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Two gene therapies for sickle cell disease approved in US

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:25:06 GMT

Regulators on Friday approved two new gene therapies for sickle cell disease that doctors hope can cure the painful, inherited blood disorder that afflicts mostly Black people in the U.S.The Food and Drug Administration said the one-time treatments can be used for patients 12 and older with severe forms of the disease. One, made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics, is the first approved therapy based on CRISPR, the gene editing tool that won its inventors the Nobel Prize in 2020. The other is made by Bluebird Bio and works differently.“Sickle cell disease is a rare, debilitating and life-threatening blood disorder with significant unmet need,” the FDA’s Dr. Nicole Verdun said in a statement announcing the approvals. “”We are excited to advance the field especially for individuals whose lives have been severely disrupted by the disease.”In the U.S., an estimated 100,000 people have the disease and about a fifth of them have the severe form. Sickl...

Finland: We ‘trust’ China will help probe Baltic Sea pipeline damage

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:25:06 GMT

Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen said she trusts Chinese authorities to assist Finland in its investigation into the Baltic Sea gas pipeline damage, which Helsinki suspects was carried out by Chinese boat Newnew Polar Bear.“Now that the vessel has indeed arrived in China, there will be joint action together with the Chinese authorities and the Finnish ones and probably also the Estonian ones to investigate,” Valtonen told POLITICO in an interview Friday. “On a diplomatic level, China has promised their assistance for the investigation and we trust them to help us out in this, that we have a thorough and transparent investigation,” she added.A Finnish probe has identified Chinese container ship Newnew Polar Bear as the primary suspect in the rupture of the Balticconnector, a 77-kilometer-long gas pipeline that connects the NATO members Estonia and Finland beneath the Baltic Sea. Authorities believe the vessel dragged its anchor across the Baltic Sea bed, cutting through t...

Harvard president apologizes amid backlash over antisemitism testimony

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:25:06 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — The president of Harvard University has apologized for her remarks at a congressional hearing on antisemitism, saying she got caught up in a heated exchange and failed to properly denounce threats of violence against Jewish students.In an interview Thursday with The Crimson student newspaper, President Claudine Gay clarified her response to a line of questioning that asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate Harvard’s code of conduct. At the Tuesday hearing, Gay said it depended on the context, adding that when “speech crosses into conduct, that violates our policies.”Gay’s response has drawn intense national backlash, as have similar responses from the presidents of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, who joined Gay in testifying before the Republican-led House Education and Workforce Committee. Wealthy donors and some members of Congress in both parties have called for their resignations.Gay told The Crimson she w...

Wilmington Police arrest suspect following police pursuit, car crash, escape from scene

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:25:06 GMT

A Tewksbury man is under arrest following a dramatic series of events early Friday morning across multiple jurisdictions.Ron Jeremiah Bell Jr., 24, is facing multiple charges, including assault with a dangerous weapon, carrying a firearm without a license, resisting arrest, and posession of a class B substance.Around 1:30 Friday morning officers initiated a traffic stop on a vehicle operating erratically. The driver fled south on I-93 in the vehicle, out of authorities’ sight. A short time later the car was seen on Lowell Street in Wilmington, where it attempted to ram a police cruiser twice.Officers then pursued the vehicle north on I-93; it exited the highway at Exit 35 and soon crashed on Andover Street before 2 a.m. The driver, believed to be Bell, fled into a wooded area, leaving behind the female passenger of his car. She was transported to Lahey Hospital with serious but non-life threatening injuries.Bell was located at 7 a.m. after an hours long search conducted by Wil...

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour first ever to hit $1B mark

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:25:06 GMT

LOS ANGELES — Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour is the first tour to cross the billion-dollar mark, according to Pollstar’s 2023 year-end charts.Not only was Swift’s landmark Eras Tour the No. 1 tour both worldwide and in North America, but she also brought in a whopping $1.04 billion with 4.35 million tickets sold across 60 tour dates, the concert trade publication found.Pollstar data is pulled from box office reports, venue capacity estimates, historical Pollstar venue ticket sales data, and other undefined research, collected from Nov. 17, 2022 to Nov. 15, 2023.Representatives for the publication did not immediately clarify if they adjusted past tour data to match 2023 inflation in naming Swift the first to break the billion-dollar threshold.Pollstar also found that Swift brought in approximately $200 million in merch sales and her blockbuster film adaptation of the tour, “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” has reportedly earned approximately $250 million in sales...

