CNN’s Special Investigations Unit reveals internal company documents on Bextra and Pfizer’s health care fraud. Watch at 3 p.m. ET Saturday on CNN.
Imagine being charged with a crime, but an imaginary friend takes the rap for you.
That is essentially what happened when Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, was caught illegally marketing Bextra, a painkiller that was taken off the market in 2005 because of safety concerns.
When the criminal case was announced last fall, federal officials touted their prosecution as a model for tough, effective enforcement. “It sends a clear message” to the pharmaceutical industry, said Kevin Perkins, assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division.
But beyond the fanfare, a CNN Special Investigation found another story, one that officials downplayed when they declared victory. It’s a story about the power major pharmaceutical companies have even when they break the laws intended to protect patients.
Read more at: CNN Health
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{Photography by Wadem}
This morning we broke the news that Canopy Financial, no. 12 on this year’s Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies, is a complete sham.
And it’s no surprise that today, everyone is trying to point the finger at everyone else.
The company’s investment bank, Financial Technology Partners, which has represented Canopy Financial through at least two separate rounds of fraudulent fundraising, emailed to say:
“Hi there, I’d respectfully ask for some consideration here and would like to have our information / logos / screenshots taken off of your Canopy Financial posts. We clearly had no clue about any such wrongdoing and exposure to this is not something we are interested in. Understand you guys are all about the news, but we’re a small firm and had nothing to do with this. Please pass to Michael Arrington if you don’t mind.”
Read more at: TechCrunch
Related articles: Canopy Financial Accused Of Serious Financial Fraud, Investors Burned.
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{Photography by The Rich Brooks}
If you want to sell something to TechCrunch, or anyone, the best way of going about it isn’t to call people at their home number, accuse them of dishonesty, and then follow up with an email requesting a clearly unethical trading of services.
All those things happened to me in the last five minutes. An account executive from CDNetworks
called on my home phone to discuss our content delivery needs. I said we were all set. I was asked if I traded content delivery for PR. I said “yes, we always trade stories for free stuff,” and, when she didn’t hear the sarcasm, told her I wasn’t being serious and that I was offended. We hung up.
Then I get a cheery email offering content delivery in “some type of exchange for some article write up or PR with TechCrunch.”
Read more at: TechCrunch
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{Photography by Mickey}
Graphic designers (UnderConsideration LLC), authors, and Internet instigators Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio recently closed their influential design blog Speak Up and left New York to set up shop in Austin, Texas. Besides the fact that their mortgage now nets them double the square-footage, not much has changed for the husband-and-wife team: They still run several blogs, including the popular branding blog Brand New, work for clients, and write books, including their newest, Graphic Design Referenced, published by Rockport. The highly-visual guide highlights the industry’s technical terms, historical moments, and influential practitioners with over 2,000 projects, so we asked Vit and Gomez-Palacio to dig out the 12 juiciest stories about our favorite brands for some salacious summer design reading.
Read more at: Fast Companyt
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{Photography by Pink Sherbet Photography}
This is the full copy of the research note written by Matthew Robson (aged 15 years and seven months), an intern at Morgan Stanley, which caused a stir after it was published by the bank
Radio
Most teenagers nowadays are not regular listeners to radio. They may occasionally tune in, but they do not try to listen to a program specifically. The main reason teenagers listen to the radio is for music, but now with online sites streaming music for free they do not bother, as services such as last.fm do this advert free, and users can choose the songs they want instead of listening to what the radio presenter/DJ chooses.
Television
Most teenagers watch television, but usually there are points in the year where they watch more than average. This is due to programs coming on in seasons, so they will watch a particular show at a certain time for a number of weeks (as long as it lasts) but then they may watch no television for weeks after the program has ended.
Teenage boys (generally) watch more TV when it is the football season, often watching two games and related shows a week (totalling about 5 hours of viewing). A portion of teenagers watches programs that are regular (such as soap operas) at least five times a week for half an hour or so but this portion is shrinking, as it is hard to find the time each day.
Teenagers are also watching less television because of services such as BBC iPlayer, which allows them to watch shows when they want. Whilst watching TV, adverts come on quite regularly (18 minutes of every hour) and teenagers do not want to watch these, so they switch to another channel, or do something else whilst the adverts run.
The majority of teenagers I speak to have Virgin Media as their provider, citing lower costs but similar content of Sky. A fraction of teenagers have Freeview but these people are light users of TV (they watch about 1 ½ hours per week) so they do not require the hundreds of channels that other providers offer.
Newspapers
No teenager that I know of regularly reads a newspaper, as most do not have the time and cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text while they could watch the news summarised on the internet or on TV. (Read more at: guardian.co.uk)
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{Photography by Orange Acid}
