GlaxoSmithKline finalized a pact to pay $750 million and plead guilty for manufacturing and distributing adulterated drugs from their manufacturing plant, Puerto Rico in Cidra, the U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday.

"This settlement resolves a significant and long-standing legal issue facing the company," said PD Villarreal, GSK’s Senior Vice President and Head of Global Litigation.

The company was accused of criminal and civil complaints which stated that the company, for years, knowingly sold contaminated skin ointment and an ineffective antidepressant.

Under the plea agreement, the company has to pay $150 million criminal fine that includes forfeiture of $10 million in assets and another $600 million to settle allegations that, because the drugs were adulterated, false claims for reimbursement were submitted to government healthcare programs.
(READ FI;LL ARTIC;E)

We are Facing the Greatest Threat to Humanity: Only Fundamental Change Can Save Us

• By Maude Barlow

  Alternet, Oct 15, 2010

  Straight to the Source
  

Maude Barlow gave this stirring plenary speech, full of hope even
in the face of ecological disasters, to the Environmental Grantmakers
Association annual retreat in Pacific Grove, California. Barlow, a
former UN Senior Water Advisor, is National Chairperson of the
Council of Canadians
and founder of the Blue Planet Project. Barlow is a contributor to AlterNet’s forth-coming book Water Matters: Why We Need to Act Now to Save Our Most Cr….

We
all know that the earth and all upon it face a growing crisis. Global
climate change is rapidly advancing, melting glaciers, eroding soil,
causing freak and increasingly wild storms, and displacing untold
millions from rural communities to live in desperate poverty in
peri-urban slums. Almost every human victim lives in the global South,
in communities not responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. The
atmosphere has already warmed up almost a full degree in the last
several decades and a new Canadian study reports that we may be on
course to add another 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees Fahrenheit)
by 2100.

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READ THE FULL ARTICLE;  http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_21826.cfm

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