‘Pharma bro’ Martin Shkreli has already found himself back in the spotlight of the law, less than a year after being released from prison for securities fraud.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asked a federal judge in the Southern District of New York last month to hold Shkreli in civil contempt of court for breaching a lifetime restraining order preventing him from working in the pharma industry, after he set up a company called Druglike.
Now, in a statement to the court, Shkreli has claimed that Druglike is not engaged in drug discovery, so doesn’t breach the terms of his restraining order. When the launch of the company was announced last July, Shkreli said the new venture was a decentralised computing network that will be used to power early-stage drug discovery projects.
At the same time, the launch information included a disclaimer that Druglike is a “blockchain/Web3 software company and not a pharmaceutical company” – a position which will now be tested in the court.
He is also reported to have said that his ultimate objective was to get back in the pharma game and that he would be challenging the ban imposed by the courts.
Shkreli also told the court he should not be held in contempt for failing to provide federal and state regulators with information on his new venture, insisting he had responded to enquiries “as extensively as possible and in good faith,” according to a Reuters report. He also failed to agree to attend an interview with the FTC.
According to court documents, Shkreli said he never had either an ownership or executive role at Druglike, adding that he believed the company had already been dissolved. He added he is continuing to play a role in a new company – called DL Software – which he also co-founded, and is creating software for chemists and physicists, which also should not come under the pharma industry injunction.
Shkreli had been dubbed “the most hated man in America” for his arrogant and defiant posturing whilst acting as chief executive of Turing Pharma, which hiked the price of off-patent HIV drug Daraprim (pyrimethamine) from $13.50 to $750 per tablet – leaving some patients forced to pay up to $16,000 in out-of-pocket co-pays.
That was not the action that led to Shkreli’s sentencing, however. He was found guilty in 2017 of securities fraud schemes involving two hedge funds that he ran, sending fake account statements in order to conceal huge losses, and also convicted of manipulating the price and trading volume of stock in Retrophin, another pharma company he founded in 2011.
In January, Shkreli was ordered to repay $64.6 million after a judge ruled he and others at Turing – now renamed Vyera Pharma – had broken competition laws to keep other suppliers of pyrimethamine off the market and is still on the hook for around $24 million of that total.
US District Judge Denise Cote, who will decide the FTC contempt motion, also imposed the ban and a $64.6 million penalty on Shkreli, which he says he has been unable to pay.
Shares of Biogen Inc. (BIIB) gained about 1.7% in premarket trading on Wednesday after the company beat revenue and earnings expectations in the fourth quarter. Biogen had earnings of $550.4 million, or $3.79 per share, in the fourth quarter, up from $368.2 million, or $2.50 per share, in the same three months of 2021. Adjusted earnings per share were $4.05, against a FactSet consensus of $3.49. The company's revenue came in at $2.5 billion for the quarter, down from $2.7 billion in the same quarter in 2021 but still beating the FactSet consensus of $2.4 billion. The revenue decline was driven by falling sales of its multiple sclerosis drugs like Tecfidera. The company said Leqembi, the Alzheimer's drug it developed with Eisai that recently received an accelerated approval in the U.S., should bring "modest in-market revenue" this year, though commercialization costs will exceed revenue. Biogen expects EPS of $15.00 to $16.00 in 2023. The FactSet consensus is $15.74. Biogen's stock has gained 33.0% over the past year, while the broader S&P 500 is down 4.4%.
Driverless vehicles without steering wheel or pedals are already hitting US roadways and could revolutionize how people move about. There's already one brand of autonomous vehicles on US roadways, with another two companies working to debut their automated transportation services soon.
In a note released Tuesday, BloombergNEF analyst Siong-Hu Wong covers the top three autonomous vehicles without steering wheels set for commercialization.
The first is Amazon-owned Zoox's electric VH6 shuttles are already operating on California public roads. The robotaxi service is only available to employees for now but expects approvals by the state government will allow the service to be offered to the general public near-term.
In February, General Motors-backed Cruise received permission from California's Department of Motor Vehicles to test its Origin shuttle on roadways.
Another robotaxi is Waymo's Zeekr M-Vision, which will enter production next year. The Zeekr is similar to the other robotaxi-makers.
Automated vehicles, or the shuttles above, could be the biggest thing to hit the auto industry ever. It will entirely change the way people get around.
However, the dystopic thing about this all is that Americans must give up owning cars and instead rely on robotaxi companies for transportation. The problem with that is control.
