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IDCC = Charlie Brown
NOK = Lucy holding football
Also, NOK is taking advantage of the fact that IDCC is sufficiently small in size to be required to issue an 8K that the parties are making progress in settlement talks. This to me appears to be a negotiating ploy by a bigger company.
I happen to agree with you there. I still think GVAX's chances for success in VITAL-1 are less than 10%. That's still up from my previous assessment prior to the interim look of less than 5% odds.
I had thought there was a good chance that VITAL-1 would be stopped for futility at the interim look, in that I expected a higher number of deaths in the GVAX arm. That does not appear to have been the case.
OT-Steve, there was one particularly good wall dive. We swam over a reef at about 20-foot depth. Then we got to the edge, and as we swam over the edge, there was a nice feeling of stomach in throat...LOL. The visibility was about 60 feet, so there wasn't a huge sense of dropping into nothingness, but it wasn't bad. Unfortunately, there aren't many big fish left on a lot of reefs in the Philippines. I did get to see some whale sharks in Donsol, SE Luzon...they ranged in length from 22 to 30 feet. They get a lot bigger, but those were the ones we saw while snorkeling.
Awhile back, I heard or read somewhere that the covariates specified in the SPA for IMPACT were the three covariates that were stat sig, or nearly stat sig, for both 9901 and 9902A. So, that would be bone mets, PSA, and LDH, I believe. However, I may have heard incorrectly, as I haven't seen any mention of this since.
Sorry all, I've been gone since mid-Feb. I'll be back on 3/12. I have limited time to surf the internet, even though a lot of places in the Philippines have wi-fi.
OT-Holy crap, the Mossad got Mughniyeh. This guy was supposed to be untouchable.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080214/ap_on_re_mi_ea/lebanon_militant
Top Hezbollah militant killed in Syria
By ZEINA KARAM, Associated Press Writer 33 minutes ago
DAMASCUS, Syria - One of the world's most wanted and elusive terrorists, Imad Mughniyeh, was killed in a car bombing in Syria nearly 15 years after dropping from sight. The one-time Hezbollah security chief was the suspected mastermind of attacks that killed hundreds of Americans in Lebanon and of the brutal kidnappings of Westerners.
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The Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah and its top ally, Iran, blamed Israel on Wednesday for the assassination. Israel denied any involvement, but officials made no effort to conceal their approval of his death.
Mughniyeh was also on the FBI's list of most wanted terrorists, and the U.S. State Department had offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction. He was indicted in the U.S. for his role in planning the 1985 hijacking of a TWA airliner in which a U.S. Navy diver was killed.
The United States welcomed Mughniyeh's death.
"The world is a better place without this man in it," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. "One way or the other, he was brought to justice."
"From Beirut to Dhahran, he orchestrated bombings, kidnappings and hijackings in which hundreds of American service members were killed," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said in a statement. "Hopefully, his demise will bring some measure of comfort to the families of all those military men he murdered."
The hijacking was the only attack on Americans for which Mughniyeh was charged, but he carried out or directed a series of terrorist spectaculars aimed at the United States and Jewish targets.
Mughniyeh's death was the latest in a series of blows to major terror figures in recent weeks. Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior al-Qaida leader, was killed in Pakistan in late January by a missile fired from a U.S. drone. This week, Pakistani security forces critically wounded and captured Mansour Dadullah, a top Taliban figure, in a firefight near the Afghan border.
But Mughniyeh, a Shiite Muslim not known to be connected to the Sunni al-Qaida or Taliban, harkened back to an earlier era of terror. A secretive, underground operator whose name was not even known for years, he was one of the first to turn Islamic militancy's weapons against the United States in the 1980s.
Mughniyeh emerged during the turmoil of Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war, rising to become Hezbollah's security chief, and the dramatic suicide bombings he is accused of engineering in Beirut were some of the deadliest against Americans until al-Qaida's Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
He vanished in the early 1990s, reportedly undergoing plastic surgery and moving between Lebanon, Syria and Iran on fake passports. But Western intelligence agencies believe he then took his terror attacks abroad, hitting Jewish and Israeli interests in Argentina, among other places.
One Western official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said Wednesday that Mughniyeh was linked to the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers near Dhahran in Saudi Arabia, an attack which killed 19 Americans.
Mughniyeh continued to head external operations for Hezbollah and was "very active and very dangerous," the official said.
His slaying could raise tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, as well as with the militant group's allies, Syria and Iran. Israel and Hezbollah fought a bloody war in the summer of 2006, and some Lebanese figures close to the Shiite militant group called Wednesday for attacks against Israel in retaliation for Mughniyeh's death.
