First FDA-approved treatment in HER2-positive metastatic colorectal cancer –
– Combination regimen is approved for use in the second-line treatment setting and beyond –
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/seagen-announces-fda-accelerated-approval-192100432.html
National security concerns over Joe Biden's classified document scandal just got worse, as two reports have emerged which place Hunter Biden at the Bidens' Wilmington, Delaware residence while he was raking in millions of dollars from CCP-linked business dealings.
First, Seamus Bruner (researcher for legendary bombshell-dropper Peter Schweizer), reports via Breitbart News, that "While addicted to drugs, cavorting with prostitutes, and making deals with businessmen tied to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence, Hunter Biden lived in the house where Joe Biden stored classified documents."
While filling out a background check, Hunter made a crackhead error and listed his 'rent' as $49,910 - when in fact that's the amount of the security deposit and 6 months of rent for prime office space at the prestigious House of Sweden in Washington DC. What's most interesting, however, is that the dates Hunter listed as living at the Wilmington, DE residence - as claimed on other documents and financial statements - overlap with the period in which multiple Biden family members were taking money from foreign businessmen with connections at the highest levels of Chinese state intelligence services through energy company CEFC. As Bruner further notes, CNN described CEFC as a state-directed entity in 2018.
CEFC, and at least four of its executives and associates - Ye Jianming, Patrick Ho, Gongwen Dong and Jiaqi Bao, have been linked to the CCP and its military intelligence apparatus. In one case, Hunter described Patrick Ho as "the fucking spy chief of China."
More via Breitbart,
By early 2017, Hunter was directly corresponding with CEFC personnel and flew to Miami in February of that year to meet with CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming. During this trip, Ye Jianming gave Hunter a 3.16 carat diamond valued at approximately $80,000..
When Hunter’s ex-wife discovered that he had obtained something of such immense value, she had her divorce attorney send an “Urgent” email seeking to determine the whereabouts of the diamond and secure the asset before Hunter could “dissipate” it. Hunter’s attorney offered a shady denial:
"There is no diamond in Hunter’s possession. I don’t know where Kathleen is getting access to this information, but on this score, what your email purports below is inaccurate."
Metadata gleaned from photos of the diamond on the abandoned laptop indicate that Hunter lied about not having the diamond and he in fact had the diamond with him in Wilmington. The current location of the 3.16 carat diamond remains unknown
After the fateful February 2017 meeting with Ye, and around the time Hunter claimed to have moved into the Wilmington house where classified documents were found, the Bidens’ business with CEFC exploded.
Nine days after Miami meeting, Hunter received two separate wire transfers of $3 million which the Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network flagged as suspicious.
We encourage you to read the rest of the Breitbart report here, as it goes into extensive detail.
Second, the Washington Free Beacon reports that photos from Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop place him at the Wilmington House in July, 2017. Of note, the classified documents were reportedly brought to the house in January of that year.
The photos 'are the most concrete evidence to date' that Hunter - who was actively negotiating a deal with a CCP-linked Chinese energy company - had access to areas of his father's home where classified documents were stored.
A Washington Free Beacon review of the laptop found four 2017 photographs of Hunter Biden, clad in a white collared shirt and a camouflage baseball cap, behind the wheel of his father's 1967 Corvette Stingray. GPS metadata embedded in the photos indicate they were taken within a minute of each other at 6:49 p.m. on July 30 of that year, just outside the president's Wilmington, Del., residence. The photos show Hunter Biden posing in the vehicle beside two young girls. One appears to be his then-12-year-old niece, Natalie Biden. The other could not be identified.
Former Secret Service agent and certified cyber forensics expert, Konstantinos Gus Dimitrelos, analyzed the photos and confirmed their authenticity.
"If requested, I will testify the photographs are genuine and were taken on July 30, 2017," he told the Free Beacon.
And as the Beacon further reports - corroborating Breitbart's reporting, "At the time the photos were taken, Hunter Biden was negotiating a lucrative business deal with the now-defunct Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC, which was closely tied to the Chinese government. Biden's former business partner Tony Bobulinski claimed to have met with Joe Biden in person in early May 2017—less than three months before Hunter Biden was pictured taking the wheel of his father's prized vehicle—to discuss the Biden family's Chinese business dealings."
