(Reuters) - An Idaho man who admitted to breaking into a Boise zoo last year and killing a monkey was sentenced to seven years in prison on Thursday, court records show.

Michael Watkins, 22, of Weiser, Idaho, in March pleaded guilty to attempted grand theft, a felony, and misdemeanor animal cruelty stemming from the break-in and beating death of the monkey at Zoo Boise in November.

The primate was one of the zoo's two Patas monkeys, ground-dwelling animals from Africa that stand more than 2 feet tall and weigh about 35 pounds. They are rare in zoos but not endangered in the wild.

The case shook officials at the zoo and triggered an outpouring of sympathy and donations from animal lovers worldwide.

Watkins scaled the security fence at Zoo Boise in the pre-dawn hours of November 17 and attempted to steal the monkey, which bit him, police said. Watkins then kicked and hit the animal, severely wounding it, according to police. The monkey later died of blunt force trauma, zoo officials said.

Zoo Boise Director Steve Burns said on Thursday the sentencing of Watkins closed a particularly devastating chapter for the facility.

"We're moving on," he said. "The court has done its job and we're continuing to do our job."

In the days after the death, zoo staff sought to boost the spirits of the companion-less Patas monkey and considered shipping it to another zoo with primates since they are exceedingly social, Burns said.

Instead, Zoo Boise in December gained two female Patas monkeys donated by the Rosamund Gifford Zoo in Syracuse, New York.

News about the monkey's death brought donations from across the United States and overseas, allowing the zoo to begin construction on Monday of a $250,000 exhibit for the three Patas monkeys, Burns said.

(Editing by Dan Whitcomb and Bill Trott)

By Jack Shafer

(Reuters) - The great thing about the Web is that it has given the opportunity to billions of people, who would otherwise never have had a chance to publish, to express their most urgent thoughts with an Internet connection and a few finger-flicks.

It's also the Web's downside, as you know if you've had the misfortune to encounter a triple-Lutz revolting page during a Google search.

But thanks to the First Amendment, there are few U.S. laws banning expression on the Web outside of posting child pornography, specific physical threats, libel or copyright infringement. So there are few ways to eliminate hostile, ugly, vile, racist, sexist or bigoted speech from its many, many pages.

That doesn't mean that there's no recourse should you find content on the Web you disapprove of, as we learned this month when Facebook surrendered to a protest and boycott led by two groups, "Women, Action and the Media" and the "Everyday Sexism Project", and activist Soraya Chemaly.

They opposed depictions of rape and violence posted by Facebook users and demanded, among other things, the removal of such "gender-based hate speech" from its pages. They also sought better policing by Facebook moderators to block future user-posted content that "trivializes or glorifies violence against girls and women."

To illustrate its objections, "Women, Action and the Media" posted screen-grab examples of gender-based hate speech from Facebook members' pages. Some of the images juxtapose photos of women in degrading or helpless positions with messages promising rape. "Slipped the Bitch a RoofieBitches Love Roofies," reads the copy over one unconscious young woman in her undergarments.

Others make jokes of women bleeding from the face or black-and-blue from a beating. "She Broke My Heart. I Broke Her Nose," reads another.

Facebook acceded to the protest after the groups convinced Nissan UK to cancel advertising and had other major advertisers on the site contemplating the same. Given the company's existing community standards, the promise to eliminate a new classification of expression was no leap.

The one billion-member-strong site already prohibits "graphic imagery for sadistic pleasure," "hate speech" (including attacks based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability or medical condition), "bullying and harassment," "promotion or encouragement of self-mutilation," "nudity and pornography" and "violence and threats." Adding another monitored and prohibited category hasn't really inconvenienced the company.

Besides, who can object to Facebook's decision to set rules for conduct inside its house? Just because Facebook has given you free access to its 21st century universal printing-press doesn't mean it has an obligation to publish your message. If you don't like Facebook's rules, you can still create controversy and test boundaries at other social media sites.

You want absolutely free speech? If it's that important to you, go pay for the right to exercise it somewhere else on the Web.

At the risk of reading Facebook's mind, I suspect its capitulation has less to do with expunging transgressive content from its pages than protecting the flow of corporate advertising dollars that prop up its $56 billion market cap. Radio and television broadcasters were equally sensitive to protests and boycotts back in the old days when their business models, like Facebook's, were providing a free, advertiser-supported service.

