In a new article, Swiss pharmaceutical industry and healthcare reporter Jessica Davis Plüss argues that an under-discussed driver of high drug prices worldwide––including the cancer drug Keytruda––is the industry’s use of “patent thickets” that extend monopolies long after original patents should expire.  TAHIR AMIN; [email protected]      Amin is the founder and CEO of the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK).  Amin told the Institute for Public Accuracy: Davis Plüss’s reporting “highlights that despite all the various discussions and policy efforts to address high drug prices, the elephant in the room is not being tackled. That elephant is patents and how…

“The incident marks at least the second time the U.S. military fired on a civilian ship in the Gulf of Oman while enforcing the blockade.”

He wrote the in-depth article “The Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program,” which makes numerous points including: “During the 1973 war, Israel used nuclear blackmail to force Kissinger and Nixon to airlift massive amounts of military hardware to Israel.” He stresses that Israel’s nuclear weapons program should not be compared with the North Korean, Indian or Pakistani programs. He notes that at this point there’s significant evidence it is more advanced than the British program, or the French program from which it emerged in the 1950s.

Al Jazeera reports: “Two activists from a Gaza-bound humanitarian flotilla have been presented before an Israeli court days after they were abducted following their detention with 175 other campaigners by Israel in international waters near Greece.”

Some experts say that Democratic lawmakers and the Biden administration missed key opportunities to shift course on Iran, with the result of a deepening crisis shaped by a longstanding reluctance or refusal to prioritize diplomacy. In 2024, Sina Toossi wrote that President Biden’s approach to Iran was “particularly self-defeating.” 

Thomas Reifer contends that we are drifting into an uncontained and potentially global war in which world leaders are deliberately acting mad. This “madman” approach is particularly dangerous in the nuclear age. Today, the number of armed conflicts around the world are higher than at any time since World War II.

“Despite being a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), since its 1979 revolution … Iran has come under unprecedented scrutiny by the IAEA. … Meanwhile, Israel — one of only four NPT non-signatories (Pakistan, India and North Korea are the others) and the only state in the Middle East actually possessing nuclear weapons — has remained free from any meaningful international oversight.”

“The Israel regime’s attack on yet another humanitarian flotilla is a grave breach of international humanitarian law, a violation of the law of the sea, an extension of its genocide in Palestine to international and Greek waters, and a product of the impunity granted to it by complicit Western states. The regime’s lawlessness is shared by every state with ships in the Mediterranean or citizens on board the flotilla that could have protected the flotilla but did not. They must act now.”

“The Israeli government is refusing to back down from its declared intention of seizing a large portion of southern Lebanon. Soon after the ceasefire was announced, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Tel Aviv had ‘not yet finished the job’ in Lebanon.

“The State Department said in a statement last week that the U.S. is in conflict with Iran “at the request” of Israel, an acknowledgment of Israel’s role in steering the U.S. into the war, which the U.S. has dubbed ‘Operation Epic Fury.’ The statement was issued by the State Department’s legal adviser, Reed D. Rubinstein, who attempted to provide a legal justification for the war.”