cc` !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> My Dragon's Lair Sharing is the reason for my being...

My Dragon's Lair Sharing is the reason for my being...

Altered and added new content 10-4-07 Important 5-4-07 No longer Child safe because of the links inside sites included here. Adult Humor is posted here. Template errors still. E shows wrong, and Netscape shows mostly correct. Activly learning HTML to correct and improve. Be it fun or serious I hope you enjoy and take away with you what I find to share. LI

Friday, November 02, 2007

FDA has not been inspecting foreign drug firms, watchdog finds

WASHINGTON - Two-thirds of the foreign drug manufacturers subject to inspection by the Food and Drug Administration may never have been visited by agency inspectors, a government watchdog reported to Congress on Thursday.

The FDA this year listed 3,249 foreign pharmaceutical manufacturers subject to its inspection — yet the agency cannot determine whether it has ever inspected 2,133 of them, according to a Government Accountability Office report released during a House subcommittee hearing.

While some of the more than 3,000 firms may never have exported prescription drugs or drug ingredients to the United States, others likely have.

Who are those firms and what are they shipping? asked Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., during Thursday's hearing of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on oversight and investigations.

"We don't know and we are not certain the FDA knows," Marcia Crosse, director of health care at the GAO, replied.

The few foreign inspections the FDA does conduct in any given year hit just 7 percent of the foreign drug makers exporting to the U.S., the GAO estimates. That means more than 13 years can pass before a foreign manufacturer is visited even once, Crosse said.

In the case of China, which with 714 drug firms boasts the largest number subject to FDA scrutiny of any country, the record is far worse. The FDA is slated to inspect just 13 Chinese establishments this year, meaning just 1.8 percent will see an FDA inspector, according to the GAO report.

In India, the No. 2 country, the record is far better. There, 65 of its 410 firms, or 15.8 percent, are slated for inspection this year, according to the GAO. That's in line with the 16.8 percent of Swiss drug firms the FDA likely will inspect in 2007.

The GAO and Congress have long warned of the FDA's shortcomings in its foreign drug inspection program. The GAO findings released Thursday largely reprise many of the same warnings outlined in a 1998 report.

"It's deja vu all over again," said Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich.

Most U.S. drug makers are inspected at least once every two years, as mandated by a law drawn up long before imports seized a sizable chunk of the drug market.

There is no such requirement that the FDA conduct foreign inspections with any regularity, even as imports of all kinds grow in volume. Concerns about the safety of imported drugs, food, toys and other consumer products have been at the fore for months.

"We're finding ourselves again on the brink of one more problem dealing with imports into our country," said Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas.

An estimated 80 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients used to make drugs sold in the U.S. are imported. Among finished drugs, an estimated 40 percent are made abroad. By ANDREW BRIDGES The Associated Press November 2, 2007 More articles

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posted by LadyIrene @ 11/02/2007 11:21:00 PM 0 comments

IRS warns of wildfire e-mail scam

Warning on Scam E-Mails Fri Nov 2, 12:20 PM ET
Members of the public are receiving phony e-mails falsely claiming to come from the IRS. http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=170894,00.html

WASHINGTON - People should be on the lookout for a new e-mail scam soliciting donations to California wildfire victims in the name of the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. government, the IRS said Friday.

The tax agency said the bogus e-mails appear to be a "phishing scheme" that tries to trick recipients into revealing personal and financial information that can be used to steal a person's assets.
The IRS said it does not send e-mails soliciting charitable donations and never asks people for the PIN numbers, passwords or other secret information for credit card, bank or other financial accounts.
People "should avoid opening any attachments or clicking on any links until they can verify the e-mail's legitimacy," IRS Deputy Commissioner for Operations Support Richard Spires said in a statement.
The agency said the scam e-mail urges recipients to click on a link which opens on a fake IRS Web site. That site includes a link to a donation form which requests the recipient's personal and financial information.
The IRS said it also believes that clicking on the link downloads malware, or malicious software, onto the recipient's computer. That software will steal passwords and other account information it finds on the victim's computer system.
It urged those who received the scam e-mail to help the IRS shut down the operation by forwarding it to phishing@irs.gov, using instructions found in "how to protect yourself from suspicious e-mails or phishing schemes" on the genuine IRS Web site, http://www.irs.gov.
Since the mail box was established last year, the IRS has received more than 30,000 e-mails from taxpayers reporting almost 600 separate phishing incidents.

