The European Commission has approved the use of Avastin, a drug manufactured by the Swiss-based health care company, Roche. Avastin is used to treat women in advanced stages of ovarian cancer.
The illness is regarded as one of the most fatal of the group of gynecological cancers, with annual death rates as high as 140,000 across the world, as per reports from the company.
It is hoped that the approval of this drug will give patients more options to treat the condition, apart from limited surgical and chemotherapy-based alternatives.
"Today's approval of Avastin marks the first major treatment advance in newly diagnosed ovarian cancer in 15 years," stated Hal Barron M.D., Chief Medical Officer (CMO)?and Head, Global Product Development, Roche.
"This is the fifth tumor type for which Avastin has been approved in Europe, making it one of few biologic drugs indicated for multiple cancers," he further mentioned.
Avastin has demonstrated in two Phase III studies that women with newly diagnosed advanced ovarian cancer, who were treated, initially, with both Avastin and chemotherapy before receiving the former alone, lived significantly longer without the disease getting worse (progression-free survival), compared to those who received chemotherapy only.
Like us on Facebook
Incidentally, the European approval comes after the controversial revocation of the drug by the U.S.'s Food and Drug Administration (FDA), who maintained the drug exposed patients to dangerous side effects like high blood pressure and hemorrhaging.
To report problems or to leave feedback about this article, e-mail: To contact the editor, e-mail:
As you can see by my username, I am AisuGirl, and no, the Japanese does not mean I am a weeaboo, it's just a joke I turned into a name.
Now that that's out of the way, how about a long heart-to-heart about our personal philosophies and what morality means? *shot* Yeah, didn't think so. Anyhows, I'm just going to eat that huge hunk of Christmas turkey and NOT sneak back here every two seconds to see if someone's replied.
LONDON ? The loose-knit hacking movement "Anonymous" claimed Sunday to have stolen thousands of credit card numbers and other personal information belonging to clients of U.S.-based security think tank Stratfor. One hacker said the goal was to pilfer funds from individuals' accounts to give away as Christmas donations, and some victims confirmed unauthorized transactions linked to their credit cards.
Anonymous boasted of stealing Stratfor's confidential client list, which includes a range of entities from banks to Apple the U.S. Air Force to the Miami Police Department, and mining it for more than 4,000 credit card numbers, passwords and home addresses.
"Not so private and secret anymore?" the group taunted in a message on Twitter, promising that the attack on Stratfor was just the beginning of a Christmas-inspired assault on a long list of targets.
Anonymous said the client list it posted was a small slice of its 200 gigabytes worth of plunder it stole from Stratfor and promised more leaks. It said it was able to get the credit details in part because Stratfor didn't bother encrypting them ? an easy-to-avoid blunder which, if true, would be a major embarrassment for any security-related company.
Austin, Texas-based Stratfor provides political, economic and military analysis to help clients reduce risk, according to a description on its YouTube page. It charges subscribers for its reports and analysis, delivered through the web, emails and videos.
Lt. Col. John Dorrian, public affairs officer for the Air Force, said that "for obvious reasons" the Air Force doesn't discuss specific vulnerabilities, threats or responses to them.
"The Air Force will continue to monitor the situation and, as always, take apporpriate action as necessary to protect Air Force networks and information," he said in an email.
Miami Police Department spokesman Sgt. Freddie Cruz Jr. said that he could not confirm that the agency was a client of Stratfor, and he said he had not received any information about any security breach involving the police department.
It soon became clear that proprietary information about the companies and government agencies that subscribe to Stratfor's newsletters did not appear to be at any significant risk, and that the main threat was posed to individual employees.
Hours after publishing what it claimed was Stratfor's client list, Anonymous tweeted a link to encrypted files online with the names, addresses and account details.
"Not as many as you expected? Worry not, fellow pirates and robin hoods. These are just the "A"s," read a message posted online that encouraged readers to download a file of the hacked information.
It also linked to images online that it suggested were receipts for charitable donations made by the group manipulating the credit card data it stole.
"Thank you! Defense Intelligence Agency," read the text above one image that appeared to show a transaction summary indicating that an agency employee's information was used to donate $250 to a non-profit.
One receipt ? to the American Red Cross ? had Allen Barr's name on it.
