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France gets an A+ from the US for its anti consumer intellectual property related policies

In this cable dated February 2010, Chargé d’Affaires Mark Pekala, –on the basis of industry submissions– recommends against the inclusion of France on the 2010 Special 301 Watch List. According to the cable, “France has, in fact, improved the pharmaceutical R & D environment” and the cable author Mark Pekala sees no evidence of lack of IPR protection or market access. In addition, France has also been “at the forefront of copyright protection and anti-counterfeiting on the Internet,” with the first graduated response enforcement mechanism in Europe and a public-private sector charter against online counterfeits.

Below I highlight how Sarkozy’s France is doing everything and more to please the pharmaceutical lobby and the copyright industry.

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And, on the whole, PhRMA is rather pleased with France.

And when it comes to copyright…”France’s Aggressive Copyright Protection” seems to be “may be more stringent than the U.S.!” France is even described as “a trailblazer” regarding internet and copyright enforcement. Of course, France is sometimes misguided, for example, as to their idea to “tax online ads (the “Google tax”) as a way to compensate authors (mainly publishers) for their losses.” According to the cable, President Sarkozy is taking an anti-competitive approach and French authorities are now studying whether Google abused its dominant position in the online advertising market.”

In conclusion, “France is at the forefront of IPR protection in Europe” and “in the case of aggressive three strikes laws, may be more stringent than the U.S.” And “France’s national health insurance cost containment efforts do not deny adequate and effective IP protection to the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, nor do they prevent fair and equitable market access.” The US Embassy, the ” Post” therefore “will continue to support U.S. pharmaceutical industry efforts to expand markets in France.” What’s good for the US pharmaceutical industry is good for the French consumers?

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MASON CITY — A former Mason City police officer said Thursday two Mason City police officers and a retired state DCI agent may have been involved in the abduction and possible murder of Jodi Huisentruit.

Further, she alleges police officials may be covering up what really happened by their failure to follow up on leads she has provided.

Maria Ohl, who was terminated from the police department last month, made the accusations while speaking to the media after a Civil Service Commission meeting at City Hall Thursday.

The commission set 9 a.m. Sept. 13 as a date for a hearing she requested concerning her termination.

Huisentruit, a KIMT-TV morning anchor, disappeared in June 1995.

Ohl said she received credible information from an informant implicating Lt. Frank Stearns, Lt. Ron Vande Weerd and Bill Basler of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, who is now retired.

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A post-debate poll shown on MSNBC.com reveals Ron Paul to be thelandslide winnerof the internet survey, capturing 43.5% of the votes on the question, “Who do you think won the Republican debate at the Reagan library?”

The next closest candidate, Mitt Romney, received just 21.5% of the votes, or almost exactly half the number of votes received by Ron Paul. You might expect Mitt Romney’s graph bar, therefore, to behalf the sizeof Ron Paul’s right? Nope. These poll results, it turns out, have beenradically distorted to diminish the apparent lead of Ron Paul in the poll.

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TAHERI-AZAR’S INCOMPETENCE as a terrorist is bewildering. Surely someone who was willing to kill and die for his cause, spending months contemplating an attack, could have found a more effective way to kill people. Why wasn’t he able to obtain a firearm or improvise an explosive device or try any of the hundreds of murderous schemes that we all know from movies, television shows, and the Internet, not to mention the news? And once Taheri-Azar decided to run people over with a car, why did he pick a site with so little room to accelerate?

Even more bewildering is that we don’t see more terrorism of this sort, a decade into the "global war on terror" launched by the United States in response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. If every car is a potential weapon, then why aren’t there more automotive attacks? Car bombs have been around since the 1920s, when the first one was detonated on Wall Street in New York City, but they require a fair bit of skill. Drive-through murder, on the other hand, takes very little skill at all. People have been killing people with cars ever since the automobile was invented, and the political use of automotive assault was immortalized in a famous 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers, in which two Algerian revolutionaries drive into a bus stand full of French settlers. Yet very few people resort to this accessible form of terrorism. Out of several million Muslims in the United States, it appears that Taheri-Azar was the first to attempt this sort of attack; so far he has been followed by two possible copycats, leading to one fatality.

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Suppliers in the iPhone 5 supply chain in Taiwan have geared up production recently with volume shipments of the new Apple smartphones to begin soon. Production of iPhone 5s at OEM maker Foxconn Electronics has reportedly reached 150,000 units per day, according to industry sources.

Lens maker Largan Precision, touch panel maker TPK Holding, reinforced glass supplier G-Tech Optoelectronics and battery vendors Simplo and Dynapack are all operating at full swing currently, the sources indicated.

[Quote]:

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Ten years after al Qaeda’s attack on the United States, the vast majority of the 9/11 Commission’s investigative records remain sealed at the National Archives in Washington, even though the commission had directed the archives to make most of the material public in 2009, Reuters has learned.

The National Archives’ failure to release the material presents a hurdle for historians and others seeking to plumb one of the most dramatic events in modern American history.

The 575 cubic feet of records were in large part the basis for the commission’s public report, issued July 22, 2004. The commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, was established by Congress in late 2002 to investigate the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks, the pre-attack effectiveness of intelligence agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the government’s emergency response.

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Apple is now being sued by HTC with patents that were owned by Google until a few days ago, according to Bloomberg. HTC already had cases going against Apple (Apple, likewise, has gone after HTC on a few fronts), but the new patents stand to bolster its lawsuits, and may even include property acquired by Google when it bought Motorola Mobility.

Google transferred nine patents to HTC on September 1, four of which were originally sourced from Motorola and are being used against Apple in a federal court in Delaware. The remaining five, three from Openwave Systems and two from Palm, will help HTC amend a complaint with the US International Trade Commission (ITC) filed in Washington and possibly reverse the preliminary ruling that HTC has infringed on Apple.

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