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The sick reality: Drugs advertised most on TV have LEAST health benefits, according to analysis of $6bn-a-year industry

The drugs that are advertised most on TV are also the least effective, according to a major analysis.

Johns Hopkins University researchers found that spending on promoting prescription drugs rose from $1.3 billion in 1996 to $6 billion in 2016. Ninety-two of 135 drugs included in the study, or nearly 70 percent, were deemed to have little health benefits. 

Dr Michael DiStefano, the lead author of the study, said: ‘The findings suggest that shifting promotional dollars to direct-to-consumer advertising potentially reflects a strategy to drive patient demand for drugs that clinicians would be less likely to prescribe.’

‘When a consumer sees these advertisements on TV or social media, they should really question if it’s the best drug for them and have a conversation with their provider.’

The findings come amid lingering ethical questions regarding TV drug advertising and come just weeks after a Harvard study found a similar discrepancy between the amount spent on medical adverts and the benefit the medicines provide to patients.

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The FBI’s Most Controversial Surveillance Tool Is Under Threat

AN EXISTENTIAL FIGHT over the US government’s ability to spy on its own citizens is brewing in Congress. And as this fight unfolds, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s biggest foes on Capitol Hill are no longer reformers merely interested in reining in its authority. Many lawmakers, elevated to new heights of power by the recent election, are working to dramatically curtail the methods by which the FBI investigates crime.

New details about the FBI’s failures to comply with restrictions on the use of foreign intelligence for domestic crimes have emerged at a perilous time for the US intelligence community. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the so-called crown jewel of US intelligence, grants the government the ability to intercept the electronic communications of overseas targets who are unprotected by the Fourth Amendment.

That authority is set to expire at the end of the year. But errors in the FBI’s secondary use of the data—the investigation of crimes on US soil—are likely to inflame an already fierce debate over whether law enforcement agents can be trusted with such an invasive tool. 

Central to this tension has been a routine audit by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) national security division and the office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI)—America’s “top spy”—which unearthed new examples of the FBI failing to comply with rules limiting access to intelligence ostensibly gathered to protect US national security. Such “errors,” they said, have occurred on a “large number” of occasions.

A report on the audit, only recently declassified, found that in the first half of 2020, FBI personnel unlawfully searched raw FISA data on numerous occasions. In one incident, agents reportedly sought evidence of foreign influence linked to a US lawmaker. In another, an inappropriate search pertained to a local political party. In both cases, these “errors” attributed to a “misunderstanding” of the law, the report says.

At some point between December 2019 and May 2020, FBI personnel conducted searches of FISA data using “only the name of a US congressman,” the report says, a query that investigators later found was “noncompliant” with legal procedures. While some searches were “reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information,” investigators said, they were also “overly broad as constructed.”

In another incident, the FBI ran searches using the “names of a local political party,” even though a connection to foreign intelligence was “not reasonably likely.” The DOJ explained the errors away by saying FBI personnel “misunderstood” the search procedures, adding they were “subsequently reminded of how to correctly apply the query rules.” These are the mistakes that will ultimately serve as ammunition in the coming fight to diminish the FBI’s power.

Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s national security program at New York University School of Law, says that while troubling, the misuse was entirely predictable. “When the government is allowed to access Americans’ private communications without a warrant, that opens the door to surveillance based on race, religion, politics, or other impermissible factors,” she says.

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Ad Network Owned by Microsoft Is Using Foreign Disinformation ‘Experts’ to Blacklist Conservative Media Companies

The Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a foreign think tank headquartered in the United Kingdom, released an assessment of American online media designed to blacklist conservative media outlets and choke off their advertising revenue. The information is kept on what GDI calls its “Dynamic Exclusion List.”

Ad networks — including most prominently Xandr — which is owned by Microsoft — are now using this list to refuse to allow advertising on conservative media websites.

Microsoft has yet to respond to a request for comment regarding Xandr’s use of the Dynamic Exclusion List, which is censoring conservative outlets. 

GDI in December released its report that detailed the alleged “disinformation risk” for the American online media market in partnership with the Global Disinformation Lab (GDIL), a think tank at the University of Texas at Austin that generates policy recommendations and solutions to combat disinformation.  