It could also worsen the turmoil in Lebanon, where Hezbollah is locked in a power struggle with the U.S.-backed government.
Hezbollah called for a huge turnout at Mughniyeh's funeral in south Beirut on Thursday. The same day, government supporters are planning a rally of hundreds of thousands in downtown Beirut to mark the third anniversary of the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
With fears growing of street violence between the two camps, the U.S. Embassy strongly encouraged American citizens in Lebanon to limit all but essential travel Thursday.
Hezbollah announced on its Al-Manar television that Mughniyeh "became a martyr at the hands of the Zionist Israelis." The station played Quranic verses in memorial and aired a rare, apparently recent picture of Mughniyeh — showing a burly, bespectacled man with a black and gray beard wearing military camouflage and a military cap.
Syrian Interior Minister Brig. Gen. Bassam Abdul-Majid said Mughniyeh was killed Tuesday night in a car bombing in the upscale Damascus neighborhood of Kfar Sousse, the state news agency SANA reported.
Witnesses in the Syrian capital said the explosion tore apart the silver Mitsubishi Pajero, killing a passer-by and leaving only the front of the SUV intact. Security forces sealed off the area and removed the body. The Lebanese television station LBC said Mughniyeh was leaving a ceremony at an Iranian school and was approaching his car when it blew up. By Wednesday, the area had been cleared and there was no indication a car bombing had taken place.
The killing is deeply embarrassing to Syria, showing that the wanted fugitive was hiding on its soil. The United States has accused Syria, home to a number of radical Palestinian leaders, of supporting terrorism.
Iran blamed Israel for the assassination, with Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini calling the bombing "yet another brazen example of organized state terrorism by the Zionist regime."
In the past, when Israel has been fingered — rightly or wrongly — as responsible for attacks on targets beyond its borders, it has generally responded with impenetrable silence, for example over last September's airstrike on an as-yet undisclosed target in Syria.
This time Israel was quick to deny any role, possibly because it could pay a price for public claims.
"Israel rejects the attempt by terror groups to attribute to it any involvement in this incident. We have nothing further to add," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office said in a statement.
Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers on the border between the two countries in July 2006, sparking an Israeli incursion into south Lebanon and a 34-day war. While Hezbollah has not come forward with evidence that the soldiers are alive, Israel regards them as such until it is proved otherwise and would not want to jeopardize their return.
Mughniyeh might have been killed by a rival group and not by a Western intelligence service, said Eliezer Tsafrir, who was the Mossad's Beirut station chief in 1983 and 1984, the time of the first attacks against U.S. targets in which Mughniyeh was implicated.
"These people make a lot of internal enemies. So it doesn't necessarily have to be Israel or America," Tsafrir said.
But regardless of whether it was behind the attack, experts say Israel may benefit from a perception its Mossad spy agency has recovered its ability to hit top terror targets.
Mughniyeh was born on Dec. 7, 1962 in the south Lebanon village of Tair Debba. He joined the nascent Hezbollah in the early 1980s and formed a militant cell known as Islamic Jihad or Islamic Holy War. The cell was said to be Hezbollah's strike arm, but the group denies any link to it.
He is accused of masterminding the first major suicide bombing to target Americans: the April 1983 car bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that killed 63 people, including 17 Americans. He is also blamed for a more devastating attack six months later, when suicide attackers detonated truck bombs at the barracks of French and U.S. peacekeeping forces in Beirut, killing 59 French paratroopers and 241 American Marines.
He was indicted in the United States for the 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847, during which Shiite militants shot Navy diver Robert Stethem, who was a passenger on the plane, and dumped his body on the tarmac of Beirut airport. The hijacking produced one of the most iconic images of pre-9/11 terrorism: a photo of the 727's pilot leaning out the cockpit window with a gunman waving a pistol in front of his face.
In the 1980s Mughniyeh was also believed to have directed a string of kidnappings of Americans and other foreigners in Lebanon. The hostages included The Associated Press's chief Mideast correspondent Terry Anderson, who was held for more than six years until his release in 1991; and CIA station chief William Buckley, who was tortured by his captors and killed in 1985.
"I can't say I'm either surprised or sad (by his death). He was not a good man — certainly, the primary actor in my kidnapping and many others," Anderson told the AP on Wednesday. "To hear that his career has finally ended is a good thing, and it's appropriate that he goes up in a car bomb."
Anderson was the last American hostage freed in a complicated deal that involved Israel's release of Lebanese prisoners, Iran's sway with the kidnappers, Syria's influence and — according to an Iranian radio broadcast — promises by the United States and Germany not to retaliate against the kidnappers.
