Successfully closed upsized IPO, raising $88 million in gross proceeds to continue advancing pipeline of Selected TIL Therapy programs
Cash position expected to fund operations into second quarter of 2025
Two Phase 1 clinical trials of lead program, TIDAL-01, in several solid tumor Indications ongoing
First ever data demonstrating anti-leukemic effect of Actimab-A in FLT3 Mutant AML models
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/actinium-pharma-highlights-three-abstracts-110000869.html
Aspira Women’s Health Inc. (“Aspira” or “the Company”) (Nasdaq: AWH), a bio-analytical based diagnostic company focused on gynecologic health, today announced a material transfer agreement with The University of Oxford for the procurement of serum samples to be used to verify and validate the Company’s endometriosis blood test algorithms. Aspira expects to use the samples to support the launch of EndoCheckSM, its first-generation blood test to aid in the diagnosis of endometriosis, by the end of 2023.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/aspira-women-health-signs-exclusive-120000211.html
Shell, Europe's largest oil company, has quietly shelved the world's largest corporate plan to develop carbon offsets, after CEO Wael Sawan laid out an updated strategy for the company that included cutting costs and doubling down on profit centers (oil and gas) - which notably omitted any mention of the company's prior commitment to spend up to $100 million per year to build a 'pipeline' of carbon credits as part of the firm's promise to achieve 'net zero' emissions by 2050, Bloomberg reports.
The pullback reflects both Sawan’s renewed commitment to the oil-and-gas business that generates most of Shell’s profits, and an admission that the prior goals were simply unattainable. Over the past two years, Shell barely made a dent. It spent $95 million, less than half of its initial budget, to build or invest in a portfolio of carbon projects from Western Africa to the Brazilian Amazon to Australian farmlands. They’ve generated few if any offsets, and Shell has struggled to find projects that meet its standards for quality.
According to investigations by Bloomberg Green (how cute), many offset programs don't deliver the environmental benefits they promise. In announcing their now-shelved programs, Shell sought to solve that problem with stringent requirements, deep pockets, and engineering expertise. What they learned was something any idiot could have told you: there's no effective way to maintain a large enough offset program to make a difference.
"It’s really hard to get scale from high-quality credits," said Carbon Market Watch's Gilles Dufrasne. "The two forces," being volume and quality, "work against each other."
Shell's carbon debacle was inspired by a 2017 Nature Conservancy paper which suggested that nature-based solutions would be a cost-effective means to offset carbon.
And - surprise, the academics were wrong again...
For example, four years into a plan to partner with Forestry and Land Scotland to plant over a million trees to generate "pending issuance units" (unborn carbon credits), they've accrued less than 0.02% of their initial goal in terms of carbon sequestration.
And in Canada, Shell's efforts to secure land for credits has turned into a total disaster despite the company bragging about the endeavor on its website. The company has also failed to hit its $100 million investment target, spending only about $69 million last year, which accounts for less than 1% of its total capital expenditure.
Another project to restore mangrove trees in Senegal, which began in 2019 and has been operated by Belgian nonprofit WeForest, won't even start producing carbon credits until 2025. Shell has also walked away from potential goldmines like the Delta Blue Carbon Project in Pakistan which would cover an area roughly twice the size of London. While the 'fundamentals were sound,' per Bloomberg, the company had concerns over the integrity of the project's local partners, as well as the origins to the land rights.
A spokesperson for Indus Delta Capital, which runs the project, said shareholders and directors in the project have been subjected to rigorous due diligence and the process by which licenses and permissions were granted is “in line with the rules of business” prescribed by both the national and regional governments. -Bloomberg
Shell has also broken ties with a Montana grasslands project run by Vermont-based Native Energy due to disagreements over deal structures and the potential use of credits to label fossil fuels as carbon neutral.
For Native’s part, chief executive officer Jeff Bernicke said it terminated discussions with Shell because “there was not a fit between their plan and Native's goals and values.” There was also a concern that the credits would be used to label fossil-fuels as carbon-neutral. A spokesman for Shell said the company has a robust due diligence process and it does not comment on specific projects or the contractual agreements.
Shell's strategy now seems more attuned to secrecy and selective partnership. The company keeps some ventures under wraps, like its involvement in the Peruvian Amazon and an Indonesian forestry venture dubbed "Sun Bird," perhaps to ward off competition from oil industry peers who are also elbowing their way into the carbon-credit market.
