From Outperform
Friday, August 2, 2024
Lilly CEO Says Weight-Loss Drug Will Be Off Shortage Soon
- End of shortage could threaten billion-dollar copycat industry
- Shares of Hims fell as much as 16% following the comments
Eli Lilly & Co. expects its blockbuster weight-loss drug to officially come out of shortage in the US in the coming days, the company’s chief executive officer said, threatening the billion-dollar industry of copycat versions of the in-demand drugs.
Lilly’s drug, sold for weight loss as Zepbound, will cease to be in shortage “very soon,” CEO David Ricks said in an interview in Paris on Thursday. “I think actually today or tomorrow we plan to exit that process.”
'Keir Starmer warns social media firms after Southport misinformation fuels riots'
Sir Keir Starmer has warned social media “carries responsibility” over the spread of misinformation amid violent protests following the Southport stabbings.
The Prime Minister said the Government would uphold the law everywhere, including online, where far-right groups have been accused of inciting violence and stirring division in the wake of the tragedy.
Disorder has spread across Southport, London and Hartlepool after three girls were killed in the attack on a Taylor Swift themed dance class in the Merseyside town on Monday.
The suspect was on Thursday named as 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana after a judge lifted anonymity protections typically given to underage defendants accused of serious crimes.
Speaking directly to social media firms during a press conference in Downing Street on Thursday evening, Sir Keir said: “Violent disorder, clearly whipped up online, that is also a crime, it’s happening on your premises, and the law must be upheld everywhere.
“That is the single most important duty of government, service rests on security. We will take all necessary action to keep our streets safe.”
But he added that it was important for Government and tech firms to “work together” to keep the country safe, saying government “blaming everybody else and pointing fingers” does not work well.
The Prime Minister said “there is a discussion to be had” about companies striking the “right balance”, warning social media “carries responsibility”, but suggested he wanted to “work together” to keep the country safe.
He added: “What has not worked well recently with the previous government, in my view, is the performative politics of a government blaming everybody else and pointing fingers. That approach to me is not effective.
“My approach is different, which is to roll my sleeves up, get the relevant people around the table and fix the problems, and meet the challenges that we have as a country.
“We did that with law enforcement and police this afternoon – similar approach with social media, which is not performative politics which gets us nowhere, but the politics of service, which is to actually work together to address the challenges that we have and make sure that we keep the country safe and respect the values of our fellow citizens, which are about law enforcement, security and safety.”
Earlier this week, Merseyside Police issued a warning over the spreading online of an “incorrect” name for the Southport attacker – now named as 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana – and a false story around his background.
Sunder Katwala, director of the think tank British Future, highlighted a number of high-profile online figures, including Laurence Fox and former kickboxer Andrew Tate, who were “sharing that false information” on X, formerly Twitter.
A number of experts said this misinformation had been used by a “vocal minority” to sow division and “fuel their own agenda and trigger a summer of thrill-seeking impulsive insurrection” following violent disorder in Southport, London and Hartlepool in the days since the attack.
John Coxhead, a professor of policing at Staffordshire University, said groups were being “cynically stirred up by opportunistic populists with nothing better to do”.
Social media giant X has come under increased scrutiny since being taken over by billionaire Elon Musk in late 2022.
Mr Musk’s approach to running the platform has been heavily criticised after he substantially cut staff numbers and rowed back on the site’s verification and content moderation systems, claiming he wanted to allow “absolute free speech” on the site.
Under his leadership, the company has also restored the accounts of many figures previously banned for breaking site rules around hate speech, including far-right figures in the UK such as Tommy Robinson – real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – and Katie Hopkins.
Since then, many users claim to have seen an increase in hateful content, as well as pornography and spam posts and accounts, despite Mr Musk claiming he would “defeat the bots” after taking over the company.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/keir-starmer-warns-social-media-190704049.html
Harris adds ex-Obama aides to her presidential campaign team
Vice President Kamala Harris has added two former aides to Barack Obama to her presidential campaign team, a source told Reuters on Friday.
David Plouffe, an American political strategist who ran Barack Obama’s successful 2008 presidential campaign, has joined Harris’ campaign for president as a senior adviser, the source said.
The campaign is also being joined by Stephanie Cutter, who previously served as Obama’s White House communications director and deputy campaign manager, the source said.
https://kfgo.com/2024/08/02/harris-adds-ex-obama-aides-to-her-presidential-campaign-team/
Google-parent Alphabet cut stake in Crowdstrike before July global outage
Google-parent Alphabet cut its stake in cybersecurity company Crowdstrike, according to a regulatory filing on Friday, much before a global outage last month triggered by a software update.
The company cut its stake to 427,895 class A shares from 855,789 shares. The change in holdings is as of June 30.
Crowdstrike did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
A worldwide tech outage on July 19 following a software update by Crowdstrike had crippled computer systems globally, affecting sectors ranging from healthcare and banking to aviation.