Whole "standards and practices" divisions were established at the networks to sanitize TV shows lest they offend. CNN's timeline of TV censorship gives you an idea of how aggressively corporate censors worked to keep such obscene words as "pregnant" off the air, to obscure Elvis Presley's gyrating pelvis, to block the bare navels of Gilligan's Islands Mary Ann, I Dream of Jeannies Jeannie, and Gidget from the visual field of viewers ( http://www.cnn.com/2007/LIVING/wayoflife/07/31/censorship/ ).

But as radio and television began to migrate from their free venues to paid ones, that which was once forbidden has become almost compulsory. Smutty talk and naked bodies that would have given a network censor a brain hemorrhage back in the 1960s have been proliferating on every channel even on the free channels!

Activists have little leverage in deterring the producers at SiriusXM's X-rated comedy channels or cable's HBO, Starz, Cinemax and Showcase channels from running shows whose plots, dialogue and imagery would automatically violate one of Facebook's content guidelines. Nudity and pornography are so pervasive on cable that you could probably start a channel of that name and nobody would protest.

"The vocabulary of hate is potentially as rich as your dictionary, and all you do by banning language used by cretins is to let them decide what the rest of us may say," Jonathan Rauch wrote almost 20 years ago in a persuasive Harper's magazine essay titled "In Defense of Prejudice: Why Incendiary Speech Must Be Protected."

One of Rauch's many rousing points was that prohibitions on speech and expression by "purists," as he calls them, almost inevitably backfire. Banishing or excommunicating the speakers of ugly, stupid and coarse ideas does not eliminate them. It usually drives them underground where sweet reason can't be heard and where shame does not work.

Banning the ugly also creates a mechanism by which other speakers can be suppressed. "Trap the racists and anti-Semites, and you lay a trap for me too," Rauch wrote. "Hunt for them with eradication in your mind, and you have brought dissent itself within your sights."

There's more danger contained in prohibiting vile speech than there is in vile speech itself.

( Jack Shafer is a Reuters columnist covering the press and politics. )

(Jack Shafer)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Despite the more than $50 billion that U.S. pharmaceutical companies have spent every year since the mid-2000s to discover new medications, drugmakers have barely improved on old standbys developed decades ago.

Research published on Monday showed that the effectiveness of new drugs, as measured by comparing the response of patients on those treatments to those taking a placebo, has plummeted since the 1970s.

While that is already unwelcome news to drug and biotech companies, the consequences for the pharmaceutical industry could get worse under President Barack Obama's healthcare law.

The law established an independent research institute to compare the effectiveness of different treatments for the same condition. That way, patients as well as private insurers and government programs such as Medicare can stop paying for less effective therapies. If the new analysis is correct, then "comparative effectiveness research" could conclude that older drugs, which are more likely to be generics, are better than pricey new brand names that deliver the most profits for drugmakers.

Fears of a crisis in drug innovation have grown over the years. When the healthcare journal Prescrire in 2011 ranked new drugs, only 17 of the 984 developed since 2001 were deemed "a real advance" or better. And a survey of 184 expert physicians in 15 specialties published last month in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery showed the doctors were more likely to rate drugs more than a decade old as "transformative."

To be sure, drugs that completely change outcomes for patients continue to emerge. Gleevec, from Novartis, greatly extends life for leukemia patients, for instance. New antivirals such as Incivek from Vertex Pharmaceuticals have doubled the cure rate in hepatitis C, and Eylea from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals is better than anything previously developed for macular degeneration.

Because of those and other examples, "we believe that a lot continues to be accomplished in terms of yielding very, very positive results for patients, so there seems to be a disconnect between that and this paper," said Randy Burkholder, deputy vice president of policy at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) trade group.

CANCER TO MENTAL ILLNESS

The new study in the journal Health Affairs examined 315 clinical trials that compared a drug to a placebo and were published in four of the world's top medical journals (BMJ, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine) from 1966 to 2010. The drugs targeted the full range of human ills, from cardiovascular disease and infections to cancer, mental disorders and respiratory illness.

In the early years, drugs easily beat the placebo: They were, on average, 4.5 times as effective, where effectiveness means how well they lowered blood pressure, vanquished tumors, lifted depression or did whatever else they were intended to.

