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February 19, 2015

Turkey: Murder of Student Ozgecan Aslan inTurkey causes Uproar and Focus on Women’s Rights - by RM

The burned body of Turkish female student Ozgecan Aslan discovered on Feb. 13 in a riverbed in the Tarsus district of Mersin in Turkey has enraged people from all walks of life around Turkey.

This has resulted in many demonstrations around the country, where both women and men have expressed their anger and called for justice and equal women's rights in the culturally male dominated Turkish environment.

Female empowerment still lags in most Muslim countries including Turkey. Despite the progress made there in regard to women during the 20th century through the efforts by its first President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey now faces attempts at going backwards again by defining women’s role as mainly domestic.

Even recently elected Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that women and men cannot be equal because it “goes against the laws of nature.”

The sheer size of Turkey’s protests, however, are perhaps the most important indication yet of how much Muslim women today are challenging traditional male dominance based on the old interpretations of gender roles within Islam.

Almere-Digest

Greece: Which Side Are You On, Jeroen Dijsselbloem? - by David Lizoain

Just over a hundred years have passed since the greatest failure of European social democracy. The workers’ movement was unable to halt the needless slaughter of World War I. First, Jean Jaures was assassinated, silencing his powerful anti-militarist voice. Soon after, the German SPD voted to authorize war credits for the Kaiser. Proletarian internationalism gave way to social patriotism.

Between the collapse of the Second International during the war and the divergent responses to the Russian Revolution, a rift opened up between socialists and communists in Europe that persists until this day.

Representatives of these two political traditions now find themselves at odds in a Eurogroup presided by Jeroen Dijsselbloem of the Dutch PvdA. The backdrop is one where events in the Balkans have the capability of triggering a much bigger conflict. And once more a situation has arisen where ultimatums issued by the strong against the weak run the risk of only making the conflagration worse.

The key points of disagreement are not technical but political. The eventual size of Greece’s primary surplus, for instance, is important for economic but also symbolic reasons. The real issue is what sort of Europe will emerge out of the ongoing negotiations.

One possible outcome is a deepening of a Europe split on debtor-creditor lines, organized in a manner that leads to an ever-increasing divergence between the core and the periphery. This is a Europe divided into those who give charity and those who beg for alms, as opposed to a Europe with automatic mechanisms of solidarity. This is a Europe acting as a potent incubator for mutual recriminations and rapid breakdowns in good will.

Merkel, Rajoy, and Passos Coelho all favour this outcome. In spite of their different national circumstances, they are united in their preference for a hard line on account of shared preferences and a shared project. The ties that bind them are ideological.

Many social democrats too are reproducing the debtor-creditor fault line. In the midst of the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression, with democracy being hollowed out, with inequality on the rise, and with the far right on the march, social democracy is once more unable to act as a cohesive European actor. And the rise of Syriza has exposed its internal contradictions.

Read more: Which Side Are You On, Jeroen Dijsselbloem?

February 9, 2015

France: Hooded gunmen fire at police in Marseille

Hooded gunmen armed with Kalashnikov rifles fired on police in the French city of Marseille, where Prime Minister Manuel Valls was paying a visit on Monday, a police source said.

Elite police trooops were being sent to the scene, in the northern suburbs of the Mediterranean port city, after the shots, the source said by telephone.

Police had originally arrived in the area, a suburb to the north of Marseille, after locals reported weapons being discharged into the air.

However when they arrived they found themselves targeted. The shots reportedly missed by only a couple of feet.

The area was cordonned off and locals, including children evacuated or ordered indoors

Read more: Hooded gunmen fire at police in Marseille | euronews, world news

Banking Industry: British HSBC ‘helped clients dodge millions in tax’

The Swiss arm of British banking giant HSBC helped wealthy clients dodge taxes and hide millions of dollars from authorities, according to a report by a network of investigative journalists released Sunday based on a cache of leaked bank files.

The allegations prompted the bank to release a statement admitting it was “accountable for past compliance and control failures” at its Swiss subsidiary HSBC Private Bank.

The files, analysed by reporters in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in collaboration with more than 140 journalists from 45 countries, showed that British banking giant HSBC provided accounts to international criminals, corrupt businessmen, politicians and celebrities.

"HSBC profited from doing business with arms dealers who channeled mortar bombs to child soldiers in Africa, bag men for Third World dictators, traffickers in blood diamonds and other international outlaws," ICIJ reported.