Backup plan?
While Shell's expensive quagmire into carbon credits may have crashed and burned, the company has a backup plan - appease climate alarmists by simply buying 'low-quality' carbon credits to achieve its lofty goals of becoming 'carbon neutral' by 2050.
In the words of Adam Matthews, chief responsible investment officer at the Church of England Pensions Board, "They're no longer aligned with trying to navigate the transition in the same way that we had previously perceived."
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/shell-quietly-ditches-failed-carbon-credit-scheme
by Megan Redshaw via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The U.S. government and pharmaceutical companies are investing a substantial amount to develop new mRNA vaccines for infectious diseases and cancer, fueling a lucrative mRNA platform valued at $136.2 billion.
A newly established White House program announced on Aug. 23 that it is granting a total of $25 million over three years to Emory University, Yale School of Medicine, and the University of Georgia to develop personalized therapeutic vaccines against cancers and emerging infections, similar to how COVID-19 mRNA vaccines target SARS-CoV-2. They aim to use mRNA—an essential element in COVID-19 vaccines developed to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infections—to program a unique class of immune cells called dendritic cells to initiate a desired immunological response.
Pharmaceutical companies such as Moderna, BioNTech, and CureVac are conducting clinical trials using mRNA-based vaccines with advanced melanoma, ovarian, colorectal, and pancreatic cancers. The National Institutes of Health is partnering with BioNTech to develop a personalized vaccine for pancreatic cancers. In addition to COVID-19 and cancer, other mRNA-based vaccines in development target influenza, genital herpes, respiratory viruses, and shingles.
Although mRNA platforms are appealing because they reduce costs and shorten the vaccine development timeline, evidence and experience suggest the mRNA technology used for novel COVID-19 vaccines is associated with various harms and neither prevents COVID-19 nor its transmission.
The unprecedented rates of adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination overshadow the benefits, according to researchers from Australia who say the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, whether from the virus or created from genetic code in mRNA and adenovectorDNA vaccines, is toxic and causes a wide array of diseases.
In their recently published paper published in Biomedicines titled, “‘Spikeopathy’: COVID-19 Spike Protein Is Pathogenic, from Both Virus and Vaccine mRNA,” the researchers explored peer-reviewed data countering the “safe and effective” narrative attached to new technologies used to develop mRNA and adenovectorDNA vaccines at “warp speed” to end the pandemic.
Spike protein pathogenicity, termed “spikeopathy,” describes the ability of the spike protein to cause disease, and the researchers say it can affect many organ systems.
Researchers noted the following key problem areas:
Now that vaccines utilizing mRNA technology have been available and widely distributed for several years, data show these vaccines produce foreign antigens in human tissues and increase the risk of autoimmune, neurological, cardiovascular, inflammatory disorders, and cancers, especially when the vaccine ingredients do not remain localized at the injection site. An antigen is any substance that stimulates an immune response. If the immune system encounters an antigen that is not found on the body’s own cells, it will launch an attack against that antigen.
Pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic data show the design of the mRNA and adenovectorDNA COVID-19 vaccines allow uncontrolled biodistribution, durability, and persistent bioavailability of the spike protein inside the body after vaccination. Pharmacokinetics is the study of how the body interacts with administered substances for the entire duration of exposure. Pharmacodynamics assesses the drug’s effect on the body more closely.
This may explain the unprecedented number of adverse events that appear to be associated with the spike protein produced by the gene-based technologies employed by Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson, as well as the viral vector DNA technology used by other countries, researchers said.
Gene-based COVID-19 vaccines are therapeutic products that actually fit within the FDA’s definition of gene therapy because they cause the cells of the vaccinated person to produce antigens for transmembrane expression that invokes an immune response. By design, these novel vaccine platforms risk tissue damage secondary to autoimmune responses raised against cells expressing foreign spike antigens, researchers said.
The FDA was aware of the pathogenicity of spike proteins before releasing COVID-19 vaccines to the public. In an October 2022 meeting with its vaccine advisors, the FDA presented a highly accurate list of potential adverse events associated with COVID-19 vaccines, including neurological, cardiovascular, and autoimmune “possible adverse events.”
