Horrible.
Just want to add another source here from an Israeli news source (Hareetz) also reporting all the major points from the above article.
https://archive.is/IZNtf https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-06-18/ty-article/.premium/israel-arrested-a-senior-doctor-in-gaza-six-days-later-he-died-in-a-shin-bet-facility/00000190-27eb-d14b-a999-27eb9aea0000
Probably not a surprise, but the suspicious uninvestigated deaths don’t end there.
Lol, I did my best, typed it on a cell phone.
I agree it may have presented barriers for coordination the FDA and access to US markets. I haven’t been able to dig deep into the Cuban studies, but just because something is labeled a phase 3 or phase 4 by the investigators doesn’t necessarily mean it was done to the standards necessary for fda approval or in the correct context of current standard of care treatments in the US or who knows how many other issues. If it was fully ready for all markets as is and required no further investigations, and it was only the US FDA causing problems, I would expect it to have already been widely available in many other countries that don’t have embargos with Cuba, like all of Europe. Currently it’s only available in Cuba, Colombia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Peru, and Paraguay.
Mostly though I didn’t want someone to accidentally misread this and think it meant cure. I realize you did not say that, but it’s just a common misreading I’ve noticed people make of the term cancer vaccines when they’ve been mentioned in popular media. Didn’t want someone to drag their poor dying relative off to Paraguay thinking they’re getting cured.
I agree the Cuban embargo is ridiculous, should be stopped, and is hurting both countries with no benefit to anyone (other than keeping a certain segment of voters in Florida happy).
It’s also not a vaccine in the sense it’s preventing cancer, it’s for the treatment of cancer that is already there, specifically non small cell lung cancers (though it’s being tested in other cancers that use the signaling mechanism being targeted). Not saying it’s impossible that it could prevent cancer, just that it hasn’t been tested in that way to the best of my knowledge.
There is some precedence for a vaccine like that though. The HPV vaccine for instance prevents HPV (and therefore hpv related cancers), but is also used as a treatment if an HPV related cancer develops.
Slight correction on that vaccine, the FDA doesn’t authorize any drug for sale in the US that hasn’t passed it’s rigorous trials and gone through its approval process. It’s currently being tested and has more trials ongoing right now. FDA will be able to approve it for sale if it passes its trials.
https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO.2023.41.16_suppl.9135
Also the word cancer vaccine kind of implies cure to some, but it’s not by any means:
“MST was 10.83 months for vaccinated vs. 8.86 months for non-vaccinated. In the Phase III trial, the 5-year survival rate was 14.4% for vaccinated subjects vs. 7.9% for controls.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5346887/
So it might be a useful tool but just don’t want to get hopes up unnecessarily. People who’s immune system reacted to the vaccine the strongest did best, so current trials are focused on combining it with an immune checkpoint inhibitor drug to increase the immune response even more hopefully (and those drugs are already being used by themselves in cancer). These drugs block “checkpoints” in the immune system that would normally stop it from attacking things like yourself, which we kind of want it to do in cancer.
Not saying I support an embargo in Cuba, I don’t, just don’t want this comment to be inadvertently read as “Cuba has had the cure to lung cancer this whole time and you’re not allowed to have it!” which isn’t true.
Don’t be lgbt though:
LGBT+ travellers
Same-sex sexual activity is not illegal in Rwanda, but is frowned on by locals. LGBT+ travellers can experience discrimination and abuse, including from local authorities.
There are no specific anti-discrimination laws that protect LGBT+ individuals in Rwanda. Read more advice for LGBT+ travellers.
Edit: sorry I think my first answer posted earlier was wrong, after more review I misunderstood “audit percentage,” it would be the percentage of taxpayers in those brackets who get audited, not the percentage of audits that bracket makes up of all audits. Below answer should be closer now.
If you’re curious you can use the percentage from article and do simple math to find the number.
Those making more than $10 million will go from 11% of them being audited to 16.5%. And we can get data on tax return audit actual numbers below.
https://www.irs.gov/statistics/compliance-presence
So diving back to the numbers, there were 3,353 audits of individuals make $10 million or more in 2023, meaning if the audit rate was 11% there were would be about 30,481 individuals total in this bracket that filed that year. So the higher audit rate would bring it to a total of about 5,029 audits of those making ten million or more, assuming the number of audits and number of people filing in that bracket are constant.
