Top Tag
Top Stories
​

Loud explosions heard…

On By admin

The Israeli military confirmed that two rockets were fired towards central Israel on Thursday evening, with at least two loud explosions heard the Gush Dan region.One was reported to have been intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system while another one is said to have fallen in open territory.  There were reports of a number of Israeli who were treated for shock.It was the first time sirens were activated in Tel Aviv since the last war with Gaza in 2014.

Video of an Iron Dome missile being fired over #TelAviv pic.twitter.com/UYxFzuGMa6

Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>

Facebook Won’t Let Employers, Landlords or Lenders Discriminate in Ads Anymore

On By admin

by Jack Gillum and Ariana Tobin

Facebook advertisers can no longer target users by age, gender and ZIP code for housing, employment and credit offers, the company announced Tuesday as part of a major settlement with civil rights organizations.

The wide-ranging agreement follows reporting by ProPublica since 2016 that found Facebook let advertisers exclude users by race and other categories that are protected by federal law. It is illegal for housing, job and credit advertisers to discriminate against protected groups.

ProPublica had been able to buy housing-related ads on Facebook that excluded groups such as African Americans and Jews, and it previously found job ads excluding users by age and gender placed by companies that are household names, like Uber and Verizon Wireless.

“This settlement is a shot across the bow to all tech companies and platforms,” said Peter Romer-Friedman, a lawyer with Outten & Golden in Washington who represented the plaintiffs along with the ACLU. “They need to understand that civil rights apply to the internet, and it’s not a civil rights-free zone.”

The changes apply to advertisers who offer housing, employment and credit offers to U.S.-based users of Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. Facebook said it hopes to implement the requirements by the end of the year.

The agreement also will create a separate online portal for housing, credit and employment offers. Those advertisers will not be able to target users in a geographic area smaller than a 15-mile radius, which advocates say tamps down on “digital” neighborhood redlining.

Housing, job and credit advertisers will also now only be able to choose from a few hundred interest categories to target consumers, down from several thousand. Critics have said such a swath of finely tuned categories, like people interested in wheelchair ramps, are essentially proxies to find and exclude certain groups. Facebook said it will keep more generic interests like “real estate,” “apartment” and “job interview.”

Facebook also said it will create a page where users can see all current housing ads whether or not the users were among those targeted. The agreement says Facebook will also study how algorithms can be biased.

“There is a long history of discrimination in the areas of housing, employment and credit, and this harmful behavior should not happen through Facebook ads,” Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg wrote in a statement Tuesday.

The changes are part of Facebook’s settlement in five discrimination lawsuits. Plaintiffs included the Communications Workers of America and several fair-housing organizations, as well as individual consumers and job seekers. The settlement includes a payout of about $5 million to plaintiffs, mostly to defray legal costs.

The company agreed last year to limit advertisers’ ability to target by some demographic categories, following a complaint by Washington state.

Facebook has previously said that it was being held to an unreasonably high standard, and that ads excluding users by age and gender were not discriminatory. “We completely reject the allegation that these advertisements are discriminatory,” Vice President of Ads Rob Goldman wrote in a December 2017 post. “Used responsibly, age-based targeting for employment purposes is an accepted industry practice and for good reason: it helps employers recruit and people of all ages find work.” The post was titled: “This Time, ProPublica, We Disagree.”

Facebook said Tuesday it had “not seen the kind of explicit discriminatory behavior that civil rights groups are concerned about.” But ProPublica used a crowdsourcing project to find dozens examples of job ads that excluded workers over 40, women and other protected groups.

Facebook has made another move recently that resulted in less transparency around ads. This year, it moved to block a ProPublica project that allowed the public to see how political ads are being targeted on Facebook.

The company said it was simply enforcing its terms of service.

The Art of a Monster

On By admin

The camera flies high above the palm trees of Hollywood, soaring north and west, all the way to the suburb of Simi Valley, where it slows down to seek out a certain street, and then slows some more until it finds a particular house. It hovers above it, and then swoops down, pushing in all the way to the doorstep, where it rests, impatient. It is the house where James Safechuck, one of the two men at the center of Leaving Neverland, an HBO documentary, grew up, but in a way it might as well be the Darlings’ house: “Peter Pan chose this particular house because there were people here who believed in him.”

