French police hunt for man who left bomb in Lyon

LYON (Reuters) - Police hunted on Saturday for a man who left a bomb in a pedestrian shopping street in the central French city of Lyon on Friday that wounded 13 people. Ninety police investigators supported by 30 scientific officers and technicians as well as local police were searching for the man, who was seen on security cameras at around 5.30 p.m. on Friday, anti-terrorism prosecutor Remy Heitz told reporters in Paris. The man was seen leaving a paper bag in front of a bakery. The package exploded about a minute after he left.

French police were able to track the movements of the man, who appeared to be around 30 years old, for 10 minutes before the attack and are still trying to identify him. The man, who had a bicycle, was wearing sunglasses and a cap. There has been no claim of responsibility yet for the bomb, Heitz said, calling for witnesses to help police find the suspect.

A source close to the investigation said traces of DNA were isolated from the remnants of the bomb. Police found the attacker used triacetone triperoxide or TATP, a powerful homemade explosive. The case is being handled as a terrorism investigation given the circumstances of the attack, committed in broad daylight, and the use of an explosive device capable of hitting a large number of people with screws and metal balls packed into a bag, he said. Police found pieces of remote detonator and white plastic fragments that were probably part of the device, Heitz said.

Eleven of those wounded in the explosion, including a 10-year-old girl, were hospitalized. Authorities have boosted surveillance and protection of public areas after Islamist groups carried out a string of attacks around France that killed dozens of people and wounded hundreds in the past few years.

Following the Lyon bomb, the Interior Ministry called for local authorities to raise surveillance and security in and around public areas and public events all over the country. Army patrols were reinforced in Lyon. The police chief for the region that includes Lyon banned demonstrations in the northern part of the city.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-security-lyon/french-police-hunt-for-man-who-left-bomb-in-lyon-idUSKCN1SV0A3?il=0

Wonder who they are really looking for…

Hawley Introduces ‘Loot Box’ Bill

Joined by two Democratic colleagues, Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) on Thursday officially floated his proposed ban on "pay-to-win" monetization in video games that explicitly target children. The bill, which detractors have claimed could "devastate" the video game industry if passed, is meant to curb what Hawley characterized as an "addiction economy" that specifically targets children.

"Only the addiction economy could produce a business model that relies on placing a casino in the hands of every child in America with the goal of getting them desperately hooked," Hawley said. "I'm proud to introduce this landmark, bipartisan legislation to end these exploitative practices." Hawley introduced the bill alongside Democratic cosponsors Ed Markey (Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (Conn.). This marks Markey and Hawley's second collaboration since the latter entered Congress—they previously collaborated on a proposed revision to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.

The new bill targets "pay-to-win microtransactions" and "loot boxes," two game mechanics often central to the profit model of so-called free-to-play video games. A pay-to-win transaction is one where payers spend money—sometimes a little, sometimes a lot—to advance in a game or get a leg up on other players. "Loot boxes" are purchasable content that when "opened" give the player a random in-game item. If passed, the bill would prohibit game developers or distributors from adding either feature to "minor-oriented" games (a term defined with reference to diverse features including everything from subject matter to music and audio). It would additionally block their implementation in games where developers have "constructive knowledge" that their game has players under the age of 18. The effect of the bill, if passed, would be a sweeping restructuring of the profit model of the video game industry, which has come to depend more and more on free-to-play as a profit model in recent years. "Today's digital entertainment ecosystem is an online gauntlet for children. Inherently manipulative game features that take advantage of kids and turn play time into pay time should be out of bounds," Markey said.

Although it is focused on game developers, the bill is really part of a larger critique advanced by Hawley since he arrived in the Senate this year. He has likened pay-to-win dynamics like the ones prohibited by the bill to gambling, taking advantage of users' cognitive biases (especially those of children unable to make full, rational judgements) to make a profit. At the same time, the bill appears connected to Hawley's apparent skepticism of the tech industry as a whole. The senator has been a vocal opponent of "big tech" and an advocate of using antitrust law to curb what he perceives as abuses.

