A claim for restitution filed by Pennsylvania's attorney general caused a last-minute delay in the sentencing of
Merck & Co. (MRK for its violation of a federal drug law in connection with its marketing of former painkiller Vioxx.
At a hearing Friday in federal court in Boston, U.S. District Judge Patti Saris delayed Merck's sentencing until April 19 to allow for more time to consider the Pennsylvania claim. Merck was originally scheduled to be sentenced Friday.
Merck, of Whitehouse Station, N.J., agreed in November to pay $950 million and plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of marketing a misbranded drug, to resolve government allegations that the company illegally promoted Vioxx and deceived the government about the drug's safety.
The government alleged Merck promoted Vioxx for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis before that use was approved by regulators. A portion of the $950 million settlement also was to resolve parallel civil allegations that Merck made false and misleading statements about Vioxx's safety, causing government health programs to pay for the drug's use. Merck denied the civil allegations.
Merck had withdrawn Vioxx from the market in 2004 after a study showed it increased the risk of heart attacks and other cardiovascular events.
The proposed November settlement was to resolve claims by the U.S.
Justice Department, more than 40 states and the District of Columbia.
But last week, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania filed a so-called victim impact statement with the court. Pennsylvania's attorney general office argued that Judge Saris shouldn't impose a sentence unless Pennsylvania obtains restitution for
Medicaid payments allegedly resulting from Merck's criminal misconduct, according to a court document filed by the U.S. Justice Department.
Pennsylvania is continuing to pursue Vioxx-related claims against Merck in proceedings coordinated by a federal judge in Louisiana, according to the Justice Department.
The Justice Department argued that Pennsylvania therefore has a forum to pursue its claims, and it shouldn't hold up the sentencing in Boston.
Merck also urged Judge Saris to decline Pennsylvania's application for restitution because it would delay distribution of the settlement money to participating states.
In a written statement Friday, Merck said: "Through a last minute request the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has attempted to derail an agreement already reached in good faith with the federal government, 44 other states, and the District of Columbia. There is no legal foundation for the Commonwealth's claim in this court and Merck will vigorously oppose it."
The Justice Department said Pennsylvania was allocated $4.5 million for alleged Medicaid losses under the $950 million settlement. States had the choice of either accepting their allocations or initiating or continuing litigation against Merck.
21 Jump Street (15
(Phil Lord, Chris Miller, 2012, US Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, Brie Larson. 109 mins.
As with comic books, now that all the big titles have gone, it's down to TV's B-list to feed Hollywood's appetite for ready-made movie concepts.
Based on the show that first traded on Johnny Depp's youthful good looks, it stars Hill and Tatum – a great odd-couple anchor – as two low-flying cops who are sent back to high school to infiltrate a drugs ring. The premise is an almost pitifully obvious excuse to aim for broad-appeal paydirt with a mix of fratboy crudity, teen-movie romance and crime-flick action, but for all the box-ticking, it has intermittently hilarious results.
Contraband (15
(Baltasur Kormakur, 2012, US Mark Wahlberg, Kate Beckinsale, Giovanni Ribisi. 110 mins.
Mark Wahlberg sticks to what he's good at, which is muscled, breathy and slightly high-pitched posturing in a brooding action thriller. Here he plays a smuggler lured out of retirement for one last job, carrying counterfeit bills out of Panama City.
We Bought A Zoo (PG
(Cameron Crowe, 2011, US Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson, Thomas Haden Church. 119 mins.
Crowe brings his hard-to-resist sentiment to bear on this story of an LA hack (Damon who buys a rundown zoo after his wife dies and tries to get it up to legal standards. A fluffy, melancholy romcom.
Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (15
(Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2011, Tur/Bos-Herz Muhammet Uzuner, Yilmaz Erdogan. 158 mins.
Ceylan's latest is his most ambitious yet, a slow-burn procedural as an arrested man searches in the Turkish wilderness for the body of a man he is said to have killed. It's long, rigorous, with many loose ends, but rewarding for those brave enough to take the challenge.
Booked Out (12A
(Bryan O'Neil, 2012, UK Sylvia Sims, Mirren Burke, Rollo Weeks. 86 mins.
Small-scale Brit movie about a lonely illustrator. Tries to be a charming homegrown Amelie, but resembles more a goofy US indie.
