October 19, 2016


News and Views


ALL OF THESE ARTICLES TODAY REPRESENT GOOD NEWS. READ THEM FOR YOUR PLEASURE.


http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/20/bernie-sanders-requests-info-from-ariad-pharmaceuticals-on-its-leukemia-drug.html

Bernie Sanders requests info from Ariad Pharmaceuticals on its leukemia drug
Christine Wang | @christiiineeee
October 20, 2016 1 Hour Ago

Video -- Ariad cancer drug pricing under congressional scrutiny

Shares of Ariad Pharmaceuticals sank Thursday after Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Elijah Cummings sent a letter to the company, demanding more information about its price increases for Iclusig, a drug used to treat chronic myeloid leukemia.

The stock was up slightly before the letter was announced, then sank as much as 7 percent. It later recovered some of its losses and ended the day just slightly lower.

Ariad said it recognizes that "oncology drugs are expensive," but it stands behind "the importance and efficacy" of its products.

"Iclusig is the first drug that we have brought to market after years of risk taking and research, and it serves a very small and seriously ill group of cancer patients," the company said in a statement.

Ariad said it received the letter and plans to respond to Sanders and Cummings' request.

Source: FactSet

The company drew anger after it raised the price of Iclusig for the fourth time in 2016 to a list price of nearly $199,000 a year. In the letter addressed to Ariad CEO Paris Panayiotopoulos, the two lawmakers said Ariad's "outrageous sales tactics" show that the company is "more concerned with its profit than with its patients."

The Food and Drug Administration originally approved Iclusig for a larger patient group in December 2012, but reports of "serious and life-threatening blood clots" and other side effects led to a temporary sales suspension. When Ariad was given the go ahead to resume sales the following year, the FDA specified that the drug could only be sold to a smaller patient subset.

Last week, Sanders tweeted about the price hikes for the drug, sending Ariad shares down 15 percent. The senator from Vermont later pledged to take on the drug industry and "lower the cost of medication across the country."

Follow
Bernie Sanders ✔ @SenSanders
The drug industry is getting very, very nervous. We are going to take them on and lower the cost of medication across this country. https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/787010021435604997 …
8:13 PM - 14 Oct 2016
3,492 3,492 Retweets 9,169 9,169 likes
Following Sanders' comments, Ariad said in a statement "our pricing reflects our significant investment in R&D, our commitment to the very small, ultra orphan cancer patient populations that we serve and the associated risk with research and development."

The FDA limited Iclusig only to chronic myeloid leukemia patients who have a genetic mutation that makes them resistant to other treatment options.

The company added that it spent 143 percent of its total revenue in 2015 in research and development for treatments of rare cancers.

Lawmakers have recently turned their attention to drug pricing practices in the pharmaceutical industry, calling out price hikes at Valeant Pharmaceuticals and Mylan, among others.



http://www.cbsnews.com/news/sonia-sotomayor-antonin-scalia-comments-want-baseball-bat/

Sonia Sotomayor: Antonin Scalia's comments made me want to use baseball bat
CBS/AP
October 19, 2016, 11:30 AM

Photograph -- Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor receives the Leadership Award during the 29th Hispanic Heritage Awards at the Warner Theatre on Sept. 22, 2016, in Washington. LEIGH VOGEL/GETTY IMAGES
Play VIDEO -- Justice Sotomayor prefers "Sonia from the Bronx"
21 PHOTOS -- Antonin Scalia 1936-2016
Play VIDEO -- Justice Scalia on 60 Minutes, part 1
Play VIDEO -- Justice Scalia on 60 Minutes, part 2


MINNEAPOLIS -- The U.S. Supreme Court continues to deeply feel the loss of Justice Antonin Scalia eight months after his death, and his empty seat makes it harder for the surviving eight justices to do their job of resolving some of the country’s most vexing legal questions, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said Monday.

Sotomayor, who spoke at the University of Minnesota, noted that the Supreme Court was designed to have nine justices so it can break ties on difficult cases.

“We try to come to decision-making as best as we can,” she said. “Where we can find a very, very narrow way of deciding a case, we use it.”

According to the Pioneer Press, Sotomayor compared Scalia’s death to the loss of a family member despite their differences.

“There are things he’s said on the bench where if I had a baseball bat, I might have used it,” she said.