The loot box bill is an extension of this opposition, which seems at base to be a product of Hawley's view about what does and does not constitute a company contributing to the economy. The pay-to-win profit model that Hawley is attacking leads to minimal investment or production of "real" value. Firms in the tech and financial sector that make their profits in analogous fashion have come increasingly under scrutiny from a number of Hawley's Republican colleagues in recent months, especially Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.). Where supporters of the Hawley bill might see a deeper critique of present political economy, opponents see only troublesome government overreach. The wide scope of the bill—which, at a mere 18 pages, is unlikely to cover most edge cases—means that it is likely to prohibit many features that adult gamers enjoy and benefit from, while creating a headache for developers.

"The actual text of the legislation, however, appears to cast a very wide net," one critic wrote at tech-news site Gizmodo. "Ostensibly, any video game created, whether for children or not, whether containing a casino-like mechanic or not, would be in some way restricted by this law." Hawley's office, however, seems undeterred by this criticism. According to an FAQ about the bill, it is their view that "the onus should be on developers to deter child consumption of products that foster gambling and similarly compulsive purchasing behavior, just as is true in other industries that restrict access to certain kinds of products and forms of entertainment to adult consumers."

https://freebeacon.com/issues/hawley-introduces-loot-box-bill/

Facebook plans to launch 'GlobalCoin' cryptocurrency in 2020

Mark Zuckerberg met governor of Bank of England last month to discuss decision

Facebook is planning to launch its own cryptocurrency in early 2020, allowing users to make digital payments in a dozen countries. The currency, dubbed GlobalCoin, would enable Facebook’s 2.4 billion monthly users to change dollars and other international currencies into its digital coins. The coins could then be used to buy things on the internet and in shops and other outlets, or to transfer money without needing a bank account. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Facebook, last month met the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, to discuss the plans, according to the BBC.

Zuckerberg has also discussed the proposal, known as Project Libra, with US Treasury officials and is in talks with money transfer firms, including Western Union, to develop cheap, safe ways for people to send and receive money. A report last year said Facebook is working on a cryptocurrency that would let users transfer money using WhatsApp, its encrypted mobile-messaging app. “Payments is one of the areas where we have an opportunity to make it a lot easier,” Zuckerberg told the company’s developer conference last month. “I believe it should be as easy to send money to someone as it is to send a photo.”

In order to try to stabilise the digital currency the company is looking to peg its value to a basket of established currencies, including the US dollar, the euro and the Japanese yen. Facebook is also looking at paying users fractions of a coin for activities such as viewing ads and interacting with content related to online shopping, similar to loyalty schemes run by retailers.

However, experts believe that regulatory issues and Facebook’s poor track record on data privacy and protection are likely to prove to be the biggest hurdles to making the currency a success. “Facebook is not regulated in the same way as banks are, and the cryptocurrency industry is, by definition almost, unregulated,” said Rebecca Harding, chief executive of banking trade data analytics firm Coriolis Technologies.

“In the UK, for example, there are no formal laws that govern this market because cryptocurrencies are not legal tender. Facebook has also had issues with protecting user data in the past few years and this may well be an issue for it as it tries to provide guarantees to users that their financial information is safe.” Following an Observer investigation last year, it emerged that the data of up to 87 million Facebook users had been used improperly by Cambridge Analytica to target ads for Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election.

Earlier this month the US Senate committee on banking wrote an open letter to Zuckerberg asking how the currency would work, what consumer protection would be offered and how data would be secured. It has also emerged that Zuckerberg held talks with the billionaire Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, whose bitter legal battle over the origins of Facebook was chronicled in the film The Social Network. The twins, who went to Harvard with Zuckerberg and later sued him for stealing their idea for a social network, founded the cryptocurrency exchange, Gemini, in 2014. In the highly unregulated world of cryptocurrencies Gemini is notable as being one of the first two companies to win regulatory approval to launch a digital currency pegged to the US dollar, the Gemini dollar.