Suspicious e-Mails and Identity Theft http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=155682,00.html

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posted by LadyIrene @ 11/02/2007 10:39:00 PM 0 comments

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Looking for brain teasers found animal torture.

Read out loud the text inside the triangle below. EyeTestT.gif
More than likely you said, "A bird in the bush,"
If this IS what YOU said, then you failed to see
that the word THE is repeated twice!
Sorry, look again.
Next, let's play with some words.
What do you see?
EyeTestT.jpg
In black you can read the word GOOD, in white the word EVIL (inside each black letter is a white letter). It's all very physiological too, because it visualize the concept that good can't exist without evil
(or the absence of good is evil ).
Now, what do you see?
file00020.gif
You may not see it at first, but the white spaces read the word optical, the blue landscape reads the word illusion. Look again! Can you see why this painting is called an optical illusion?
What do you see here?
file00124.jpg
This one is quite tricky!
The word TEACH reflects as LEARN.
Last one.
What do you see?
file00220.gif
You probably read the word ME in brown, but.......
when you look through ME
you will see YOU!
Test Your Brain


ALZHEIMERS' EYE TEST

Count every " F " in the following text:

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE
SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTI
FIC STUDY COMBINED WITH
THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS...

(SEE BELOW)

HOW MANY ?

WRONG, THERE ARE 6 -- no joke.
READ IT AGAIN !
Really, go Back and Try to find the 6 F's before you scroll down.

The reasoning behind is further down.
The brain cannot process "OF".




Incredible or what? Go back and look again!!

Anyone who counts all 6 "F's" on the first go is a genius.
http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/ae77.htm

Three is normal, four is quite rare.

Send this to your friends.
It will drive them crazy.!
And keep them occupied
For several minutes..!








More Brain Stuff . . . From Cambridge University .

O lny srmat poelpe can raed tihs.
cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The
phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mni d, aoc cdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy,

it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm.

Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if
you can raed tihs psas it on !!



Psas Ti ON !
[Could not delete all of FW line]




Homo sapiens, a member of the order Primates with highly evolved mental capabilities.
"
Homo sapiens, a member of the order Primates with highly evolved mental capabilities."
You might think these brain tests are cool and benign. As I was looking for more I found this from Wikipedia. Caution. Do not go to links if you cannot handle reading and seeing what 'human beings' do to other primates.
If you want to read what else we do as the more evolved creature, which is cold blooded calculated torture, read the experiments on Cambridge University Primates. And the varience of the licence does not account that these are violations against living breathing feeling creatures, that laugh and cry like you and I, even if you don't understand what they say and think. And I know there are those of you who think that animal testing gets Human Beings better health and longer lives. For the sacrifice of others do you appreciate or thank them?
EU Votes to end testing. More links from a blog. June 2007: European MPs of all parties rushed to support a new Written Declaration this week, calling for an end to the use of Great Apes and wild-caught primates in research. Click here to read ‘The Primate Nations’ Report
LI

Legal Status: See also: Non-human primate experiments and International trade in primates

Monkeys imported for experimentation in a crate. Credit: BUAV
Monkeys imported for experimentation in a crate. Credit: BUAV

Humans are recognized as persons and protected in law by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights[8] and by all governments, though to varying degrees. Non-human primates are not classified as persons. The status of non-human primates has generated much debate, particularly through the Great Ape Project [9] which argues for the personhood of the non-human members of the family Hominidae. In 1995 Ignaas Spruit, director of Leiden (Netherlands) based Pro-Primates organization, went farther, as he proposed that some rights should be recognized to all non-human primates.[10] In the same way, the American anthropologist Earnest Albert Hooton, enlarging the sense of the famous quote by Terence, used to say "Primas sum: primatum nil a me alienum puto", that is to say: “I am a primate; nothing about primates is outside of my bailiwick”[11].