Crowdstrike shares have lost nearly 35% of the value since the outage as investors rethink their security strategy and regulators debate whether it is safe to have complex and critical software in the hands of a large companies.
The company was sued by shareholders on Wednesday over misleading and false assurances about its software which caused the global outage.
Delta CEO told CNBC earlier this week the outage cost the airline $500 million and it has hired a law firm to seek compensation from Microsoft and Crowdstrike.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-parent-alphabet-cuts-stake-101322690.html
'Harris 'inner circle' girds for battle'
Kamala Harris is preparing for the fight of her life, if her inner circle is anything to go by.
The vice president has surrounded herself with a group of tested operators, many of them Black women who have been involved in Democratic politics for decades, as she gears up for a brutal three months of campaigning before the Nov. 5 election.
U.S. Senator Laphonza Butler of California, for one, struck a bullish tone this week when asked on MSNBC about the prospect of Harris facing a barrage of sexist and racist attacks.
"Bring it," she said. "Because we are not new to this."
The tight-knit group of advisers are fiercely loyal to Harris and passionate about her career, with many having shepherded her since she was a newcomer to Washington when she joined the Senate in 2017, according to Reuters interviews with four people with direct knowledge of her closest confidants.
Some of the group privately lobbied Joe Biden to pick a Black woman - Harris in particular - as his running mate in 2020 at a time when he had only publicly committed to naming a woman, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss the matter.
Harris' inner circle include advisers and allies such as Minyon Moore, chair of the Democratic National Convention Committee, convention rules co-chair Leah Daughtry, Democratic National Committee (DNC) member Donna Brazile and Tina Flournoy, a former chief of staff to Harris, the people said.
They are no strangers to power, with many having served in Bill Clinton's 1993-2001 presidency.
Harris, an 11th-hour substitute at the top of the ticket after Biden dropped out, may need all the help she can get, even though her campaign has made a strong start.
Harris remains untested, politically, on the national stage, despite being a former senator from the most populous U.S. state of California. She dropped out of the 2020 Democratic primary early and she trails Republican rival Donald Trump in some battleground states in this year's race, according to opinion polls.
There are signs of a break from the past for Harris in one area. So far this year, some members of her family - long among her closest advisers - have played a less prominent role than in her 2020 run.
Younger sister Maya Harris, who ran that short-lived campaign, has been mostly absent during key moments this time round, three of the people familiar with Harris' campaign said.
The advisers and family members included in this article either declined comment or didn't respond to requests for comment. The Harris campaign didn't comment.
The 59-year-old vice president faces a tight race and needs to be prepared for a wave of attacks, Democratic strategist Anthony Coley said.
Trump has called Harris "crazy," "nuts", "dumb as a rock" and questioned her identity by suggesting she had previously downplayed her Black heritage. Some Republicans in Congress disparage her as a diversity hire. Right-wing activists and trolls have smeared her online with racist and sexist barbs.
The inner circle is "battle tested in a way that is going to be helpful over the next 99 days," Coley said.
"It's going to be fast, it's going to be furious, it's going to be deep. And you have to have people who know how to respond quickly and smartly to these types of attacks."
The Trump campaign didn't respond to a request for comment for this article.
'FORCE OF NATURE, FORCE FOR GOOD'
Women with years of experience running the White House and election campaigning also hold key organizational roles inside the Harris camp.
Lorraine Voles serves as her White House chief of staff; Erin Wilson is her deputy chief of staff; Sheila Nix is her chief of staff on the campaign; Kirsten Allen serves as her White House communications director; and Rohini Kosoglu is one of her closest advisers, who has worked for her since her time in the Senate.
Voles, a veteran Washington communications fixer and adviser, has been credited by analysts for being a stabilizing force within Harris' inner circle since May 2022, after turmoil in her office that included departures in her communications, national security and other teams.
"Lorraine is a force of nature and a force for good who looks around corners and plays to win," said Chris LeHane, who worked with Voles at the Clinton White House.
A deputy press secretary for Bill Clinton, Voles was subsequently communications director for then-Vice President Al Gore and for then-Senator Hillary Clinton.
Some of the top male staffers she relies on are Brian Fallon, a former senior aide to Hillary Clinton who runs her communications at the campaign; Ike Irby, who served as her deputy domestic policy adviser at the White House until earlier this year; and Dean Lieberman, a national security adviser, who earlier worked for the White House National Security Council.
Democratic strategist Joel Payne said the people around Harris had experience building coalitions, including the group of voters that coalesced around the Biden-Harris ticket in 2020 and those who supported Obama in 2008 and 2012.
"These are folks who have that lineage ... to those previous eras of Democratic politics and an understanding of how to rebuild those coalitions from the past," he added.