The GDI report on the American online media landscape reviewed 69 news outlets, and listed ten outlets it found are the most at risk of spreading disinformation, and ten outlets that are the least likely to spread disinformation. GDI rated conservative sites as having the highest risk for spreading disinformation and liberal websites as the most trusted.

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23 Baltimore schools have zero students proficient in math, per state test results

Baltimore City is facing a devastating reality as the latest round of state test scores are released.

Project Baltimore analyzed the results and found a shocking number of Baltimore City schools where not a single student is doing math at grade level.

“We’re not living up to our potential,” said Jovani Patterson, a Baltimore resident who made headlines in January 2022, when he filed a lawsuit against Baltimore City Schools. The suit claims the district is failing to educate students and, in the process, misusing taxpayer funds.

“We, the taxpayer, are funding our own demise,” Patterson said at the time.

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Black Reparations Inspiring a Multicolored Pandora’s Box of Intersectional Demands

Until a few years ago, the idea of paying financial reparations to descendants of African slaves was dismissed as a fringe idea.   

Now a notion that President Barack Obama once rejected as impractical is becoming public policy. California offers a dramatic example as officials there review a proposal that could pay in excess of $1 million each to some black residents, while more than a dozen U.S. municipalities are moving ahead with their own race-based programs to redress the legacies of slavery.  

But the reparations movement is bigger and wider than that. Its rise in the United States has inspired a global movement committed to redressing perceived historical injustices to all manner of aggrieved groups. The causes include gay reparations, climate reparations, colonial reparations, university reparations – and Roman Catholic Church reparations for officially sanctioning colonization, slavery, and genocide in the New World. Scholars, activists and legislators across the United States and Europe and in former colonies are drawing on the logic and language of the black reparations movement and international human rights law to make the claim that their causes also deserve atonement and compensation for past wrongs.   

Some warn that reparations open a controversial and bottomless Pandora’s Box, given history’s long catalogue of official policies that criminalized or discriminated against sex workers, polygamists, Jews, Catholics, Slavs, and the Roma, among a vast array of potential claimants.  

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IT’S OFFICIAL: CDC Adds COVID-19 Vaccine to Routine Immunization Schedule for Children and Adolescents

For the first time, the ‘unsafe and ineffective’ COVID-19 vaccine was formally added to the routine immunization schedule for both children and adolescents by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Thursday.

It is common knowledge that COVID-19 poses no threat to young children, that mRNA vaccinations against the virus are not effective or safe and that some people have even died after receiving a COVID vaccine. But the CDC and its advisory council continue to push for childhood vaccinations despite all these facts.

Back in October 2022,  the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which provides advice and guidance to the Director of the CDC regarding the use of vaccines for the control of vaccine-preventable diseases, voted to recommend COVID-19 to be included in the 2023 childhood immunization schedule in 15 unanimous votes.

ACIP recommended the use of COVID-19 vaccines for everyone as young as 6 months and older. The COVID-19 vaccine and other vaccines may be administered on the same day.

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First Balloons, Now Space Lasers: Chinese Satellite Blasts Green Lights Over Hawaii

Chinese spy balloons aren’t the only strange thing flying over U.S. airspace as of late.

Numerous green laser lights were spotted over Hawaii on Jan. 28, initially believed to be from a NASA satellite that monitors the thickness of ice sheets on earth. However, the claim was retracted on Feb. 6, and responsibility was instead attributed to a Chinese atmospheric monitoring satellite.

The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan published a photo of the lasers on Jan. 28 saying they were “thought to be from a remote-sensing altimeter satellite ICESAT-2/43613,” the NASA satellite. Then, on Feb. 6, NAOJ released an updated report and said it was unlikely to have come from the NASA satellite due to the trajectory of the lasers.

NASA scientist Dr. Alvaro Ivanoff determined via a simulation that the culprit was likely China’s Daqi-1/AEMS satellite, according to Science Alert.