But Edward Djerejian, who was U.S. ambassador to Syria at the time and was involved in negotiations through the Syrian government on hostage releases, said he had "no knowledge of such a deal" promising not to retaliate. "When I was in government we made no deals," he told the AP.
Giandomenico Picco, an Italian diplomat working at the time as a special assistant to U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar, said he was certain but never able to confirm that the hooded man he met in the slums of Beirut to finalize the deal was Mughniyeh.
Mughniyeh's trail of terror was believed to continue into the 1990s.
Israel accused Mughniyeh of involvement in the 1992 bombing of its embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina in which 29 people were killed.
Argentine special prosecutor Alberto Nisman also accused Mughniyeh in the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish center, an attack which killed 85 people. Prosecutors said Iranian officials orchestrated the attack and entrusted Hezbollah to carry it out.
The Khobar Towers bombing came two years later. Faris bin Hizam, a Saudi journalist who closely follows Islamic groups, said Mughniyeh flew to the kingdom days before the bombing and met the group that carried out the attack.
Mughniyeh spent his final years moving between Lebanon, Iran, Syria and Turkey, and used as many as 47 different forged passports, bin Hizam said.
His last public appearance was believed to be at the funeral of his brother Fuad, who was killed in 1994 by a booby-trapped car in Beirut. In 2006, Mughniyeh was reported to have met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Syria.
Mughniyeh's body was brought to south Beirut in the afternoon and was laid in a refrigerated coffin, wrapped in Hezbollah's yellow flag.
His father — Fayez, a south Lebanese farmer — as well as Hezbollah's deputy leader, Sheik Naim Kassem, and other Hezbollah officials received condolences at the hall from allied Lebanese politicians and representatives of militant Palestinian factions. Though bitter rivals of Hezbollah, some pro-U.S. politicians including Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora and parliamentary majority leader Saad Hariri offered written condolences.
Wow that post cut through all the legalese mumbo jumbo and made everything crystal clear
The original poster seemed to imply that with his first post, you jumped in with your answer, I answered you, then the original poster clarified his first post.
Paheka, Cramer has nothing to do with Altucher's posts. Cramer does not run a hedge fund anymore. Altucher runs Formula Capital. TheStreet.com's writers do not fall in lockstep with every changing Cramer position. Adam Feuerstein disagrees with him all the time regarding biotechs. Arne Alsin clashed with Cramer and alumnus Herb Greenberg over Overstock.
And how does a link by TheStreet.com to a blog post mean that Cramer controls the blogger?
What does Cramer have to do with Sramana Mitra's blog? Guest writer Vijay works for Atheros.
OT: <<I always thought the slowdown would be imperceptible, but nothing could be further from the truth. The difference is huge—like the Celtics vs the Lakers
Ouch
New treatment can clear brain clots
By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer 1 hour, 20 minutes ago
http://tinyurl.com/yvc7q6
WASHINGTON - It's a tiny vacuum cleaner for the brain: A new treatment for stroke victims promises to suction out clogged arteries in hopes of stopping the brain attack before it does permanent harm.
Called Penumbra, the newly approved device is the latest in a series of inside-the-artery attempts to boost recovery from stroke, the nation's No. 3 killer.
Now the question is how to determine which patients are good candidates — because, illogical as it may sound, unclogging isn't always the best option.
"Is the patient at a stage of stroke where you're going to hurt them by pulling a clot out, or show benefit?" asks Dr. Walter Koroshetz of the National Institutes of Health. "It's good we have devices. Now we have to learn how to use them."
More than 700,000 Americans suffer a stroke each year, and more than 150,000 of them die. Survivors often face serious disability.
Most strokes occur when blood vessels feeding the brain become blocked, starving delicate brain cells of oxygen until they die. For those, the clot-busting drug TPA can mean the difference between permanent brain injury or recovery — but only if patients receive intravenous TPA within three hours of the first symptoms.
Yet fewer than 5 percent of stroke sufferers get TPA, because they don't get specialized care in time. And of those treated, it only helps about 30 percent, because the clot is often too big or tough for TPA to bust.
Enter Penumbra, an option for patients who miss out on early care — it can be tried up to eight hours after a stroke strikes — or if standard TPA treatment fails.
Specialists thread a tiny tube inside a blood vessel at the groin and push it up the body and into the brain until it reaches the clog. Just like a vacuum cleaner, it sucks up the clot bit by bit to restore blood flow.
For the right patient, Penumbra can produce dramatic help, says Dr. Demetrius Lopes of Chicago's Rush University Medical Center, one of two dozen hospitals that tested the device in 125 severe stroke patients.