TIES TO WASHINGTON POWER BROKERS
The counsel of figures like Moore, Daughtry, Brazile and Flournoy lend Harris years of experience from the Clinton White House and the DNC and the political chops to navigate a party that did not fully embrace her in the early years she was vice president.
These women also bring deep knowledge of Washington and ties to its power brokers. They give Harris an advantage over Trump, according to Marcia Fudge, a co-chair of the Harris campaign and former housing secretary in Biden's administration.
"It brings her a level of experience that his people don't have," Fudge told Reuters.
Trump's campaign is built around a handful of loyal, little-known political advisers, who helped him sweep away multiple Republican challengers in the primaries.
Another sounding board for Harris is Senator Butler, a union organizer who has known Harris since she was San Francisco district attorney in the early 2000s and served as a senior adviser to her 2020 campaign. With her union ties, Butler offers a bridge to the labor community, an important Democratic constituency for Harris.
This week, the United Auto Workers union endorsed Harris for president, providing a potential boost for her in the swing state of Michigan.
Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, a political strategy group, said this team would help Harris portray herself as politically in the center, while also appealing to left-leaning voters.
"They understand how to position her as a moderate."
HARRIS HUSBAND: 'PROFESSIONAL WIFE GUY'
Although family members are playing a less prominent role in this campaign, they are strong supporters.
Harris' brother-in-law - Maya's husband - Tony West, chief legal officer at Uber and former associate attorney general in the Obama administration, has been by the vice president's side during key moments on the trail this year.
He joined her on trips while Biden's own presidential bid was collapsing and then again at the Harris campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, where Harris addressed campaign leaders and staffers for the first time as the presidential candidate.
"He's a thought partner, no formal role," said one of the people with knowledge of the campaign.
Harris' husband, Doug Emhoff, remains cheerleader-in-chief.
The 59-year-old former lawyer has hit the campaign trail hard, visiting abortion clinic in Maine, stumping in New Hampshire and channeling what Vanity Fair calls "professional Wife Guy" - the supportive husband.
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/bring-kamala-harris-inner-circle-100243961.htm
'Children of freed sleeper agents learned they were Russians on the flight, Kremlin says'
A family of Russian sleeper agents flown to Moscow in the biggest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War were so deep under cover that their children found out they were Russians only after the flight took off, the Kremlin said on Friday.
"Before that, they didn't know that they were Russian and that they had anything to do with our country," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
"And you probably saw that when the children came down the plane's steps that they don't speak Russian and that Putin greeted them in Spanish. He said 'buenas noches'."
Giving new details about the swap and those freed, Peskov confirmed that Vadim Krasikov, a hitman released by Germany, was an employee of Russia's FSB security service and had served in Alpha Group, the FSB's special forces unit.
Krasikov was convicted by a German court of killing a former Chechen militant in a Berlin park in 2019. President Vladimir Putin hugged him after he got off a plane in Moscow on Thursday evening.
Krasikov, wearing a baseball cap and a tracksuit top, was the first of the returnees to disembark the plane and meet Putin, signalling his importance to Moscow, which prides itself on bringing home intelligence operatives arrested abroad.
Among those released were the so-called "illegal" sleeper agents - the Dultsevs, a husband and wife convicted a court in Slovenia of pretending to be Argentinians in order to spy, who were flown back to Russia with their two children.
Peskov said that while the couple were being held in jail they were given only restricted access to their children, and feared they could lose their parental rights.
"The children asked their parents yesterday who it was that was meeting them (in Moscow). They didn't even know who Putin was. This is how the 'illegals' work. They make such sacrifices out of dedication to their work," Peskov said.
Peskov said that Russian government agencies were working on freeing other Russians abroad. The exchange had been negotiated by the FSB and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, he said.
Putin's decision to meet them on the tarmac was "a tribute to people who serve their country and who after very difficult trials, and thanks to the hard work of many people, have been able to return to the Motherland," he said.
The trade involved 24 prisoners, including 16 moving from Russia to the West and eight prisoners held in the West sent back to Russia. Those released by Moscow included U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich and Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza, who also holds British citizenship.
Although Moscow released more prisoners than it received, it was portrayed by Russian authorities as a victory, and appeared to go over well on the streets of Moscow.
"I am not remotely political, but any way you look at it: any exchange is wonderful, that our Russian comrades returned to the motherland," said Zulfia, interviewed in the city centre.
Andrei Lugovoi, a former spy wanted by Britain for murdering dissident Alexander Litvinenko with atomic poison and now serving as head of an ultranationalist party's faction in the Russian Duma, said on Telegram: "Our people are at home with their families. And for each of them it is no pity to hand over a bunch of foreign agent scum."
Asked if the prisoner swap was a sign that Russia might be ready to strike a compromise deal on Ukraine, Peskov said they were different situations and that work on a possible diplomatic solution to what Russia calls its "special military operation" in Ukraine was being conducted on "different principles".
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/kremlin-says-fsb-agent-deep-112216482.html
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