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Bayer
pleads guilty to rubber price fixing chrges
Washington: Bayer AG has agreed to plead guilty
and pay a $66 million fine for its part in an international
rubber chemical price-fixing cartel. The plea by Bayer,
based in Leverkusen, Germany, was entered in court papers
filed in US District Court in San Francisco. Bayer becomes
the second company to plead guilty as part of the conspiracy.
In May, Crompton Corp. of Middlebury, Connecticut, parent
of Uniroyal, agreed to pay a $50 million fine in the case.
Prosecutors
say the conspiracy involved additional unnamed companies
which were part of a cartel and centered on fixing prices
for additives and fillers used to improve the elasticity,
strength and durability of rubber products such as tires,
outdoor furniture, hoses, belts and shoes.
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Encouraging
results with novel HIV/AIDS vaccine
Bangkok, Thailand: Progenics Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
has announced that its human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)
vaccine candidate stimulated the production of specific
anti-HIV antibodies in animals. When tested in the laboratory,
these antibodies inactivated certain strains of HIV isolated
from infected patients.
The vaccine-elicited antibodies were observed to bind
to the surface of the virus rendering it non-infectious
- a critical step in preventing the establishment of HIV
infection after initial exposure. Such neutralizing antibodies
against HIV have been difficult to induce with vaccines
currently in development. The Company presented these
findings today at the XV International AIDS Conference
in Bangkok.
According
to John P. Moore, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Microbiology
and Immunology, Weill Medical College of Cornell University
and a collaborator on the project "a common feature
of successful vaccines for other infectious diseases is
their ability to rapidly neutralize viruses in newly exposed
individuals before the infection can become established.
Inducing neutralizing antibodies will be important for
developing a preventative AIDS vaccine." According
to the company, their goal is to advance a prophylactic
HIV vaccine into human testing within the next four years.
Progenics Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a USA based biopharmaceutical
company, is focusing on the development and commercialization
of innovative therapeutic products to treat the unmet
medical needs of patients with debilitating conditions
and life-threatening diseases.
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Evolution
of spam into criminal activity
San Ramon, USA: Clearswift, the MIMEsweeper(TM)
company, has announced the findings of its thirteenth
spam index to reveal how spam has evolved over the past
twelve months. According to the survey, the overriding
trend is the transition of spam from being annoying and
indecent to illegal and malicious.
When Clearswift's spam index first began measuring different
spam content, it was dominated by an almost even mix of
pornography, financial, healthcare and direct product
spam along with significant amounts of gambling and scam
related content.
As
revenues for spammers continued to push the tide of spam
higher, it was financial and pharmaceutical spam that
rose the most, now making up 69.6 per cent of spam between
them, compared to 39.2 per cent this time last year. Pornographic
spam has fallen from 21.8 per cent to 4.8 per cent in
the same period. This trend is also indicative of the
growing sophistication of spammers and the move of criminal
activity online. Organized crime gangs have been moving
their operations online and spam provides a virtually
invisible channel for this kind of activity. By using
spam to direct email users onto disreputable websites,
it is possible to conceal their activity from authorities.
Spam is now a hotbed for a variety of financial scams,
such as web-phishing and 'pump and dump' stock tipping,
and serves as a black market for illegal goods such as
fake pharmaceuticals and counterfeit software.
Organized crime gangs now have access to a significant
network of zombie PCs, mainly home PCs with broadband
connections, capable of churning out vast quantities of
spam. These networks are now being used as a platform
for a variety of crimes such as extortion, using the threat
of denial of service attacks, and fraudulent identity
theft scams, using web-phishing techniques. Clearswift
enables organizations to protect themselves against digital
attacks, and it's portfolio includes MIMEsweeper(TM),
an advanced content security solution, as well as a range
of specialized security solutions for the most security
conscious environments.
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