Daqi-1 monitors the earth’s atmospheric environment and can project lasers from its Aerosol and Carbon Dioxide Detection Lidar (ACDL), according to The Science Times.

NASA’s IceSAT-2 functions similarly and fired 10,000 lasers per second to measure changes on the earth’s surface, according to The Science Times.

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Video Raises Questions About Tortuguita’s Death at “Cop City” Amid Permit Appeal

Body-worn camera video released by the Atlanta Police Department (APD) showing the immediate aftermath of a Georgia State Patrol trooper’s fatal shooting of Manuel Esteban Paez Terán at the forested site of a planned police training facility raises questions about the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s (GBI) initial story of Terán’s killing. The video release comes at a time when the facility’s land disturbance permit is being legally challenged.

APD released four videos from a unit of officers who were not directly involved in the shooting. The footage appears to confirm Terán’s killing was carried out by a Georgia State Patrol SWAT team, which is not required to wear body cameras.

Terán, whose chosen name was Tortuguita, was shot and killed by police on January 18 during a violent raid on a protest encampment in the South River Forest that has blockaded construction of what Atlanta-area activists have dubbed “Cop City,” an 85-acre, $90 million police militarization and training complex spearheaded by the Atlanta Police Foundation that, if built, would be one of the largest police training facilities in the country. The site would contain several shooting ranges, a helicopter landing base, an area for explosives training, police-horse stables and an entire mock city for officers to engage in role-playing activities.

The GBI initially said Tortuguita was shot and killed after allegedly firing a gun and injuring a Georgia state trooper during the raid, but APD’s newly released body camera video appears to show officers suggesting that the trooper was shot by friendly fire in the initial moments after the shooting. In one video, after gunshots ring out through the forest, an officer can be heard saying, “That sounded like suppressed gunfire,” implying the initial shots were consistent with the use of a law enforcement weapon, not the Smith & Wesson M&P Shield nine-millimeter the GBI alleges Tortuguita purchased and fired upon the trooper with, which did not have a suppressor.

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US Pentagon is developing a new ‘weapon of mass destruction’: Thousands of drones will work together to destroy enemy defenses – but experts fear humans will lose control of the ‘swarms’

The US Pentagon is planning a new ‘weapon of mass destruction’ that involves thousands of drones that strike by air, land and water to destroy enemy defenses – but experts fear humans could lose control of the ‘swarms.’

The top-secret project, dubbed AMASS (Autonomous Multi-Domain Adaptive Swarms-of-Swarms), would represent automated warfare on an unprecedented scale.

AMASS is still in the planning stages, but DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) has been collecting bids from suppliers for the $78 million contract.

Small drones would be equipped with weapons and tools for navigation and communication, along with abilities ranging from radar jamming to launching lethal attacks.

While the technology would change how the US goes to war, experts in the industry raise concerns.

Zachary Kallenborn, a policy fellow at George Mason University in Virginia, said: ‘As the swarm grows in size, it’ll become virtually impossible for humans to manage the decisions.’

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US shoots down another ‘high-altitude object’ over Alaska

The U.S. military on Friday took down an object flying over Alaskan airspace days after shooting down a Chinese spy balloon along the South Carolina coast, the White House confirmed.

John Kirby, a national security spokesperson for the White House, said the Defense Department was tracking a “high-altitude object” over Alaska at 40,000 feet that posed “a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight.

The object was shot down within the last hour at President Biden’s direction, Kirby said, and landed in U.S. waters.

The government is still collecting information about the object, Kirby said. It is not yet known whether it was operated by another country or if it was privately or commercially owned. Kirby also would not say if the object was a balloon or another device.

“We’re calling this an object because that’s the best description we have right now,” he told reporters.

“We don’t understand the full purpose. We don’t have any information that would confirm a stated purpose for this object,” he continued, adding that officials expect to be able to recover the debris.

The object was shot down by military aircraft that are part of U.S. Northern Command. The object first came to the administration’s attention on Thursday night, and Biden was briefed on the matter at that time, Kirby said. 

The decision to take down the object over Alaska comes six days after Biden directed the military to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon days after it was first discovered floating over the continental United States.

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