Major Banks Could Be Liable For Jeffrey Epstein Sex Trafficking: Judge

 by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Two major banks and a bank executive could be liable for Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking, a judge has ruled.

Plaintiffs have presented enough evidence that JPMorgan Chase, longtime JPMorgan executive Jes Staley, and Deutsche Bank could be liable for Epstein’s sex trafficking, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff said on May 1 as he rejected motions to dismiss cases brought against Staley and the institutions.

“Plaintiffs have pled sufficient facts to support their allegations that JP Morgan had … knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking venture, either directly or by recklessly disregarding what was plainly to be seen,” Rakoff, a Clinton appointee, wrote in a 54-page decision.

One of the plaintiffs, a woman who says she was abused by Epstein and his associates, has also pled “sufficient facts to support her allegation that Deutsche Bank knew or recklessly disregarded that Jeffrey Epstein ran a sex-trafficking venture,” the judge also said.

The ruling came in cases brought by several alleged Epstein victims and the U.S. Virgin Islands government against JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank. It also covers a claim filed against Staley by JP Morgan.

The banks are accused of violating federal law that prohibits sex trafficking of children by force, fraud, or coercion, with one section of the law allowing for the punishment of people who knowingly benefit financially from participating in a sex trafficking venture.

Defendants have argued they did not participate in Epstein’s venture because they were only providing typical banking services. Participation in a venture requires “specific conduct that furthered the sex trafficking venture,” or conduct that is “more than just passive facilitation,” previous rulings have stated. But plaintiffs have presented evidence that both banks structured the voluminous cash withdrawals Epstein enacted in ways that hid how they were suspicious, the judge said, in addition to delaying or failing to file suspicious activity reports.

Plaintiffs have noted that Epstein pleaded guilty to a sex offense in Florida in 2008 and that news articles and lawsuits lodged before and after the plea accused Epstein of sex offenses, including abuse of minor girls. They have released internal correspondence showing JPMorgan officials questioning whether the bank should cut ties with Epstein in light of the allegations.

The ruling means the cases are slated to hear on trial later this year.

Former Executive

Staley was the head of JPMorgan’s private banking division in 2000 when he began to service Epstein’s accounts. Emails indicate the two became friends.

“I deeply appreciate our friendship. I have few so profound,” Staley, who has left the company, said in one missive.

Staley visited homes owned by Epstein on multiple occasions.

One day after Staley went to Epstein’s home in New York, Epstein emailed to say “you were with Larry, and I had to put up with…,” attaching a picture of a young woman posing in a sexually suggestive manner. In another missive, Epstein wrote no words but only sent a picture of a different girl.

Plaintiffs say Staley not only saw one of the alleged victims while visiting Epstein, but that he abused multiple girls himself.

Staley wrote to Epstein after a visit: “That was fun. Say hi to Snow White.” Epstein asked, “what character would you like next?” Mr. Staley responded, “Beauty and the Beast.”

“If the allegations in plaintiffs’ complaints are taken as true, Mr. Staley had actual first-hand knowledge that Epstein conducted a sex-trafficking venture,” Rakoff said in the new ruling.

Staley, who was brought into the lawsuits by JPMorgan, has said he was not in charge of Epstein’s accounts.

“The third-party complaints, while creating provocative media fodder, never explain how an employee who is not alleged to have had decision-making authority over Epstein’s accounts—and who is not alleged to have seen any of the suspicious account activity that other JPMorgan employees ignored—caused the plaintiffs’ alleged injuries,” he said in one filing.

Staley has asked the court to dismiss the bank’s claim against him, arguing that the bank is trying to “treat Mr. Staley as its public relations shield by asserting claims that lack any legal (or factual) basis.” That motion is still being considered.

The Epoch Times reached out to JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank for comment.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/major-banks-could-be-liable-jeffrey-epstein-sex-trafficking-judge

How inflammation can cause heart failure

 A  study led by St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto has uncovered a way in which inflammation of the heart can prompt the production of a protein that impairs heart function.

The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, describes a process by which inflammation can cause heart failure, a chronic health condition affecting hundreds of thousands of people in Canada.