The leaked files were first obtained by French daily Le Monde, which then distributed them through the ICIJ to news outlets around the world, including The Guardian in the UK, Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung and 60 Minutes in the USA, who published their reports simultaneously on Sunday.

The Guardian alleged in its report that the files showed HSBC’s Swiss bank routinely allowed clients to withdraw “bricks” of cash, often in foreign currencies which were of little use in Switzerland, marketed schemes which were likely to enable wealthy clients to avoid European taxes and colluded to conceal undeclared accounts from domestic tax authorities.

Read more: Business - HSBC ‘helped clients dodge millions in tax’ - France 24

USA: What happened to the Hippocratic Oath? Can Pharmaceutical And Medical Industry Still Be Trusted ?

Hippocratic Oath has been shoved under the mat?
I-Lawsuit noted recently “Medical professionals like doctors and pharmacists prescribe to the Hippocratic Oath before starting their practice.

The oath is believed to have been written by ancient Greek Philsopher Hippocrates and dates back to 5th Century BC.  When translated notable parts include to, “keep patients from harm and injustice”, and to practice medicine in both “purity and holiness”.

But are they keeping that Oath?

Undoubtedly there are more doctors who care about the quality of patient care over personal profit, but what about the professionals who are willing to take bribes to endorse a product?

In-between doctors and pharmaceutical companies are the little-known championers of the pharmaceutical industry- the drug reps.

According to Glassdoor the average Pharma sales rep made more than $80,000 last year while the average biotech rep pulled in $152,000 dollars a year- 6 times more than the average American citizen.

Pharma representatives rarely have any formal education in science with the majority holding a BA in the liberal arts or business.

A former rep for Eli Lily revealed that he was the only member of his team with a background in science, and that the majority of his coworkers were “former cheerleaders and ex-models”.

Base salaries begin at $60,000 for new reps and $150,000 for a seasoned biotech representative- but perks don’t stop there. Johnson & Johnson’s reps celebrated on internet forumswhen they were given a chance to partake in a new fleet of Audi A3’s, with a MSRP of over $27,000.

With commission ranging from 10-15%, a company car, free gas and bank account the job is undeniably sexy,  but pharma reps aren’t the only ones who are benefitting from Big Pharma’s generosity.

Doctors who endorse their products routinely receive gifts as well. Medical giant Medtronic shocked the media when it was discovered they had bribed a team of 13 doctors  $210 million over the course of 15 years to post favorable studies of the off-label use of their INFUSE bone graft.

Many patients who received the bone grafts became paralyzed or died from complications stemming from the uncontrollable bone growth.

Consequently large drug companies have grown "wealthy beyond imagination" through blockbuster drugs that depended on government-funded research—and by committing fraud.

Elisabeth Warren, a Democratic Senator recently noted that over the past 10 years, some of the US's wealthiest drug companies—those that capitalize on government research to generate billions of dollars in revenues through the sale of blockbuster drugs—have found another way to boost profits".

Warren said, in a prepared text of her speech at an event sponsored by the health care advocacy group Families USA. "They've been caught defrauding Medicare and Medicaid, withholding critical safety information about their drugs, marketing their drugs for uses that aren't approved, and giving doctors kickbacks for writing prescriptions for their drugs."

Democrats have largely laid off the pharmaceutical industry since the legislative debate over the Affordable Care Act, when drugmakers agreed to support the bill as long as it didn't include certain policies. And Warren—whose home state is home to several large drug companies—praised the industry's scientific advances.

But, said Warren, drug companies paid roughly $13 billion in settlements with the federal government
between 2007 and 2012. "That doesn't happen without serious wrongdoing."

After 1978 Bayer (a German Company) and other pharmaceutical companies produced Factor VIII and IX.
The product was designed for hemophiliacs, people who suffer from a genetic disorder whose blood can not clot to stave bleeding. As a result, even a minor cut could cause them to bleed out and lose dangerous levels of blood. Factor VII is harvested from the blood plasma of non-hemophiliacs, but to purportedly to cut costs Bayer harvested blood from pools of “high risk” individuals.

This included:  prison populations, intravenous drug users and blood from clinics with a large amount of homosexual donors. Federal law also forbids the use of blood from an individual with a history  of viral hepatitis- but Bayer and other companies failed to enact strict prerequisites for blood farming. As a result, thousands of hemophiliacs died from the HIV- tainted blood plasma.

Senator Warren said, "it seems that the biggest drug companies are increasingly playing by a different set of rules than everyone else," Warren said. "The government has kicked thousands of small and medium-sized physician practices out of the Medicare program for fraud, but not one of these major drug companies has ever been kicked out. The government convicts hundreds of people of health care fraud every year, but not one of these major drug company cases has even gone to trial."

