
“The equation for me is very clear in Iraq: the strong ISIS and other strong terrorist organizations have a price.”
American forces are working covertly to slow down the advances of the Iraqi forces in Tikrit and elsewhere against ISIS, Almassian said.
“If the Iraqi forces succeeded in crushing and eliminate these terrorist elements from that area, the Iraqi government will empower its position and the Iranians will empower their position in the Middle East,” he told RT.
Since the US-led offensive against the Islamic State began several months ago, Secretary of State John Kerry said that nearly 2,000 airstrikes have helped ground forces retake 700 square kilometers (270 square miles) of territory, kill 50 percent of IS commanders and choking off some of the group’s oil revenue.
According to US officials, approximately 6,000 Islamic State members in Iraq and Syria have died since the strikes began.
Weapons in space would undermine global stability – Russia
RT | March 11, 2015
The deployment of weapons to outer space must be prohibited, as an attack from Earth’s orbit could potentially target any country in the world at any time and ruin global stability, a Russian delegation said at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva.
The risks of this becoming a reality are now more “likely in light of scientific and technological developments,” the Russian representatives said, as quoted by TASS.
Speaking at the plenary session on the prevention of an arms race in space, they drew attention to the draft treaty introduced by Russia and China last year.
The Russian delegation noted “it is not a complete recipe, but rather an invitation to work together on its future development.”
The address stated that it is important to use the time when there are no weapons in space “to start substantive work on the text.”
At the same time, it has been a priority to pursue global policy initiatives to encourage countries not to become the first to place weapons in space, the delegation said, referring to “voluntary political commitments that would confirm peaceful nature of [nations’] space activities.”
The prevention of the placement of weapons in orbit has been an important goal of Russia’s foreign policy.
Russia has been promoting various initiatives that would prohibit the weaponization of space. One such project includes the draft resolution ‘No First Placement of Arms in Outer Space,’ presented at the UN General Assembly.
The draft resolution outlines further action to keep outer space free from weapons. One of the points included in the resolution is to discuss the issue at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, in order to create and adopt a binding international treaty on the prevention of placing arms in space.
The initiative was originally proposed by Russia and China in 2008, with an updated Russian-Chinese draft submitted to the Conference on Disarmament in June 2014.
Some space activities fall under international regulation of space law, as well as a series of treaties on nuclear disarmament and nuclear test bans. However, not all types of weapons are covered within this legal framework.
Read more:
Naked, unarmed black man shot dead by white metro Atlanta cop
RT | March 10, 2015
An African American man running and “crawling” naked through his apartment complex in suburban Atlanta was fatally shot Monday by a DeKalb County police officer. The unarmed man may have had mental health issues, authorities said.
The unidentified white DeKalb police officer responded to a call regarding a man, identified as Anthony Hill, 27, according to social media and confirmed by the Atlanta Journal Constitution, who was allegedly “acting deranged, knocking on doors and crawling around naked,” at The Heights apartment complex in Chamblee, Georgia, said Cedric Alexander, director of the county public safety department.
Despite being equipped with a stun gun and pepper spray, the officer fired two shots when Hill allegedly ran in his direction, ignoring calls to stop.
“The officer called him to stop while stepping backward, drew his weapon and fired two shots,” he said.
Hill, a resident of The Heights, died of the body wounds. Alexander said the investigation is in the hands of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) as “a result of what’s going on currently across this country as it relates to police shootings.”
“No weapon was found,” Alexander said. “The GBI is going to take the point on this investigation.”
Alexander did not say the distance between Hill and the officer, a 7-year veteran of the police force, when the latter shot.
“I think in all fairness we need to wait and see what the outcome of the investigation is because I can’t tell you, beyond what I have told you so far, what kind of measures that officer may have taken,” he said.
The officer has been placed on administrative leave.
As for Hill, Alexander suggested the man may have had some mental health issues.