Barr, of Austin, Texas, recently retired from the Texas Department of Banking and said he discovered last Friday that a total of $700 had been spent from his account. Barr, who has spent more than a decade dealing with cybercrime at banks, said five transactions were made in total.
"It was all charities, the Red Cross, CARE, Save the Children. So when the credit card company called my wife she wasn't sure whether I was just donating," said Barr, who wasn't aware until a reporter with the AP called that his information had been compromised when Stratfor's computers were hacked.
"It made me feel terrible. It made my wife feel terrible. We had to close the account."
Stratfor said in an email to members that it had suspended its servers and email after learning that its website had been hacked.
"We have reason to believe that the names of our corporate subscribers have been posted on other web sites," said the email, passed on to The Associated Press by subscribers. "We are diligently investigating the extent to which subscriber information may have been obtained."
The email, signed by Stratfor Chief Executive George Friedman, said the company is "working closely with law enforcement to identify who is behind the breach."
"Stratfor's relationship with its members and, in particular, the confidentiality of their subscriber information, are very important to Stratfor and me," Friedman wrote.
Repeated calls to Stratfor went unanswered Sunday and an answering machine thanked callers for contacting the "No. 1 source for global intelligence." Stratfor's website was down, with a banner saying "site is currently undergoing maintenance."
Wishing everyone a "Merry LulzXMas" ? a nod to its spinoff hacking group Lulz Security ? Anonymous also posted a link on Twitter to a site containing the email, phone number and credit number of a U.S. Homeland Security employee.
The employee, Cody Sultenfuss, said he had no warning before his details were posted.
"They took money I did not have," he told The Associated Press in a series of emails, which did not specify the amount taken. "I think why me? I am not rich."
One member of the hacking group, who uses the handle AnonymousAbu on Twitter, claimed that more than 90,000 credit cards from law enforcement, the intelligence community and journalists ? "corporate/exec accounts of people like Fox" news ? had been hacked and used to "steal a million dollars" and make donations.
It was impossible to verify where credit card details were used. Fox News was not on the excerpted list of Stratfor members posted online, but other media organizations including MSNBC and Al-Jazeera English appeared in the file.
Anonymous warned it has "enough targets lined up to extend the fun fun fun of LulzXmas through the entire next week."
The group has previously claimed responsibility for attacks on companies such as Visa, MasterCard and PayPal, as well as others in the music industry and the Church of Scientology.
____________
Associated Press writers Jennifer Kway in Miami, Ramit Plushnick-Masti in Houston, Texas and Daniel Wagner in Washington, D.C. contributed to this report.
_____________
Cassandra Vinograd can be reached at http://twitter.com/CassVinograd
It's property tax time in the city of Madison, and a letter from Mayor Paul Soglin blames the state for a local tax increase.
It all has to do with how much money local governments get from the state each year through what's called "shared revenue," which is a portion of state income taxes shared to help cover government costs.
This year, Madison took a 25 percent cut, and the mayor said that's part of why homeowners' tax bills may have gone up this year.
As resident Charles Quackenboss made his way to city hall to pay his property tax bill, he said it wasn't as bad as he expected.
"It was up about $150 over last year, and I think that is outstanding," said Quackenboss after paying his bill. "I think the mayor and county executive did a good job of keeping the tax levy reasonable. It could have gone up a lot more."
City of Madison taxes went up 3.7 percent this year, and in a letter with tax bills the mayor said that's primarily because of a cut in state aid.
"There is no question that the state's shared revenue decisions have driven up the property tax in Madison," said Soglin.
Soglin argued that the formula to figure out local aids needs to change. Although Madison is the second largest city in the state, it gets the 15th most shared revenue.
"The formula was well-intended to deal with issues of population and poverty, but it was always assumed that the state would be fair in terms of the funding," said Soglin.
Todd Berry, of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, said that's exactly why Madison gets less -- because it is considered a property-wealthy city.
"Either the appropriation has to be made larger so Madison will compete for some money, or they've got to take it away from poorer communities like Milwaukee, Beloit or Racine to give it to Madison," said Berry. "So it is a little unfair to suggest that the state is entirely to blame here."
But as Quackenboss looks at his bill, he said he thinks the city should get more money, too.
"When you're considering Madison, you must consider city services to all state buildings," said Quackenboss. "I don't think we get all the state money that we should for that."