Warren in a bill proposed to the Senate wants pharmaceutical companies to fund more of the basic research conducted by the National Institutes of Health. Many blockbuster drugs do stem, at least in part, from NIH research.

Under Warren's proposal, "the biggest and most successful drug companies" would have to contribute to the NIH's budget whenever they settle criminal accusations with the federal government. In addition to the fines that companies already pay, they would have to contribute 1 percent of their annual profits to the NIH for five years.

"It's like a swear jar: Whenever a huge drug company that is generating enormous profits as a result of federal research investments gets caught breaking the law—and wants off the hook—it has to put some money in the jar to help fund the next generation of medical research," Warren said.

If such a policy had been in place over the past five years, NIH would have seen a budget bump of about $6 billion—or 20 percent—per year, she said.

In the meantime, however, in the US, the boundaries between the drug companies, FDA, and doctors have became increasingly blurred. FDA officials sometimes move to jobs in the pharmaceutical industry, which means they may not want to burn their bridges with industry.

The same FDA officials who approve the drugs are responsible for monitoring them after they are on the market, which gives them an obvious disincentive to say that the drugs they earlier certified as safe were now unsafe.

Finally, the FDA gets input from outside advisory panels made up of doctors who are experts in their fields. Most of these doctors receive payments as consultants, research grants and support for travel to conferences from drug companies.

In some cases, the doctors are working as paid consultants to the same companies whose drugs are coming up for approval by their advisory committees.

The US is the only country in the world where you can turn on the TV and have an announcer tell you to go ‘ask your doctor’ for a drug.

Doctors often will give medications to patients even if they don’t think they need it. For example, one study showed that 54% of the time doctors will prescribe a specific brand and type of medication if patients ask for it.

Drugs on the average cost twice as much in the US than in Canada or Europe . US  Dr's also prescribe more drugs to their "patients" than any other nation in the world

The argument drug manufacturers make for the high cost of their products is that the money supports research and development of new life-saving medicine. And they also say that expensive advertising is needed not to sell drugs, but to educate doctors and patients. Indeed, a whopping 80% of their budgets is used for marketing and advertising, certainly not education.

 Some things definitely are broken and need fixing in the US Pharmaceutical and Medical Industry.

A Special EU-Digest Report





Greece: Defiant Greece sets itself on collision course with European partners - by Deepa Babington and Renee Maltezou

Leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras laid out plans on Sunday to dismantle Greece’s “cruel” austerity programme, ruling out any extension of its international bailout and setting himself on a collision course with his European partners.

In his first major speech to parliament since storming to power last month, Tsipras rattled off a list of moves to reverse reforms imposed by European and International Monetary Fund lenders: from reinstating pension bonuses and cancelling a property tax to ending mass layoffs and raising the mininum wage back to pre-crisis levels.

Showing little intent to heed warnings from EU partners to stick to commitments in the 240 billion euro bailout, Tsipras said he intended to fully respect campaign pledges to heal the “wounds” of the austerity.

Greece would achieve balanced budgets but would no longer produce unrealistic primary budget surpluses, he said, a reference to requirements to be in the black excluding debt repayments.

“The bailout failed,” the 40-year-old leader told parliament to applause. “We want to make clear in every direction what we are not negotiating. We are not negotiating our national sovereignty.”

In a symbolic move that appeared to take direct aim at Greece’s biggest creditor, Tsipras finished off his speech with a pledge to seek World War II reparations from Germany.

Tsipras ruled out an extending the bailout beyond Feb. 28 when it is due to end, but said he believed a deal with European partners could be struck on a so-called “bridge” agreement within the next 15 days to keep Greece afloat.

Read more: Defiant Greece sets itself on collision course with European partners - The Globe and Mail

February 5, 2015

ECB ups the pressure on Greece and its promises to renegotiate its debt

Pressure is growing on Greece and it finance minister to toe the line and stick to its financial commitments.

The European Central Bank on Wednesday brought forward a ban on the debt-stricken country using its bonds as collateral for cash.

It means that a waiver that allowed Greece to swap its junk-related debt for money will now expire on February 11, weeks earlier that the previous deadline of February 28.

Greek banks will still have access to funds through the ECB’s emergency lending programme but even here there are moves to tighten up conditions for access to that financial mechanism.

Read more: ECB ups the pressure on Greece and its promises to renegotiate its debt | euronews, world news