“I can only reasonably assume that if he was running around the apartment complex naked, I believe we can make the assumption there may have been some mental health experience that he might have been having,” Alexander said.
Alexander added that DeKalb County police officers do undergo some training to deal with the mentally ill, but he said there will be an examination to determine if additional instruction is warranted.
“That’s becoming more and more apparent,” Alexander said. “We have already, as many departments have begun to do, look at how to expand our mental health training when we find it certainly necessary to do so. Because it appears that we’re seeing more and more of these cases across the country in which police are engaging with those who appear to be in distress.”
Hill’s murder comes about a week after the suspicious DeKalb County police shooting of a 44-year-old Kevin Davis in Decatur.
READ MORE: Wisconsin officer who shot unarmed man was exonerated in previous fatal shooting
Once upon a TIME
By Margarita Simonyan, RT Editor-in-Chief | March 9, 2015
Once upon a time – last October, to be precise – I gave an interview to a TIME magazine correspondent for the publication’s in-depth profile on RT. Late last week that piece finally appeared on America’s newsstands.
The opus is an object lesson in writing about RT, which over the last year or so has blossomed into its own cottage industry: full of half-truths, half-quotes and full-on commitment to fitting your subject into an existing narrative box, rather than an attempt to understand or discover anything new.
In an effort to give the article a sense of timeliness, the author uses the backdrop of Boris Nemtsov’s murder to frame the RT story. How did RT treat this tragic, headline-grabbing event that reverberated around the world, and the tens of thousands-strong Moscow march that followed it? According to TIME : “On March 1, when a massive march began in Moscow to protest Nemtsov’s murder – with many carrying signs that read propaganda kills – RT was showing a documentary about American racism and xenophobia.”
Would you like to know what TIME was writing about on March 1? It was comparing the merits of two new models of the Samsung smartphone. A poignant story indeed!
If this example seems like an attempt to purposefully mislead the audience about the quality of TIME’s journalism, it’s because it is. But it’s the same as TIME’s deliberate avoidance of the fact that the Nemtsov mourning rally was the lead story on RT’s March 1 hourly news bulletins from 8am till midnight, with live updates published across our websites and social media platforms throughout the day.
If the introductory presentation of RT is based on brazen omissions, then the next part is a classic example of misdirection, and concerns every mainstream media hound’s favorite bone – RT’s financing. Now, I can empathize with the challenge of trying to write an honest-to-goodness sad-sack story about the outspent (and new favorite epithet, ‘outgunned’) Western media at a time when RT is broadcasting multiple 24/7 TV channels around the world for the mind-blowing sum of $225 million, while the UK’s BBC World Service and the US’ Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG, which includes Voice of America and Radio Free Europe) – both running predominantly online and radio services with small and sporadic television presences in a handful of regions – receive $375 million and $721 million respectively.
But TIME certainly gets an A for effort. First, this stateside magazine with a largely US audience pretends that American government-funded BBG doesn’t exist. Then, it compares the financing of RT to the BBC World Service (with the BBC correctly coming out as more generously subsidized, even though TIME uses RT’s obsolete budget figure to narrow the gap), but pivots to a qualifier: “The BBC’s International Service is the biggest broadcast newsgathering operation in the world.”
To achieve this kind of status on such a relatively conservative budget would be remarkable indeed – if only it were true. The problem is that BBC’s “International Service” isn’t a thing in and of itself. It is the newsgathering department of BBC News (budget – $530 million), which is part of the British Broadcasting Corporation (budget – over $7 billion), funded through the license fee that is charged to every UK household with a TV.
This department feeds a substantial part of the content of BBC World News, the UK’s global news channel and RT’s closest counterpart. Formally, BBC World News is set up as a private entity (it is owned by BBC Global News Ltd, the commercial arm of the BBC) and its budget is unknown. BBC News also lends its resources (from newsgathering to the newsroom space) to the BBC World Service (that’s the mostly radio and online service with a $375-million budget that TIME talks about – also funded through the UK TV license). If by now all those structural and budgetary cross-overs seem a little murky, it’s because they are. TIME is obviously counting on its readers to gloss over the details.