"Heart failure is a major cause of illness and death. Its symptoms can include breathlessness, tiredness, palpitations or ankle swelling," said Dr. Andrew Advani, study senior author, St. Michael's endocrinologist and Keenan Chair in Medicine. "Our team wanted to understand how heart failure happens so that we can look for potential new treatments."

How inflammation impacts heart failure

Inflammation occurs when white blood cells come together in one place. Sometimes inflammation can be a good thing, for example, when white blood cells come together to fight an infection. But when inflammation happens where there is no infection it can lead to negative outcomes. Scientists have known for many years that heart failure is associated with inflammation, but it was not clear how white blood cells impair heart function, says Advani.

Through a series of experiments, Advani and the team discovered that inflammation causes heart cells to produce a protein called ISG15. They found that ISG15 sticks to other proteins in heart muscle cells, causing them to stop working properly. When cell proteins stick to other proteins, this is called a post-translational modification. Post-translational modifications can affect how proteins work and they can play important roles in the development heart failure.

"This is a new idea, that this particular post-translational modification caused by inflammation can affect the functioning of heart muscle and cause heart failure," Advani said. "The discovery opens up a whole new field of heart failure research."

He cautions that this translational research is in the early stages and it could take many years for the findings to benefit patients. Still, the results are exciting because of the potential for new treatments, including possible therapies to stop ISG15 from sticking to proteins or new ways to identify people who are at risk of developing heart failure, Advani said.

The research took place at the Keenan Research Center for Biomedical Science at St. Michael's Hospital, and was supported, in part, by the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada and by the Banting and Best Diabetes Center.

More information: Veera Ganesh Yerra et al, Pressure overload induces ISG15 to facilitate adverse ventricular remodeling and promote heart failure, Journal of Clinical Investigation (2023). DOI: 10.1172/JCI161453

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-05-inflammation-heart-failure-reveals-insights.html

AI in medical imaging could magnify health inequities, study finds

 Artificial intelligence (AI) technology in the medical field has the possibility to automate diagnoses, decrease physician workload, and even to bring specialized healthcare to people in rural areas or developing countries. However, with possibility comes potential pitfalls.

Analyzing crowd-sourced sets of data used to create AI algorithms from medical images, University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) researchers found that most did not include patient demographics. In the study published April 3 in Nature Medicine, the researchers also found that the algorithms did not evaluate for inherent biases either. That means they have no way of knowing whether these images contain representative samples of the population such as Blacks, Asians, and Indigenous Americans.

According to the researchers, much of medicine in the U.S. is already fraught with partiality toward certain races, genders, ages, or sexual orientations. Small biases in individual sets of data could be amplified greatly when hundreds or thousands of these datasets are combined in these algorithms.

"These deep learning models can diagnose things physicians can't see, such as when a person might die or detect Alzheimer's disease seven years earlier than our known tests—superhuman tasks," said senior investigator Paul Yi, MD, Assistant Professor of Diagnostic Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at UMSOM. He is also Director of University of Maryland Medical Intelligent Imaging (UM2ii) Center. "Because these AI machine learning techniques are so good at finding needles in a haystack, they can also define sex, gender, and age, which means these models can then use those features to make biased decisions."

Much of the data collected in large studies tends to be from people of means who have relatively easy access to healthcare. In the U.S., this means the data tends to be skewed toward men versus women, and toward people who are white rather than other races. As the U.S. tends to perform more imaging than the rest of the world, this data gets compiled into algorithms that have the potential to slant outcomes worldwide.

For the current study, the researchers chose to evaluate the datasets used in data science competitions in which computer scientists and physicians crowdsource data from around the world and try to develop the best, most accurate algorithm. These competitions tend to have leaderboards that rank each algorithm and provide a cash prize, motivating people to create the best one. Specifically, the researchers investigated medical imaging algorithms, such as those that evaluate CT scans to diagnose brain tumors or blood clots in the lungs. Of the 23 data competitions analyzed, 61 percent did not include demographic data such as age, sex, or race. None of the competitions had evaluations for biases against underrepresented or disadvantaged groups.

