'Cynical and illegal': Journalists, activists blast US-led missile strike against Syria

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The US-led missile attack against Syria demonstrates Washington's complete disregard for international law, and its timing, before a proper investigation was conducted, raises serious questions, experts told RT. Describing Saturday morning's missile attack as illegal, Joe Lauria, an independent journalist and former Wall Street Journal correspondent, told RT that the strike was shocking - but not surprising. "They did not prove that they were acting under Article 51 of the UN Charter, which is self-defense - the US was not acting in self-defense," Lauria told RT. "They did not get Security Council authorization, and the US Congress did not weigh in on this, so it's illegal internationally and under US law." The decision to launch the missiles just hours before inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) were scheduled to begin a fact-finding mission at the site of the alleged gas attack in Douma on Saturday represents "quite an extraordinary moment," Lauria told RT. "But I should say it's not unusual. The United States has done this kind of thing before," he added.

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Attacked by The Times: The academic working group on Syria, Propaganda and Media for looking at the evidence

https://www.sott.net/article/382825-Attacked-by-The-Times-The-academic-working-group-on-Syria-Propaganda-and-Media-for-looking-at-the-evidence

Here's Why Utah's New Free-Range Kids Law Will Help Parents of Color

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Jessica Calarco, a sociologist writing in The Atlantic, says that Utah's new Free-Range Kids law represents an "unfair double standard" because parents who are poor, working class, or people of color will be less able to take advantage of it.

"A major shortcoming of their otherwise well-intentioned movement is that the people who have the most to gain from it—poor and working-class parents—will find themselves held to a different set of expectations," she wrote.

But the law strives to protect all parents: those who free-range by choice and those who have no alternative but to let their kids play outside, come home with a latchkey, or wait briefly in the car because mom or dad is busy earning a living.

To bolster her point, Calarco mentions the case of Debra Harrell (a case the country first heard about here at Reason). Harrell, a mother of color, had been thrown in jail for a night and had her child taken away for 17 days simply because she let the girl play in the sprinkler park while she worked her shift at McDonald's. Here is a tape of the harrowing interrogation Harrell had to endure.

I wrote that it was terrible for the state to treat a mom who made a rational, loving parenting decision like a criminal. Judging from the outcry, most of America felt the same.

The new Free-Range Law gives moms like Harrell a leg to stand on. In Utah, at least, it is no longer considered "neglect" to let your kids play outside alone.

The Utah law would also have helped a middle-class family, the Meitivs of Maryland, when they were accused of neglect for letting their kids, 10 and 6, walk home from the park on their own (a story I was also the first to report).

This across-the-board benefit is appreciated by Joyce McMillan, head of the Child Welfare Organizing Project Watkins, a non-profit that works to keep families intact in the face of over-reaching authorities. McMillan became active on free-range parenting issues after authorities took her infant daughter for nearly two years. As she told me in a celebratory phone call about the new law, "They call it 'free-range parenting.' I call it 'the rights of parents.'"

Which is not to say that there isn't a problem with the way some authorities may interpret the law. Calarco's concern is that the law says parents can't be arrested for giving their kids some unsupervised time, provided the kids' "basic needs are met" and the kids are of "sufficient age and maturity to avoid harm or an unreasonable risk of harm." She worries that some authorities will interpret poverty as neglect.

That is a worry of mine, too. That is not the fault of the law. That is the fault of anyone with an inflated idea of "unreasonable harm" or "basic needs." As Diane Redleaf, legal director of the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare, points out on her blog: if a mom is homeless, clearly her children's basic needs are not being met the way anyone would wish. But that cannot be interpreted as negligence.

In Illinois, Redleaf was influential in making sure neglect laws now specify that parents must have "blatantly disregarded" their child's care, not that they were too poor to afford better circumstances.

Like Calarco and like me, Redleaf believes that this needs to be made clear in law and practice across the country. But, she adds, this is "not a defect in the free range law at all. … Free range parenting laws are a good start precisely because they can benefit all children. But they aren't a solution to poverty."