Long-standing Michigan laws have become a new weapon for a group of aspiring education reformers seeking to guard school children in the state against what they call “illegal hyper-sexualization” and other “woke” teachings.
Activists concerned about what they were seeing in the state’s public schools recently formed a non-profit, non-partisan organization they call the Great Schools Initiative (GSI). They aim to help parents keep children from being exposed to teachings about gender change, sexual practices, and other concepts that they believe are harmful.
Co-founder Monica Yatooma, who has no children in a public school, became alarmed when she heard friends speak of things happening at their children’s public schools. Shocking news updates also caught her attention. It sounded like an effort to indoctrinate children in her community’s public schools about sexuality.
Yatooma began researching the websites of school districts in her state, where she saw evidence of programs espousing the teachings of critical race theory (CRT) and “the hyper-sexualization of students through exposure to gender ideology,” she said. “That’s where GSI came from.”
Michigan parental rights activist Monica Yatooma. (Courtesy of Monica Yatooma)
Now, she and others are using the group’s efforts to help parents statewide.
“Our goal is to bring back orthodox education and to improve our schools,” the group’s co-founder Nathan Pawl told The Epoch Times. “Our immediate mission is to protect the safety and privacy of every student and to restore parental control over what their child is being taught in school.”
Human sexuality is “a highly sensitive” subject, Pawl said. “It often implicates family structure, religion, and the maturity levels, both physically and spiritually, of school children.
“Uninvolved parents have let their schools run unchecked for years in the realm of sex education,” he said.
Digging for Solutions
As GSI activists began investigating, they uncovered significant problems in numerous districts.
Group members began attending school board meetings more regularly, hearing stories from other parents, and researching state laws looking for solutions, Pawl said.
“We discovered that Michigan has very strong and wise statutes on the books dealing with sex education and parental rights dating back to the mid-1970s.”
GSI researchers found that Michigan law does not mandate that schools teach sex education, with the exception of lessons on HIV and AIDS. If sex-ed is taught, it cannot be a requirement for graduation.
“These laws do not prohibit the existence of LGBTQ students, nor do they prohibit a school from teaching about a wide range of sex education topics,” Pawl said.
“Rather, these laws wisely restrict sex education to specific courses and class sections, with an approved curriculum, to be taught by an instructor qualified to teach sex education,” GSI wrote in a blog posted on its website.
An illustration encouraging children to think of gender as a spectrum was distributed by Gorham High School in Maine. (Courtesy of a student who asked to be identified as HB)
GSI members realized that under existing Michigan law, parents must be notified before a sex-ed course is presented to their children. They have a right to preview lesson content and materials and to observe the instruction at reasonable, agreed-upon times.
The laws also say that parents have the right to opt out of the class without penalty or negative ramifications to the student, such as loss of credit. An opt-out can be accomplished by filing a written notice with the school.
But most parents are unaware of these provisions in the law, GSI members said.
Michigan law “solidifies the role of the family, especially parents, and allows them to decide what pace to set for their children with regard to learning about human sexuality,” Yatooma said. The statutes “assert the necessary parental control that parents have. A parent always knows the child best.”
It’s important, she said, to “protect the innocence of all of our children for as long as possible” and “set common-sense standards and boundaries to protect their safety and privacy.”
In their digging, GSI members also realized that the Michigan statutes mandate that any school district desiring to create or change a sex-education program must form a sex education advisory board tasked with reviewing proposed plans, setting goals and objectives, and providing community input to the school board. And at least once every two years, the board must report to parents on the status of the program’s goals and objectives.
Boards are to be comprised of pupils, parents, educators, local clergy, and community health professionals. At least half of the members must have children enrolled in a school in the district. Without such a board, a school district may not teach sex education, Michigan law says.
GSI now is encouraging parents and others to see if their local school districts have a sex education advisory board in place, verify its makeup, and check to be sure it’s doing what the law requires.
Parents Unaware of Their Rights
Many Michigan parents are not aware of the power they already have under existing state law to withdraw their children from lessons, activities, discussions, books, videos, and other materials they find inappropriate, Pawl said.
GSI aims to inform and educate parents, but also take “impactful actions,” he said.
The group has teamed up with the Thomas More Society to draft the Michigan Parental Education Opt-Out Form. The Thomas More Society is a non-profit, national, public-interest law firm providing pro bono legal services to individuals or groups fighting to restore “respect in law for life, family, and religious liberty” and to preserve democracy through election integrity efforts.