He points to 45-year-old Aretha Streeter, whose left side remained paralyzed almost an hour after a big dose of TPA. Lopes scanned her brain and spotted a key artery completely blocked. She agreed to the Penumbra experiment, and started moving as Lopes suctioned out the clot. Streeter was walking the next day, and was left with weakness in her arm instead of paralysis.
The study's full results will be presented next month at a meeting of the American Stroke Association.
But the device vacuumed out clots well enough to earn California-based Penumbra Inc. a surprise speedy approval from the Food and Drug Administration in late December. Rush's Lopes says it caused few serious side effects, and that about 42 percent of successfully treated patients showed significant recovery a month later.
Penumbra isn't the only mechanical clot-buster. Doctors also can try threading a corkscrew-shaped wire called the Merci Retriever through the clot and tugging it out. Researchers also are experimenting with dripping TPA directly on the clot instead of the old IV method, and even beaming the clog with ultrasound waves for an extra jolt.
Here's the rub: Unclogging sometimes does more harm than good in bad strokes, says Koroshetz, deputy director of NIH's National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
When the dam is broken and blood rushes into oxygen-deprived brain tissue, it sometimes triggers swelling or a brain hemorrhage. Either can kill.
So treatment is a balancing act: Using brain scans to estimate if the stroke already has killed all the brain tissue it's going to, or if enough still could be salvaged that it's worth the risk of this injury, Koroshetz explains.
"Your ability to succeed with taking the clot out depends on what's going on in the brain," he cautions.
The NIH is funding a 900-patient study comparing standard therapy with different inside-the-artery treatments — the TPA drip, ultrasound, and the Merci Retriever — to tell if and how they should be used. Researchers will decide soon whether to include the new Penumbra device in that study.
What treatment to pick is a doctor's dilemma. For patients, the message is clear: Call 911 as soon as you experience stroke symptoms. They include sudden numbness or weakness, especially on one side; confusion, trouble speaking or walking; or an abrupt terrible headache.
Aretha Streeter didn't realize the worst headache of her life meant a stroke had begun, although her mother had died of a stroke and her sister had survived one. Fortunately she went on to her job as a hospital technician at Rush, so care was just steps away when she slumped over.
"It came and went so fast," Streeter says in amazement at both the speed of the stroke, and its treatment.
___
EDITOR's NOTE — Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.
OT-Ha ha...no, I didn't bother to see it in the theaters. It was on HBO, and I had seen it took place in the SoCal suburbs, so I tuned in. I would only recommend it if you like movies that are way off the wall and try to be funnier than they really are. Weeds and Californication have a similar SoCal suburban theme, but are a hundred times funnier.
BTW, Camilla Belle is part Brazilian, as is Jordana Brewster. I once had to spend four hours in Sao Paolo's intl airport to change planes. Most of the time my jaw was on the floor. I've never seen anything like that before.
OT-Saw her in a movie with Daniel Day-Lewis, and another movie called The Chumscrubber. Her name is Camilla Belle.
Northwest Bio received approval to TEST their vaccine in Switzerland. The sources interviewed for that article are either ignorant or lying.
Gee whillikers! Jumpin' Jehovaspat Batman!
Well, this is a small surprise for me. It probably means that the GVAX arm median survival is currently in a range of about one month worse than Taxotere on the low side to several months better on the high side.
Hah!--I only jump off walls when I have a thousand feet of water below me.
My guess is.......that biotech that was a lot higher several years ago....don't know if it still has the same name.
Genaera.
I don't think David believes GVAX will fail the first interim look. That was me who posted that. CEGE powered the trial assuming the 18.9 month median survival for Taxotere without taking into account the asymptomatic subgroup's MS.
<<The survival benefit of D3P compared with MP has persisted with extended follow-up (P = .004). Median survival time was 19.2 months (95% CI, 17.5 to 21.3 months) in the D3P arm, 17.8 months (95% CI, 16.2 to 19.2 months) in the D1P arm, and 16.3 months (95% CI, 14.3 to 17.9 months) in the MP arm. More patients survived 3 years in the D3P and D1P arms (18.6% and 16.6%, respectively) compared with the MP arm (13.5%).>>
Interesting. Yes, the power of large numbers. Basically, for the approved regimen it was a 2.9-month median survival benefit, with 18.6% vs 13.5% in three-year survival. Granted, the trial population was split 50-50 between symptomatic and asymptomatic, and the numbers were a lot better for the asymptomatic subgroup comparison.