In total, CEFC paid Hunter Biden $6 million in legal and consulting fees in 2017 and 2018.
And of course, the same media which suggested the Trumps were Russian operatives based on a hoax - are virtually silent at actual risks to national security posed by the Biden family.
The future of the family is a matter of enormous and incalculable importance, and the strength, health, and integrity of marriage and family life constitute an absolutely essential precondition for all other social, economic, and political goods. — Wilfred McClay
In 1860, Milton Bradley created the Checkered Game of Life board game. His patent application made it clear that "in addition to the amusement and excitement of the game, it is intended to forcibly impress upon the minds of youth the great moral principles of virtue and vice." The game's red-and-ivory checkerboard presented a 64-square obstacle course featuring character traits—bravery, idleness, industry, honesty—that could lead to wealth, suicide, prison, disgrace, fame, ruin, or happiness.
The deeply religious Bradley explained that the game represents "the checkered journey of life." The most successful player would "gain on his journey that which shall make him the most prosperous, and to shun that which will retard him in his progress." Part of your life outcomes were in God's hands; other parts were in yours. As each player twirled a wooden teetotum, they were offered key life decisions and character traits to choose from (e.g., "Bravery or Idleness" and "College or Fame") that led to next steps. While landing on "Cupid" meant going directly to "Matrimony," landing on "Gambling" led directly to "Ruin."
For Bradley, challenging circumstances at any point in life did not have to dictate outcomes. If a player landed at the Poverty square immediately after Infancy, they needn't fear. It is "not necessarily a fact that poverty will be a disadvantage." "School" and "Ambition" were both accessible from "Poverty." "Perseverance" could lead to "Success." The game's original game was clear: choices matter. Redemption was an ever-present possibility. Honor was in your grasp, even if you had committed a crime. The traits a player chose to adopt determined whether they achieved the overarching goal of the game-to live to a "Happy Old Age."
The Checkered Game of Life sold millions of copies. On its centennial in 1960, however, Hasbro Company, which had purchased the Milton Bradley Company, released a new version with a truncated name: Game of Life. The revamped edition bore no resemblance to the original. There was no teetotum, no vices like "Disgrace" or "Idleness" to be avoided, no virtues like "Honesty" or "Perseverance" to be embraced. The new version defined success as a function of how much money a player amassed and involved practical matters like choosing a college or profession, buying insurance, securing a mortgage, or playing the stock market. In a 2012 lecture to Harvard University students, historian Jill Lepore described the 1960 Game of Life as "incredibly grubby . . . just a shamelessly amoral and cash-conscious monster of a board game."
Perhaps in a nod to Milton Bradley's inclusion of Matrimony, the 1960 Game of Life did put its thumb on the scale in one area. Each player had to go to church and get married if they wanted to succeed. And you could only add a baby girl or boy if you were already married. The new requirement—Bradley's original version simply presented marriage as a virtuous choice—prompted no moral outrage. It merely reflected cultural norms concerning marriage and childbearing in 1960, since at the time 95 percent of all babies were born within marriage. Imagine what the reaction would be today.
Indeed, nearly 50 years later, in 2007, Hasbro again revamped the Game of Life. According to Hasbro's promotional materials, "The Game of Life: Twists and Turns puts a new and modern spin on Hasbro's classic family board game. It is a game of choices, where players can 'test drive' different lifestyles, take their chances and experience the twists and turns of real life."
There are no absolutes in the new version—virtually anything goes. The only commonality is that each player is given a branded Visa credit card (ironically, with the name of Milton Bradley). Marriage is no longer required. If a player lands on a space that offers the marriage option, choosing that option does not guarantee a particular outcome. Moreover, if a player chooses that option, all other players have $1,000 automatically drained from their bank account for a wedding gift. Thus, in today's Game of Life: Twists and Turns, marriage is not mandatory, and moreover, your friends have a perverse incentive to encourage you not to get married.