How a local museum helped 100-plus Chicago Bears employees tell their stories through sneakers in the NFL’s My Cause, My Cleats campaign

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:25:06 GMT

When Sneakerhead University first opened its doors on State Street in fall 2022, co-founders Shay Belvin and Mykol Branch had one room with three tables, a bucket of 12 paints and a desire to preserve sneaker history and tell stories using sneakers.While students at North Carolina Central, a historically Black university in Durham, N.C., Belvin and Branch came up with the idea to sell Black empowerment T-shirts through their now-defunct label “HBCU Made.” It was during that time they also had the idea to create a sneaker museum.“We wanted a creative way to tell the Black story of different topics and the movement of America,” Belvin told the Tribune. “Selfie museums were really huge (at the time).”The two studied marketing in college, and after graduation Belvin, a Detroit native, came to Chicago to start a museum while Branch initially returned home to Baltimore to open one. They chose Chicago, they said, because they could list brands and people...

IOC confirms Russian athletes can compete at Paris Olympics with approved neutral status

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:25:06 GMT

By GRAHAM DUNBAR (AP Sports Writer)GENEVA (AP) — Some Russian athletes will be allowed to compete at the 2024 Paris Olympics, the IOC said Friday, in a decision that removed the option of a blanket ban due to the invasion of Ukraine.The International Olympic Committee decision confirmed moves it started one year ago to reintegrate Russia and its military ally Belarus into global sports, and nine months after it urged sports governing bodies to look at ways to let individual athletes compete.Though the IOC’s official position was expected, the timing surprised some Olympic watchers after reports last week in Paris suggested the long-promised decision would come in March. It is still up to each sport’s governing body, which run their own Olympic competitions, to assess and enforce neutral status for individual athletes who have not actively supported the war and are not contracted to military or state security agencies. The IOC said on Friday eight Russians and three...

Man killed in Ramona shooting identified: SDSO

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:25:06 GMT

RAMONA, Calif. — The victim in a shooting on State Route 78 through Ramona earlier this week was identified by authorities on Friday.Angel Jauregui, a 35-year-old Ramona resident, was named by the San Diego County Sheriff's Department as the decedent in the incident.The shooting was reported just before 11:30 p.m. after multiple gunshots were heard in the area near the intersection of SR-78 and Haverford Road. According to SDSO, responding deputies located a red Ford F150 at the scene and Jauregui with multiple gunshot wounds.Paramedics transported Jauregui to a nearby hospital for treatment, but he later succumbed to his injuries and was pronounced dead by medical staff around 12:15 a.m. on Wednesday. 76-year-old woman pleads not guilty in deadly North Park hit-and-run The circumstances surrounding the shooting remain under investigation, according to SDSO. No suspect information has been provided at this time.Homicide investigators remained on the scene for hours Wednesday. Evid...

Vessel owner pleads guilty in plot to smuggle workers, drugs from Honduras to Louisiana

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:25:06 GMT

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A Pennsylvania man described by authorities as the lead defendant in a drug distribution and human smuggling case has pleaded guilty to federal crimes in Louisiana.Court records show that Carl Allison, 47, of Pittsburgh pleaded guilty Thursday before U.S. District Judge Eldon Fallon in New Orleans. Sentencing was scheduled for March 28. The U.S. Justice Department said in a statement that Allison, the fourth person to plead guilty in the case, faces a possible life sentence. Prosecutors said Allison was the president and owner of a company that supplied immigrant labor for factories in the U.S. But, according to an indictment, Allison was involved in illegally smuggling Honduran nationals into the country to work illegally as part of a seagoing operation that also involved transporting cocaine.Authorities found 23 Honduran nationals and about 24 kilograms (53 pounds) of cocaine aboard after a vessel owned by Allison became disabled last year in the Gulf of Mexico ...

Local New Hampshire newspaper publisher found guilty of political advertisement omissions

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:25:06 GMT

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — A judge has found the New Hampshire publisher of a weekly community newspaper guilty of five misdemeanor charges that she ran advertisements for local races without properly marking them as political advertising. The judge acquitted Debra Paul, publisher of the Londonderry Times, of a sixth misdemeanor charge on Thursday following a bench trial in November. She is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 20. Each charge carries a maximum penalty of up to a year in jail and a $2,000 fine.The New Hampshire attorney general’s office charged Paul last year, saying she failed to identify the ads with “appropriate language” indicating that they were ads and saying who paid for them as required by state law. The office said it had warned her in 2019 and 2021. Last year, it received more complaints and reviewed the February and March issues of the paper. Two political ads leading up to a local election in March did not contain the “paid for” language and a third had no “...