AP Shills For Big Pharma Antidepressants With ‘Bewildering’ Hit Piece

Cruising through X last week a weird story caught my eye: it reported that The Food and Drug Administration’s top drug regulator, Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, was trying to hire a “friend” who wants the FDA to add warnings to antidepressants about “unproven pregnancy risks.” The story makes several claims that are bewildering and appear to be fabricated. I sent several questions to AP’s global health editor Jonathan Fahey, but he did not respond to repeated requests to explain the article’s puzzling errors.

AP reporter Matthew Perrone later blocked me on X. I’ve pasted my email to Fahey at the bottom of this article.

The person AP’s Matthew Perrone identifies as a “friend” of FDA’s Hoeg is Dr. Adam Urato, chief of maternal-fetal medicine at Metro West Medical Center in Massachusetts.

One passage in the AP story stood out to me:

Within the agency, Hoeg’s close relationship with Urato is viewed as a clear conflict of interest that, under normal FDA standards, would result in her recusing herself from any work on the petition. But Hoeg is actively working to speed up the agency’s review of her friend’s proposal, according to the people familiar with the situation.

I have never seen the term “friend” defined as a “conflict of interest” by any federal agency. Nor have I run across “friend” defined as a “conflict of interest” in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. It’s a conflict of interest that doesn’t seem to exist.

And I happen to know quite a bit about conflicts of interest in science, because I’m an expert on the matter.

While I was a Senate staffer, I wrote a law on conflicts of interest called the Physicians Payments Sunshine Act. The bill I wrote was later passed into law and you can now go look up doctors on the government’s Open Payments website to see who is giving them money. I’m sure AP reporters use this website all the time. During my time in the Senate, I also helped to reform conflicts of interest at the National Institutes of Health. This took thousands of hours, untold numbers of meetings, and years of work to complete.

When I left the Senate and joined the Safra Ethics Center at Harvard, I was celebrated as the “Father of Sunshine” for this work to reform conflicts of interest in medicine.

Confused by the AP’s confusing reporting, I contacted Health and Human Services (HHS) and FDA, sending them almost the exact same questions that I sent to AP’s Jonathan Fahey.

Being a friend is not a violation of ethics or conflicts of interests’ laws,” wrote HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon, in an email. Several senior FDA officials told me that HHS doesn’t even have a legal definition for what a “friend” is and no government conflict of interest form asks people to identify who their friends are.

It’s a hit piece from industry against Dr. Hoeg, who is doing an amazing job at the FDA,” said one FDA official.

Hoeg did not respond to requests for comment, but during a phone call, Urato told me the AP story was filled with fake facts. The FDA has not offered him a full-time job as AP reported, and if they did, he couldn’t take it as he has a full-time clinical practice with hundreds of patients. FDA has expressed interest in offering him a limited, part-time position as an “advisor,” but nothing has been formalized.

He’s known Hoeg for only a couple years, and met her once when he went to DC to testify in favor of a labelling change for antidepressants that warns pregnant women about the documented risks for fetuses.

This whole thing is being made up, and it’s an absurdity,” Urato said. “I’m not close friends with her as we’ve only discussed work. But If I say I’m not friends with her, then it’s like saying I’m her enemy.”

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We visited “ground zero” for hospice fraud: Los Angeles, California

At age 69, Lynn Ianni is a pickleball whiz, zipping from dinks to drives energetically. When she suffered an injury on the court two years ago, she sought physical therapy, and was surprised to learn her Medicare insurance wouldn’t cover it.

She was, according to Medicare records, dying and in hospice.

“They said, ‘you’re in hospice.’ And I said, ‘what? What are you talking about?” Ianni said. “‘Are you kidding me? Do I look like I’m in hospice?’”

Ianni’s Medicare number had been stolen, and used by a company to fraudulently enroll her in hospice – specialized, compassionate care for terminal patients nearing the end of their lives. It was another example of fraud in the hospice industry, long a nationwide problem. But her case arose well after officials had promised to stamp it out in California, where the problem has been especially acute.

Medicare is federally administered, and hospices must be certified for reimbursements. But the state issues the licenses for hospices to operate.