OT-Aaaaaarggghhh! eom
OT-Dew...Loss #4 happening tonight at Staples
Phil passes Red
That was some hilarious NOK spin....and futile. EOM
Hmmm....for the uninitiated, the post I'm replying to is probably from an IDCC conference call, probably from October or November this year. The post is not included in a threaded discussion, and there are no links, but the quotes are likely from IDCC CEO Bill Merritt, although nobody is quoted by name in the post.
&*%$#@@%@% Celtics! Two threes in the final minute and they tie it up with 18 seconds left.
Edit: they stole the ball from Billups and now have the ball with five seconds to go.
Edit #2: ha! Celts miss and Detroit has the ball with 1.7 seconds left!
Edit #3: yessssss!!! Draw the foul on the kid! Game over! Pistons class of the East!
Being a survival trial, stopping it for futility at the interim could mean that there are more deaths in the experimental arm. In fact, that's what I think will indeed happen.
<<FWIW, The CEGE CEO responded to a question after a recent presentation that there is no provision for stopping Vital-1 for futility since all Vital 1 patients in the experimental arm will have been treated at the time of any interim.>>
Then he's blowing smoke up the butt of whoever asked that question. If there are more deaths in the experimental arm, the DSMB will let everyone know and then the experimental arm patients will all be urged to take Taxotere. The remainder of your post IMO still overemphasizes the importance of a very small sample of patients in a single-arm, nonrandomized trial at a top cancer center.
Well, I'm on the record as stating that VITAL-1 gets stopped for futility at the first interim look, so I guess our views are diametrically opposite on this one. CEGE stated V-1 is 80% powered for statistical significance if the GVAX median survival beats the Taxotere MS by 33%...but this was assuming the Tax MS was 18.9 months, which was the figure for the entire ITT group in TAX327. It wasn't until three years later that SNY released the asymptomatic subgroup figure of 23.0 months.
<<But our weakening currency is helping to keep our economy from completely falling off a cliff, as the Europeans have started to return to the US to buy our cheap goods, after having stayed away due to our extremely shabby treatment of them by US immigration authorities.>>
Oops...maybe I spoke too soon. Too bad this wasn't a Nokia executive.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/12/14/europe/EU-GEN-Iceland-US.php
OT-Yes, the Chinese released the hold back then in order to allow it to strengthen about 10% or so. Looks like they have reached their goal.
Actually, the PRC let the yuan float a little bit and strengthen against our currency about 10%, but I think the two are still tied, just to a lesser extent.
OT-As someone who travels to the Philippines rather frequently, even though the country does peg its currency to ours, the Philippine peso continues to strengthen vs our W peso. Two years ago, it was 53.5 Phil pesos to one US dollar. Now, it's 40.9 Phil pesos to one W peso. It's fallen from 42.4 to 40.9 in the past two weeks.
I hate to say it, but there is no real credible reason to believe our peso won't fall further against most currencies. The currency issue IMO is therefore not an incentive for NOK or ERIC to settle. Sammy is another matter, as the W peso is strengthening against the Korean won since early November. But our weakening currency is helping to keep our economy from completely falling off a cliff, as the Europeans have started to return to the US to buy our cheap goods, after having stayed away due to our extremely shabby treatment of them by US immigration authorities.
Saul, Corpstrat, Steve, Walk...all good points to consider. As I said before, these things have a way of snowballing. Anything could happen. As has been speculated by many, starting with David Miller, the opening preamble in Scher's and Hussain's letters strongly indicated that those letters were written with the express purpose of getting leaked. Why would the chairperson of ODAC need to document her professional credentials to the FDA in the beginning of her letter, if not for the express purpose of that letter being leaked to the public?
<<It will be “looked into” just as the Mitchell Report looked into the use of performance-enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball. In other words, there will be a lot of sound and fury that will ultimately prove to be of no real consequence.>>
Except for the suspensions of many of the active players named in the report, the trashing of the professional reputations of everyone named except for Brian Roberts (who got screwed), and the probable failure of Roger Clemens getting inducted into the HOF on his first go-round.
These things have a way of snowballing. If the congressional investigation turns up potential criminal acts that played a part in Provenge not getting approved, there's no telling what might happen. I've already found out a little more about Scher's investment habits than I knew about yesterday.
I moderate another investment board on I-Hub, and many of my posts and others on the board would end up getting copied and pasted on another investment website, without linked attribution. So I'm a little more aware of this issue than I used to be.
If you think the Congressional panel is not going to look into the hows and whys of the FDA decision and how it was related to the two conflicted panel members, I predict you'll be wrong. Whether or not the decision gets reversed (odds are against it), I'm virtually certain it will at least be looked into.