As Lepore noted in her Harvard lecture, the new version's "only object is to experience all that life has to offer. With Milton Bradley's Visa card in hand, you can do whatever you want. It doesn't matter. No one cares. There are no consequences." However, real life, unlike the Game of Life, is not a game. There are choices in real life and those choices have consequences for adults and their children—all of which brings us to the role of the Family in FREE (which stands for: Family, Religion, Education, and Entrepreneurship).
As we have seen, the family our students will form matters monumentally to their ultimate success and personal agency—and the type of family that has been found to be most beneficial for the prospects of young adults and their future children is an intact, married, two-parent household. It bears repeating that millennials are taking divergent paths toward adulthood and family formation, paths associated with markedly different economic outcomes. Millennials are much more likely to flourish financially if they first earn at least a high school degree, then find full-time work, and then marry before having any children. According to an Institute for Family Studies study, 97 percent of millennials who make this ordered series of decisions—the Success Sequence—are not poor by the time they reach their prime young-adult years (ages 28 through 34).
Despite all this—and despite the fact that there has been a resurgence in the number of children living with two parents in recent years—there is reason for both worry and action. In 2016, the National Center for Health Statistics division of the Centers for Disease Control released a report on attitudes toward marriage, childbearing, and sexual behavior. It found that the percentage of respondents aged 15 through 44 who thought it was "okay for an unmarried female to have and raise a child" had increased over time. Among women, 70 percent agreed in 2002 and 78 percent agreed in 2011-2013. Among men, 59 percent agreed in 2002 and 69 percent agreed in 2011-2013. An even higher percentage of women aged 15 through 24 (77 percent) agreed with the statement in 2011-2013, while only 60 percent of men in the same age group agreed.
If we want to inspire the rising generation to have more children born into stable, married, two-parent households—one of the best predictors of a life of agency—I recommend four steps:
Ian Rowe is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the CEO of Vertex Partnership Academies. This essay is excerpted from Chapter 13 of Mr. Rowe's new book, Agency: The Four-Point Plan (FREE) for ALL Children to Overcome the Victimhood Narrative and Discover Their Pathway to Power (Templeton Press, May 2022).
This week, the UK government made the ground-breaking decision to block Nicola Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, which had been passed in the Scottish parliament last year.
One of the most dangerous and controversial aspects of the Scottish legislation was that it would enable children as young as 16 to obtain a gender-recognition certificate and thus legally change sex. So it was more than a little alarming to hear the UK education secretary, whose government had just blocked the bill, endorsing precisely this aspect of it.
Speaking to Kay Burley on Sky News on Tuesday, Keegan was asked whether she thought 16 was too young to be able to legally change sex. Her response was: ‘No I don’t, actually. I was working at 16. I was paying taxes at 16. I could make decisions for myself at 16.’
In other words, in Keegan’s eyes, children who are not old enough to legally purchase a scratch card, get a tattoo, sit on a jury, vote in an election or get married, should be able to legally change their sex.
For Keegan to equate having a job with legally changing sex is both disingenuous and dangerously naive. We know from a variety of sources, including from NHS guidance published last year, that social transitioning – where a young person changes their name, pronouns and the way they dress – can have ‘significant effects’ on their ‘psychological functioning’. It can potentially make it less likely that young people suffering with gender-identity issues will settle into themselves and their bodies. This can lead children down a slippery slope towards irreversible medicalisation.
Even with the law as it stands, we are already witnessing growing numbers of adult ‘detransitioners’, who have been left with the mental and physical scars of decisions they regret. In most cases, their pathway towards medical transition began in their youth. This is not something that any responsible adult should wish to encourage.
In some ways, the education secretary’s comments are not such a surprise. After all, this is the same Gillian Keegan who has been praised by trans-activist outlet Pink News, as a ‘rare LGBTQ+ ally’ in the Tory Party. And this is the same Gillian Keegan who previously declared that ‘transwomen are women’.