Three years ago, California’s state auditor sounded the alarm that Los Angeles County had seen a 1,500% increase in hospice companies since 2010 – more than six times the national average relative to its elderly population.

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Former Missouri GOP House Speaker Sentenced to Prison for Pandemic Fraud – Sentenced to 21 Months in Prison

A true man of the people, Former Missouri House Speaker John J. Diehl Jr. was sentenced to 21 months in prison on fraud-related charges.

Diehl was Missouri House Speaker in 2015 until he resigned after he was caught sending sexually explicit emails to an intern.

First Alert reported:

Diehl admitted that on March 30, 2020, he applied for an Economic Injury Disaster Loan on behalf of his law firm, the Diehl Law Group. The loan program was designed to help struggling small businesses during the pandemic.

Less than a month after applying for the loan, an advance of $1,000 was deposited into the Diehl Law Group bank account. He later made a $1,320.15 payment to a country club for personal dues and charges.

Then, on June 9, 2020, the remainder of the loan, $93,900, was put into the law firm’s bank account. Diehl reportedly transferred some of that money into his personal bank accounts. On Sept. 16, 2020, Diehl also transferred $50,039.55 of the EIDL proceeds to the Diehl Law Group’s retirement plan, in which Diehl was the only participant.

Diehl was was sentenced to prison this week.

Diehl admitted to taking $370,000 in small business administration loans. He will also have to pay a $50,000 fine.

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Gavin Newsom’s wife and her firm pocketed $3.7M from her ‘gender stereotypes’ charity, unearthed IRS filings reveal…days after her sanctimonious rant at the press

Jennifer Siebel Newsom stole the spotlight at her husband’s Planned Parenthood press conference last month when she scolded reporters for not asking enough about the ‘war on women’.

But now, financial filings obtained by the Daily Mail suggest the First Partner of California may have to answer some tough questions of her own. 

IRS documents from recent years show Gavin Newsom‘s wife has been paying herself and her company, Girls Club LLC, up to a third of her nonprofit’s entire income each year – pocketing over $3.7 million over the past decade. 

Siebel Newsom, 51, runs the Representation Project, a charity that fights against ‘intersectional gender stereotypes’ and ‘harmful gender norms’. 

The organization brings in between $1 million and $1.7 million a year in grants and donations, with roughly $300,000 of it going straight to her and her company in recent years, according to financial records. 

The most recent IRS filings up to March 2024 show Siebel Newsom, who’s also the beneficiary of a multi-million-dollar trust from her wealthy family, receives a $150,000 annual salary from the Representation Project, and her company took another $150,000 from the charity’s funds. 

Her unusually high compensation to her and her company has recently sparked criticism from charity watchdogs – with a Daily Mail analysis showing Siebel Newsom and her nonprofit colleagues earn more than 95% of charities of a similar size. 

‘As [Governor Newsom] continues his national rebrand tour, the fact that he and his wife put one third of their “charity” revenues into their own pockets will undoubtedly raise red flags in the eyes of middle class Americans,’ Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of the conservative transparency nonprofit Americans for Public Trust, told the Daily Mail, referencing the $300,000 paid to Siebel Newsom and her firm.

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BOOM! Jesse Jackson’s Democrat Son CALLS OUT Obama, Biden, and Clinton for Politicizing His Father’s Funeral: They ‘Do Not Know Jesse Jackson’

Jesse Jackson Jr., son of the late Rev. Jesse Jackson, has come out swinging against the Democrats who shamelessly turned his father’s funeral into a hate-filled anti-Trump spectacle.

Jackson, who has largely stayed out of the spotlight during this mourning period, issued a fiery statement blasting the political opportunists who hijacked the solemn event to push their divisive agenda during the homegoing service for his father at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition headquarters in Chicago on Saturday.

On February 18, Jonathan Jackson Jr. pleaded during a press conference for people not to bring politics into his father’s funeral services.

“Dad believed that funerals were not for the dearly departed. He believed funerals were for the living. He believed they were great gathering meetings.