Sotomayor did not directly address how filling Scalia’s seat has become a divisive issue in the presidential race between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump. The GOP-controlled Senate has so far refused to act on Democratic President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to replace the conservative Scalia, saying it should be up to the next president to pick Scalia’s successor.

But those politics have complicated the internal workings of the Supreme Court, which often needs at least five votes to decide a closely contested case. A 4-4 tie means the last lower court decision stands. It also takes four votes for the high court to agree to hear a case. Sotomayor said nearly all the cases the Supreme Court takes involve disagreements between appeals courts in different federal circuits across the country.

“When we take cases it’s because there’s a pressing legal problem that has divided the courts below, and justice across the country is being administered in an unequal way, because courts in different parts of the country are deciding the exact same issue in a different manner,” Sotomayor said.

Letting a “vexing legal question” go unresolved allows that uncertainty over the law to continue, she said. But even a split decision lets the issue get decided and the precedent will be binding across the country, she added. Having a full nine members therefore has “great value,” she said.

“It’s much more difficult for us to do our job if we are not what we’re intended to be - a court of nine,” she said.

Sotomayor spoke to about 2,700 people - mostly lawyers and students - as part of an annual lecture series led by a former dean of the university’s law school, Robert Stein. As is her custom, she spent most of the event roaming the hall and shaking hands with people, not missing a beat as she answered Stein’s questions, which dealt mostly with how she rose from being a diabetic child in a Bronx housing project in New York to become the first Latina Supreme Court justice and only the third woman ever to sit on the high court. She also took questions from the audience.

Attorney Dawn Van Tassel asked a question on behalf of her daughter’s fourth-grade class, where the teacher saw Sotomayor’s visit as a learning opportunity. She asked how to teach young people about civil discourse in an age when she can’t be sure it’s safe for her child to watch the evening news.

What matters, Sotomayor said, is that children learn citizens need to make informed, carefully considered decisions.

“They should be teaching themselves how to think about that choice starting now. Because as they think about it they’ll help you think about it and they’ll help other people think about it more, too,” she said.

Sotomayor wouldn’t disclose how she intends to vote, but she said it doesn’t matter because she gets one vote just like everyone else.



https://www.laprogressive.com/stop-police-brutality/

25 Ways to Stop Police Brutality
BY SHARON KYLE
POSTED ON OCTOBER 18, 2016

The following message is an appeal from noted civil rights activist Shaun King. Known widely for his use of social media to promote social causes, including the Black Lives Matter movement, King recently posted a message on social media that offers 25 practical solutions that address police brutality (shown below). He asked that these solutions be shared far and wide. Shaun King is the senior justice writer at the Ney York Daily News.

Daily, I hear friend and foe alike ask what the SOLUTIONS are to the problems of police brutality. They see our protests and assume that we haven’t thought this through. We have. Here they are. SCROLL DOWN for the whole list.

For the past 6 weeks I have mapped out 25 reasonable, practical, achievable solutions for police brutality and even spelled out HOW we make them a reality.

Below, I have listed the WEB link and the FACEBOOK link for each solution. Read them, share them, refine them, then…let’s plan on getting to work and making them a reality.

We can do this. We WILL do this.

Here’s the introduction to the series

LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-introducing-25-part-serie…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1094157720623145

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#1: Radically diversify America’s Police Departments
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-police-brutality-fix-chan…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1096129407092643

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#2: Require American Police to have more training than cosmetologists
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-cops-trained-cosmetologis…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1096915633680687

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#3: Police must be routinely and randomly tested for steroids and other illegal drugs
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-police-routinely-tested-d…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1097380140300903

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#4: Bad Apples MUST Be Fired – they are toxic and dangerous
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-violent-racist-job-securi…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1098144406891143

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#5: Police must be required to earn 4 year degrees – it changes everything
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-police-officers-required-…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1098787190160198

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#6: Policing for profit must become a banned practice. A profit motive must never undergird law enforcement.
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-policing-profit-america-b…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1101066569932260

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#7: We must overhaul 911 – particularly for calls made about the mentally ill. It is the rotary phone of emergency services.
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-911-operators-save-lives-…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1101804536525130

