US to target fake pill web sales

17 December 2010 Last updated at 05:36 ET

Online stores that sell fake drugs or pills without prescriptions are being targeted by the US government.

It has set up an initiative that will try to shut down the web stores and educate people about the dangers of buying drugs from such places.

Search firms, payment providers and net hosting firms have all pledged to help the crackdown.

Research suggests about 36 million Americans have bought medicines from unlicensed web pharmacies.

"Those who sell prescription drugs online without a valid prescription are operating illegally, undercutting the laws that were put in place to protect patients, and are thereby endangering the public health," said Victoria Espinel, US intellectual property enforcement co-ordinator, in a statement.

"It is a real wake-up call that so many Americans have engaged in this dangerous behaviour," she said.

Web firms joining the initiative include search giant Google, domain registration firm Network Solutions, hosting companies as well as payment processors Paypal, Visa and Mastercard.

Together, the firms hope to tackle every link in the chain that keeps unlicensed pharmacies operating by stopping them showing up in search results, taking their websites offline, delisting the domains they use and stopping payments reaching them.

Many spammers align with online pharmacies and direct those who click on links in junk mail to the pedlars of fake pills.

The commercial partners in the initiative will also share information with law enforcement agencies and fund public awareness campaigns of the dangers of buying drugs from unlicensed pharmacies.

"The abuse of prescription medications is one of the most troubling public health problems in our country today," said Steve Pasierb, president of the non-profit Drugfree.org which runs education campaigns about drug abuse.

Drugfree and the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies are planning research to find out why one in six Americans have bought drugs from web pharmacies. They will also look into what they buy and try to uncover the reasons some people see the practice as risky and others do not.

The initiative was announced at a White House summit on intellectual property and is one result of a plan the Obama administration submitted to Congress in mid-2010 that committed to tackling counterfeit medicines.

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Assange tells of 'smear campaign'

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Julian Assange spoke to Newsnight's Kirsty Wark after being released on bail

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Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has said attempts to extradite him to Sweden over sexual assault allegations are part of a "smear" campaign.

Mr Assange is staying at a house near Bungay, Suffolk, after being freed on bail by the High Court in London while awaiting extradition proceedings.

He said more information would be published by the whistle-blowing website following his release.

Mr Assange denies the allegations made by Swedish prosecutors.

'Disturbing aspects'

Speaking to BBC Newsnight, the 39-year-old Australian said of the case against him: "My feeling is in fact that there's a number of different interests - personal, domestic and international - that are all feeding from this process and encouraging it and pushing it along.

"But it is revealing some important things. It's revealing some disturbing aspects of Europe.

"For example, that any person in any European country can be extradited to any other European country without the provision of any evidence whatsoever."

Referring to the Wikileaks website, he said: "Now that I am back to assist the directing of our ship, our work will proceed in a faster manner.

"But as we have seen with my absence, things are well set up to proceed even without my direct involvement."

BBC Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark asked Mr Assange if he would give his word of honour that he would not try to abscond before the next hearing.

He replied: "We have done everything by the book. We have tried as hard as possible to set up a situation where we can clear my name of these allegations.

"But what we have not seen is the provision of any evidence or material to allow us to do that."

'Continuing vendetta'

Mr Justice Ouseley ordered Mr Assange be bailed on payment of �240,000 in cash and sureties.

The judge imposed strict bail conditions including wearing an electronic tag, reporting to police every day and observing a curfew.

Mr Assange must also reside at a manor home on the Norfolk-Suffolk border owned by Vaughan Smith, a Wikileaks-supporting journalist and owner of the Frontline Club in London. Mr Assange had spent the previous eight nights in prison.

Mr Assange's solicitor Mark Stephens said after the court appearance that the bail appeal was part of a "continuing vendetta by the Swedes".

Speaking to the BBC after his release, Mr Assange said there was a rumour from his lawyers in the US that there had been an indictment made against him there.

A spokeswoman from the US Department of Justice would only confirm there was "an ongoing investigation into the Wikileaks matter".

Mr Assange has received the backing of a number of high-profile supporters, including human rights campaigners Jemima Khan and Bianca Jagger, and film director Ken Loach.

Sex allegations

Wikileaks has published hundreds of sensitive American diplomatic cables, details of which have appeared in the Guardian in the UK and several other newspapers around the world.

He has been criticised in the US, where former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has said he should be hunted down like the al-Qaeda leadership.

Mr Assange argues the allegations against him are politically motivated and designed to take attention away from the material appearing on Wikileaks.

Mr Assange is accused of having unprotected sex with a woman, identified only as Miss A, when she insisted he use a condom.

He is also accused of having unprotected sex with another woman, Miss W, while she was asleep.

A full extradition hearing should normally take place within 21 days of the arrest. Mr Assange was arrested on 7 December, so this should be by 28 December.

However, in such a high profile case, it is possible that a full extradition hearing will not take place for several months.

At that hearing Mr Assange will be able to challenge the warrant and raise any defences to the extradition request.

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Facebook suffers brief shut down

17 December 2010 Last updated at 03:58 ET

Facebook was forced to take itself offline after a staff member accidentally leaked internal product prototypes.

The social network was unreachable for about 20-30 minutes while the mess was cleared up.

The outage happened as the site introduced redesigned brand pages, a revamped photos section and a new page management feature.

In a statement on its blog, Facebook apologised for the brief downtime.

"For a brief period of time, some internal prototypes were made public to a number of people externally." read the message. "As a result, we took the site down for a few minutes. It's back up, and we apologise for the inconvenience."

The BBC understands that the problem arose when code for a number of new products was exposed to the public before they were ready to be launched. This included a feature called "memories" that indexed what people have done on Facebook chronologically.

"They're not pleased that they had to shut the website down for 30 minutes," said Sam Gustin at Wired.com.

"But it comes with the territory when you have a culture of iterative innovation, they say," he said. "Sometimes code gets pushed out before it's ready."

"There's probably an engineer at Facebook who is feeling pretty sheepish that he or she caused the world's biggest online social network to shut itself down for a half an hour," added Mr Gustin.

The news blog ReadWriteWeb saw the funny side of things by listing five things to do during a Facebook outage. They included resorting to instant messaging, using the phone to connect with people and reading a book.

On Twitter, one widely circulated tweet doing the rounds read "Facebook is down. Half the world population had suddenly become productive. The other half of the population is using Twitter."

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