The four-page opt-out form they’ve created, which is free online, leaves school administrators with little wiggle room to dismiss parental opt-out requests on technicalities—something some school districts have already attempted to do, Pawl said.
“We have provided a comprehensive list of dozens of examples of situations, topics, and items that parents may reasonably find objectionable,” Pawl said.
The list includes distribution of birth control and providing references to abortion clinics; gender ideology and gender modification surgery information; sexual attraction; teachings or discussions on sensual topics; non-grammatical use of pronouns inconsistent with biology; display and distribution of LGBT materials, books, and flags; and the furnishing of clothing for cross-dressing.
‘Rogue Sex Education’
The GSI form addresses both the approved sex-education class and the informal instruction involving sexuality that goes on throughout the school day during the time allotted for other subjects, Pawl said.
GSI considers such informal instruction “rogue,” because it hasn’t been reviewed and recommended by a sex education advisory board and approved by the local school board.
Also considered “rogue sex ed” are class chats about sexuality with teachers not certified to teach sex education and the injection of gender identity and sexual orientation into lessons and activities outside the confines and structure of an approved sex education class.
“Schools have allowed and encouraged sex education to be permeated into much more than the few classes listed on the school’s opt-out form,” reads a statement on GSI’s website.
That’s why the new form created by GSI activists with the help of Thomas More Society lawyers is so needed, members told The Epoch Times.
In just a few days more than 200 parents used the GSI opt-out form, and about 10 school districts have accepted it, Yatooma said.
State Education Officials Respond
The Michigan Department of Education (MDE) issued a memo on Feb. 2 to provide guidance to local school superintendents on how to handle the flurry of parents opting their children out of sex education.
The MDE position is that the statutory parental opt-out option applies only to board-approved sex education classes.
“These requirements are specific to sex education classes within a health course or unit … and should not be construed to apply to classes or course content outside that scope.
“Policies and procedures for excusing a student from participating in courses and content areas other than the sex education classes within a health education program, such as an English or Social Studies course, are not provided for in … state law,” the memo reads, in part.
Such policies are to be determined at the local district level, subject to any relevant state and federal conditions, the MDE memo says.
In rebuttal, Pawl cited former Michigan Attorney General Frank Kelley’s Opinion 5881 issued on April 21, 1981, which he believes supports GSI’s position.
Kelley opined that Michigan law “prohibits a board of education of a school district from including any sex education instruction in any class or course that students are required to take.”
Also, in support of GSI’s position, Pawl referred to the portion of the MDE memo, which states, “By law, sex education classes must be taught by a person qualified to teach health education.”
“It is clear,” Pawl said, “that a teacher that is not certified in sex education has no business infusing a math or social studies class with information pertaining to gender or sexual orientation. It is illegal.”
A statement on GSI’s website characterizes these situations as violations “of privacy and a safety issue when teachers, counselors, or administrators have conversations or solicit private information through polls, quizzes, and other communications about human sexuality … This would include promotion of any and all sexual ideologies.”
Pawl contends that state law requires that this type of activity be confined to sex education advisory board-reviewed and school board-approved sex education classes only.
In contrast, the MDE memo advises school administrators that activities and materials outside of the approved sex-education instructional program, such as “communications, library holdings, surveys, after-school programs, and student-led non-curricular clubs … would not be subject to the sex education excusal provisions specified in statute.”
Laws Being Ignored or Circumvented
GSI alleges that, for a number of reasons—including ignorance—state laws on sex education are being ignored by some schools, and intentionally skirted by others.
As evidence, Pawl cites an MDE informational video about a suburban Detroit 5th- and 6th-grade language arts and social studies teacher.
The instructor announces in the video that every year on the first day of school he reads aloud to his class the book “I Am Jazz: The Real-Life Experience of a Transgender Child” by LGBT activist Jazz Jennings.
A book bin in the classroom overflows with other LGBT titles.
The teacher—also chairperson of his school’s Diversity Committee and a former Michigan Teacher of the Year—says he uses the reading to show his students that they can be comfortable talking about LGBT issues with him “whenever and wherever” they need to.
The video shows his classroom door covered with LGBT pride signs, stickers, and emblems. The teacher points out the rainbow-hued gay pride flag and transgender flag on display as tools that he says he uses to stimulate discussion and help create a “safe and inclusive space” for all students.
GSI members object to that.
“Nobody can display a Playboy flag in the classroom and claim it is a benign symbol and conversation starter,” Pawl said. “Flags are a tool that represents something and that begs questions.”
