cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/6252553

Dec 7 (Reuters) - The Biden Administration on Thursday announced it is setting new policy that will allow it to seize patents for medicines developed with government funding if it believes their prices are too high.

The policy creates a roadmap for the government's so-called march-in rights, which have never been used before. They would allow the government to grant additional licenses to third parties for products developed using federal funds if the original patent holder does not make them available to the public on reasonable terms.

White House advisers said on a press call that cost to consumers is a factor government agencies may consider when thinking of using march-in rights.

"We'll make it clear that when drug companies won't sell taxpayer funded drugs at reasonable prices, we will be prepared to allow other companies to provide those drugs for less," White House adviser Lael Brainard said on the call.

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Dec 7 (Reuters) - The Biden Administration on Thursday announced it is setting new policy that will allow it to seize patents for medicines developed with government funding if it believes their prices are too high.

The policy creates a roadmap for the government's so-called march-in rights, which have never been used before. They would allow the government to grant additional licenses to third parties for products developed using federal funds if the original patent holder does not make them available to the public on reasonable terms.

White House advisers said on a press call that cost to consumers is a factor government agencies may consider when thinking of using march-in rights.

"We'll make it clear that when drug companies won't sell taxpayer funded drugs at reasonable prices, we will be prepared to allow other companies to provide those drugs for less," White House adviser Lael Brainard said on the call.

. . .

Few predicted that the smash hit video game of 2023 would feature old-school game mechanics, hours of brooding cutscenes and a vexing learning curve.

Yet “Baldur’s Gate 3,” a 20-year-old title based on a 50-year-old role-playing game, has already become one of the highest-rated video games of all time.

“This is a very specific niche of game,” admitted Swen Vincke, the CEO of Larian, its developer. “We’ve never been about the money.”

Nonetheless, since Larian released the title in August 2023, the company has been raking in the money. And it has done this with a rare focus on elements like story and character, upending the industry’s conventional wisdom about what it takes to create a blockbuster game.

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Two months after a prominent conservative activist and fundraiser was caught hosting white supremacist Nick Fuentes, leaders of the Republican Party of Texas have voted against barring the party from associating with known Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers.

In a 32-29 vote on Saturday, members of the Texas GOP’s executive committee stripped a pro-Israel resolution of a clause that would have included the ban. In a separate move that stunned some members, roughly half of the board also tried to prevent a record of their vote from being kept.

In rejecting the proposed ban, the executive committee's majority delivered a serious blow to a faction of members that has called for the party to confront its ties to groups that have recently employed or associated with outspoken white supremacists and extremists.

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Last weekend, Ally was kicked out of a family Shabbat dinner. Ally is 21 years old and from New York.

"My dad is a staunch Zionist. He said, 'You better not f*ing have gone to that protest.' "

Ally has gone to many protests.

"He was like, 'I don't want to have you in my house right now. You are not welcome at this dinner table,' " Ally said.

Ally, who requested anonymity due to ongoing harassment, has family in Israel. Some are currently in the Israel Defense Forces.

Since the Israel-Hamas war began, there have been protests demanding a cease-fire. Many Jewish Americans have joined in. Some say they've been met with hostility from within their own communities. Ally is a student at Columbia University, and is part of Jewish Voice For Peace, which is vocally demanding a cease-fire in Gaza.

What Ally wants, beyond a cease-fire, is to address the human rights violations Palestinians have endured over the years.

"My position as a Jew is that it [has] always been our responsibility, according to our religion, to stand up for all those who are targeted, all those who are oppressed, all those who are facing violence. Because as a people, we've been persecuted for so long."

Rabbi Ari-Lev Fornari, also with Jewish Voice for Peace, says lately, he's been hearing about a lot of arguments like the one at Ally's Shabbat dinner table.

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Researchers have devised an attack that forces Apple’s Safari browser to divulge passwords, Gmail message content, and other secrets by exploiting a side channel vulnerability in the A- and M-series CPUs running modern iOS and macOS devices.

iLeakage, as the academic researchers have named the attack, is practical and requires minimal resources to carry out. It does, however, require extensive reverse-engineering of Apple hardware and significant expertise in exploiting a class of vulnerability known as a side channel, which leaks secrets based on clues left in electromagnetic emanations, data caches, or other manifestations of a targeted system. The side channel in this case is speculative execution, a performance enhancement feature found in modern CPUs that has formed the basis of a wide corpus of attacks in recent years. The nearly endless stream of exploit variants has left chip makers—primarily Intel and, to a lesser extent, AMD—scrambling to devise mitigations.

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A team of scientists has used multiple space- and ground-based telescopes, including the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, to observe an exceptionally bright gamma-ray burst, GRB 230307A, and identify the neutron star merger that generated the explosion that created the burst. Webb also helped scientists detect the chemical element tellurium in the aftermath of the explosion.

Other elements near tellurium on the periodic table – like iodine, which is needed for much of life on Earth – are also likely to be present among the kilonova’s ejected material. A kilonova is an explosion produced by a neutron star merging with either a black hole or with another neutron star.

“Just over 150 years since Dmitri Mendeleev wrote down the periodic table of elements, we are now finally in a position to start filling in those last blanks of understanding where everything was made, thanks to Webb,” said Andrew Levan of Radboud University in the Netherlands and the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, lead author of the study.

While neutron star mergers have long been theorised as being the ideal 'pressure cookers' to create some of the rarer elements substantially heavier than iron, astronomers have previously encountered a few obstacles to obtaining solid evidence.

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The United States remains tightly in the grasp of an ongoing, and escalating, crisis of deaths caused by opioid overdoses.

With a record-high 109,000 people dying in 2022, it is clear that something new needs to be done to reverse this trend.

Philadelphia is near the epicenter of the crisis. Some of the country’s largest open-air drug markets can be found in the Kensington neighborhood. Heroin, prescription opioids and fentanyl aren’t the only drugs of concern. Xylazine, a powerful non-opioid also known as tranq, has an overwhelming presence on the streets.

We are a group of Scandinavian and American researchers who have studied drug treatment and harm reduction, and we have been watching the situation in Philadelphia from a variety of perspectives.

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The biggest names in late night have turned their private group chat into a Spotify podcast, Strike Force Five. All the proceeds will go to support their staff during the writers' strike.

Who are they?

• The hosts of the shows arguably most immediately affected by the strikes: Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver, Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon.

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If you were to fly over any city in the world that's blazing under triple-digit temperatures right now, you wouldn't see anything that would look like a disaster.

Yet, extreme heat killed more people in the U.S. last year than hurricanes, floods, lightning or tornadoes, according to the National Weather Service. Kathy Baughman McLeod says it doesn't have to be this way.

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[ Emphasis mine]

Fascism is still on the rise:

Members of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) gathered in the eastern German city of Magdeburg Friday to begin their annual party conference, which will last until Sunday.

The party is currently polling well nationally, between 18% and 22%, as establishment parties struggle with voter resentment. The party's numbers are roughly twice what they were during 2021 federal elections. In Magdeburg, leadership implored members not to let up.

Party Co-Chair Tino Chrupalla said the numbers reflect a new "harmony" among leadership. "We will carry this harmony into the next election," he said, as he greeted some 600 delegates in attendance.

Chrupalla referenced upcoming state elections in Bavaria and Hesse, and voiced confidence about the broader prospect of growing political popularity, saying, "Next year we can win Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg" — all states in the east of the country where AfD has tended to perform best.

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