CHRISTIAN NEWS FROM RAY
A free service of Jesus Christ is Lord Ministries
News selected and edited by Ray Mossholder
TOP OF THE EVENING TO YOU, March 11, 2014
DRUG COMPANY CHIMERIX TURNS DOWN THE MONEY NEEDED TO KEEP SEVEN-YEAR-OLD BOY ALIVE
A pediatric cancer charity is offering to pay for 7-year-old cancer survivor Josh Hardy to receive lifesaving medication that could cure him of a potentially deadly virus. But Chimerix, the pharmaceutical company that produces the medication, is still refusing to give Josh the treatment he so desperately needs. In fact, a representative for the charity said he tried speaking with Chimerix CEO Kenneth Moch about Josh’s case – but Moch hung up on him.
Over the course of his childhood, Josh has survived four bouts of kidney cancer and even suffered from heart failure. Then, in November 2013, he developed a bone marrow disorder as a result of his cancer treatments and underwent chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Though his treatments were a success, Josh subsequently developed adenovirus – an acute infection that can be deadly in people with compromised immune systems.
Doctors at St. Jude recommended that Josh be treated with Brincidofovir – an antiviral drug that has been proven to clear up adenovirus in children within two weeks. However, the drug has not yet been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), preventing Josh’s family from gaining access to the medication.
Josh’s mother, Aimee Hardy, has appealed to Moch to grant Josh emergency access to the medication, but the company is refusing to make an exception. According to Fox News’ Peter Johnson Jr., Chimerix has given hundreds of patients emergency access to Brincidofovir in the past, but Moch said the company has since stopped this practice because “they cannot afford it.”
Now, the Max Cure Foundation, a charity dedicated to researching rare pediatric cancers, has offered to pay for the cost of the drug – but Chimerix still won’t budge. “I spoke to Mr. Moch yesterday by phone. I told him that we had the $50,000 that I thought he was claiming he needed to supply the drug,” Richard Plotkin, vice chair of the Max Cure Foundation, told Johnson Jr. on Fox and Friends. “He then told me it isn’t about money. He told me it’s all about ethics. I said, ‘Fine, tell me why you will not give [it to] this little boy.’ If he does not get the drug, he will die this week, I’m told. He said he cannot make an exception.”
Through a grassroots campaign launched by Josh’s mother, Chimerix has received hundreds of phone calls and emails in support of Josh, and the hashtag #savejosh has been trending on Twitter. Supporters have even started chartering buses so they can protest at the company’s headquarters.
Although support for Josh is strong, Hardy says her son is running out of time.
“It’s horrible for us as parents to see, because he’s a vibrant, strong little boy, and even though he is frail, he has a very strong will about him,” Hardy told Fox News. “But things just keep stacking against him, and we just want to do everything we can to give him the opportunity to make a full recovery.”
Plotkin asked Moch if he would react differently if Josh was his child or grandchild, but Plotkin said Moch refused to answer and hung up the phone.
“As a result, it appears the final plea is to the board of directors at Chimerix…I ask the board to close their eyes, and as you close your eyes, assume there’s a little boy lying in a hospital bed who says to his father, ‘Daddy, am I going to die? And if I’m going to die, who will take care of me in heaven?’” Plotkin said. “And then I want you to assume that this little boy is your child or grandchild. And members of the board of directors, I have no doubt how you would respond to that.”
DON’T DRINK THE WATER!
Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of radioactive water generated by the melted-down reactors of the stricken Fukushima nuclear power station should be poured into the Pacific Ocean, according to Japan’s chief foreign adviser on the disaster.
In remarks that will outrage environmentalists, fishermen local people, and any nation that has the Pacific Ocean as a part of it, Dale Klein, formerly the chief regulator of the US nuclear industry, said that the Japanese Government must persuade its public to accept the “controlled release” of contaminated water to ease the risk of storing it in tanks.