So TIME laments: “What is the West to do in the face of a form of richly endowed propaganda?” Yes, what IS the West – with its BBG, BBC News/World News/World Service, CNN International (that has never contradicted a State Department position), Deutsche Welle, France 24, Euronews, and countless newspapers and magazines (including TIME ) read around the world – to do in the face of RT and its $225 million? Poor dears!
But the pièce de résistance of the article is my actual interview. Back in October, the TIME correspondent and I spoke in my offices for an hour-and-a-half. This discussion is reduced to some 60 words (in an essay of 2,800) spread across five quotes, plus there is one more quote from our London correspondent. So much for the “inside” look at RT, touted in the headline.
One of the quotes is from our discussion of what makes up the Russian point of view, the presentation of which is one of RT’s stated goals. I said that this worldview is “defined by certain principles expressed by the state: by representatives of the Russian state, if you talk to people on the street, if you look at different polls with Russian people as a whole – you will see that one of the important things that we do not like in the existing world order is the desire of Western countries to make unilateral judgments about what is good, what is bad in the countries far removed from them, about which they know very little, and take military actions based on those unilateral judgments.”
This is what is left of this quote in print: the worldview is “defined by certain principles expressed by the state, by representatives of the Russian state.” Notice a difference? Of the constituencies that are part of the Russian state and define its views, goals and grievances only state representatives make the cut. The opinion of the Russian people is irrelevant. A decade ago I might have been surprised.
By the way, sometimes those representatives call me on my “old yellow telephone” – in plain sight in my office where I give most of the interviews – “to discuss secret things.” What kinds of secret things? Mostly budgets (seeing as RT is publicly funded) and the president’s travel details to coordinate the work of our pool reporters. I said as much to the TIME reporter. Of course, only the conspiratorial-sounding “secret things” comment made the cut. Again, in the good old days I expected higher standards from the Western press…
There are also smaller, funnier fact- and bias-fails that have crept into the piece, like the detail that I gave my interview in the office just across the river from the Kremlin (did we move and I hadn’t noticed? At least someone remembered to pack the phone).
Or that in 2002 I “got a job as a reporter for state TV in Moscow, assigned to the Kremlin pool” – never mind that I’ve already been with the same employer for years, heading up the channel’s regional bureau and continuing my work as a war reporter, which started in 1999 in Chechnya, then took me to Abkhazia in 2001 and Beslan, North Ossetia in 2004.
(Side note: does TIME have a quota for how often Kremlin must be mentioned in an article about RT?)
Or that the “propaganda war” that the West is ostensibly losing is desperately “one-sided” (except for the headlines screaming about Russia’s “Uncontrolled Violence,” “Putin’s Missile”, “The Fascist in the Kremlin,” or how “Russia Wants to Restore Soviet Union”).
But if I had to nit-pick every piece of nonsense said or written about RT, I’d have no time left to run “Putin’s on-air machine.”
~
Margarita Simonyan is RT’s Editor-in-Chief.
Government deems security risks too low to ‘exempt defense from austerity,’ says think tank
RT | March 9, 2015
The government believes strategic threats posed to Britain are not serious enough to merit insulating military spending from budget cuts, according to a report by a top defense think-tank.
The paper by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) centers on the economics of defense under austerity.
It concludes: “The government is not yet convinced that strategic security risks are high enough to justify an exemption for defense from austerity.”
The findings jar with recent statements by politicians and leading generals on the dangers faced by the UK.
In February, the top British officer in NATO – General Sir Adrian Bradshaw – referred to Russia as an “obvious existential threat to our whole being,” while Prime Minister David Cameron has called the rise of the Islamic State a “mortal threat.”
The investigation also indicates Britain is unlikely to meet the symbolic spending of 2 percent of GDP on defense, expected by NATO in coming years, and that thousands of soldiers could be cut irrespective of who wins the general election this year.
