Today's Stories

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

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From Vioxx to Vytorin

Merck is a Repeat Offender

By MARTHA ROSENBERG

Even as Merck seeks closure on its Vioxx nightmare by paying $4.85 billion to tens of thousands of plaintiffs who took the painkiller--not that it did anything wrong--the bad ink continues.

Articles about Vioxx, withdrawn from the market in 2004 for doubling stroke and heart attack risk, in the April 16, 2008 JAMA charge Merck disguised mortality data it submitted from Vioxx trials to the FDA and wrote the scientific papers itself it claimed were penned by doctors.

Merck transposed its own clinical study results of 34 deaths in the Vioxx group and 12 in the placebo group to 29 deaths in the Vioxx group and 17 in the placebo group when it submitted data to the FDA write Bruce Psaty, MD, PhD; and Richard Kronmal, PhD, professors at the University of Washington in JAMA. Worse, Merck knew as early as 2001 that participants in Vioxx trials who had Alzheimer's disease were dying at three times the rate of those taking placebo.

Articles extolling Vioxx as the Super Aspirin were also a product of Merck machinations says another article in JAMA. They were actually ghostwritten from Merck's own research with doctors' "guest author" names attached as an afterthought write Joseph S. Ross, MD, MHS, Kevin P. Hill, MD, MHS and two other authors on the basis of 250 court documents they examined.

Merck marketing, with Schering-Plough, of Vytorin, the cholesterol drug exposed as no more effective than generics in January, is also under scrutiny in a House Energy and Commerce Committee investigation.

In fact it was the investigation, begun in December 2007, that pried loose the results of the Enhance study which Merck and Schering-Plough were sitting on since April 2006-- despite clearance by consultant Michiel Bots--while they tried to change end points apparently to spin the data and unloaded Schering-Plough stock, say published reports.

"I would like for the companies to explain why they didn't proceed with data analysis after Dr. Bots' independent consultation report indicated the data were 'fine,'" Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), chairman of the committee, said to The Star-Ledger.

In May, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing into deceptive drug industry marketing also looked at Merck's multimillion dollar "cholesterol from two sources: food and family" Vytorin campaign in light of the suppressed Enhance study results.

"Many consumers may not have taken Vytorin had they been aware of the study results," said Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) to Deepak Khanna, senior vice president of the Merck and Schering-Plough joint venture, according to The Star-Ledger.

Nor are other Merck drugs doing well.

Fosamax, Merck's osteoporosis drug, was already facing more than 100 suits for causing osteonecrosis of the jaw or jaw bone death--added to its warning label in 2005--when a new wrinkle emerged. Women who took Fosamax were twice as likely to have atrial fibrillation, a chronically irregular heartbeat, as those who didn't says an article in the April 28, 2008 Archives of Internal Medicine, echoing a New England Journal of Medicine article last year.

And Singulair, Merck's allergy and asthma pill is under FDA review for possible suicide side effects.

But even as jokes appear about the number of Merck staffers required to change a light bulb--10 to call it a breakthrough, 10 to conference call Wall Street, 10 to suppress evidence it's been done before and more safely and one to change the bulb--Merck is repeating its mistakes.

In April, it tried to launch a new cholesterol drug, Cordaptive, that combines niacin, a B vitamin which raises HDL but causes facial flushing with laropiprant, an anti-flushing drug, without waiting for study results, like it did with Vytorin.

Not only did the company want to start making money before safety was established in a 20,000 patient study that ends in 2012, Merck admits there are "theoretical" safety concerns about laropiprant's effect on the liver, according to The Star-Ledger.

Plus, the science behind Cordaptive--that raising HDL, or good cholesterol will result in fewer heart attacks and strokes--is no longer reliable, says The Star-Ledger's George E. Jordan.

"The utility of biomarkers was turned on its ear in a study of GlaxoSmithKlein's diabetes pill Avandia, which found it lowered blood sugar in patients but resulted in elevated heart risks," he writes. "Vytorin dramatically reduced LDL, but it worked no better at clearing clogged arteries than a generic drug five times less expensive."

No wonder the FDA rejected Cordaptive out of hand, causing Merck to cut 1,200 sales jobs and add to its anti-fan club.

Merck didn't even do simple market research. Vitamin and drug stores have been selling flush free niacin for years. A bottle costs about $9.95.

Martha Rosenberg is staff cartoonist on the Evanston Roundtable. She can be reached at mrosenberg@evmark.org

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