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#8: Take women from 12% of police to 50% of police – they are more professional, less brutal, and just as effective
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-combat-police-brutality-h…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1102497229789194?match=d29tZW4%3D

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#9: Require cops to live in or near the areas they police. It’s too easy to mistreat strangers.
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-cops-live-area-police-art…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1103885226317061?match=Y29wcyBsaXZl

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#10: Communities of color actually need less policing. Start by decriminalizing addiction and petty offenses.
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/communities-color-massively-ov…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1105674012804849?match=bWFyaWp1YW5h

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#11: American Police must be regularly tested for racial bias
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-american-police-regularly…


Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1106406346064949?match=cmFjaWFsIGJpYXM%3D

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#12: American Police must be regularly tested and treated for PTSD
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-american-cops-regularly-t…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1106971526008431?match=cHRzZA%3D%3D

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#13: Why we must take bad laws on policing all the way to the Supreme Court
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-police-brutality-supreme-…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1108710325834551

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#14: Good police officers must actually speak out on bad cops
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-good-police-speak-bad-off…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1109507299088187

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#15: We must decriminalize mental illness
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-docs-treat-mentally-ill-d…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1112068195498764

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#16: We need to unleash the full power of body cameras
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-body-cameras-fail-unleash…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1113638592008391

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#17: Police departments must create and enforce reasonable new use of force standards
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-police-officers-force-mat…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1115188505186733

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Here’s SOLUTION #18: Police must always carry 3 less lethal weapons other than firearms

LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-police-officers-weapons-g…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1116266275078956?match=bGV0aGFs

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#19: Police must be banned from using violence based on their imagination of a threat
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-police-violence-based-ima…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1118984044807179

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#20: Every city and state in America must ban racial profiling
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-city-america-ban-racial-p…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1120067191365531

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#21: Police must be immediately filmed making a statement after each use of force incident
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-cops-record-statements-fo…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1121470467891870

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#22: Independent review boards must oversee investigations of police misconduct
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-police-independent-boards…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1122606474444936

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#23: Police misconduct cases must be tried by special/independent prosecutors
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-police-officers-local-pro…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1127405207298396

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#24: Police departments which fail to obey the Death in Custody Reporting Act should be cut off from all federal funding.
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-departments-don-report-ki…

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shaunking/posts/113241262679#25: We must focus our fight against police brutality on the local and state level

#25: We must focus our fight against police brutality on the local and state level
LINK: http://www.nydailynews.com/…/king-combatting-police-brutali…

Facebook: http://facebook.com/shaunking/posts/1133406260031624




https://www.laprogressive.com/rehabilitating-lapd/?utm_source=LA+Progressive+Newsletter&utm_campaign=29b39e45f5-LAP+News+-+11+August+16+PC&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9f184a8aad-29b39e45f5-286822829

Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks: Rehabilitating the LAPD
BY JASMYNE CANNICK
POSTED ON OCTOBER 18, 2016

Photograph -- jasmyne-cannick_official2


As a part of the Los Angeles Police Department’s efforts at rehabilitation around the use of deadly force, the public is expected to give them the benefit of the doubt and believe that a 147-year-old institution with a well documented rap sheet pattern of behavior that includes scandals, racism, police misconduct, police brutality and questionable officer-involved-killings can change its stripes—which is exactly the opposite of what many in law enforcement believe civilians with the same sordid and lengthy background are capable of.

The department is about to embark on the first steps in making real changes to how its officers use force in an effort to lower the number of police shootings.

Last week the Los Angeles Police Commission voted to teach an old dog new tricks. Upon recommendations from the commission’s inspector general, the department is about to embark on the first steps in making real changes to how its officers use force in an effort to lower the number of police shootings. Simply put, an institution riddled with strife, public mistrust and that has been labeled as the most murderous police department in the country is about to attempt to rehabilitate itself.

The proposed changes are being billed as a new day in the LAPD, a sort of signal that the tide is changing and it’s no longer business as usual—that they’re actually doing something. And while the department’s administration is claiming to be in the process of rehabilitating itself, the labor union that represents its officers is opposing November’s Public Safety and Rehabilitation Act.