It warns that up to 30,000 service personnel could be axed. Given the Royal Navy may be largely exempt from redundancies, to ensure it can crew Britain’s aircraft carriers, the army could be forced to handle 80 percent of the intended reductions.
The report comes at a difficult time for David Cameron who this week faces a rebellion by a number of Tory MP’s over defense cuts.
Last week Bob Stewart, an army colonel turned Tory MP, argued defense is in a “parlous state” and that service chiefs should resign over cuts. He suggested he might step down himself, either as an MP or from the influential Defence Select Committee.
UK allies are also worried. General Raymond Odierno, chief of staff of the US Army, recently told the Telegraph he was “very concerned” at the cuts being made to the UK’s armed forces.
He criticized Chancellor George Osborne’s refusal to confirm whether the UK will meet NATO member states’ spending target of 2 percent of respective national GDP.
“What has changed, though, is the level of capability. In the past we would have a British Army division working alongside an American army division,” he added. Cuts mean the US Army now expects Britain to provide only half its previous commitment.
Supreme Court spurns two Guantanamo appeals
RT | March 9, 2015
The US Supreme Court declined to hear two Guantanamo Bay appeals cases on Monday, upholding the decision of lower courts to reject a damages claim by a wrongfully detained Syrian, and block the release of alleged torture photographs of a Saudi national.
In the case of Janko v. Gates (14-650), the Supreme Court let stand a January 2014 ruling by the DC Circuit Court that rejected a claim by a Syrian national for damages after being wrongfully held in Guantanamo Bay for seven years.
US forces in Afghanistan captured Abd al-Rahim Abdul Razak al-Janko, a Syrian Kurd, at a Taliban prison in 2002, and held him as an “enemy combatant” at Guantanamo for years. He was released in 2009 after a federal court judge ruled his continued detention “defied common sense.”
Even though al-Janko had a formal federal adjudication that his detention had been unlawful, the DC Circuit Court rejected his claim for damages in January 2014, relying on a precedent in the 2012 Al-Zahrani v. Rodriguez case that “enemy combatants” could not sue the US government.
Steve Vladeck, a professor at the American University Washington College of Law, wrote at the time that such a ruling might mean that Congress could “foreclose federal jurisdiction” even on meritorious claims, and that this would have “obvious salience far beyond Guantanamo and the specific context of counterterrorism litigation.”
In the second case, Center for Constitutional Rights v. CIA (14-658), a human rights group was suing the government for release of documents pertaining to the “enhanced interrogation” of Saudi national Mohammed al-Qahtani.
Also known as “Detainee 063,” al-Qahtani was captured in Afghanistan in 2001, and held at Guantanamo Bay ever since. Documents describing his interrogations as torture were leaked to the press in 2006. All charges against him have been dismissed, but he remains imprisoned.
A federal court in New York had ruled in September 2014 that releasing the photos and videos of al-Qahtani’s interrogations would “harm national security,” because the images were “uniquely susceptible to use by anti-American extremists as propaganda to incite violence against United States interests domestically and abroad.”
Following the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the appeal, evidence of al-Qahtani’s treatment will remain secret from the public.
Pharmageddon: America’s bitter pill
RT | December 27, 2011
The United States has a passion for pills, being the world’s biggest users of psychotropic drugs, consuming 60 per cent of them. And pharmaceutical firms are keen to keep cashing in on the multibillion-dollar market, even if it costs people’s health.
America is regarded as a country with a prodigious appetite for consumption. Today, a widespread fondness for pharmaceuticals has turned the US into a nation of pill-poppers.
With over $14 billion in annual sales, antipsychotics remain the top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the US.
Dr. Harriet Fraad believes Big Pharma has manufactured a climate of insanity by manipulating and even creating illness for capital gain.