Another Michigan Department of Education video shows a consultant advising teachers not to risk “outing” students by organizing LGBT club meetings for after school, when parents will be picking up their children.
Instead, the consultant suggests, teachers should hold such club meetings at lunch hour.
Teachers are told to avoid club names that suggest an obvious LGBT theme, in favor of more innocuous names, such as “Diversity Club” or “Spectrum” or “Social Support Club,” according to the video.
In another MDE instructional video, psychologist Amorie Robinson, known locally as Dr. Kofi Adoma, instructs teachers on how to handle things like gender identity, name changes, and personal pronouns.
“Gender fluidity” is a normal process, Robinson says, and should be addressed with children aged 3–5 through something she calls “psycho-ed.” She advises teachers to employ a “psycho-ed” approach at school-wide events, such as Coming Out Day and Gay History Month.
Forcing ‘Their Agenda on Students’
“A reasonable person cannot help but conclude that the LGBT agenda in our schools is being driven on purpose by the Michigan Department of Education with help from well-funded national non-profit organizations,” Pawl said.
“It is evident that teachers and administrators are being taught how to cloak their activities, and, in some cases, actively circumvent the law in order to force their agenda on students. This comes at a time when so many parents tell us of the atrocious academic proficiency of their schools.”
Erick G. Kaardal, special counsel for the Thomas More Society. (Courtesy of Erick G. Kaardal)
GSI wants to cooperate with school boards, administrators, and teachers to “improve policies to provide the safety, privacy, and parental control which Michigan families deserve,” Erick G. Kaardal, special counsel for the Thomas More Society, told The Epoch Times.
“GSI hopes that most of the issues can be resolved through the parental complaint administrative process without litigation,” he said, but added that “litigation remains an option for GSI, if that doesn’t work.”
The Michigan Parent Alliance for Safe Schools, an LGBT rights advocacy group, did not respond to a request for comment.
GSI also will help families file complaints, the group’s members told The Epoch Times.
“Those children are not the state’s property,” Yatooma said.
“The system is trying to form the thoughts and mindset of the next generation. They are forcing a subset of ideologies about sex and race on these vulnerable young minds that most of their parents do not agree with.”
House Republicans are kicking off an investigation into the origins of COVID-19 by requesting documents and testimony for current and former Biden administration officials.
The Republican chairmen of the House Oversight Committee and the Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic are seeking information, including from Dr. Anthony Fauci, concerning the idea that the coronavirus leaked accidentally from a Chinese lab.
“This investigation must begin with where and how this virus came about so that we can attempt to predict, prepare or prevent it from happening again,” Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, chair of the virus subcommittee, said in a statement on Monday.
Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., chairman of the oversight committee, said Republicans will “follow the facts” and “hold U.S. government officials that took part in any sort of cover-up accountable.”
The letters to Fauci, National Intelligence Director Avril Haines, Health Secretary Xavier Beccera and others are the latest effort by the new Republican majority to make good on promises made during the 2022 midterms campaign.
Wenstrup, who is also a longtime member of the House Intelligence Committee, has accused U.S. intelligence of withholding key facts about its investigation into the coronavirus. Republicans on the committee last year issued a staff report arguing that there are “indications” that the virus may have been developed as a bioweapon inside the China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
That would contradict a U.S. intelligence community assessment released in unclassified form in August 2021 that said analysts do not believe the virus was a bioweapon, though it may have leaked in a lab accident.
The letters sent Monday do not require the cooperation of recipients. But in announcing the Republican staff report in December, Wenstrup said that lawmakers would issue subpoenas if potential witnesses didn’t cooperate.
It is extremely difficult for scientists to establish definitively how diseases emerge, but studies by experts around the world have determined that COVID-19 most likely emerged from a live animal market in Wuhan, China.
Initially dismissed by most public health experts and government officials, the hypothesis that COVID-19 originated from an accidental lab leak began to receive scrutiny after President Joe Biden ordered an investigation into the matter in May 2021.
The 90-day review was meant to push American intelligence agencies to collect more information and review what they already had. Former State Department officials under President Donald Trump had publicly pushed for further investigation into virus origins, as had scientists and the World Health Organization. But the review proved to be inconclusive, with intelligence agencies saying that barring an unforeseen breakthrough, they wouldn’t be able to conclude the origin either way.