But the Safechucks are not the only people who believe, because here is another suburban house, and here again is that seeking, searching intelligence, the camera pushing closer and closer. It is the house in Brisbane, Australia, where the other subject of the documentary, Wade Robson, grew up. The implication is clear: Michael Jackson could have any little boy in the world; all he needed were parents who would serve up their sons to him.

The two mothers, Stephanie Safechuck and Joy Robson, interviewed at length in the film, are a remarkable pair. Their eyes glimmer with excitement as they talk about hotel suites, meeting movie stars, the lavish guest rooms at Neverland Ranch and its excellent wine cellar. (“That was just something I really enjoyed,” Stephanie says in a matter-of-fact way, as though describing a nice feature of a resort.) They tell us that living in the orbit of Michael Jackson was a “dream,” a “fantasy,” even as one of them admits that she spent a lot of her time at Neverland alone, playing with the chimps, because Jackson and her son avoided her all day long. Most damning is the women’s tacit and unexamined admission that the central proposition upon which their fantastical stories depend—that it never occurred to them that Jackson might pose a threat to their sons—is false. Here is Stephanie pressing her ear against a hotel bedroom, trying to hear what is happening inside; here is Joy, realizing that a new boy appears every 12 months.

[Read: On not believing “Leaving Neverland”]

In early March, the physician Drew Pinsky said on the Daily Pop talk show that he suspected both of these women had themselves been the victims of childhood sexual abuse, before quickly walking back the statement to a less slanderous avowal that he did not know either of them, and was merely guessing. But his speculation offered the only explanation outside the demonic for the most harrowing of the women’s remarks; when Jackson asked Joy whether her son could live with him for a year, she offered a modified plan:  She would not leave Wade with him, but would “share Wade” with him.

The fathers, as is so often the case in stories of child sexual abuse, are largely absent from their sons’ lives. Pedophiles tend to skulk away from fathers, and for good reason. They believe that even an inattentive father—even a bad one—will usually stir to action if he senses that his children are under threat from an adult male. Both men seem to have enjoyed the material delights offered by Jackson’s obsession with their sons, but they were often called away to the drudgery of their own Dickensian jobs: James’s father had inherited a family rubbish business; Wade’s owned a couple of small fruit shops. Both marriages were unhappy.

“What the hell is wrong with Michael?” Chris Rock asked in Never Scared, which was filmed in 2004, the same year the pop star was indicted on a second child-molestation charge. “Another kid?” he asked, stunned, before summing up the situation perfectly: “We love Michael so much, we let the first kid slide.” In 1993, the parents of a boy named Jordan Chandler filed a civil suit against Jackson, which the entertainer settled for an estimated $25 million. The 2004 molestation charge against him was supported by evidence gained during a 2003 police raid on Neverland Ranch, including photographs of a hidden closet outfitted with multiple deadbolts and a bed, life-size mannequins of children that could be bent into various positions, and enough children’s toys to fill the lair of a figure from Grimms’ Fairy Tales. In 2005, Jackson was found not guilty of the molestation charge, and other charges against him. But the photographs and their terrible implications lived on, even as Jackson’s true believers insisted he was an innocent man.

[Read: I’m not black, I’m Kanye]

Like Hannibal Buress’s bit about Bill Cosby raping women, Leaving Neverland is what finally got many people to admit to themselves what they already believed. The testimony of the two men is so intimate, so drenched with the sorrow of ruined childhoods, that it cannot be denied. They talk about falling in love with Michael Jackson, about childhood sexual pleasure, and all the other aspects of this kind of abuse that we don’t want to understand. During descriptions of the sex acts, the film sometimes cuts away from the speaker to show pictures of the little boys they were at the time of the events. They were beautiful children, so young that a parent might still have read bedtime stories to them.