“One of the things that drives Big Pharma is to find a diagnosis that is very vague, so that everybody can fall into that,” she told RT. “Everybody is sad sometimes. There are good reasons. The point is to market pharmaceuticals. And the advertising strategy is to have vague diagnosis and then find wiggle room so that they apply to everyone.”
The US is the only Western country that allows direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs. For example, an ad for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder warns that untreated patients will likely end up divorced. Another commercial promises to make you happier, but side-effects may include dry mouth, insomnia, sexual dysfunction, diarrhea, nausea and sleepiness.”
Critics also say Big Pharma uses its financial muscle to ply doctors with gifts, cash kick-backs and research funding in exchange for endorsing or prescribing the latest and most lucrative drugs.
Harriet Fraad says there is a whole network of doctors hustling these drugs.
“If a patient comes in with a knee injury and says, ‘I’m so sad.’ Oh, are you depressed? Hey write a prescription! They’re given out like M&Ms.”
Last year, prescription drug abuse became the number one cause of accidental death, with more than 30,000 Americans overdosing.
For instance, Seroquel, medication for bi-polar disorder, generated $4.4 billion in sales last year.Listing all its side-effects requires 49 seconds of air-time.
The number of children consuming antipsychotic medication has doubled in the past decade. Millions of American adolescents are taking drugs like Adderall, doled out by doctors to treat hyperactivity.
Author of Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic, psychologist Bruce Levine, told RT that, “All these drugs are very similar to illicit or illegal drugs, except they’re more dangerous. Marijuana is a little safer. But kids have no choice.”
Pfizer, America’s most profitable multinational pharmaceutical company makes anti-depressants not only for people, but also for animals. In 2009, the pharmaceutical giant paid $2.3 billion to settle civil and criminal allegations over illegally marketing one of its drugs. It was the largest healthcare fraud settlement and criminal fine in US history.That being said, the fine amounted to less than three weeks of Pfizer’s drug sales.
“The money is so huge that the fines are immaterial. They’re not thinking about the social effects of what they’re doing. They’re thinking about the profits they accrue,” says psychotherapist Harriet Fraad.
The pharmaceutical industry remains the most profitable business in the US. More success and financial gain for the companies will always remain possible as long as more Americans are encouraged to take drugs.
Justice Dept set to charge NJ Senator Menendez with corruption
RT | March 6, 2015
An influential US senator will face federal corruption charges, concluding a two-year investigation into Sen. Robert Menendez (D-New Jersey), which has scrutinized a Florida eye doctor, underage prostitutes and accusations against the Cuban government.
Department of Justice prosecutors accuse Menendez, the senior senator from New Jersey and the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, used his powerful position to advance the business interests of Dr. Salomon Melgen, a close friend and financial benefactor, in exchange for gifts, several media outlets reported Friday afternoon. Attorney General Eric Holder has signed off on the requested charges, according to CNN.
The senator has consistently denied wrongdoing since the investigation became public in 2013.
“As we have said before, we believe all of Senator’s actions have been appropriate and lawful and the facts will ultimately confirm that,” Menendez spokesperson Tricia Enright said in a statement Friday. “Any actions taken by Senator Menendez or his office have been to appropriately address public policy issues and not for any other reason.”
The investigation began in the fall of 2012, when Menendez was running for reelection. A scandal erupted days before the vote, when he was accused of “inappropriate sexual activities with young prostitutes” on a 2010 trip to the Dominican Republic. Conservative news site the Daily Caller broke the story after GOP political operatives set up several Skype interviews with several women in the Dominican Republic who claimed the senator had paid them for sex.
According to the anonymous tip that launched the probe, Melgen provided the underage women, as well as free flights on his private plane, the Washington Post reported. The women later recanted their stories about meeting Menendez on the 2010 trip.
The New Jersey lawmaker vehemently denied that he employed any sex workers in the Dominican, and accused the Cuban government of hatching a plot to derail his political career; as the son of Cuban immigrants, he is one of several key Latinos in Congress aligned against any relaxation of the embargo on the island-nation.