Alas, that's true. But they exist to help the Debra Harrells of the world as much as the Meitivs in Maryland.

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Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to President Trump: Do Not Strike Syria

ORIGINAL LINK
Washington, DC – Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (HI-02) today (April 12, 2018) called for President Trump to refrain from using military action against Syria that would expand and escalate the conflict, and likely result in additional civilian and military casualties, more refugees, and fewer resources to invest in rebuilding American communities, and instead work toward peace. […]

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WATCH: During Raid on Wrong Home Cops Kill Innocent Unarmed Dad—No Charges

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After the story of how police shot and killed an innocent father during a raid on the wrong house died down, authorities quietly announced that no charges will be brought against the officer who pulled the trigger.

The post WATCH: During Raid on Wrong Home Cops Kill Innocent Unarmed Dad—No Charges appeared first on The Free Thought Project.

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Mattis admits US has ZERO evidence of Assad's supposed chemical attack

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The US is "still assessing the intelligence" needed to prove the Assad regime conducted a recent alleged chemical attack in Syria, Defense Secretary James Mattis said Wednesday. Secretary of Defense James Mattis told lawmakers in the US Thursday that the Pentagon does not have any evidence that chlorine or sarin were used in the Syrian city of Douma. Mattis went on to say that the majority of the claims were coming from mainstream media reports and social media posts - in other words, the rising tensions between nuclear superpowers over an alleged chemical attack in Syria, inching closer towards World War 3, has been all based on ZERO evidence, only fake media reports.

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This Is Fake News | This Is Not

Fake News:

Not Fake News:

YouTube restores Health Ranger video channel without explanation as tech giants feel the heat from censorship backlash

https://www.naturalnews.com/2018-04-11-youtube-restores-health-ranger-video-channel-without-explanation-as-tech-giants-feel-the-heat-from-censorship-backlash.html

Why no mention of now-deleted Las Vegas videos? Seems confirmation of why the channel was banned, so why is Mike Adams not addressing?

XOXO: Russia’s UN Envoy Reveals How He Kisses His US Counterpart

ORIGINAL LINK
While the relations between Moscow and Washington remain strained amid tensions in the Middle East and in Europe, it appears that interactions between Russian and US diplomats at the United Nations follow a different dynamic.

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How a drugmaker turned the abortion pill into a rare-disease profit machine

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Milkos via Shutterstock/Salon

Even though the $550 yellow pills sold as Korlym have a controversial origin as the abortion pill, Leslie Edwin says they “gave me life.”

The 40-year-old Georgia resident lives with Cushing’s syndrome, a potentially deadly condition that causes high levels of the hormone cortisol to wreak havoc on a body. When first diagnosed, she said, she gained about 100 pounds, her blood sugars were “out of control,” and she suffered acne, the inability to sleep and constant anxiety.

“I wouldn’t leave the house,” Edwin said of her first bout with the condition. “I quit my job after a certain point. I just couldn’t keep being in front of people.”

That’s when Edwin endured surgeries, including one to remove her pituitary gland. She went into remission, but then, in 2016, her weight shot up 30 pounds and the anxious feelings returned. Her doctors prescribed Korlym.

The drug’s active ingredient is mifepristone, once called RU-486 and better known as the abortion pill because it causes a miscarriage when taken early in a pregnancy. Nearly two decades ago, Danco Laboratories won approval to market Mifeprex in the U.S. as the abortion drug, with tight restrictions on use. Corcept Therapeutics, a Silicon Valley-based drug company, began marketing Korlym six years ago as a specialty drug for about 10,000 rare-disease patients such as Edwin.

The difference in price between Korlym and Mifeprex is striking, even though the ingredients are the same: One 200-milligram pill to prompt an abortion costs about $80. In contrast, a 300-milligram pill prescribed for Cushing’s runs about $550 before discounts. Patients wanting an abortion take only one pill. People with Cushing’s often take up to three pills a day for months or years.