The most grievous moment of the film is when Wade describes the horror of a particular sex act forced on him: “To be graphic about it … a full, adult, grown-man-sized penis in my mouth … in a little 7-year-old’s mouth.” And the most heartbreaking moment takes place when James describes what it was like to meet the fate that all these children apparently met: being replaced by another boy and, his bond with his own family already broken, abandoned. One night, James went to spend the night at Jackson’s Century City apartment, but another little boy was also there. Jackson took that child to his bedroom and closed the door, leaving James to sleep alone on the couch. “I cried and cried,” he tells us of that long night, “and I cried out for my mom.”

There is one moment in the film in which it is possible to think that Jackson—otherwise portrayed as monstrous—might have had moments of self-awareness, even of guilt. Wade says he once woke up in the middle of the night to find him sitting in the corner of the bedroom, sobbing. Jackson told him that he was sad because the boy was scheduled to return to Australia the next day, but throughout Jackson’s long, public life were hints that on some level, he was grappling with the deep horrors that he was allegedly committing in private.

Jackson’s childhood was marked by terror of his father. He said that just catching sight of the man could make him vomit; that Joe Jackson beat his sons with razor strops and belts when they made slight mistakes rehearsing. Michael’s sister La Toya accused their father of sexually abusing her in her early adolescence, but the claim was roundly denied by members of the family, who also deny the sexual-abuse allegations made in the documentary. (Jackson’s estate is suing HBO for $100 million, for violating a nondisparagement agreement.)

One of Jackson’s most famous songs grapples with the notion of guilt—“I’m starting with the man in the mirror/I’m asking him to change his ways”—and the “Thriller” video is about a young man trying to convince people that he turns into a monster at night. Perhaps, as he began to develop his relationships with young boys, he was testing the public, waiting for a punishment that never came. His plastic surgery seemed to become an act of self-erasure. In the end, the only way he could conquer the night was to have a doctor come and put him under anesthesia.

And through this terrible man, this destroyer, poured a force that can only be truthfully described as art. Michael Jackson’s dancing is no mortal enterprise: James Brown’s shuffle, Fred Astaire’s precision, and some other element that exists so far beyond anything as simple as influence, or talent, that we can only say we know it when we see it. It’s not a gift; it’s the gift itself.

The ancient question: What moral stain awaits us if we cannot abandon the art of a monster? None.

[Read: The disturbing truth about Kevin Spacey’s “Let Me Be Frank” video]

Edmund Wilson taught us in “The Wound and the Bow”—nominally about Sophocles’s Philoctetes, an obscure play about the great archer who was bitten by a snake and suffered from its suppurating wound for years—that “the victim of a malodorous disease which renders him abhorrent to society and periodically degrades him and makes him helpless is also the master of a superhuman art which everybody has to respect and which the normal man finds he needs.” T. S. Eliot wrote in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” More to the point, Don Cornelius said, “It is always a pleasure to find something that matters.”

Michael Jackson’s art matters. It matters not because of any sociopolitical significance, although many of his songs bear uplifting messages. It matters not for its implications about race in America. It matters because of the simple fact that it is, in every sense, the gift revealed.

A generation ago, young people read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift to understand how to live meaningful lives by cultivating within themselves the ability to receive art: “An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that ‘begging bowl’ to which the gift is drawn.”

You can cast away Picasso because Hannah Gadsby told you he was cruel to women. But can you cast away Guernica? Art isn’t something mere; it doesn’t exist as the moral bona fides of the person who made it. That person is a supernumerary. Separate yourself from any art—even popular art; even art created simply as entertainment—and you separate yourself from all of it.

Countdown to “Full Spectrum Dominance”

On By admin

Photograph Source NASA/Bill Anders

The US is formally committed to dominating the world by the year 2020. With President Trump’s new Space Directive-4, the production of laser-armed fighter jets as possible precursors to space weapons, and the possibility of nuclear warheads being put into orbit, the clock is ticking…

Back in 1997, the now-re-established US Space Command announced its commitment to “full spectrum dominance.” The Vision for 2020 explains that “full spectrum dominance” means military control over land, sea, air, and space (the so-called fourth dimension of warfare) “to protect US interests and investment.” “Protect” means guarantee operational freedom. “US interest and investment” means corporate profits.