Animal testing - Thousands of primates are used every year around the world in scientific experiments because of their psychological and physiological similarity to humans. Chimpanzees, baboons, marmosets, macaques, and green monkeys are most commonly used in these experiments. In the European Union, around 10,000 were used in 2004, with 4,652 experiments conducted on 3,115 non-human primates in the UK alone in 2005.[12] As of 2004, 3,100 non-human primates were living in captivity in the United States, in zoos, circuses, and laboratories, 1,280 of them being used in experiments.[9] European campaign groups such as the BUAV are seeking a ban on all primate use in experiments as part of the European Union's current review of existing law on animal experimentation.

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posted by LadyIrene @ 10/27/2007 10:13:00 AM 0 comments

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Don't cash that check before it clears

Play Video
PlayVideo

Post Office Cracks Down on Fake Check Scam: Fake Checks, Real Victims

The U.S. government is cracking down on overseas scammers who send fake checks to Americans in exchange for real money. Bob Orr reports.

Answers.com

(CBS/AP) The e-mails arrive out of the blue, from Nigeria or other exotic countries. They tell of inheritances, political problems, other reasons someone needs to get money out of the country. If you help, they promise to let you share the money.

Unfortunately, thousands of people fall for the scam, losing an average of $3,000 to $4,000 each.

So far this year, an average of more than 800 people a month have filed complaints about such scams.

Hoping to stem the losses, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service announced an international crackdown Wednesday in which more than 540,000 fake checks with a face value of $2.1 billion have been seized.

Not all of the scams are as esoteric as the Nigerian wire transfer or rely on greed, reports CBS News correspondent Bob Orr.

Jill Parker, for example, lost thousands to an overseas con artist posing as a potential tenant. She listed her Chicago apartment for rent on the Internet and got an immediate offer from a businessman overseas.

"He agreed to take the apartment, and he said he said it would send us a check for $25,000," she said.

Parker was told to deposit that check, keep $3,600 to cover the rent, and wire the balance -- more than $21,000 -- to an account that the tenant claimed would be used for furniture. When the check initially cleared, she forwarded the cash. But, a week later, the renter's bank said it was fake, leaving Parker out of $21,000 of her own money.

"We would have never sent any money had we known that the money wasn't in our bank,” she said.

So far there have been 60 arrests in the Netherlands, 16 in Nigeria and one in Canada, the Postal Inspection Service said, and the effort is continuing.

"There is no room in the mail for any of these phony come-ons," Postmaster General John Potter said.

Most of the cons start with e-mails telling of an inheritance or lottery win and ask the victim to help bring the money to the United States. The victim is asked to cash a check that comes in the mail and to send part of the money back to the person sending it, said Greg Campbell, inspector in charge of global security and investigations for the Postal Inspection Service.

Then that person disappears with the money and the original check bounces, leaving the victim with a loss.

Retired people have lost their nest eggs and young families have been defrauded of their savings for a home, Potter said.

Many of the cases originate in the Netherlands, where West African con artists operate from Internet cafes, said Johan Van Hartskamp, commissioner of the Amsterdam police.

In what he called "Operation Dutch Treat," police have arrested 60 people there, with three extradited to the United States and four more facing extradition. The rest are being prosecuted in the Netherlands, he said.

Ibrahim Lamorde, director of the Nigerian Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, said the problem is monumental and "will only be surmounted through global efforts."

U.S. Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher said: "There is no lottery. There is no inheritance. The checks are not real. But there are real victims. The crime knows no borders, and our coordinated law enforcement knows no borders." WASHINGTON Oct 3n

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posted by LadyIrene @ 10/04/2007 06:14:00 PM 0 comments