Soglin and Berry said the other problem is that the funding formula hasn't really been used since the early 2000s. The Legislative Fiscal Bureau confirmed that local aids have been flat or cut since the early 2000s under Gov. Jim Doyle and Gov. Scott Walker.
GAZA (Reuters) ? Rival Palestinian factions took a significant step towards reconciliation on Thursday as the Islamist group Hamas said it planned to join Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Abbas held a meeting in Cairo with leaders from the factions, including Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal, where a committee was formed to prepare for the inclusion of Hamas, as well as the smaller militant group Islamic Jihad, in the PLO.
There are still some serious obstacles that could prevent a final unity deal and attempts to reconcile in the past have failed.
Hamas and Abbas's Fatah faction have been rivals for years. In 2006, Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in a brief civil war, leaving Fatah dominant in the West Bank.
Hamas has refused to recognize Israel's right to exist or renounce violence, while the PLO has signed interim peace accords with the Jewish state. It was unclear how Hamas would be included in the PLO, given the discrepancy.
The committee will now prepare for an internal election of the PLO parliament in order to facilitate Hamas and the Islamic Jihad membership.
One official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Hamas's Meshaal had told Abbas that his group was "in favor of peaceful resistance and a truce in Gaza and the West Bank at this stage."
The official offered no further explanation on what that might mean. Hamas has said in the past it would agree to a long-term truce with Israel, but remains sworn to its destruction.
A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Abbas's overtures to Hamas hurt the chances for peace and called on the international community not to grant the Islamist group legitimacy or recognition.
"Hamas is not a political organization that conducts terrorism. Hamas is a murderous, genocidal terrorist organization to the core," said spokesman Mark Regev.
(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi; editing by Andrew Roche)
Indian firefighters attempt to put out a fire as smoke billows out of the historic Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, which was stormed by armed gunmen in November 2008.
Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images
Indian firefighters attempt to put out a fire as smoke billows out of the historic Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, which was stormed by armed gunmen in November 2008.
On Nov. 26, 2008, terrorists simultaneously attacked about a dozen locations in Mumbai, India, including one of the most iconic buildings in the city, the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel.
For two nights and three days, the Taj was under siege, held by men with automatic weapons who took some people hostage, killed others and set fire to the famous dome of the hotel.
The siege of the Taj quickly became an international story. Lots of people covered it, including CNN's Fareed Zakaria, who grew up in Mumbai. In a report that aired the day after the attacks, Zakaria spoke eloquently about the horror of what had happened in Mumbai, and then pointed to a silver lining: the behavior of the employees at the Taj.
Apparently, something extraordinary had happened during the siege. According to hotel managers, none of the Taj employees had fled the scene to protect themselves during the attack: They all stayed at the hotel to help the guests.
"I was told many stories of Taj hotel employees who made sure that every guest they could find was safely ferreted out of the hotel, at grave risk to their own lives," Zakaria said on his program.
There was the story of the kitchen employees who formed a human shield to assist guests who were evacuating, and lost their lives as a result. Of the telephone operators who, after being evacuated, chose to return to the hotel so they could call guests and tell them what to do. Of Karambir Singh Kang, the general manager of the Taj, who worked to save people even after his wife and two sons, who lived on the sixth floor of the hotel, died in the fire set by the terrorists.
Often during a crisis, a single hero or small group of heroes who take action and risk their lives will emerge. But what happened at the Taj was much broader.
During the crisis, dozens of workers ? waiters and busboys, and room cleaners who knew back exits and paths through the hotel ? chose to stay in a building under siege until their customers were safe. They were the very model of ethical, selfless behavior.
What could possibly explain it?
Getting To The Bottom Of It
Earlier this month, a study in the Harvard Business Review proposed an answer to that question.
The study was done by Rohit Deshpande, a Harvard business professor who researches both business ethics and global branding.
About nine months after the attacks on the Taj, Deshpande was in India interviewing senior management of the hotel on a completely different topic, but found that the people he was talking to kept steering the conversation back to the terrorist attacks.
"What was interesting about all those interviews with senior management was that they could not explain the behavior of their own employees," he told me. "They simply couldn't explain it."
YouTube
An NDTV tribute video to the brave staff of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel.
And so Deshpande decided to do his own investigation of the company to see if he might be able to untangle the cause.
Last year, Deshpande flew to India to review the company's HR policies and also do interviews with the hotel staff, everyone from managers to kitchen workers.
