February 17, 2005 – a moderately busy news day twenty years ago.
Starting with news that President Bush named John Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, as the government’s first national intelligence director Thursday, turning to a veteran diplomat to revive a spy community besieged by criticism after the Sept. 11 attacks. Ending a nine-week search, Bush chose John Negroponte, who has been in Iraq for less than a year, for the difficult job of implementing the most sweeping intelligence overhaul in 50 years. Negroponte, 65, is tasked with bringing together 15 highly competitive spy agencies and learning to work with the combative Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld, the brand new CIA Director Porter Goss and other intelligence leaders. He’ll oversee a covert intelligence budget estimated at $40 billion. John Negroponte, a former ambassador to the United Nations and to a number of countries, called the job his “most challenging assignment” in more than 40 years of government work.
And curbing abuses Last week, the Senate overwhelmingly approved legislation that would sweep most class-action lawsuits seeking more than $5 million out of state courts and into federal courts. The House could approve the bill later this week. If so, it would be the first and least controversial – of the changes the president hopes to make in the legal system. A key provision in the bill seeks to do away with coupon awards by pegging them to attorneys’ fees. Lawyers would be paid a percentage based on the percentage of coupons cashed in, and not based on the number awarded. The measure would do nothing to close the gap between attorneys’ fees and the money their clients collect. Bill sponsors hope the number of lawsuits would be curbed by shifting them to federal courts, where it would take longer for a case to make its way through the system.
The bill also would end the current practice of shopping a case around from state to state, looking for a friendly judge or state consumer laws that favor their case.
And finally, Merck & Co., which pulled its popular arthritis drug Vioxx last year because of heart risks, said Thursday that it may return it to the U.S. market if a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel finds that the drug’s heart risks are similar to those of rivals still on the market. But an outspoken FDA researcher said he believed that the suddenly popular arthritis pill Mobic—which many people turned to after Vioxx was pulled—also may cause increased risk of heart attacks. Mobic, sold in the U.S. by North Chicago-based Abbott Laboratories, has been the primary benefactor from problems with the so-called Cox-2 class of painkillers. Merck’s dramatic announcement and new testimony questioning the health risks of prescription painkillers puts pressure on advisers to the FDA to make the call on whether Vioxx and its rivals Celebrex and Bextra, used by millions of people, should remain on the market in some form or be pulled altogether. “If the advisory committee and FDA conclude that the benefits of this class outweigh the risks in some patient populations, then we would have to consider the implications of these new data given the unique benefits Vioxx offers,’’ Peter Kim, president of Merck’s research laboratories, said during testimony at an FDA hearing looking into health risks of Cox-2 drugs. Although Merck pulled Vioxx from the market, Pfizer Inc., which owns both Celebrex and Bextra, only issued warnings and continues to sell the drugs.
Dr. David Graham, a safety researcher for the FDA who stunned the industry when he went before Congress last fall and blew the whistle on the safety of several other drugs, also said he believed high dosages of Vioxx, Celebrex and Bextra were a threat to patient safety. He also warned that the arthritis pill Mobic, which benefited from the Vioxx scandal because it falls outside the Cox-2 class, also may cause increased risk of heart attacks. Mobic is on pace to reap more than $1billion in U.S. sales—a measure Wall Street deems a blockbuster.
And that’s just a tiny slice of what went on, this February 17, 2005 as presented by The CBS World News Roundup Late Edition.