It emerged last month that Facebook is looking for $1bn (£790m) in funding to support the project, and has held talks with payments giants including Visa and Mastercard. Facebook has been long expected to make a move in financial services, having hired the former PayPal president David Marcus to run its messaging app in 2014. Marcus, a board member of crypto exchange Coinbase, runs Facebook’s blockchain initiatives, the technology on which cryptocurrencies run. In February JP Morgan became the first major US bank to create its own cryptocurrency, JPM Coin, as a way for its clients to settle payments.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/24/facebook-plans-to-launch-globalcoin-cryptocurrency-in-2020

Open Letter:

https://www.banking.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/5.9.19%20Facebook%20Letter.pdf

At $2.1 million, newly approved Novartis gene therapy will be world’s most expensive drug

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved the first gene therapy for a type of spinal muscular atrophy, a lifesaving treatment for infants that will also be the most expensive drug in the world. Known as Zolgensma, the gene therapy treats children under 2 years of age with spinal muscular atrophy, an inherited neuromuscular disease that causes progressive loss of muscle function. The most severe form of SMA causes infants to die or rely on permanent breathing support by the age of 2. The disease is caused by a defect in a gene that makes SMN, a protein necessary for the survival of motor neurons. Zolgensma uses a re-engineered virus to deliver a functional copy of the defective gene so that SMN protein can be produced. Novartis is pricing Zolgensma at $2.125 million, or an annualized cost of $425,000 per year for five years, the company said.

Launching Zolgensma will be a big test for Novartis and CEO Vas Narasimhan, now two years on the job. Shareholders expect the gene therapy to deliver blockbuster sales to justify the $8.7 billion that Novartis spent to acquire it last year. To achieve commercial success, Novartis must persuade doctors who treat SMA patients that the muscle-preserving benefits from a one-time injection of Zolgensma will be durable. Complex payment and insurance reimbursement arrangements required for expensive gene therapies need to be handled deftly. Novartis is likely to face backlash from critics who believe charging millions of dollars for any medicine — no matter how effective — renders it unaffordable for a healthcare system already under financial stress.

There’s also competition. Spinraza, approved in late 2016 and sold by Biogen, has already been used to successfully treat thousands of patients with severe and milder forms of SMA. The drug requires regular spinal infusions costing $750,000 in the first year and $375,000 annually thereafter, for life. Sales last year totaled $1.7 billion. Zolgensma may be more convenient than Spinraza, but Roche is developing a daily pill for SMA called risdiplam that could reach the market in 2020. The FDA approved Zolgensma to treat children under 2 diagnosed with SMA, regardless of genetic mutation. In its pivotal clinical trial and an ongoing clinical trial, a majority of the infants and young children injected once with Zolgensma remained alive, could breathe on their own, and showed improvements in motor milestones like being able to sit up without support.

Zolgensma “is markedly better than any other therapy out there, particularly in the clinical trials of type 1 that we’ve released,” Narasimhan told STAT in a recent interview. “Clearly, parents will know right away that this is a medicine that performs extremely, extremely well in these infants and has this kind of marked effect on their well-being.” In its announcement, acting FDA Commissioner Ned Sharpless said the approval marks “another milestone in the transformational power of gene and cell therapies to treat a wide range of diseases.”

A survey of 30 doctors currently treating SMA patients, conducted by the analysts at Jefferies, found that 30% would use Zolgensma in newly diagnosed SMA patients one year after launch. Doctors were also interested in trying combinations of Zolgensma and Spinraza. Jefferies is forecasting Zolgensma sales to reach $2.6 billion, above the $1.9 billion consensus peak sales estimate.

https://www.statnews.com/2019/05/24/hold-novartis-zolgensma-approval/

>>6586914

Are you asserting that I am helping them by posting this?

>>6587128

>baker didnt put his own post in notables

And there is the problem…posting while baking, more like a hit and run!