Dr. Joseph Belanoff, chief executive of the drug’s maker, Corcept, said Korlym’s average cost per patient is $180,000 annually and concedes that “we have an expensive drug. There’s no getting around that.”

The story of Korlym highlights how America’s drug development system can turn an old drug into a new one that treats relatively
few — but often very desperate — patients.

When the Food and Drug Administration approved Korlym in 2012, it was designated as an orphan drug, giving Corcept seven years of market exclusivity as well as other economic incentives. Congress approved orphan drug incentives to encourage the development of medicines for rare diseases that affect fewer than 200,000 patients. Since the drug’s approval, Korlym’s price has risen about 150 percent, and last year the company’s revenue nearly doubled to $159.2 million. (Korlym is the company’s only product and treats about 1,000 patients in the U.S.)

“You can hike that drug [price] 50 percent or 80 percent, and if there is backlash you can walk it back,” said Dr. Joshua Liao, an associate medical director at University of Washington Medicine.

Corcept has steadily increased the price with little backlash.

Belanoff said the profits from Korlym pay for the company’s past spending on the drug’s research and development as well as its effort to create new drugs. The company last month reported an encouraging Phase 2 trial update on Korlym’s successor, relacorilant, a drug that could treat Cushing’s without the side effects for some women of endometrial thickening and possible vaginal bleeding.

The company’s pipeline is also full of potential oncology drugs that hold the promise of using molecules to influence the cortisol receptors, with wide-ranging effects in the body. Korlym in combination with another drug is being tested for the treatment of metastatic triple-negative breast cancer, which tends to be more aggressive than other types of breast cancer. And relacorilant is in the very early stages of testing to treat castration-resistant prostate cancer.

While many of the second-generation drugs are not related to Korlym structurally, Korlym did “provide the funding.… If there had not been orphan-drug pricing and the [Orphan Drug] Act, you would have to look for a different way to develop those drugs,” Belanoff said.

Korlym came to market in 2012 with an average wholesale price of $223.20 per pill before discounts, according to the health care technology firm Connecture. Corcept boosted the price $20 to $50 each year. By December 2017, each pill had an average wholesale price of $549.60 before any discounts or rebates were negotiated for patients.

Alan Leong, senior research analyst and owner of BioWatch, who follows Corcept, said he thought the company might fail at one point but noted that Belanoff “played the odds” with Korlym and won.

So far, incrementally increasing Korlym’s price while adding patients has paid off. Corcept’s stock soared 27.4 percent in January before Teva Pharmaceutical Industries announced it had filed an application for a generic version on the drug. Teva declined to comment for this story.

Belanoff said he would like to know where Teva obtained enough doses of Korlym to successfully test a generic: “We have a single pharmacy and a single manufacturer and the medicine has to be [FedEx’ed] to the patient.”

Talking to analysts last month, Corcept Chief Financial Officer Charlie Robb said the impact of Teva’s generic filing for the next few years is “nothing but litigation, which we can comfortably afford.”

Corcept’s executives expect revenues to keep climbing, reaching $275 million to $300 million in 2018 — an expectation that has not changed despite Teva’s announcement.

A ‘Pioneering Substance’

Cushing’s syndrome happens when the body produces too much of the powerful hormone cortisol, which normally helps keep the cardiovascular system functioning well and allows the body to turn proteins, carbohydrates and fats into energy. But too much cortisol can be destructive. It can cause cognitive difficulties, depression, fatigue, high blood pressure, bone loss and, in some cases, Type 2 diabetes. Those affected by the syndrome can develop a fatty hump between their shoulders and a rounded face. Without treatment, patients can die of a variety of complications, including sepsis after the hormone compromises the immune system.

Mifepristone, the active ingredient in Korlym, helps Cushing’s patients by blocking the body’s ability to process cortisol. It induces an abortion by blocking the body’s receptor for progesterone, which causes the uterine wall to break down.

