James Temple of the San Francisco Chronicle blogs that Google’s departure from its usual iterative, customer attentive release philosophy has earned the company a class action lawsuit on top of widespread derision. “A class action complaint filed in San Jose federal court alleges that Google Inc. broke the law when its controversial Google Buzz service [answer to a question nobody asked] shared personal data without the consent of users,” Temple writes. The suit relies in part on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Up until now there have been Google and Gmail features that I celebrate, ones that I help improve and ones that I ignore. Buzz became the first that I loathe.

As reported in the New York Times:

North Korea declared Friday that it was in the “concluding stage” of tests to enrich uranium. Its statement would appear to end a decade-long debate within American intelligence agencies about whether the country was working on a second pathway to building nuclear weapons.

The statement came in a brief announcement by the official North Korean news agency, quoting what it said was a letter from the North Korean government to the United Nations. No details were offered, and the use of the word “tests” suggests that the country may only be experimenting and has not yet undertaken the huge expense required to install the thousands of centrifuges necessary to produce enough uranium for a nuclear weapon.

The CBS Evening News says the government “hit Pfizer, the world’s largest drug maker, with a record $2.3 billion in fines for violating federal drug marketing rules. Among other things, Pfizer was accused of promoting the pain medication Bextra [valdecoxib] for unapproved uses.” NBC Nightly News added that “[Pfizer is] admitting that the painkiller Bextra and 12 other drugs were promoted for what’s known as off-label use, which the FDA says put public health at risk in the process.” While ABC World News exclaimed “Bextra became a blockbuster, bringing in $1.2 billion a year, as sales reps assured doctors it could be used not just for arthritis, but for any acute pain.  In exchange for hearing company sales pitches, doctors were paid up to $1,500 to attend meetings, and were treated to conferences at lush resorts, given air fare, hotels, meals, even massages.”

In the Washington Post:

Officials at the departments of Justice and Health and Human Services called the agreement with Pfizer and one of its subsidiaries a cautionary example of their strategy to team up with states to police errant health-care businesses.

The Wall Street Journal:

The settlement disclosed on Wednesday was the largest ever by a drug maker accused of marketing wrongdoing. Pfizer said in January that it had recorded a $2.3 billion settlement-related charge in the fourth quarter.

Bloomberg:

The four-year investigation uncovered a range of practices, including kickback payments to doctors in the sale of nine other drugs, among them the impotence drug Viagra and cholesterol pill Lipitor, officials said. The agreement resolves all “material pending matters” with the Justice Department, Pfizer’s general counsel, Amy W. Schulman, said in a statement.

The Los Angeles Times:

The settlement reflects an emphasis by the Obama administration on holding U.S. healthcare corporations accountable for their activities, especially in trying to market drugs to patients and doctors for uses that have not been approved, Justice Department officials and legal experts said. They also noted that several states, and federal prosecutors in various jurisdictions, had been investigating Pfizer for much of the eight years of the Bush administration as well.

The New York Times:

Although the investigation began and largely ended during the Bush administration, top Obama administration officials held a news conference on Wednesday to celebrate the settlement, thank each other for resolving it and promise more crackdowns on health fraud.

USA Today:

As part of the settlement, Pfizer will pay a criminal fine of $1.195 billion, the largest criminal fine ever imposed in the USA for any matter, according to the Justice Department. Pharmacia & Upjohn must pay a $105 million criminal fine.

The Associated Press:

As part of its illegal marketing, Pfizer invited doctors to consultant meetings at resort locations, paying their expenses and providing perks, prosecutors said.

“They were entertained with golf, massages, and other activities,” said Mike Loucks, the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts.

Loucks said that even as Pfizer was negotiating deals on past misconduct, they were continuing to violate the very same laws with other drugs.

To prevent backsliding this time, Pfizer’s conduct will be specially monitored by the Health and Human Service Department inspector general for five years.

In an unusual twist, the head of the Justice Department, Attorney General Eric Holder, did not participate in the record settlement, because he had represented Pfizer on these issues while in private practice.

The American Lawyer

Lawyers for whistle blowers have been working on the cases for about three years, according to Simmer and Barbara Bonar, name partner at the Kentucky-based litigation boutique B. Dahlenburg Bonar and another one of the whistle blower attorneys. Bonar represented Robert Liter, a former Pfizer salesman who marketed the anti-epilepsy drug Lyrica, she says. Once the federal government got involved in the whistle blower cases, Bonar says she focused primarily on obtaining information and passing it along to the government. Simmer says the whistle blower attorneys mostly focused on tracking down other Pfizer sales reps to corroborate their clients’ stories.

Blog posts and comments from August 28th – 31st have been lost due a hardware failure and recovery from backup.

Surry.

From DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show reported in The New York Times:

Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.

The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.

“You can just engineer a crime scene,” said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper, which has been published online by the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics. “Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”

Fingerprint matches, tool marks, bite marks  and other forensic disciplines are likewise more suspect and before. Some are bunk while others are less scientifically rigorous than juries are lead to believe.