The glossy brochure explains that, in the past, the Army evolved to protect US settlers who stole land from Native Americans in the genocidal birth of the nation. Like the Vision for 2020, a report by the National Defense University acknowledges that by the 19th century, the Navy had evolved to protect the US’s newly-formulated “grand strategy.” In addition to supposedly protecting citizens and the constitution, “The overriding principle was, and remains, the protection of American territory … and our economic well-being.” By the 20th century, the Air Force had been established, in the words of the Air Force Study Strategy Guide, to protect “vital interests,” including: “commerce; secure energy supplies; [and] freedom of action.” In the 21stcentury, these pillars of power are bolstered by the Cyber Command and the coming Space Force.

The use of the Army, Navy, and Air Force—the three dimensions of power—means that the US is already close to achieving “full spectrum dominance.” Brown University’s Cost of War project documents current US military involvement in 80 countries—or 40% of the world’s nations. This includes 65 so-called counterterrorism training operations and 40 military bases (though others think the number of bases is much higher). By this measure, “full spectrum dominance” is nearly half way complete. But the map leaves out US and NATO bases, training programs, and operations in Estonia, Latvia, Poland, and Ukraine.

As the US expands its space operations—the fourth dimension of warfare—the race towards “full spectrum dominance” quickens. Space has long been militarized in the sense that the US uses satellites to guide missiles and aircraft. But the new doctrine seeks to weaponize space by, for instance, blurring the boundaries between high-altitude military aircraft and space itself. Today’s space power will be harnessed by the US to ensure dominance over the satellite infrastructure that allows for the modern world of internet, e-commerce, GPS, telecommunications, surveillance, and war-fighting.

Since the 1950s, the United Nations has introduced various treaties to prohibit the militarization and weaponization of space—the most famous being the Outer Space Treaty (1967). These treaties aim to preserve space as a commons for all humanity. The creation of the US Space Force is a blatant violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of those treaties. In more recent decades, successive US governments have unilaterally rejected treaties to reinforce and expand the existing space-for-peace agreements. In 2002, the US withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), allowing it to expand its long-range missile systems. In 2008, China and Russia submitted to the UN Conference on Disarmament the proposed Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space, the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects. This would have preserved the space-as-a-commons principle and answered US claims that “enemies” would use space as a battleground against US satellites.

But peace is not the goal. The goal is “full spectrum dominance,” so the US rejected the offer. China and Russia introduced the proposed the treaty again in 2014—and again the US rejected it. Earlier this year, the US withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty. Last month, President Trump sent an unclassified memo on the new Space Directive-4 to the Vice President, Joint Chiefs of Staff, NASA, and the Secretaries of Defense and State.

The document makes for chilling and vital reading. It recommends legislating for the training of US forces “to ensure unfettered access to, and freedom to operate in, space, and to provide vital capabilities to joint and coalition forces.” Crucially, this doctrine includes “peacetime and across the spectrum of conflict.” As well as integrating space forces with the intelligence community, the memo recommends establishing a Chief of Staff of the Space Force, who will to join the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The memo also says that US space operations will abide by “international law.” But given that the US has rejected anti-space weapons treaties, it is barely constrained by international law.

In late-2017, Space.com reported on a $26.3m Department of Defense contract with Lockheed Martin to build lasers for fighter jets under the Laser Advancements for Next-generation Compact Environments program. The report says that the lasers will be ready by 2021. The article links to Doug Graham, the Vice President of Missile Systems and Advanced Programs at Lockheed Martin Space Systems. In the original link Graham reveals that the Air Force laser “is an example of how Lockheed Martin is using a variety of innovative technologies to transform laser devices into integrated weapon systems.”

As if all this wasn’t bad enough, the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) states in a projection out to the year 2050: “Economies are becoming increasingly dependent upon space-based systems … By 2050, space-based weapon systems may also be deployed, which could include nuclear weapons.” But this is extremely reckless. Discussing technologies, including the artificial intelligence on which weapons systems are increasingly based, another MoD projection warns of “the potential for disastrous outcomes, planned and unplanned … Various doomsday scenarios arising in relation to these and other areas of development present the possibility of catastrophic impacts, ultimately including the end of the world, or at least of humanity.”