But the trend line was inexorably downhill, found Dr Mark Olfson of Columbia University and statistician Steven Marcus of the University of Pennsylvania. By the 1980s drugs were less than four times better; by the 1990s, twice as good, and by the 2000s just 36 percent better than a placebo. Since older drugs were much superior to placebo and newer ones only slightly so, that means older drugs were generally more effective than newer ones.

"Their results are pretty compelling," said Dr Aaron Kesselheim of Harvard Medical School, who helped conduct the survey of physicians on "transformative" drugs but was not involved in this study. "It does appear that things are headed in the same direction, with newer drugs having relatively less efficacy."

Experts disagree on why that should be, but suspicions range from the U.S. regulatory process to basic biology.

"It may be that the drug discoveries based on low-hanging fruit were made long ago," said Olfson, as with discoveries based on the most basic or easily targeted causes of high blood pressure. In that case, older drugs based on those targets would pack a bigger punch than newer ones that target less-central causes of disease.

Or, it could be that the patients who volunteer for clinical trials have gotten harder to treat. In many cases, people volunteer because existing drugs are not helping their cancer, schizophrenia or other condition, Olfson said, "and may have forms of the disease where it's harder for a drug to demonstrate a benefit."

Another explanation could be that the scientific quality of clinical trials has improved over the decades, as the Health Affairs analysis found. Human studies in the 2000s were more likely than those in the 1960s to enroll hundreds of patients rather than dozens.

"It may be that the compounds aren't getting less effective but that they're getting looked at more carefully," said Dr Harold Sox of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and former editor of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

'SOMETHING REAL IS GOING ON'

While experts agree that tougher trials and similar factors explain some of the decline in drugs' reported effectiveness, "something real is going on here," said Olfson. "Physicians keep saying that many of the new things just aren't working as well," and therefore prescribe antidepressant drugs called tricyclics (developed in the 1950s) instead of SSRIs (from the 1980s), or diuretics (invented in the 1920s) for high blood pressure instead of newer anti-hypertensives.

Whatever the reason for many new drugs packing less punch than old ones, that will not keep them from reaching patients.

"The way the drug regulatory system is set up, even if you have just a small advance, if you market it right it can be very profitable," said Kesselheim.

Critics of the high prices of drugs that are only marginally (if at all) more effective than older, cheaper, often generic medications hope that head-to-head studies will persuade more physicians to stop prescribing expensive but less effective drugs. The Affordable Care Act of 2010 - "Obamacare" - established the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to conduct such comparative effectiveness research.

The drug industry says it isn't worried. "Our sector is not concerned about objective, high-quality patient-centered comparative effectiveness research," said PhRMA's Burkholder. "We believe the substantial value of our products will continue to be demonstrated."

(Reporting by Sharon Begley; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Douglas Royalty)

Claude Alexander Allen III, of Gaithersburg, was arrested by Montgomery County police and online court records show he's been charged with first-degree murder.

A phone message left at the Allen household wasn't returned. A lawyer who has represented the younger Allen in a prior marijuana possession case declined to comment Friday. It wasn't immediately clear if he had a new lawyer.

The killing occurred at the Gaithersburg home that property records show is owned by Allen's mother and father, Claude A. Allen.

Police say they were called to the home around midnight by a man who said he had killed someone who had tried to break into his home. Officers who arrived determined that there had not been a break-in, and police say the younger Allen, and the victim, 25-year-old Michael Phillip Harvey, knew each other. Harvey's body was found in woods outside the home.

Police didn't immediately reveal a motive or say how the body ended up in the woods.

The elder Allen was a domestic policy adviser in the Bush White House, but his political career effectively ended when he was arrested in 2006 for leaving a Gaithersburg Target store with merchandise that authorities said he didn't pay for. He pleaded guilty to theft that same year, admitting that he made phony returns to discount department stores, and was fined and placed on probation.

He told the judge at his sentencing hearing that he had lost perspective while working long hours and getting little sleep in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

He's been a member at Covenant Life Church, an evangelical church in Gaithersburg.

"The very sad story being reported in the news today is the only information we have at this time. We are grieving and praying for the family of the victim, the Allen family and all involved," church spokesman Don Nalle said in a statement.

The younger Allen was not scheduled to appear in court on Friday.