When the FDA approved Korlym for a specific set of Cushing’s patients, the agency required a “TERMINATION OF PREGNANCY” warning box at the top of the label.

Dr. Constantine Stratakis, a senior investigator and scientific director at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development who specializes in treating people with Cushing’s syndrome, calls mifepristone a “pioneering substance” because it “has a lot of crossover” to other receptors in the body.

That means the drug has a lot of potential uses. Belanoff and Dr. Alan Schatzberg, a Stanford University psychiatrist and scientist, co-founded Corcept in 1998 to explore whether mifepristone could help treat major depression. In 2002, Schatzberg said the drug “may be the equivalent of shock treatments in a pill.”

But clinical trials didn’t back up the claim. Schatzberg rotated off the board and left the company in 2007, saying the company “went in a different direction.” A congressional investigation also questioned whether Schatzberg had conflicts of interest as the government’s principal investigator overseeing clinical trials and a co-founder of Corcept, which had awarded him stock options.

In response to the congressional investigation, Stanford said Schatzberg was fully compliant with its internal conflict-of-interest policy.

Leong of BioWatch recalls the transition to Cushing’s research as a difficult time for Corcept. But after the “psychiatric depression program shut down, [Belanoff] stuck to it,” Leong said.

Social Contract

Corcept’s “Hail Mary” moment came in 2007. The company filed an application to see whether mifepristone might work for Cushing’s patients. (Cushing’s affects about 20,000 people in the U.S., but Corcept executives say the condition often goes undiagnosed.)

Developing the drug cost about $300 million, Belanoff estimates, and involved long-term toxicology tests to ensure that patients could safely take higher doses for months or years. As an orphan drug, a portion of Korlym’s research and development costs could be written off. For example, Corcept reported in 2013 that it had $19.7 million in federal tax credits.

And while Korlym’s annual costs pale against other specialty drugs, which run as high as $750,000 a year, the climbing price tag and increasing number of patients do affect the health care system.

“It’s like an unseen cost and then down the road this is a huge cost burden,” said the University of Washington’s Liao.

Most patients are covered by private insurance, Belanoff said, but Medicare and Medicaid are paying for the drug as well. According to Medicare Part D data, 52 Korlym patients cost Medicare $2.6 million in 2013. Two years later in 2015, 115 beneficiaries filed claims of $11.4 million.

In Georgia, Leslie Edwin is on private insurance and describes herself as being in “a really high tax bracket” yet she never paid more than $25 a month through Corcept’s patient assistance program called SPARK (the Support Program for Access and Reimbursement for Korlym).

“Across the board, it would be very difficult to find any patient that pays the full price,” said Edwin, who volunteers as president of the nonprofit patient advocacy group Cushing’s Support and Research Foundation. The small organization, which reported $50,000 in contributions and grants in 2015, notes on its website that Corcept as well as Novartis Oncology provide financial support to the organization. Edwin is not paid, and the group’s federal tax filing details that the majority of its expenses go to distributing a quarterly newsletter, contacting members and patients “to promote mission,” and providing referrals to doctors.

Belanoff said he believes Corcept has a “social contract” to take care of patients and pledged that any patient who is prescribed Korlym will get it regardless of insurance coverage or costs.

“We were starting with a notorious drug, and the growth has been steady from a very low base over time,” Belanoff said, emphasizing that the “single most important thing” is that the drug works very well.

Dr. Sherwin D’Souza at St. Luke’s Boise Medical Center in Idaho prescribed Korlym for the first time last year to Vonda Huddleston, knowing the company would provide financial assistance until Huddleston could get insurance to pay for surgery.

Huddleston, though, recalled being concerned about the price and what it would cost her out-of-pocket. The company provided her first two months’ worth for free and asked her to call back when she was enrolled for insurance.

“They were so eager to get me on this medication,” she said.

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