“Full spectrum dominance” is not only a danger to the world, it is a danger to US citizens who would also suffer the consequences, if and when something goes wrong with their leaders’ complicated space weapons.

German lawmakers want Trump’s ambassador kicked out

On By admin

A top German politician is calling for the expulsion of U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell, who he says is acting like “a high commissioner of an occupying power.”

Grenell, a former Republican operative with a penchant for outrageous statements, has angered opposition lawmakers in Germany, who claim he is interfering in sovereign German matters.

Wolfgang Kubicki, the deputy chairman of the opposition Free Democrats (FDP), called on Germany’s foreign minister to “declare Richard Grenell persona non grata immediately.”

And he was not the only one criticizing the American ambassador.

“Grenell is a complete diplomatic failure. [He] damages trans-Atlantic relations with his repeated clumsy provocations,” Carsten Schneider, a lawmaker with the Social Democrats (SPD), told the German news agency DPA.

Grenell has done little to ingratiate himself to his host country since taking up the position in May 2018. Comments he made this week about Germany’s contributions to NATO led to Kubicki’s rebuke.

Donald Trump has clashed with Chancellor Angela Merkel repeatedly over Germany’s NATO spending, and it’s not the only cause of tension between the two leaders. Merkel has also been spearheading an unprecedented summit between EU leaders and Chinese President Xi Jinping — and on Tuesday she said Berlin would not be following Washington’s demands that Chinese telecoms giant Huawei be banned from helping to build its 5G infrastructure.

READ: Trump threatens Germany: We won’t share intel with you if you use Huawei

In his remarks, Grenell criticized the budget of Germany’s finance minister and said it was unacceptable that the country was once again going to miss its NATO defense spending target.

Grenell said Germany’s plan to lower military spending to 1.25 percent of its gross domestic product by 2023 was a “worrisome signal to Germany’s 28 NATO allies,” adding that it should stick to the 2 percent goal and “not run away.”

A member of Merkel’s conservative alliance urged Grenell to show some restraint, reminding him that Germany meets many of its NATO obligations.

“If one keeps an overall view, many comments made are more coherent than those of the American ambassador, if he thinks he has to comment on something every week,” Michael Grosse-Brömer said.

Grenell has talked several times recently about interfering in German affairs.

Over the weekend, in an interview with Breitbart, Grenell appeared to suggest he would work to topple Germany’s centrist government.

“I absolutely want to empower other conservatives throughout Europe, other leaders,” Grenell said. “I think there is a groundswell of conservative policies that are taking hold because of the failed policies of the left.”

In January, Grenell demanded Berlin stop development of Nord Stream 2, the gas pipeline being laid across the Baltic Sea to bring gas from Russia to Germany.

“We emphasize that companies involved in Russian energy exports are taking part in something that could prompt a significant risk of sanctions,” the ambassador wrote in a letter sent to the German newspaper Bild Am Sonntag.

Grenell’s appointment was strongly opposed by Democrats, who highlighted his previous undiplomatic outbursts. Within hours of being appointed German ambassador, those fears appeared well-placed, when Grenell tweeted what was seen as a threat to German businesses.

Cover Image: U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell stands for the Diplomatic Corps at Bellevue Castle at the Federal President’s New Year’s Reception on 14 January 2019 in Berlin. (Photo by Bernd von Jutrczenka/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images)

University of Illinois at Chicago Missed Warning Signs of Research Going Awry, Letters Show

On By admin

by Jodi S. Cohen

For a year, the University of Illinois at Chicago has downplayed its shortcomings in overseeing the work of a prominent child psychiatrist who violated research protocols and put vulnerable children with bipolar disorder at risk.

But documents newly obtained by ProPublica Illinois show that UIC acknowledged to federal officials that it had missed several warning signs that Dr. Mani Pavuluri’s clinical trial on lithium had gone off track, eventually requiring the university to pay an unprecedented $3.1 million penalty to the federal government.

UIC’s Institutional Review Board, the committee responsible for protecting research subjects, improperly fast-tracked approval of Pavuluri’s clinical trial, didn’t catch serious omissions from the consent forms parents had to sign and allowed children to enroll in the study even though they weren’t eligible, the documents show.