Four Horsemen (NC
(Ross Ashcroft, 2012, UK 97 mins.
Somewhat doom-mongering doc with its sights on the global power elite.
The Devil Inside (15
(William Brent Bell, 2012, US Fernanda Andrade, Simon Quarterman. 83 mins.
Cheap Last Exorcism rip-off about a late-80s possession case that suggests some "found footage" shouldn't be spared the bin.
Bill Cunningham New York (12A
(Richard Press, 2010, US/Fra 84 mins.
Amiable doc on the veteran fashion photographer; one to file next to The September Issue.
How To Re-Establish A Vodka Empire (15
(Daniel Edelstyn, 2011, UK/Ukr 75 mins.
Easygoing doc about a Jewish Londoner seeking to explore his family's roots as Ukrainian manufacturers of premium-brand vodka.
In Darkness (15
(Agnieszka Holland, 2011, Pol/Ger/Can Robert Wieckiewicz, Benno Furmann, Agnieszka Grochowska. 144 mins.
Poland's own Oscar-nominated Schindler's List tells the true story of a sewer worker who saved Jews from the Nazis.
Out from Friday
Battle Royale meets Twilight in this hyped teen action flick based on the bestselling books.
Coming-of-age drama dealing with thugs, drugs and deadbeat dads in the shadow of the Olympic stadium, starring Charlie Creed-Miles.
A cast of real-life Navy Seals star in a fictional kidnap drama-thriller.
The Dardennes brothers bring their latest nuanced, realist drama, a hit at Cannes 2011.
Hindi action spy thriller.
Coming soon
In two weeks …
Aardman sets sail with The Pirates! …
Werner Herzog's death row doc Into The Abyss …
In three weeks …
Sean Penn plays a neurotic rock star in This Must Be The Place …
Julia Roberts reimagines Snow White in Mirror Mirror …
In a month …
Writer Joss Whedon invites us to The Cabin In The Woods …
Liam Neeson sinks your Battleship …
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Rosario Dawson's acting break came when she was just 15, in Larry Clark's troubling film Kids. She's built a thriving career since, but it's her work as a political activist that sets her apart
Rosario Dawson is not like other Hollywood actors. Consider this: she's 32, and in her 20s decided she'd had enough of being judged on her looks, so took to wearing enormous sweatshirts to auditions.
"I'd perform my ass off, and the casting directors would be like, 'You are perfect for this role, but can you wear something a little less shapeless?'" Her manager would bargain with her. She could wear a roll-neck jumper, he said – but could it at least be a fitted one? "I'm like, 'Ugh, fine', but these stupid conversations needed to be had, because unfortunately, don't believe what they tell you, there's very little imagination in Hollywood." She hoots with laughter.
It annoyed her when casting directors asked to see her in more revealing clothes, she says, because she was naked in the film Alexander, "so go to any crazy, sick website and you'll be able to look at it in slow motion if you like". Does that bother her? "No, not at all, my point being: then don't complain, 'We don't know what she really looks like.' Are you kidding?! Do your research. 'She looks a little fat right now'," she says, recalling a message that filtered down from some rotten, deluded film executive. "Really? They're called breasts … There was definitely a period for a couple of years where I rebelled against it. It probably cost me a lot of really big jobs, but I was just so angry."
I had been worried Dawson would be too tired to talk properly. Earlier in the day, she had called to put the interview back two hours, pleading jetlag, her voice full of mid-Atlantic grogginess. But she arrives at the Guardian on foot, poses quickly for a photo, sits down and she's away, words tumbling out.
She's been a women's activist for years, and I realise how steeped she is in feminist argument when she talks about how public-sector cuts are affecting women in the UK. (Dawson has a flat in London, but this still takes me aback. She's active in all sorts of ways – she's a long-time volunteer with a girls' club where she grew up in Manhattan, and appears in the feminist documentary
Miss Representation. Later this month she's performing in
A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant and a Prayer, a benefit in London for the organisations
V-Day and
Women for Women International. The event is based on writings about violence against women, edited by playwright, activist and close friend,
Eve Ensler.