Backed by California’s Governor Jerry Brown, Proposition 57 wants to focus law enforcement on serious violent crime and stop wasting costly prison space on non-violent people who can be rehabilitated. It is largely seen as an extension to 2014’s Proposition 47, which was approved by voters and reduced non-violent, non-serious crimes to misdemeanors and gave more inmates a higher chance for parole consideration. Both propositions are designed to aide in the reduction of California’s swelling prison population.

Like with Proposition 47, district attorneys, county sheriffs and numerous police associations are opposing Proposition 57. In Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Police Protective League is urging a no vote on Proposition 57.

But isn’t what’s good for the goose, good for the gander?

Some would say that there isn’t much difference between the behavior of serial criminals and the LAPD. Both tend to be repeat offenders with a pattern of behavior that stretches back to their earliest days and have an equal chance at recidivism.

On the one hand the police union doesn’t want us to believe that criminals can become productive members of society and and have engaged in a campaign of fear-mongering around Proposition 57. On the other, the Police Commission and Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck want the public to believe that the LAPD can and will change how it interacts with them, including being more transparent and forthcoming with information after an officer-involved-shooting.

Angelenos would be well within their rights to be skeptical and give the LAPD the side eye on its reeducation efforts because after all it’s been nearly 150 years and promise after promise of a change soon coming. Add to that, if the public believes what the foes of rehabilitation say, then you can’t rehabilitate a life long serial offender and to many that’s exactly what the LAPD is.

As humans, for the most part we tend to be optimistic and have a need to believe in the redeeming qualities of others and nowhere is that more true than in the state of California. Just like the police want the public to believe in not only their ability but also their desire to rehabilitate they should give the public the same benefit of the doubt and lay off of the fear-mongering around Proposition 57.

In closing, I’m not hating on the men and women who patrol the streets of Los Angeles but I am pointing out the hypocrisy in asking the public to do something that you are unwilling to reciprocate–we call that sending mixed messages. Police officers should give the public the same benefit of the doubt that they’re seeking—that change is possible—even within an organization like the Los Angeles Police Department.



http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/15/us/barbershop-discount-kids-who-read-trnd/

Michigan barbershop gives kids a discount for reading out loud
By Faith Haleh Robinson, CNN
Updated 12:25 PM ET, Sun October 16, 2016

Photograph -- A young client reads aloud
Photograph -- The barbershop's library
Photograph -- Ryan Griffin and 9-year-old client DJ Watkins


(CNN)A barbershop in Michigan is offering its younger clients a discount for a haircut -- as long as they read out loud.

From $10 a haircut, kids can get back two bucks if they read to their barbers.

But, wait! There's more. Kids also get quizzed on what they read.
"It's not just about reading, but also about comprehension," said Ryan Griffin, the barber who created the program at The Fuller Cut barbershop in Ypsilanti.

Griffin, 44, said he was instantly inspired to offer this deal to his younger clients while reading an article about another barbershop incorporating the same concept.

"It hit me like a book! I was like, that is so responsible to have these kids not waste their time just either sitting there doing nothing, or playing a video game. They can read," Griffin told CNN.

Almost all of Griffin's clientele is African-American. He says he really wanted to offer his younger visitors books with a strong, positive message.

Books like "Chocolate Me," "Big Hair Don't Care" and "I am Mixed" are among the hundreds of titles in the shop's library, Griffin said.

Some kids opt out of reading because they most likely feel intimidated to read out loud. However, it doesn't stop Griffin from encouraging them to read.

Griffin said he will correct them along the way with any words the kids don't know how to say. And he has seen lots of improvement from his readers.

"You may have a kid that never wanted to read, and now all of a sudden the kid will come in and read," he said. "You may have a kid that's reading really soft because he doesn't want somebody to hear him mess up, but then after a couple of times this kid is (reading) out loud now."

It's been a little over a year since Griffin got this program going.

The kids and parents both enjoy it, he says -- especially being able to get a $2 discount. Because why not?

But to Griffin it's a simple thing. It's about giving back to the community and paying it forward through education.

"I truly believe it's an absolute simplistic thing. It didn't cost me one red cent to get this program started, and I say it because all it took was somebody else to inspire me and the barbers here," Griffin said.

"It's taught me that it doesn't matter how big you think your contribution is, because even though you may think it is small it might mean the world to somebody else. If I could say anything, it'll be just do something. Because you never know the magnitude what it means to somebody else."