CRIMEA TO SECEDE FROM UKRAINE – YES OR YES
The Crimean parliament voted today that the Black Sea peninsula will declare itself an independent state if its residents agree to split off from Ukraine and join Russia in a referendum. Crimea’s regional legislature adopted a “declaration of independence of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea.” The document specified that Crimea will become an independent state if its residents vote on Sunday in favor of joining Russia in the referendum. Residents who vote in the March 16 referendum reportedly will have two choices regarding whether to join Russia — “yes now” or “yes later.”
According to KyivPost.com, voting “no” is not an option and residents will have to vote to join Russia immediately or declare independence and then join Russia.
“There is no option for ‘no,’ they are not counting the number of votes, but rather which one of the options gets more votes,” Kharkiv Human Rights Group member Volodymyr Yavorkiy told the Post. “Moreover, the first question is about Crimea joining Russia, the second — about it declaring independence and joining Russia. In other words, there is no difference.”
Western nations have said they will not recognize the vote as legitimate. But the move might be used as an attempt to ease tensions with Crimea existing as a self-proclaimed state without Russia moving quickly to incorporate it into its territory.
After a brief war between Russia and Georgia in 2008, some leaders in Georgia’s breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia also asked to join Russia, but their request was never granted.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s acting Prime Minister Oleksandr Turchynov asked the national parliament to approve the formation of a national guard and for the mobilization of reserves and volunteers into the country’s armed forces “to defend the country and citizens against any criminals, against external and internal aggression.” Turchynov said that the mobilization will include those who have previously served in the army and volunteers.
Russian forces have strengthened their control over Ukraine’s Crimea region in the run-up to a referendum set for Sunday on whether to split off and become part of Russia.
Yatsenyuk, who will fly to Washington tomorrow to meet with Barack Obama, called on Western nations to defend Ukraine against a nation “that is armed to the teeth and that has nuclear weapons.” Meanwhile, Ukraine’s fugitive president, Viktor Yanukovych, accused the country’s new government of fomenting civil war.
Yatsenyuk asked Russia, the U.S. and European Union member Britain to abide by a treaty signed in 1994, in which they pledged to guarantee Ukraine’s security in exchange for giving up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons. “We are not asking for anything from anyone,” Yatsenyuk told parliament. “We are asking for just one thing: military aggression has been used against our country. Those who guaranteed that this aggression will not take place, must from the one side pull out troops and from the other side must defend our independent, sovereign state.” Parliament is expected to vote still later today on the motion on mobilization and the appeal to the West.
Yanukovych, speaking in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, repeated the Russian claim that the new Ukrainian authorities are kowtowing to radical nationalists, and that they posed a threat to Russian-speaking eastern regions.
Yanukovych, who fled last month after months of protests, said he would soon return to Ukraine.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
MALAYSIAN JETLINER STILL NOT IN PLANE SIGHT
A digital mapping company that allowed web surfers around the world to hunt the vast ocean waters for the vanished Malaysian jetliner crashed today after an overwhelming response. Colorado-based Digital Globe has trained its five satellites on the Gulf of Thailand region—the last known whereabouts of Malaysia Airlines flight 370. The orbital units transmit photos and data of the vast area which viewers can scan on a website called Tomnod– Mongolian for “Big Eye.” The hope is that millions of sets of eyes, with an assist from above, can help solve the mystery of what happened to the plane and the 239 people on board.
But a day after the initial images were posted online, the site required emergency maintenance to handle the large virtual search party. “It’s a good reason to have our site crash,” a spokesperson for DigitalGlobe told FoxNews.com. “We did get an overwhelming amount of people responding. It has been going well. We are getting a lot of tags and will be uploading more images for people to search.”
Once the site is back up, any computer user can log onto Tomnod and pore through thousands of high-definition images of a particular region and publicly “geotag” anything that raises suspicion. A computer algorithm is then used to determine whether certain areas are tagged more than others, and in-house experts follow any leads from the consensus tagging.