Many scientists, including Fauci, who until December served as Biden’s chief medical adviser, say they still believe the virus most likely emerged in nature and jumped from animals to humans, a well-documented phenomenon known as a spillover event. Virus researchers have not publicly identified any key new scientific evidence that might make the lab-leak hypothesis more likely.
But Republicans have accused Fauci of lying to Congress when he denied in May that the National Institutes of Health funded “gain of function” research — the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential impact in the real world — at a virology lab in Wuhan. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, even urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Fauci’s statements.
Fauci, who served as the country’s top infectious disease expert under both Republican and Democratic presidents, has called the GOP criticism nonsense.
Cruz and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., have previously said that an October 2021 letter from NIH to Congress contradicts Fauci. But no clear evidence or scientific consensus exists that “gain of function” research was funded by NIH, and there is no link between U.S.-funded research to the emergence of COVID-19. NIH has repeatedly maintained that its funding did not go to such research involving boosting the infectivity and lethality of a pathogen.
Nonetheless, Fauci indicated in November that he would “cooperate fully and testify” if Republicans followed through with their plans to investigate COVID’s origin.
“I have no trouble testifying — we can defend and explain everything that we’ve said,” he told reporters during a White House briefing last year.
A Lufthansa spokesperson reported on Wednesday a company-wide system fault, with massive delays and disruptions in airlines resulting from the failure.
Lufthansa cited a statement by German network provider Telekom explaining that several glass-fiber cables were damaged in Frankfurt during rail construction work, disrupting operations worldwide.
The company quoted the statement in saying that the complete fixing of the cable disruptions would likely take until Wednesday afternoon.
All of Lufthansa's departures from Frankfurt airport were stopped, as systems for check-in and boarding were interrupted.
German air traffic control was temporarily re-routing all aircrafts landing in Frankfurt airport to other destinations such as Cologne, Düsseldorf and Nürnberg because of the breakdown. The measure intended to prevent the hub from filling up, an air traffic control spokesperson confirmed.
Take-offs, on the other hand, were still possible in Frankfurt. Lufthansa's second-biggest hub, Munich, was not restricted by air traffic control at this point in time. If problems persisted, this could become an option, a spokesperson of air traffic control said.
International flights were also affected by the failure, leading to many passengers potentially missing their connecting flights.
Passengers and aircraft staff alike were stranded at Frankfurt airport. A spokesperson in Frankfurt said that the company was intensively working on a solution. Other airports in Germany seemed to be less affected.
The F-16 fighter jet sent to shoot down the aerial object over Lake Huron this weekend missed with its first missile, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen.Mark Milley confirmed Tuesday.
The “first shot missed, second shot hit,” Milley told reporters following a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels.
Asked whether the missile miss changes how the U.S. may go about downing the next aerial object over its territory, Milley said officials “go to great lengths to make sure that the airspace is clear and the backdrop is clear out to the max effective range of the missile.”
He added that the missile “landed harmlessly in the water of Lake Huron” and was later tracked down.
“We made sure that airspace was clear of any commercial civilian or recreational traffic. We do the same thing for the maritime space, so we’re very, very deliberate in our planning. … We’re very, very careful to make sure that those shots are in fact safe,” he said.
The U.S. and Canada shot down three unidentified objects over Alaska, Lake Huron and Canadian territory in the last few days, incidents that follow the U.S. downing of a suspected Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina earlier this month.
The first of the three newer objects, which was shot down from 40,000 feet over Alaska on Friday, was hit after President Biden gave the order.
The second object was brought down on Saturday in northern Canada after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau green-lit the mission and Biden authorized fighter jets to fly into Canada.
The third object, initially labeled an “unidentified aircraft,” was downed Sunday over Lake Huron after initially being spotted Saturday in Montana.
The White House on Monday said the uncertainty of the surveillance capabilities of the three objects led to Biden’s orders for the military to shoot them all down, and that the administration will establish an interagency team to look into unidentified objects in U.S. airspace.
While the U.S. government is currently pulling parts of the Chinese spy balloon from the Atlantic Ocean, Milley said it will be difficult to recover the three recently downed objects as they have all fallen into “very difficult terrain.”
“The second one off the coast of Alaska is something in some really, really difficult terrain in the Arctic Circle with very, very low temperatures in the minus 40s. The second one is in the Canadian Rockies in the Yukon — very difficult to get that one. And third one is in in Lake Huron at probably a couple hundred-feet depth,” he explained. “We’ll get them eventually, but it’s going to take some time to recover those.”