No two lives in human history will have the same number of people attending their funerals, nor will the same people be at their funerals. Your friends aren’t my friends, and my friends aren’t your friends. We don’t know the same people. You don’t know the same people that I know.

Do not bring your politics, out of respect to Reverend Jesse Jackson and the life that he lived, to these homegoing services. Come respectfully, and come to say thank you.

But these homegoing services are welcome to all — Democrat, Republican, liberal, and conservative; right-wing, left-wing — because his life is broad enough to cover the full spectrum of what it means to be an American.

We only ask people to come and be respectful in the context of the extraordinary life that he lived. Dad would have wanted us to have a great meeting to discuss our differences, to find ways of moving forward and moving together.”

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FBI secretly seizes election records from Arizona’s largest county as voting probe expands

The FBI is expanding its criminal probe into suspected election irregularities, secretly obtaining a large tranche of voting records from Arizona’s largest county with a recent grand jury subpoena, multiple people familiar with the probe told Just the News.

The sources, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the grand jury probe, said FBI agents are receiving gigabytes of electronic election data from Maricopa County, about a month after the bureau first disclosed an investigation into election irregularities by raiding a warehouse near Atlanta and seizing ballots from the 2020 election conducted in Fulton County, Georgia’s largest metropolis.

Election irregularities in Arizona and elsewhere

The subpoena comes five years after the GOP-led Arizona state Senate conducted a lengthy investigation into the 2020 election and concluded there were significant irregularities.

More recently, the bureau was alerted to a report filed by Republican and Democrat election observers who believed they observed irregularities in November 2024 at a warehouse in Arizona where blank and filled-out absentee ballots were observed in the same location, according to the sources.

Congress has never released the report from the staffers who were sent to observe the 2024 election in Maricopa County, which includes Arizona’s largest city of Phoenix.

But House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil recently hinted at the significance of the report in an interview with the Just the News, No Noise television show.

“We’re digging back through those reports that were submitted by our election observers that were deployed across the country,” Steil said. “This is where working hand in glove with other federal government agencies is so important.

“We have reports documenting instances that occurred in Arizona and across the country, and we are reviewing those in real time and working hand in glove with federal partners to make sure that the law was followed in every jurisdiction in the country,” he added.

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Bombshell Divorce Filings Allegedly Reveal the Vulgar Lifestyle of an Illegal Alien Loving California Democrat Lawmaker, Threatening His Career

A pro-illegal Democrat Assemblyman in California is facing a sordid, career-threatening scandal after stunning </> divorce documents were recently unsealed.

As The New York Post reported on Sunday, Assemblyman Joaquin Arambula of Fresno finds himself in a legal battle with his wife, Elizabeth, who has made a series of alarming allegations that call into question his fitness not only as a lawmaker but as a family man.

In the unsealed documents, Elizabeth claims that her husband spends most of his days drinking, smoking marijuana, and playing video games during the day while hiding these activities from everyone he knows.

“For years, I have covered for Respondent’s struggles with alcohol, marijuana, and gaming, concealing them from our children, family, friends, and his professional circle,” Elizabeth Arambula states.

“On a typical day, he spent much of his time using his THC pen, drinking whiskey, playing games on his iPad, and taking a few meetings scattered throughout,” she added.

Elizabeth also alleged that Joaquin Arambula, who is running for Fresno City Council, got so drunk during the day that she had to drive him to work, and a government car sometimes took him back home.

Due to Joaquin’s alleged transgressions, Elizabeth is seeking spousal support and child custody for the couple’s three children, who are 11, 14, and 15.

In even more potentially foreboding news for Joaquin Arambula, his wife says she has documented proof of his misdeeds.

For example, the petition shows that Joaquin Arambula checked himself into Reflections Rehabilitation for a whopping $30,000, seemingly confirming at least part of his wife’s allegations.

Joaquin Arambula says that his wife is twisting the facts and seeking financial gain.

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The “Conspiracy Theory” That Was Too Big for the CDC to Cover Up

Remember Pfizer executive Jordan Trishton Walker?

He said, “There is something IRREGULAR about [vaccinated women’s] menstrual cycles,” adding, “people will have to investigate that.”