"We hope that by bringing awareness to this issue in these data competitions—and if applied in an appropriate way—that there is tremendous potential to solve these biases," said lead author Sean Garin, Program Coordinator at the UM2ii Center.

The study's authors also encourage future competitions to require not only high accuracy, but also fairness among different groups of people.

"As AI models become more prevalent in medical imaging and other fields of medicine, it is important to identify and address potential biases that may exacerbate existing health inequities in clinical care—an essential priority for every academic medical institution," said UMSOM Dean Mark T. Gladwin, MD, Vice President for Medical Affairs, University of Maryland, Baltimore, and the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor.

More information: Sean P. Garin et al, Medical imaging data science competitions should report dataset demographics and evaluate for bias, Nature Medicine (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41591-023-02264-0

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-05-ai-medical-imaging-magnify-health.html

Intranasal RNA therapy to lungs

 Scientists at UMass Chan Medical School have developed a technology to deliver gene therapy directly to lung tissue through intranasal administration, a development that could potentially create a new class of treatments for lung disease.

Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study by a multidisciplinary team of RNA biologists, chemical biologists, immunologists and virologists describes the delivery of siRNA molecules locally to lung tissue. It is the first demonstration that multimeric siRNA molecules can be taken up into the lung after intranasal administration and achieve safe and robust genetic silencing. More importantly, the platform technology is adaptable for other pulmonary diseases such as pulmonary fibrosis and respiratory viruses.

"Achieving robust silencing at this level that is well tolerated hasn't been achieved before," said Vignesh N. Hariharan, Ph.D., co-author of the study and a postdoctoral associate in the lab of Anastasia Khvorova, Ph.D., the Remondi Family Chair in Biomedical Research and professor of RNA therapeutics. "We've shown sufficient silencing to prove anti-viral efficacy can be done with siRNA and we think this architecture is the way forward to using RNA silencing therapeutically in the lungs. This would potentially open a new class of therapeutics for treating lung diseases."

Using the novel chemical scaffold, Dr. Hariharan and colleagues successfully delivered stabilized divalent siRNA molecules to animal models that blocked SARS-CoV-2 and prevented infection.

"The lung is a tough organ to get RNA molecules to because it's very sensitive to potential toxins and particles that can cause immune reactions," said Hariharan.

Small interfering RNA (siRNA) is a class of short, noncoding RNA molecules, only 20 to 24 base pairs in length, found in cells and that can be produced synthetically. They are part of the RNA interference (RNAi) system first identified by 2006 Nobel Laureate Craig Mello at UMass Chan Medical School.

siRNA molecules interfere with the expression of genes by binding to messenger RNA (mRNA) after it's been transcribed from the genome. Once bound to its target, the siRNA recruits cellular proteins that cut the mRNA, which is then degraded naturally by the cell before it can produce the corresponding protein. This prevents the cell from making proteins from that specific genetic sequence.

"If you think of the cell as being a huge block of text in a word processing program, siRNA is like a search and find function; using the right combination of letters you can find any word in the text, or in this analogy, any genetic sequence," said Jonathan K. Watts, Ph.D., professor of RNA therapeutics and co-author on the study. "Using siRNA we can subvert the protein-production process by deleting specific disease-causing mRNA sequences before they are made into a protein, allowing us to treat the disease."

In a mouse model of SARS-CoV-2, Dr. Watts and colleagues were able to deliver a siRNA that bound to and degraded viral mRNA inside the cells. The sequence targeted by researchers was found in all known variants of the SARS-Cov-2 including delta and omicron, leading the team to believe that its function was critical to the survival of the virus. Delivery of this chemically modified siRNA to animal models reduced protein translation by 60 to 80 percent, a level strong enough to prevent infection.

"Optimizing the chemical scaffold is key to the clinical application of siRNA therapeutics in lung tissue," said Watts. "There are other delivery mechanisms, such as lipid-encased RNAs, that work well for tissues such as the liver, but this approach isn't easy to adapt for the lung."