React19, an organization that provides financial, emotional, and physical support to those experiencing long-term injuries from COVID-19 vaccines, provided a list of over 3,400 published papers and case reports of injuries affecting more than 20 organ systems. More than 432 peer-reviewed papers relate to papers and case reports of myocarditis, cardiomyopathy, myocardial infarction, hypertension, aortic dissection, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), tachycardia, and conduction disturbance—a problem with the electrical system that controls the heart’s rate and rhythm.
The most common group of adverse events reported following COVID-19 vaccination to both pharmacovigilance databases and Pfizer involve neurological disorders. According to the paper, neurological symptoms and cognitive decline with accelerated neurodegenerative disease are features of acute COVID-19 vaccine injuries and, to some extent, long COVID syndrome. Research suggests (pdf) LNPs transporting the mRNA to make spike proteins can cross the blood-brain barrier and cause neurotoxic effects.
It’s not just the spike protein that can cause disease. LNPs that serve as the delivery method are also toxic and pro-inflammatory.
Research from 2018 showed even small amounts of nanoparticles taken up by the lungs can lead to cytotoxic effects. Ingested nanoparticles have been shown to affect lymph nodes, the liver, and the spleen, while when injected as a drug carrier, they can pass any barrier and translocate to the brain, ovaries, and testes, mainly after phagocytosis by macrophages, which help distribute them across the body. The effects on the reproductive system suggest lipid nanoparticles can be cytotoxic and damage DNA.
According to the authors, two components in the mRNA lipid nanoparticle complexes, ALC-0315 and ALC-0159, are concerning, as they have never been used in a medicinal product and are not registered in either the European Pharmacopoeia or in the European C&L Inventory database. A question posed to the European Parliament in December 2021 pointed out that the manufacturer of the nanoparticles specifies the nanoparticles are for research only and not for human use. The European Commission responded that the excipient in Pfizer’s Comirnaty vaccine “has been demonstrated to be appropriate … in compliance with the relevant EMA scientific guidelines and standards.”
Still, this could explain the root cause of numerous post-vaccination adverse events, researchers said.
Americans are constantly debating policing and gun control. But to discuss these issues, we have to depend on government crime data. Unfortunately, politics has infected the data handling of agencies such as the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control.
Last year, the CDC became the center of controversy when it removed its estimates of defensive gun uses from its website at the request of gun control organizations. For nearly a decade the CDC cited a 2013 National Academies of Sciences report showing that the annual number of people using guns to stop crime ranged from about 64,000 to 3 million. The CDC website listed the upper figure at 2.5 million.
Mark Bryant, who runs the Gun Violence Archive, wrote to CDC officials after a meeting last year that the 2.5 million number “has been used so often to stop [gun control] legislation.” The CDC’s estimates were subsequently taken down and now lists no numbers.
The FBI is also susceptible to political pressure. Up until January of 2021, I worked in the U.S. Department of Justice as the senior advisor for research and statistics, and part of my job was to evaluate the FBI’s active shooting reports. I showed the bureau that many cases were missing and that others had been misidentified. Yet, the FBI continues to report that armed citizens stopped only 14 of the 302 active shooter incidents that it identified for the period 2014-2022. The correct rate is almost eight times higher. And if we limit the discussion to places where permit holders were allowed to carry, the rate is eleven times higher.
The FBI defines active shooter incidents as those in which an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated, public area. But it does not include shootings that are deemed related to other criminal activity, such as robbery or fighting over drug turf. Active shootings may involve just one shot being fired at just one target, even if the target isn’t hit.
To compile its list, the FBI hired academics at the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University. Police departments don’t collect data, so the researchers had to find news stories about these incidents.
It isn’t surprising that people will miss cases or occasionally misidentify them when using news stories, but the FBI was unwilling to fix its errors when I pointed them out. My organization, the Crime Prevention Research Center, has found many more missed cases and is keeping an updated list. Back in 2015, I published a list of missed cases in a criminology publication.
Unfortunately, the news media unquestioningly reports the FBI numbers. After 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken used his legally-carried concealed handgun to stop what would have been a mass public shooting, an Associated Press headline noted: “Rare in US for an active shooter to be stopped by bystander.” A Washington Post headline proclaimed: “Rampage in Indiana a rare instance of armed civilian ending mass shooting.”