“Conspiracy theorists” like Naomi Wolf were called “batshit crazy” for noticing what women were screaming from the rooftops.

But the data proves they were right all along:

• 42% of women with regular cycles reported heavier bleeding than usual after vaccination

• 71% of women on birth control experienced breakthrough bleeding

• 66% of menopausal women (who should NEVER bleed) started bleeding again

• And in one major study, 78% of vaccinated women reported some form of menstrual disorder.

What did Rochelle Walensky’s CDC do? They tried to COVER IT UP.

This report reveals how far they went to silence women, bury the evidence, and who profited from it all.

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Democrats’ War On Election Integrity Exposes Their Dirty Secret

During last week’s contentious hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, Delaware Sen. Chris Coons asked then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, with great concern, “Will you rule out the deployment of ICE or CBP officers to polling places this November?”

The secretary’s answer was sharp and to the point. “Do you plan on illegal aliens voting in our elections?”

Once again, Democrats are saying the quiet part out loud. The people who have told us for years that illegal aliens never vote, and that voter fraud doesn’t exist, are terrified of anyone actually checking to see if that is true.

Sen. Coons’ fears are echoed by former Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who said in a recent X post, “Senate Dems need to put into the approps bill a prohibition on ICE agents being near polling places. This is a must-have.”

And just days after achieving a trifecta in state government, Virginia Democrats introduced legislation to do exactly what Inslee said — never mind that it’s completely unconstitutional.

If you’re an American with a job and a family, you’re probably scratching your head and asking, why is it the “last chance?” What is the governor talking about? Why are Democrats keeping immigration officers away from polling places? Here is where it gets even stranger and more suspicious.

When President Obama was elected in 2008, many Democratic ruling class figures came to believe that they would inevitably win every election in the future, no matter what they did, because of changing demographics. That hypothesis has been thoroughly refuted by the unprecedented MAGA movement and even repudiated by its own authors.

Nevertheless, the idea swept the Democratic Party like a fever, and it largely explains its sprint to the far left ever since. It also explains the Biden-era policy of letting millions of illegal immigrants into the United States. The last generation of Democrats bet big on immigration, not persuasion or popular policy, winning them elections.

Democrats claim that illegal aliens don’t vote, yet when the Trump administration asks to check voter rolls, Democrats refuse. When the Trump administration asks to see who blue states give Medicaid to, they refuse. When the Trump administration tries to deport violent criminals here illegally, Democrats refuse. It is an unsettling pattern of behavior.

The urgency from Democrats spanning Washington, D.C. to Washington state is another sign that President Trump’s policies and executive enforcement of the law are working. Last year, we saw international immigration cut in half, a decline in the foreign-born population by nearly two million, and millions of prospective illegal aliens deciding simply not to come to America. It’s a reversal of the trend Democrats have come to rely on for electoral relevance.

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Brazilian healer John of God, promoted by Oprah Winfrey as an inspiring figure of spiritual miracles, sentenced to 118 years in prison for sexual rapes

João Teixeira de Faria, also known as John of God, self-proclaimed Brazilian medium and spiritual surgeon, has accumulated sentences exceeding 489 years in prison for systematic rapes and sexual abuses.

In September 2023, a Goiás court imposed an additional 118 years, six months, and 15 days on him for 17 cases of rape, rape by deception, and rape of vulnerable persons. He had already received 19 years and four months in December 2019 for four rapes, and in 2020 he added another 40 years for five additional cases.

The convictions are based on judicial evidence and testimonies that the courts considered credible. More than 600 women from Brazil and abroad, aged between 9 and 67 years, reported abuses committed between 1986 and 2017 at his center in Abadiânia.

Among them is his own daughter, Dalva Teixeira, who recounted abuses from the ages of 10 to 14 and a forced pregnancy that ended in abortion due to beatings.

The victims described an identical pattern: Faria would separate them during “private healing sessions,” turn off the lights, and sexually assault them under the excuse of transferring spiritual energy.

International media reported even more serious allegations of an alleged “baby farms” system: poor young women supposedly held and forced to gestate in order to sell newborns abroad.

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