The IRB’s shortcomings violated federal regulations meant to protect human subjects, putting it in “serious non-compliance,” according to one of five letters from UIC officials to the federal government the university turned over to ProPublica Illinois after a nearly yearlong appeal for the documents under open records laws.

Still, UIC officials have continued to blame only Pavuluri. In written statements, the university told ProPublica Illinois last year — and again this week — that “internal safeguards did not fail” and that researchers are “responsible for the ethical and professional conduct” of their projects.

A ProPublica Illinois investigation published last year, “The $3 Million Research Breakdown,” revealed Pavuluri’s research misconduct and the university’s oversight failures. The stories revealed that, in a rare rebuke, the National Institute of Mental Health in November 2017 ordered UIC to repay millions in grant money it had received for one of Pavuluri’s lithium studies.

But information was limited — particularly relating to the university’s response to federal officials about its own role — because the University of Illinois system withheld or redacted some documents, citing federal and state privacy laws.

ProPublica Illinois had requested the records under the Freedom of Information Act in early 2018, and, after the university declined to turn them over, appealed to the Illinois attorney general’s public access counselor. The agency decided last month that the school had “improperly denied” ProPublica Illinois all or parts of five letters sent from UIC to officials at the National Institute of Mental Health and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Human Research Protections. Other requested records remain under review by the public access counselor.

In one of those letters, dated March 22, 2013, James Fischer, then UIC’s director of the Office for the Protection of Research Subjects, told OHRP that an initial internal audit determined that the IRB shortcomings had “the potential to compromise the integrity of the human subjects protections program.”

Another letter Fischer sent OHRP in October 2015 explains why a university investigative panel concluded children likely were harmed by Pavuluri’s studies, despite her claim otherwise. The university has refused to release the panel’s report, but an executive summary — referenced in the October letter — found that children were harmed based on reports from parents and “a preponderance of evidence.”

“It is clear that it is not because of [Pavuluri’s] actions that harms may have been avoided,” the panel concluded, according to a quote from the report that Fischer included in his letter. “It is despite her actions that no subject came to worse harm.”

The study, “Affective Neuroscience of Pediatric Bipolar Disorder,” began in 2009 and aimed to use imaging to examine how the brains of adolescents with bipolar disorder functioned before and after taking lithium. The scans were compared with brain images of healthy, unmedicated children.

The study was almost complete, and the money spent, when it was shut down in 2013, when one of the young subjects became ill after she withdrew from other medication to begin receiving lithium for the study.

According to the protocol NIMH had approved, subjects should not have been able to participate if they had previously used psychotropic medication. The IRB did not approve medication withdrawal, records show.

The child’s hospitalization was reported to the IRB and then to federal officials, who requested more information. UIC conducted the initial audit and then an investigation, keeping federal officials informed of the findings over the next two years.

NIMH officials eventually determined both Pavuluri and the IRB had failed in numerous ways and demanded the $3.1 million be refunded. The study, NIMH officials concluded, had been compromised and the results had no scientific merit. The university had previously returned about $800,000 for two of Pavuluri’s other federally funded projects that also shut down prematurely when similar problems were discovered.

The newly obtained documents describe disorganization in Pavuluri’s work, with poor record keeping that included missing dates and identification numbers for the research subjects, among other problems. That made it difficult for UIC officials who later reviewed the research to understand who took part in the trial and the details of their participation.

Still, the records contain details that explain why 89 of the 103 children who participated should have been ineligible, including because they had histories of substance abuse, seizures or suicidal tendencies.

Although the federal grant limited the study to teenagers between 13 and 17, the IRB approved Pavuluri’s request to expand the age of participants to include 10- to 12-year-olds despite a specific prohibition by NIMH against doing this and a lack of proper documentation by Pavuluri about the reasons for the expansion.

Pavuluri went even further from the protocol and enrolled 8- and 9-year-olds, records show.

In another significant violation, the IRB approved the inclusion of research subjects as long as they hadn’t taken lithium, even though the NIMH grant originally prohibited the participation of anyone who had previously taken any psychotropic medication. Nearly 25 percent of the children enrolled in the study withdrew from or tapered other medication before participating, including the girl whose illness ultimately prompted the study’s shutdown.