The CPRC’s numbers tell a different story: Out of 440 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2022, an armed citizen stopped 157. We also found that the FBI had misidentified five cases, usually because the person who stopped the attack was incorrectly identified as a security guard.
We found these cases on a budget of just a few thousand dollars. Though we found that armed citizens had stopped eight times as many cases as the FBI claims, I make no assertion that we unearthed all of these stories. It is quite possible that the news media itself never covers many such incidents.
While the FBI claims that just 4.6% of active shootings were stopped by law-abiding citizens carrying guns, the percentage that I found was 35.7%. I am more confident that we have identified a higher share of recent cases, and our figure for 2022 was even higher – 41.3%.
The FBI doesn’t differentiate between law-abiding citizens stopping attacks where guns are banned and where they are allowed, but you can’t expect law-abiding citizens to stop attacks where it is illegal to carry guns. In places where law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry firearms, the percentage of active shootings that were stopped is 51%. For 2022, that figure is a remarkable 63.5%.
In order to follow the FBI’s definition, we excluded 27 cases because a law-abiding person with a gun stopped the attacker before he was able to get off a shot.
In an email I received in 2015, a bureau official acknowledged that “the FBI did not come across this incident during its research in 2015, but it does meet the FBI’s active-shooter definition.” The official noted they will miss active-shooter cases because the reports “are limited in scope.” Yet, the FBI database never added the incident.
When the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler reached out to the FBI for comments on our earlier work up through 2021, they emailed: “We have no additional information to provide other than what is provided within the active shooter reports on our website.”
However, a researcher at Texas State University did respond to two of the cases we had identified in our earlier work. He argued that one case involving a shooting at a dentist office was excluded because it involved a domestic dispute and another at a strip club because it was a “retaliation murder.” We list 14 examples where the FBI list includes shooting resulting from domestic disputes and three others where a shooting started after someone was denied entry to a lounge or bar. So why the double standard? Domestic disputes and “retaliation murders” are only included when they don’t involve permit holders stopping the attacks.
The FBI data on active shootings is missing so many defensive gun uses that it’s hard to believe it isn’t intentional. Errors can happen, but the failure to fix past reports shows a troubling disregard for the truth. The reality is that armed, law-abiding citizens are unsung guardian angels.
John R. Lott Jr. is a contributor to RealClearInvestigations, focusing on voting and gun rights. His articles have appeared in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, USA Today, and Chicago Tribune. Lott is an economist who has held research and/or teaching positions at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Stanford, UCLA, Wharton, and Rice.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fbi-data-active-shootings-misleading-john-lott-jr
U.S. President Joe Biden will travel to Florida on Saturday to survey damage from this week's Hurricane Idalia, but a visit with the state's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, is not scheduled, despite the president's assertion that they would meet.
Biden, a Democrat who is running for re-election next year, told reporters at the White House on Friday that he would see DeSantis, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination to challenge Biden in 2024, during the trip.
DeSantis's spokesman Jeremy Redfern said that was not the case.
"We don’t have any plans for the Governor to meet with the President tomorrow," Redfern said in an email. "In these rural communities, and so soon after impact, the security preparations alone that would go into setting up such a meeting would shut down ongoing recovery efforts."
The White House said Biden and his wife, Jill, would meet with members of the community affected by the storm.
"Their visit to Florida has been planned in close coordination with FEMA as well as state and local leaders to ensure there is no impact on response operations," White House spokesperson Emilie Simons said in a statement.
The White House said Biden informed DeSantis on Thursday before visiting the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Washington that he would be coming to Florida, and the governor did not express concerns at the time.
The back-and-forth suggests politics could be creeping into the storm response.
Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who is also running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, drew criticism for his praise of President Barack Obama in 2012 when the Democrat visited his state in the aftermath of superstorm Sandy.
Biden said earlier this week that politics had not affected his conversations with DeSantis.
"I think he trusts my judgment and my desire to help. And I trust him to be able to suggest that he’s -- this is not about politics. This is about taking care of the people of his state," Biden told reporters on Wednesday. The two men have spoken regularly this week.
Biden has asked for billions of dollars in additional emergency funding following a string of severe weather events.
He plans to visit Florida before flying to his home state of Delaware for the weekend. The president regularly visits states that have been affected by natural disasters.
https://news.yahoo.com/biden-says-hell-meet-desantis-220941162.html