By making the siRNA molecule with chemically modified nucleotides, Watts and colleagues can protect the siRNA from being degraded too quickly by the cells. This keeps the siRNA in the lung longer, and enables it to slip past the immune response.

The next step is for researchers to apply this new chemical approach to delivering siRNA to the lung for other pulmonary diseases including pulmonary fibrosis and asthma.

More information: Vignesh N. Hariharan et al, Divalent siRNAs are bioavailable in the lung and efficiently block SARS-CoV-2 infection, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2219523120

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-05-scientists-sirna-therapy-lung.html

Dynavax misses on bottom line, but reaffirms 2023 guidance

 Although its Q1 2023 bottom line results came in below expectations, Dynavax Technologies (NASDAQ:DVAX) is trading flat in after-hours trading. The boost could be the result of a sigh of relief from investors as the company maintained its 2023 outlook.

https://seekingalpha.com/news/3964031-dynavax-misses-bottom-line-reaafirms-2023-guidance

'Surgeon general declares loneliness an epidemic'

 [Budget? Wait for it...]

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared loneliness as an epidemic in the country on Tuesday, outlining a series of actions Americans can take to address the growing issue.

“Our epidemic of loneliness and isolation has been an underappreciated public health crisis that has harmed individual and societal health. Our relationships are a source of healing and well-being hiding in plain sight — one that can help us live healthier, more fulfilled, and more productive lives,” Murthy said in a statement.

Murthy issued an advisory laying out the consequence of loneliness, which can include a 29 percent increased risk of heart disease, a 32 percent increased risk of stroke, a 50 percent increased risk of developing dementia for older adults, and an increased risk of premature death by more than 60 percent. The advisory — which is 82 pages — includes six pillars to repair social connection in the United States.

Strengthening social infrastructure, like building more parks and libraries, and enacting pro-connection policies, like having accessible public transportation or paid family leave, are two of Murthy’s pillars he says will help overcome loneliness. He also said reforming digital environments is a pillar of his plan, saying people must be aware of how online environments may negatively affect their social connections.

The other pillars of his plan include mobilizing the health care sector, deepening knowledge of loneliness and social connections, and cultivating a culture of connections. The advisory said everyday practices, like acting kind and respectful toward one another, can help strengthen social connections.

“Given the significant health consequences of loneliness and isolation, we must prioritize building social connection the same way we have prioritized other critical public health issues such as tobacco, obesity, and substance use disorders,” Murthy said in the statement. “Together, we can build a country that’s healthier, more resilient, less lonely, and more connected.”

Murthy’s advisory comes just days after he published an op-ed in the New York Times on Sunday that said he was planning on releasing a framework on loneliness. He also emphasized in the op-ed that social connections must be a “top public health priority” in the country. 

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3983153-surgeon-general-declares-loneliness-an-epidemic/

Samsung bans employee use of ChatGPT after reported data leak

 Samsung is banning employees from using artificial intelligence (AI) programs like ChatGPT after a reported data leak exposed one of the company’s sensitive codes.

Bloomberg reported Tuesday that some Samsung staff members uploaded sensitive code information to ChatGPT, raising concerns that information uploaded to the AI software could be exposed to other users. A memo obtained by Bloomberg News informed employees that they were prohibited from using AI programs like ChatGPT due to cyber security, noting that the data uploaded could also be difficult to retrieve and delete.

“Interest in generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT has been growing internally and externally,” Samsung told staff in the memo reported by Bloomberg. “While this interest focuses on the usefulness and efficiency of these platforms, there are also growing concerns about security risks presented by generative AI.”

In an internal survey conducted by the company last month, 65 percent of respondents said that AI tools pose a security risk, the report said.

The company said that the use of AI programs would be banned on company devices and asked employees to not submit company information to these programs on their personal devices. Samsung is in progress of developing its own AI program and said in the memo that it is working “to create a secure environment for safely using generative AI.”

“We ask that you diligently adhere to our security guideline and failure to do so may result in a breach or compromise of company information resulting in disciplinary action up to and including termination of employment,” the company said in the memo.

https://thehill.com/business/3983581-samsung-bans-employee-use-of-chatgpt-after-reported-data-leak-report/