Most Recent Posts

Since Sandwich Monday began, certain sandwiches have been our white whales: the Hippogriff Burger, a Reuben signed by J.D. Salinger, an Actual White Whale sandwich. Also, the mysterious St.Paul sandwich, native to St. Louis: It's an egg foo young patty, with lettuce, pickle and mayo, on white bread. But we finally caught one.

Miles: This is the same sandwich my Model U.N. group made the first time we all got high together.

Ian: This really comes from the "These Are The Only Things I Had In My Fridge" school of cooking.

Enlarge image i

If you're looking for a deal on prescription drugs or tired of standing in line at the drugstore counter, maybe you'd be inclined to try an online pharmacy.

Perhaps you'd feel better about that choice if the site carried the name of a well-known chain, say, www.walgreen-store.com or www.c-v-s-pharmacy.com.

Well, not so fast. The Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. attorney's office in Colorado cracked down on those misleading sites, which weren't connected to their namesakes, and more than 1,600 others that the feds say are breaking the law by selling prescription drugs, some of them counterfeits.

"Illegal online pharmacies put American consumers' health at risk by selling potentially dangerous products," John Roth, director of the FDA's Office of Criminal Investigations, said in a statement. "This is an ongoing battle in the United States and abroad ...."

Many of the websites that were shut down claimed to be Canadian companies. But the FDA says that was a lie. The websites made use of bogus licenses and certifications to trick U.S. consumers, the FDA said.

The far-reaching bust is part of an international effort with a catchy, prehistoric name: Pangea VI. Pretty sure online drug sales weren't a problem back in the supercontinent's heyday.

This modern sweep was part of an International Internet Week of Action that wrapped up June 25.

The Interpol-coordinated Pangea project, now in its sixth wave, goes after sites hawking unapproved or risky drugs. Many of the them also sell drugs that legally require a prescription without actually getting one.

The FDA told one operator of many websites, including canadianfamilypharmacy.biz and cheapcanadianpharmacy.net, to stop selling drugs that violate U.S. laws. The agency's warning letter said a couple of impotence drugs being sold as "Levitra Super Force" and "Viagra Super Force" hadn't been approved by the agency. FDA also faulted the sites for selling "generic Celebrex." Problem is that Celebrex, a painkiller, is only available as a brand-name drug in this country, so a generic version is verboten.

Separately, Maine just enacted a law making it OK for residents to buy prescription drugs from other countries.

The FDA doesn't approve. "Medicine bought from foreign sources, such as from Internet sellers, from businesses that offer to buy foreign medicine for you, or during trips outside the United States, may not be safe or effective," an FDA spokesman told Shots via email in response to questions about the Maine law..

When Chinese workers have a grievance, they are increasingly taking dramatic and direct action.

As we've reported, an American executive at a Chinese factory has been prevented by workers from leaving the plant since Friday. Chip Starnes of Specialty Medical Supplies says it's a misunderstanding following a decision to shut down part of his medical-supply business and move some jobs to India where wages are lower.

He says workers erroneously believe he plans to lay them all off. As of Wednesday, he still wasn't allowed to leave the plant on the outskirts of Beijing.

This story is part of a larger pattern of labor strife in China.

As The Wall Street Journal noted: "While bosses aren't held captive in their companies every day in China, Starnes is not the first one. In January this year, around 1,000 workers at Shanghai Shinmei Electric Company held Japanese and Chinese managers hostage in the factory, claiming that work rules for bathroom breaks and punishments for tardiness were too harsh."

Li Qiang, executive director of New York-based China Labor Watch, says though the problem is common, it's rare for a Westerner to be involved.

"Generally, a lot of worker protests are similar to this because of unpaid wages," he told NPR through a translator. "Bosses move factories without a heads up to workers, and so workers are left unpaid."

Indeed, as the Journal says: "Numbers for such disputes are hard to come by, though an investigation by the Economic Information Daily, a newspaper published by the official Xinhua news agency, found that more than 400 bosses ran away from bankrupt factories in Eastern China's Zhejiang province in 2008.

Most of those executives worked for foreign companies, meaning workers had virtually no hope of claiming months or even years of back pay owed to them."

NPR's Anthony Kuhn explained the root of the story on Tuesday's Morning Edition:

"The big picture is that Chinese wages are starting to rise pretty quickly, particularly in the coastal manufacturing enclaves. And so foreign manufacturers have to look farther inland where wages are lower or they have to look to other countries, including Southeast Asia. Every country welcomes investment coming in. When it [investment] starts to look elsewhere, when it starts to move out, sometimes companies experience difficulties. ... We may be seeing this more and more in the future, and the question is: Does China have the infrastructure and the institutional resources to deal with this? And in this case, the answer is no."

Last week was a wild one for China's economy.

Interest rates on the loans that banks make to one another soared to alarming levels, and lending began to freeze up. Shanghai stocks nose-dived, taking Asian markets and the Dow, briefly, with them.

Things have calmed down, but the crisis showed how China's new leaders are trying to confront threats to the health of the world's second-largest economy.

Many here see it as the first shot in a long battle to reform a once-successful economic model that is now running out of gas.

In this particular case, the People's Bank of China — the nation's central bank — wants to cut down on rampant and risky lending. So earlier this month, in a departure from the past, it refused to pump money into the system when some banks desperately needed it.

"The central bank wants to send a message," says Oliver Rui, a finance professor at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai. "Don't take it for granted that whenever you need the money, you can easily get it."

Rui says the government was targeting midsized, state-run banks that lend into what's known as China's "shadow banking" sector.

Risky Lending

Here is an example of how shadow banking can work and why it concerns the government: A state-owned company borrows from a state-owned bank at a government-set low interest rate, maybe 5 percent.

More On China

Asia

Belly Dancing For The Dead: A Day With China's Top Mourner