NIMH has said it was not informed about the eligibility changes allowing younger participants and those with a history of taking other medications. It said “the changes were significant, because they increased risk to the study subjects.”

In written responses to recent questions from ProPublica Illinois, a UIC spokeswoman said no employees were disciplined for the IRB noncompliance and the university did not fail in its oversight role.

UIC officials have said they took appropriate steps once they realized problems with Pavuluri’s research, including reporting the concerns to the federal agencies, suspending her research and eventually ordering that she retract journal articles. They have said her case was an anomaly, that UIC “does not allow non-compliance,” and that research on human subjects “was performed upholding the highest standards in ethical and responsible research conduct.”

In its only universitywide communication to employees about Pavuluri’s research, sent last spring days after the initial ProPublica Illinois story about the problems, school officials discussed Pavuluri’s missteps but did not mention the IRB’s compliance failings. The letter noted that UIC “did not have any systemic issues of lax research oversight.”

Some “corrective actions” were taken, however, including changes to the IRB review process, records show. IRB panels were instructed to emphasize the research protocol as the preeminent document when reviewing researchers’ requests to make changes to ensure compliance with the approved criteria.

UIC also conducted an audit to determine if consent documents provided to research subjects in other studies followed the rules. A UIC spokeswoman declined to tell ProPublica Illinois the results of that audit, though a document indicates the audit found deficiencies in consent forms for 11 of the 28 protocols examined.

UIC provided hundreds of pages of documents in response to ProPublica Illinois records requests last year, but withheld or heavily redacted others. Last May, ProPublica Illinois asked the attorney general’s office, which is tasked with interpreting and enforcing the state Freedom of Information Act, to review whether the documents should be public, including the letters between UIC and federal officials.

Last month, the office of newly elected Attorney General Kwame Raoul issued an opinion on five of the letters, finding that all or parts of each were “not confidential” and should be public because they include the findings and corrective actions of the review process.

The university argued that the Illinois Medical Studies Act, which says medical-related peer reviews can be confidential, prohibited the documents’ disclosure. The public access counselor agreed that limited parts of the letters that described internal quality control could be withheld.

Raoul’s office has not yet ruled on ProPublica Illinois’ appeals for other Pavuluri research records the university has refused to provide, including research protocols, documents submitted to the IRB and records created as part of investigating and correcting issues related to Pavuluri’s work and university responses.

Pavuluri, who founded UIC’s Pediatric Mood Disorders Clinic when she joined the university in 2000, retired in June and has opened a private practice, the Brain and Wellness Institute, in Lincoln Park. In an interview with ProPublica Illinois last year, she called her mistakes oversights and said she made decisions in the best interests of her patients. She said she received minimal research guidance and training from the university, though she received $7.5 million in National Institutes of Health grants during her tenure at UIC.

Pavuluri has said she expanded the criteria for who could enroll in the study because it was difficult to find enough subjects within the narrow age range, and who were not already taking other medication.

But she said university officials placed too much blame on her instead of recognizing that those responsible for oversight also were responsible.

“It was in their interest to kind of maybe see this as one person’s mistake [rather] than the responsibility of the IRB as well,” Pavuluri said in an interview last year. She has declined to speak again with ProPublica Illinois and did not respond to a recent request for comment.

UIC officials have said that while there were problems with Pavuluri’s research, a review of her medical practice determined she provided “high quality patient care.”

But following ProPublica Illinois’ reporting, state regulators, who review complaints about Illinois doctors and decide if discipline is warranted, launched an investigation into Pavuluri. The state Department of Financial and Professional Regulation issued three subpoenas to UIC in August and September seeking records related to Pavuluri and her research.

State investigations of doctors are not made public unless the department imposes discipline.

Pavuluri’s research also has been under investigation by two divisions of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, according to subpoenas, emails and other documents: the inspector general’s office, which examines waste, fraud and abuse in government programs, and the Office of Research Integrity, which reviews claims of scientific misconduct.

Home Ethos About Contact
Terms Policy GDPR RichTVX
© Saeculum XXI U.S. Intelligence News