The piece Dawson is performing is radical. Written by Periel Aschenbrand,
In Memory of Imette starts with the narrator being terrified by the murder of a female student near her apartment. She arms herself with weapons including "a big-ass hunting knife," Aschenbrand writes, "with which, if need be, I could slice off someone's testicles". I ask how Dawson feels about performing the monologue, and she says she completely agrees with its central message, that men and women need to talk more about rape. "You know, don't just walk down the street and be like everything's peaches and roses. It's one in three women who are going to be raped, killed, beaten or abused in her lifetime, and that's just real. To not live with that as a reality is really dangerous for women, and it lets a lot of guys off the hook from really paying attention to what's happening to the women around them. Because it's not all the men who are doing it, but not every single guy that boasts in the locker-room about the hot sex he had last night, had it with someone who was conscious."
It's not the first time Dawson has addressed the subject of rape head-on. She produced the
2007 film Descent, written and directed by her friend Talia Lugacy, and starred as Maya, a student who is raped by a classmate. The character goes on to exact revenge, in one of the more extreme scenes in modern, mainstream film-making, but the story is also thoughtful. It shows the slow arc of Maya's brutalisation, and her feelings after striking back, too.
Being a producer on the film provided some useful distance, she says.
"Otherwise I could have disappeared into that character more, you know, and it would have taken me down. It was really depressing … But I thought it was important to show and really talk about revenge, and to put that question into people's minds. People have all these ideas about it, but what it would actually look like is not a triumph. It's actually really degrading and sad." After the film came out, Ensler invited her to sit on the board of V-Day, a movement to end violence against women. "I remember exactly where I was when she asked," she says, "and I was so excited."
Dawson's career has taken her through gritty dramas (He Got Game , broad teen comedies (Josie and the Pussycats , musicals (Rent , very broad adult comedies (Clerks II and children's films (Zookeeper . It includes the comic book fantasy, Sin City – a project that reflects her lifelong love of comics. (In 2006, she co-created her own comic series,
Occult Crimes Taskforce.
She started out playing Ruby in
Larry Clark's 1995 film Kids, aged 15. Written by
Harmony Korine, Kids is a tough, troubling film, opening with a scene of child sex and moving through drugs, theft, extreme violence, racism, rape and brutal conversations about men having sex with disabled women. In its midst, Dawson seemed one of the few mild beacons of hope. Her character was tough, too, laughing and joking about the difference between sex, making love and fucking (she preferred the last , but there was something essentially redemptive about her.
Although she's very different to that character, she understood her circumstances, having grown up on New York's Lower East Side herself.
Her mother was 17 when Dawson was born, and only found out she was pregnant when she was picked for the 1980 Olympic volleyball team and had to take a test. (The US Olympics team
boycotted that year for political reasons, so it didn't affect her participation.
Dawson's biological father was not around, but when her mother was eight months' pregnant she started seeing a man she'd known for years, who went on to adopt her daughter. "I think about that now," says Dawson, "such a young man, marrying a woman with a baby who's not his – that just doesn't happen. He just loved my Mom, and he loved me, and I loved my Dad, you know?"
She's never met her biological father. "I tried looking him up online, and 70-something names showed up, some of them only with addresses, and I thought: I'm not going to do that … Maybe if I have a child, I'll want to know, just for medical history reasons." She was "violently afraid" of becoming a teenage mother herself, aware of how it had limited her mother's options, but the experience of being adopted has made her keen to follow that lead – ideally to adopt an older child, who's otherwise unlikely to find a home.
When she was growing up, Dawson's father worked in construction, and her mother did a variety of jobs – electrician, plumber, typist – but the family faced financial straits. They lived, initially, "in this slumlord apartment, with rats, tilted floors, a bath tub in the kitchen". There was a farmers' market nearby and her mother "used to get food out of the bins. It was fresh food, but technically speaking, she was bin-diving. We still ate and we were eating organic," she gives a wry smile. "But that's a pretty tough thing as a Mom to have to do."
They moved into a squat when she was six and her brother Clay was one. "A place with a huge, gaping hole in the ground and plastic for windows. I saw the stress on my parents. We were the only children in the building for years, because no one else was that crazy. But we had a wonderful childhood because of it. Everybody who moved in had different apartments, and it wasn't until the sewage lines and the electricity went in that everybody disappeared behind their doors. People really needed each other beforehand."