Also here are the audit rates by tax bracket for 2022 and 2021.
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/statement-for-updated-audit-rates-ty-19.pdf
The $10 million plus bracket went from only 2% audited in 2021 to 8% audited in 2022. Wonder what changed between those years…
Yes that’s what happened. One court slapped it down for unfairly reducing minority representation in violation of the voting rights act, so this map was drawn to increase minority representation. Now these two judges struck down the new map saying basically “I think it should be unconstitutional to consider race at all when drawing districts, even if it’s to make sure they aren’t being unfairly diluted, voting rights act is unconstitutional.” It’s supreme court bait to try and get them to strike down more of the voting rights act with their same reasoning they used to strike down affirmative action policies. If the supreme court decides to take this up eventually, I’d say the voting rights act days are numbered unfortunately with this court.
Just click on the author’s byline and look at their past "investigations, " it tells you all you need to know. But this article is filled with such endless BS it would take ages to unpack it all. I’ll just post one thing from the beginning of the article.
During this period, Ukraine has not become an independent self-sustaining democracy, but a client state heavily dependent on European and U.S. support, which has not protected it from the ravages of war.
From the ravages of war, wow, what country invaded and annexed them multiple times and is ravaging them? Not worth mentioning I guess. The fighting is all the US and EU’s fault for helping Ukraine to defend itself! If Ukraine had just rolled over everytime Russia wanted to lop off sections of their country or even take the whole thing plus some neighboring countries to boot, then everything would be peaceful! It goes on from there like that. Impressive mental gymnastics throughout, and clearly trying to push an established viewpoint of the author rather than inform, really more of a bad opinion piece than an “investigation.”
Technically a treatment for methanol or ethylene glycol poisoning! Though we have a better one now. But yes the schedule system is a joke.
From a medical marijuana perspective it wouldn’t change much for states where it is still illegal. It will make things easier for people who are prescribed it in states where it is legal, and hopefully for places that produce or sell marijuana that are currently locked out of banking and payment systems. This would also allow Medicare to at least consider covering it in those states, but they wouldn’t necessarily have to. Medicare coverage decisions are made by the center for Medicare and Medicaid services, we’ll have to see after this change goes through what they determine. They do also already cover FDA approved medications based on cannibinoid ingredients like marinol or epidiolex which are pharmaceutical preparations of delta 9 thc and cannibidiol respectively (these are already available in every state since they are fda approved). Private insurance also will make their own determinations about whether they will cover it or not, but with this change there is a chance they could, whereas before there was no possible way. Medicaid coverage is mostly determined by each individual state.
The only way this would over ride state law and allow medical marijuana into a state that doesn’t have legal marijuana would be if somehow the marijuana plant itself got an FDA approval, but that is very unlikely for a lot of reasons, foremost that the marijuana plant has a large mix of many different drugs with many differences in amounts and ratios of those drugs from strain to strain, plant to plant, different parts of the plant, or even the same plant at different times in its life. It’s not like, heroin, or fentanyl, or cocaine which are specific chemicals. You could never really say “marijuana plants in general” have a specific indication for a specific disease, it would need to be much more specific in terms of what is actually being given, and only that would have the evidence and therefore the FDA approval. Like take epidiolex/cannibidiol for instance, a single chemical, 25 mg/kg/day was found effective as an add on therapy to another primary therapy for reduction in seizure frequency in children with Lennox gestaut syndrome and dravet syndrome. That’s the specific indication and dosage that the FDA agrees is effective based on the evidence. Lots of other reasons too you’d never see an FDA approval for “all marijuana plants in general,” but the unpredictable mix of tons of different drugs across many many strains of marijuana plants and variability between the plants itself is enough to make this a practical impossibility. It’s definitely contributed a few medications that have roles in certain diseases though, like many other plants before it.