Keegan also has a tendency to ignore evidence that challenges her assumptions on the trans issue. In a recent select-committee meeting, Conservative MP Miriam Cates presented Keegan with research showing that a large number of pupils were being taught troubling ideas about gender as though they were fact. Keegan responded by dismissing these concerns and the research, claiming that she had not seen or heard about this problem first-hand.
North of the border, some champions of Sturgeon’s bill have gone even further than Keegan. Earlier this week, Green MSP Maggie Chapman suggested on LBC that we should be exploring the possibility of children as young as eight being able to legally change their sex.
If such a change were implemented, it would mean that children who cannot open their own bank account, purchase Christmas crackers or sign up to Facebook would be able to legally change their sex. The absurdity speaks for itself.
Then again, this is the same Maggie Chapman who previously claimed that ‘sex is not binary or immutable’ and that GCSE textbooks showing sex as male and female are presenting a ‘gross oversimplification’ of biological sex. I would be interested to know what Maggie’s grades were for that particular module.
What Chapman’s bizarre intervention makes clear is that allowing 16-year-olds to legally change their sex will not be the end of the matter.
The slippery slope can clearly be seen in Ireland, which introduced self-ID in 2015 and allows 16-year-olds to obtain a gender-recognition certificate (albeit through a court order). Once that law was passed, a government review group recommended that ‘a system of gender recognition should be introduced for children of any age’. Does this mean that toddlers could transition in the near future?
Trans-lobby groups see no issue with this. Last year, Stonewall came out with the ludicrous statement that ‘children as young as two recognise their trans identity’. Perhaps most shocking of all, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) recently updated its ‘Standards of Care’ guidelines to recommend that young children should be able to access irreversible surgical procedures, including double mastectomies and phalloplasties.
Our duty as adults is to safeguard our children. There is a reason we have legislation in place to prohibit children from doing certain things that may cause them harm. Unfortunately, there are organisations and individuals, including those in positions of power, who seek to dilute these safeguards when it comes to matters of sex and gender. This should worry us all.
James Esses is co-founder of Thoughtful Therapists.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/01/18/the-slippery-slope-to-trans-toddlers/
Health care is not on the agenda as a top issue in the new Congress, but it will leap forward and conservatives need to be prepared.
House Republicans have pledged to control government spending toward the goal of achieving a balanced budget in 10 years. But they can’t hope to do that without addressing the pending insolvency of Medicare and the massive expansion of spending in Medicaid, which now has more than 90 million recipients.
The other side can cut the campaign ads right now—shoving granny off the cliff—to attack Republicans for “cutting Medicare.” They must take preemptive action.
It’s important for seniors to know that Medicare must be changed to be saved and for young people to understand the gargantuan taxes they will have to pay as a result of today’s uncontrolled spending.
The issue must be addressed thoughtfully and carefully and not with across-the-board cuts. The solution is improving the program to give consumers more choices in a properly functioning market where competition drives prices down—key to most of the problems in our health sector.
Two examples of popular and successful programs that rely on consumer choice and private competition should be the foundation of modernization efforts:
Both programs need repairs and updates. But these hugely popular programs should serve as a foundation for reform to make the program more efficient.
Tackling the unconscionable waste in Medicaid is another important target, but it again must be done carefully to stress the importance of the program in serving the most vulnerable. First reform: Recipients should be able to use the value of their subsidy to choose private coverage if they prefer and thereby expand their access to physician care.
None of this will be easy. But it is vitally important to present a positive plan that builds on the successful programs Republicans have created. The secret is consumer choice, private competition in a properly functioning and regulated market, while allowing government to focus on protecting the most vulnerable.
The Democrats’ solutions are predictable. They create new government programs and then build and build on them, pouring more and more taxpayer resources into expanding the programs to patch the many flaws—as they are doing now with Obamacare. Ever-rising costs and prices are hidden only because taxpayers are picking up more and more of the tab.
These programs are quickly running out of other people’s money, and we must take a different approach. Instead of pouring more money into unreformed Medicare and Medicaid, we should build on what we know works by engaging private sector innovation and energy to make the programs better.