What he published in the Harvard Business Review is his case study of the company.
Now, because this is a case study and not a double-blind research study, it's impossible to draw definitive conclusions. But this is what Deshpande thinks:
"It perhaps has something to do with the kinds of people that they recruit to become employees at the Taj, and then the manner that they train them and reward them," he says.
From A To Z ? Recruitment To Reward
First, recruitment. In their search to find maids and bellhops, the Taj avoids big cities and instead turns to small towns and semi-urban areas. There the Taj develops relationships with local schools, asking the leaders of those schools to hand-select people who have the qualifications they want.
"They don't look for students who have the highest grades. They're actually recruiting for personal characteristics," Deshpande says, "most specifically, respect and empathy."
Taj managers explained to Deshpande that they recruited for traits like empathy because that kind of underlying value is hard to teach. This, he says, is also why recruiters avoid hiring managers for the hotel from the top business schools in India. They deliberately go to second-tier business schools, on the theory that the people there will be less motivated by money.
And this strategy, as Deshpande points out, is highly unusual in India.
"Let me put this into a little cultural context for you," he says.
"India is a country where people are almost obsessed about grades. In order to get ahead, you have to have really high grades. But here is an organization that is doing just the opposite ? they're recruiting not for grades, they're recruiting for character."
Part of this focus on character is ideological, he says.
The Taj is owned by a corporation called the Tata group, which for the past hundred years has been run by an extremely religious family that's interested in social justice: The company typically channels about two-thirds of its profits into a charitable trust.
But Deshpande says there are also practical reasons for this focus on character. The Taj hotel has made its name on customer service, and they are near maniacal about it, treating it almost like a science.
For example, managers have mapped the number of interactions that happen between customers and hotel employees in a typical 24-hour stay. There are on average 42, often unsupervised, interactions between employees and guests.
Each of these interactions is viewed by the company as an opportunity for employees to delight their customers with their kindness. So everything ? everything ? about the training and rewards systems set up by the Taj is designed to encourage kindness.
Deshpande gives one example. "If guests say something or write something very complimentary about an employee, within 48 hours of [the] recording of that compliment, there is some sort of reward that is made."
Rewards range from gifts to job promotions.
This system ? of immediately rewarding desired behavior ? will likely sound familiar to people interested in psychology.
It's by-the-book conditioning, the same kind of conditioning used by B.F. Skinner to train his pigeons.
And in his study, Deshpande argues that it is this combination of selection and routinized rewards that explains what happened during those terrible three days when the Taj hotel was under siege.
The employees, he argues, were essentially performing the behaviors they were selected and trained to perform. In this case, extreme kindness to customers.
Enabling Ethics
EnlargeSajjad Hussain/AFP/Getty Images
The reception area of the Taj Mahal Hotel reopened on Dec. 22, 2008, less than a month after devastating attacks that rocked India's financial and entertainment capital.
Sajjad Hussain/AFP/Getty Images
The reception area of the Taj Mahal Hotel reopened on Dec. 22, 2008, less than a month after devastating attacks that rocked India's financial and entertainment capital.
And for Deshpande, all of this has much larger implications: For him, what happened at the Taj is proof positive that organizations can create ethical behavior.
"I am absolutely convinced that corporations can enable ethical behavior, and I think what happened at the Taj on [Nov. 26, 2008] is a great example," he says.
But Tom Donaldson, professor of business ethics at the Wharton School, says producing ethics isn't so simple.
"If ethics could be engineered by the organization infallibly, we wouldn't be hearing about so many scandals in church organizations," he says.
It's not that rewards don't matter, Donaldson argues. They profoundly influence behavior, he says. But Donaldson wonders if all the training and conditioning done by the Taj can really be said to have produced truly ethical behavior. What would happen, he wonders, if those employees had confronted a different kind of ethical dilemma, one presented by the customers they'd been conditioned to serve?
"I'd like to know what a Taj employee would do," he says, "for example, if one of the guests ended up striking a homeless person, or one of the guests attempted to sexually assault a hotel worker."
It's hard to condition real ethics, he says.
But for Deshpande, in the example of the Taj and the incredible sacrifices of the employees who work there, there is still a clear, and very compelling, lesson.
"Corporate design is absolutely critical," Deshpande says. "For good, and for evil."