In short, you’ll still need to convince individual states to legalize it or make medical marijuana laws if you want an actual marijuana plant or plant preparation prescribed to you. Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance coverage could all be different (and even different by insurance company), but there’s at least a chance it could give coverage now, whereas it was impossible before. This also makes marijuana research easier and helps reduce any federal criminal penalties.
Republicans of course voted against any fines at all:
Now with a 3-2 democratic majority on fcc a lot is getting done. One of Biden’s nominees was stonewalled by the senate for years (ISPs launched a huge smear campaign against her, even the daily mail of all things went after her). Biden had to relent and finally nominated someone else who got approved late 2023, finally breaking the 2-2 deadlock that Republicans were using to block everything like this including net neutrality.
He couldn’t have vetoed it without vetoing Ukraine aid, Taiwan aid, and Palestinian aid too, fyi. While the house passed it as 4 separate bills, the senate combined it all into one.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/23/politics/senate-vote-israel-ukraine-aid-dg/index.html
Possibly, but also keep in mind article five doesn’t say that any hostile act leads to automatic full scale war in response:
The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
Emphasis on “such action as it deems necessary,” meaning a country can individually respond with its own discretion on what it thinks is a proportional response. Though in practice any response and individual contributions would be heavily negotiated within NATO. Theoretically a country could say it deems no action necessary even if article five was invoked. Just another reason why electing pro Russian leaders like Trump, Orban, or now Fico in Slovakia are dangerous and threaten the existence of NATO, even if they don’t technically leave NATO.
It’s just a multiple choice test with question prompts. This is the exact sort of thing an LLM should be very good at. This isn’t chat gpt trying to do the job of an actual doctor, it would be quite abysmal at that. And even this multiple choice test had to be stacked in favor of chat gpt.
Because GPT models cannot interpret images, questions including imaging analysis, such as those related to ultrasound, electrocardiography, x-ray, magnetic resonance, computed tomography, and positron emission tomography/computed tomography imaging, were excluded.
Don’t get me wrong though, I think there’s some interesting ways AI can provide some useful assistive tools in medicine, especially tasks involving integrating large amounts of data. I think the authors use some misleading language though, saying things like AI “are performing at the standard we require from physicians,” which would only be true if the job of a physician was filling out multiple choice tests.
Point taken. But I think bringing profits into it just makes things even more clear. Profit margins on film were as high as 80% for Kodak at times. I doubt any digital camera based company is making anything close to those kind of margins. Bringing people away from film cameras was definitely not in their best interest, but they did make digital cameras too, only beaten to the market by two years by Fuji Film (1991 vs 1989). They kind of even still do make digital cameras apparently? No idea how much involvement they have with them, but their branding is at least on them. Even if they had been more successful in digital cameras they would have needed a massive downsizing and shuttering of most of their chemical based jobs in Rochester, NY and other places. I think a transition to pharmaceuticals or other ways to leverage their core chemical manufacturing business would have made more sense, which they kind of tried too by purchasing at least one pharmaceutical company, but not very successful either. I think a lot went wrong at Kodak, but I don’t think leaning even more heavily into digital photography would have saved them, and pushing in that direction certainly wouldn’t have looked too appealing at the time given their massive monopoly and profits in film.
They did actually make lots of digital cameras and were a pioneer in their development. But they were always a film business, not a camera business. The camera was just the vehicle for recurring payments in the form of film, an early subscription model business basically. Selling a single digital camera without the years of film purchases after was way less profitable for them. Even with a full switch to digital their business would have needed to rapidly decrease in size and scale, shuttering most of their factories aimed at producing chemicals for film. There was no real way for Kodak to continue on in the massive form it once had no matter how the switch to digital happened. Even the remaining camera industry is still shrinking in size now compared to where it was with the advent of camera phones. Market cap of Kodak in the 90s was like 30 billion not even accounting for inflation and higher valuation of stock in the 30 years since, compare that to something like Nikon who has a current market cap of 3.71 billion. So yeah, the executives were right to avoid transitioning if the goal was to maximize profits for share holders, and they’re a corporation so that’s definitely their goal, right or wrong.
Anti corruption laws, pushing for ranked choice voting, popular interstate vote compact, and fighting gerrymandering? Oh yeah, donated.