Her mother was always an activist; when Dawson was 10, her mother volunteered at a crisis centre where women who had been "beaten and abused, probably for years, showed up with children and the T-shirt on their back". She would help her mother at
Housing Works, an organisation providing housing for families and homeless people living with HIV/AIDS. "One person had been living like a hermit and didn't have any family, any friends, and died. So here we were cleaning it out, and trying to make it nice and new again, so we could bring in someone else. It was heavy work."
Her parents and other squat residents built a stoop to keep away drug dealers, and it was hanging out there one day that she was discovered by Clark and Korine. "This guy was like, 'You just look so perfect.' And I thought, 'what are you talking about?' Harmony was hopping up and down, he was 19, and Larry can come off a little lasciviously, so I was like, 'Um, Daddy, there are random people here who have asked me to be in a movie.'"
Her father rode her to the audition on the crossbar of his bicycle. "I remember thinking, 'Oh, this looks legitimate.' It was a big office. I had to read, and Larry said, 'Is that your boyfriend outside?' And I was like, 'Ew, that's my Dad! What is wrong with you?'"
The family went on holiday to Texas with the money she made, and ended up living there. Dawson wasn't completely sold on acting then. She'd always loved maths, and started to love biology. But she ended up moving back to Manhattan, and attending the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute.
Dawson has a mixed heritage – Puerto Rican, Afro-Cuban, Irish and Native American – and says this has been an unexpected asset. "I remember having a conversation with an actress who was blonde and blue-eyed, and she was like, 'You're going to do really well here [Hollywood].' And I was still really struggling, and said, 'O-K.' And she said, 'no, Rosario, there are a million girls who show up in Hollywood every day who look like me. There's not a lot of people who look like you."
Spending time with Dawson is uplifting. Her political discussion flows from Voto Latino, the organisation she co-founded in 2004 to encourage Latino people to vote; her passionate support for
One Billion Rising, Ensler's upcoming march to end violence against women; ecological campaigns; a call for an end to lobbying in Washington. She has been shooting Trance, an art-heist film directed by Danny Boyle, and is rapturously excited to be playing US labour rights activist,
Dolores Huerta, in a film directed by Diego Luna.
And she talks with just as much effusive energy about the women's benefit. "I love this piece," she says, "because it's really in your face, and sometimes you've got to make people a little uncomfortable.
"There are horror movies that are made, but those are fake horrors – there are plenty of real things to be scared about, and to want to do something about. I'm just grateful," she says, like a true comic-book enthusiast, "to be able to use my powers for good, not evil".
Rosario Dawson performs A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer at the Lyric Theatre, London, on 26 March 2012. All proceeds go to V-Day and Women for Women International. Details:
nimaxtheatres.com
or 0844 482 9674.
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Lab tests confirmed L. monocytogenes in a sample of the company's Los Corrales Queso Fresco Fresh Cheese and Banana Leaf (code date 03/16/12 , according to a NJDHSS news release Thursday. The pregnant woman's Listeria infection was diagnosed March 2 at a New Brunswick hospital.
El Ranchero del Sur, based in South River, NJ, has agreed to recall its products and close its production plant. While the facility is inspected, all products and ingredients have been embargoed, state public health officials said.
According to the news alert, El Ranchero del Sur cheese products are found primarily in Mexican and Latin American grocery stores, restaurants, and other Hispanic food establishments under the name brands El Ranchero, Los Corrales, and Carnes Don Beto. The plant number 34-0013669 is marked on the label. All products are 14 ounces in weight, except for the Queso Hebra Oaxaca String Cheese ball, which is sold in 10 pound packages.
The state health department's Food and Drug Safety Program is requesting that local health departments check to ensure that El Ranchero del Sur products are removed from retail food establishments in their area.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC , Listeria infection can be passed to an unborn baby through the placenta, even if the pregnant woman is not showing signs of illness. Listeriosis can cause premature labor and miscarriage and, if passed along to a newborn, may result in sepsis or meningitis and be fatal.
In 1985, in an outbreak of Listeria infection that sickened 142 people who had eaten commercially produced soft cheese mixed with unpasteurized milk, 93 of the victims were pregnant women or their offspring. Twenty fetuses and 10 newborns died in that outbreak.
The CDC advises pregnant women not to eat soft cheeses such as feta, Brie and Camembert, blue-veined cheeses, or Mexican-style cheeses such as queso blanco, queso fresco, and Penela unless they have labels that clearly state they are made from pasteurized milk.
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