And we must build on successful programs to expand private sector options with Health Savings Accounts, Association Health Plans so small employers can get wholesale health insurance prices, boosting telemedicine, working with states to expand more affordable health insurance options, and giving employees access to Health Reimbursement Arrangements to gain more control and ownership over their coverage—for starters.
The House is expected to focus its health care efforts on COVID, especially investigating the source of the virus, vaccine harm, and the calamitous management of the pandemic by federal public health agencies. Meanwhile, the Biden administration will proceed in as many ways as it can to drag more people into government health programs.
Republicans should add consumer-choice reforms to their agenda, taking proactive action to divert attack ads on Medicare and Medicaid.
Grace-Marie Turner heads the Galen Institute where she focuses on free-market ideas for health reform. galen@galen.org
https://www.realclearhealth.com/articles/2023/01/18/plan_now_to_divert_2024_attack_ads_111453.html
Since the failures of the US military missions in places like Afghanistan and Iraq – and many other Muslim nations like Libya – critics of the US mission in the “global war on terrorism” have lamented the lack of a coherent strategy.
As the tired line from Carl von Clausewitz goes, “war is an extension of politics through other means.” Warfare, therefore, is an inherently political act. More precisely, it is the use of violence by a state or non-state actor to affect a political outcome.
Thus whenever military force is used it must have clear ends set forth by the political leadership ordering the use of that military force. Those clearly defined political ends must be supplemented by reliable ways to achieve that realistic political objective. The means are the resources that must be brought to bear in order to accomplish the political end.
What’s more, those political objectives must be fixed into place by the political and military leadership. They cannot change mid-mission (this has nothing to do with being flexible at the tactical level).
One of the greatest failures of the last 30 years of US foreign policy interventions across the Middle East was what former secretary of defense Robert Gates called “mission creep.” This is akin to shifting goalposts in the middle of the game, making the game unwinnable.
As America’s failed operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria and so many others since 1945 have shown, mission creep can be catastrophic to both the prestige of the US military as well as its readiness to conduct its larger mission of deterring actual great state rivals to the United States, namely China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
Once the base of operations for al-Qaeda and their Taliban allies, after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, Afghanistan became the primary target of America’s justified wrath.
With a handful of Special Forces operators, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) paramilitary officers, loads of local tribal allies and judicious American airpower, the US military effectively deposed the Taliban and broke al-Qaeda’s stronghold on the country in about two months from October to December 2001.
Had it not been for shabby planning that December, it is likely the conflict would have wrapped up with the capture or death of Osama bin Laden as he fled American forces in the foothills of Tora Bora.
Even without having captured bin Laden, though, by the spring of 2002, the US forces in Afghanistan had accomplished what the American people had wanted them to: They had disrupted the terror networks in the country and brought to justice the groups responsible for 9/11.
Despite this fact, the Americans hung around for another 20 years, bleeding its troops, weapons stocks and treasury dry in the rocks of Afghanistan.
For what purpose? Initially, it was to avenge ourselves upon the culprits behind 9/11. Once that was mostly achieved, why did the US expand its footprint and commitment to the “Graveyard of Empires?” The lack of a coherent, concrete strategy was one reason.
In Iraq, the justification for war was clear: The George W Bush administration was convinced that Saddam Hussein had developed a massive, covert WMD (weapons of mass destruction, notably nuclear) program and had partnered with al-Qaeda.
Once the US military was ensconced in the heart of the so-called “fertile crescent,” it became blatantly clear that both charges the Bush administration had made against Saddam Hussein were wrong or fabricated, depending on whom you ask.
Rather than leave and try to save its power, the Americans again opted to hang around with massive targets on their backsides – all while the Bush administration quietly changed the objective from removing a regime that was actively building WMD and working with al-Qaeda to spreading democracy in the Middle East to end terrorism.
In Iraq, the world saw the worst excesses of America’s strategic ignorance: It invaded the country based on false pretenses, with a force that was far too small to secure the country from insurgents; changed its objectives from something obtainable (ending a regime that was purportedly planning to nuke the US) to something less realistic (spreading democracy); and the Americans left in humiliation – empowering its foes (Islamist Iran and ISIS) in the process.