Despite the women changing their stories, the FBI continued to investigate Menendez’s relationship with the Florida opthamologist.
The investigation began to focus on whether the senator intervened on Melgen’s behalf, asking Medicare to change its reimbursement policies that benefited the eye doctor to the tune of $8.9 million, money that he has since repaid, according to Politico.
Melgen was accused of overbilling the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) for his reimbursement for the drug Lucentis, a costly medication used to treat macular degeneration. During the billing dispute ‒ in 2009 and in 2012 ‒ Menendez urged the government agency to change its policy, which he said he considered to be unfair, the New York Times reported.
”The bottom line is, we raised concerns with CMS over policy and over ambiguities that are difficult for medical providers to understand and to seek a clarification of that and to make sure, in doing so, providers would understand how to attain themselves,” Menendez told the Associated Press in 2013.
In 2013, Menendez paid Melgen back $58,000 in return for the 2010 plane trips, and called his failure to disclose the flights ‒ as required by federal ethics laws ‒ an “oversight.” Along with the flights, the Florida doctor donated heavily to the senator’s campaign coffers, including $700,000 to a Democratic super PAC (political action committee) that spent heavily on Menendez’s 2012 reelection bid.
Prosecutors are also looking into whether the senator illegally advocated for Melgen in the Dominican Republic, where the opthamologist had a government contract for port screening equipment, CNN reported. When the US government was considering donating similar technology to the Caribbean nation, Menendez told both the State Department and the Commerce Department that the Dominican government was trying to get out of a contract with an unnamed American company that authorities there “[didn’t] want to live by.”
Melgen’s relationship with the senator isn’t the only one that might be mentioned in the government’s corruption charges against Menendez. The FBI also investigated his ties to the Isaias family. Brothers Roberto and William were banking magnates in Ecuador when they fled to the US after they were accused of embezzling tens of millions of dollars from the country’s largest bank before it collapsed, Politico reported. The New Jersey lawmaker is accused of illegally helping the brothers gain permanent residency while fighting their extradition cases, according to CNN. Menendez also assisted Roberto’s daughter Estefania with visa problems.
The Isaias family donated $10,000 to Menendez’s 2012 Senate campaign and more than $100,000 to the Democratic Party. The senator served as the chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee ‒ the party’s chief fundraiser for upper chamber candidates ‒ from 2009 to 2011.
If Menendez is unable to remain in office due to the corruption charges, it is unclear who might replace him, the Washington Post reported. New Jersey Democrats are focusing on winning the governorship when current Gov. Chris Christie (R) leaves office in 2017, and members of the state’s delegation in the House are not likely to run for the Senate seat.
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Elite Western universities are a corrupt, parasitic empire
Instead of high-quality education, these institutions are fostering a global neo-feudal system reminiscent of the British Raj
By Dr. Mathew Maavak | RT | May 30, 2025
In a move that has ignited a global uproar, US President Donald Trump banned international students from Harvard University, citing “national security” and ideological infiltration. The decision, which has been widely condemned by academics and foreign governments alike, apparently threatens to undermine America’s “intellectual leadership and soft power.” At stake is not just Harvard’s global appeal, but the very premise of open academic exchange that has long defined elite higher education in the US.
But exactly how ‘open’ is Harvard’s admissions process? Every year, highly qualified students – many with top-tier SAT or GMAT test scores – are rejected, often with little explanation. Critics argue that behind the prestigious Ivy League brand lies an opaque system shaped by legacy preferences, DEI imperatives, geopolitical interests, and outright bribes. George Soros, for instance, once pledged $1 billion to open up elite university admissions to drones who would read from his Open Society script.
China’s swift condemnation of Trump’s policy added a layer of geopolitical irony to the debate. Why would Beijing feign concern for “America’s international standing” amid a bitter trade war? The international standing of US universities has long been tarnished by a woke psychosis which spread like cancer to all branches of the government.
So, what was behind China’s latest gripe? ... continue
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