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 …

Drugs and crime chief says $352bn in criminal proceeds was effectively laundered by financial institutions

Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations‘ drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the …

Who says teenage stalkers and demanding bosses send the most irksome text messages? Not Elizabeth Espinal.
The New Yorker recently sued Miami-Dade’s mammoth supplier of most things fast and greasy, Burger King, claiming the company acted like an ex-boyfriend who couldn’t take a hint: It repeatedly text-messaged her — with spam ads — although she told it to get lost.
Espinal’s contention: Burger King “caused actual harm” by harassing her with the “cryptic” messages, according the lawsuit. Espinal was “subjected to aggravation” and made to pay for receiving them. Now she …

Former high roller Terry Watanabe is accusing Harrah’s of some serious funny business in Las Vegas.

In what may be the nastiest spat since the days when Vegas handled disputes outside of court—if you get my meaning—Watanabe has filed a lawsuit accusing the casino giant of plying him with alcohol and prescription drugs in an attempt to keep him gambling. In the end, he says he lost more than $100 million.

Watanabe made his money with his father in the import/export business, running Oriental Trading Co. in Omaha, Nebraska. He sold …

SAN FRANCISCO — In January, Mike Rowland was so broke that he had to raid his retirement savings to move here from Boston.
A week ago, he and a couple of buddies bought a two-unit apartment building for nearly a million dollars. They had only a little cash to bring to the table but, with the federal government insuring the transaction, a large down payment was not necessary.
“It was kind of crazy we could get this big a loan,” said Mr. Rowland, 27. “If a government official came out here, …

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which got $10 billion and debt guarantees from the U.S. government in October, expects to pay $14 million in taxes worldwide for 2008 compared with $6 billion in 2007.
The company’s effective income tax rate dropped to 1 percent from 34.1 percent, New York-based Goldman Sachs said today in a statement. The firm reported a $2.3 billion profit for the year after paying $10.9 billion in employee compensation and benefits.
Goldman Sachs, which today reported its first quarterly loss since going public in 1999, lowered its rate …

For Plymouth Rock team, money woes, questions crowding out hopes

David P. Kirkpatrick seemed to relish the role of big-shot Hollywood insider as he briefed state development officials about his bold plan to challenge Tinseltown at its own game.

And the former head of Paramount Motion Pictures certainly sounded like the right man to build a huge movie and TV studio in Massachusetts. He talked about how he helped bring “Forrest Gump’’ to life. He casually referred to Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston …

Bread on the busbars could have seen ‘dump caverns’ used

A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week which saw significant overheating in sections of the mighty particle-punisher’s subterranean 27-km supercooled magnetic doughnut.
According to scientists at the project, had the LHC been operational – it is scheduled to recommence beaming later this month – the snag would have caused it to fail safe and shut down automatically. This would put the mighty machine …

Now this is ridiculous. Not only did Apple pull all the unofficial Google Voice apps out of the App Store for an absurd reason, now they expect the developers of those apps to fund refunds out of their own pockets.
Read more at: Gizmodo

WE HUMANS have let loose something extraordinary on our planet – a third replicator – the consequences of which are unpredictable and possibly dangerous.
What do I mean by “third replicator”? The first replicator was the gene – the basis of biological evolution. The second was memes – the basis of cultural evolution. I believe that what we are now seeing, in a vast technological explosion, is the birth of a third evolutionary process. We are Earth’s Pandoran species, yet we are blissfully oblivious to what we have let out …

. . . But Anna Wintour’s proposed solution really takes the cake. The Vogue editor stood up to offer, “Could someone lead a committee that would make ground rules for retailers of when the discounting starts, and then all the retailers can agree to it?” Von Furstenberg interjected that that was illegal — in fact, if the big department stores had any such agreement, it would amount to price-fixing and collusion, an anti-trust lawsuit in the making. “Is that something we can change?” asked Wintour. “We have friends in …

Network Solutions is investigating a breach on its servers that may have led to the theft of credit card data of 573,928 people who made purchases on Web sites hosted by the company.
Networks Solutions notified 4,343 of its nearly 10,000 e-commerce merchant customers on Friday about the breach. It affects 573,928 cardholders whose name, address, and credit card number were exposed between March 12 and June 8, said Susan Wade, a spokeswoman for Network Solutions.
Mysterious code was discovered in early June on servers hosting e-commerce customer sites during routine …

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill saying that anyone offering an open Wi-Fi connection to the public must report illegal images including “obscene” cartoons and drawings–or face fines of up to $300,000.
That broad definition would cover individuals, coffee shops, libraries, hotels, and even some government agencies that provide Wi-Fi. It also sweeps in social-networking sites, domain name registrars, Internet service providers, and e-mail service providers such as Hotmail and Gmail, and it may require that the complete contents of the user’s account be retained …

Earlier today we mentioned that Digg.com appears to have changed the behavior of its short URLs so they no longer go to the source of the story for logged-out users: instead they direct visitors to a landing page on Digg (Digg).com.
The change has many negative implications for publishers, including the fact that readers who think they are creating a link to your content are actually just pushing traffic to Digg.
Now Digg appears to have confirmed this questionable move was intentional. While we’ve yet to receive a response to our …

A man diagnosed with terminal cancer and given six months to live is to sue the NHS – after his “tumour” turned out to be a harmless abscess.

Phil Collins, 61, quit his job, planned his own funeral and blew £18,000 from a pension pay-out after being told he had inoperable gallbladder and liver cancer.
He fulfilled a lifelong dream of buying a Triumph motorbike, bought wife Isabel a car and made financial arrangements to ensure she was secure after his death.
But when the six month deadline passed he went back …

The original recordings of the first humans landing on the moon 40 years ago were erased and re-used, but newly restored copies of the original broadcast look even better, NASA officials said on Thursday.

NASA released the first glimpses of a complete digital make-over of the original landing footage that clarifies the blurry and grainy images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the surface of the moon.

The full set of recordings, being cleaned up by Burbank, California-based Lowry Digital, will be released in September. The preview is available …

.rar 32MB. A distributed real-time co-located high-frequency trading platform… A very low latency (microseconds) event-driven market data processing, strategy and order submission engine.

Update: Some Readers Don’t Know What the Hell Any of This Means
In short: I gamed Google and tricked people who were looking for the stolen Goldman Sachs software to come to my site… So I could see which organizations they were involved with. It’s a mystery to me why more organizations don’t hide what their people are doing online (ask any 12 year old computer …

A Racine man must give a deer head he took from a roadside carcass to wildlife officials, a state appeals court ruled today.

According to the ruling from the 2nd District Court of Appeals, John Longo found a dead deer on the side of the road near his home in February 2008. He loaded it into his truck, took it home and ate it. He had the deer’s head mounted and hung it in his home, court documents show.
Longo, now 69, didn’t immediately return a message left at a residential …