Having thoroughly failed in its Middle East wars, the Americans have now taken the odious products of its failure factories and sent them to the Russo-Ukrainian war. After the Russians invaded Ukraine last year, the Americans flooded weapons and other forms of support into the besieged nation.
What was the plan, though? Initially, it seemed like the United States’ objective was to rally its NATO partners into repulsing the Russian invasion into Western Ukraine in 2022. This was a sensible strategy – and it worked. The relatively small Russian invasion force of 160,000 troops collapsed under the sustained pressure of Ukraine’s defenders.
Once Kiev was secured and the survival of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government was assured, the logical course of action would have been to sue for peace, to negotiate a settlement that kept western Ukraine free and ceded the Russian-speaking provinces of eastern Ukraine and Crimea officially to the Russians.
At the precise moment that the Americans had achieved their desired goal, though, Washington doubled down and encouraged the Ukrainians to shift their objective from one of realistic territorial defense to an insane attempt to restore Ukrainian control completely over both eastern Ukraine and the heavily fortified Crimean Peninsula.
Recently, Western leaders have begun talking openly about their desire to see President Vladimir Putin overthrown and the Russian Federation partitioned. Even under the best of circumstances, short of total world war, this was never going to happen. But the fantasists in Washington have deluded themselves and Ukraine into committing strategic suicide based on these unattainable dreams.
By following the strategically illiterate Americans, all the Ukrainians will do is drain themselves – as well as NATO’s coffers and weapons stocks – and make themselves susceptible to a massive Russian counterattack. This, of course, is precisely what is happening in Ukraine.
Thanks to their close association with the geopolitical naïfs in Washington, Ukraine has been duped into charging headlong into a war it cannot win against nuclear-armed Russia, all while the West does little to prepare itself for the wider war it has provoked.
Had there been any adult in Washington during this current crisis or had former president Donald Trump been in charge during this time, it is likely that the entire Russo-Ukrainian war would have been avoided. Alas, the Washington establishment is incapable of self-awareness.
These pampered princes must offer tribute for their unfounded status to the gods of war with the blood of Ukraine’s sons and daughters – and eventually the blood of America’s youth.
Washington’s ruling class has blundered for decades at the strategic level. With each foreign policy disaster, America’s overall standing atop the world system has declined until it has reached its current nadir.
By neutering America’s power and standing in the world in these endless brush fire wars, the United States now has a stark choice to make.
Either Washington manages to pull out a miracle in Ukraine or the Russians will crush Ukraine, and then break the back of the NATO alliance – thereby ending the US strategic position in Europe and likely birthing an entirely new world order where there are multiple power centers, as opposed to only America’s.
This fate was avoidable had the US simply given more attention to strategy rather than ideology. One way or the other, though, the United States is returning to the real world. It’s not going to be pretty when it realizes how far it has truly fallen.
Brandon J Weichert is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower. He is a geopolitical analyst who manages The Weichert Report: World News Done Right. His work appears regularly in The Washington Times and Real Clear Politics. Weichert is a former US congressional staffer who holds an MA in statecraft and national security affairs from the Institute of World Politics in Washington, DC, and is an associate member of New College, Oxford University.
Palatin Technologies, Inc. (NYSE American: PTN), a biopharmaceutical company developing first-in-class medicines based on molecules that modulate the activity of the melanocortin receptor system, today announced the initiation of a Phase 2b clinical trial with the melanocortin agonist, bremelanotide. The BREAKOUT Study, entitled "A Phase 2b, Multicenter, Open-Label, Prospective Study of BREmelanotide in DiAbetic Kidney Disease to Assess the Efficacy in Reducing Urinary PrOtein and Maintaining Podocyte Density and FUncTion" initiated patient screening/enrollment in December 2022, and currently expects to initiate patient dosing in January 2023.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/palatin-initiates-enrollment-phase-2-123000606.html