“Luckily, the imagery had been exhausted with searching before the site went down,” Luke Barrington, senior manager of Geospatial Big Data for DigitalGlobe said to FoxNews.com. “We have had six million map views. Half-a-million people have signed up, it’s 100 times the response we’ve had before.”
Many of the searchers tagged pictures of what appeared to be oil slicks in images that were taken Sunday, but it was later determined that they were not related to the Malaysian airplane.
New images were today that included a wider area, branching out from the gulf of Thailand to the West Peninsula of Malaysia and the Malacca Straits.
JOEL OSTEEN REPORTS $600,000 MISSING
Televangelist Joel Osteen’s church in Houston announced Monday that $600,000 in Sunday donations were stolen from its safe last weekend, My Fox Houston.com reported.
The heist at Lakewood Church wasn’t discovered until 8:30 a.m. Monday morning when a church employee and off-duty Harris County Sheriff’s Officer noticed the break in, the report said. Investigators believe the theft occurred sometime between Sunday afternoon and Monday morning.
The donations were from services on March 8 and March 9 and included cash, checks and credit cards. Lakewood has asked anyone who attended services LAST weekend to pay attention to their accounts and report any suspicious activity.
“The funds were fully insured, and we are working with our insurance company to restore the stolen funds to the church,” the Lakewood statement said, according to the Houston Chronicle.
Lakewood stresses this was not a data breach, but says the theft was limited to donations made in the actual services. More than 40,000 people attend weekly services led by Osteen, whose televised sermons reach nearly 100 countries.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
NOT ENOUGH CARE ABOUT OBAMACARE
In the final stretch of enrolling Americans in ObamaCare, the administration is lagging far behind its own goals — leaving uncertain whether the program is attracting enough people for the system to work.
The Department of Health and Human Services reported today that more than 940,000 people signed up in February, bringing the total enrollment number to 4.2 million. That’s well short of the unofficial goal of signing up 7 million by the end of open enrollment on March 31.
The numbers renewed calls from Republicans to push off the looming penalty for not buying insurance. And they revived accusations that the administration still is not telling the whole story behind those numbers. “Given these dismal enrollment numbers, the president needs to work with Congress to get rid of this year’s individual mandate penalty,” said Brendan Buck, spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner.
Hoping for a surge in the final weeks, administration officials are going to new lengths to promote the law and encourage people to sign up — including President Obama plugging HealthCare.gov during a YouTube appearance with comedian Zach Galifianakis. “During this final month of open enrollment our message to the American people is this: you still have time to get covered, but you’ll want to sign up today,”
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said today that the administration recently has backed off the goal of enrolling 7 million by month’s end. But the government also is coming up short in attracting young adults into the system. The government wanted roughly 40 percent of enrollees to be between 18 and 34 years old; the latest report shows just a quarter of those who have selected a plan are in that coveted age group.
The government, and the insurance industry, wants to attract a high percentage of young adults in order to offset the costs of taking on older, less-healthy customers. Failure to attract enough younger customers could result in higher premiums for everyone else.
It is possible that many participants could be waiting until the final few days and weeks of the month to enroll — after March 31, most of those who do not have insurance will be required to pay a penalty. But Republicans were skeptical.
“It seems the president’s push to enroll young adults is far too little, too late,” said Indiana SenatorJim Buck. “The administration won’t tell us how many people have actually paid for a plan or how many were previously uninsured. But what we do know is that young adults — those who the White House repeatedly said are critical — are deciding the health care law is a bad deal. Now, millions stand to be forced to pay a new tax because of this law.”
The administration has further not said how many of those enrolling through the ObamaCare exchanges were previously uninsured. That figure matters because the health care overhaul was originally pitched as a way to cover the nation’s estimated 47 million uninsured. But a newly released study suggested many of those people are not being reached. The study by McKinsey & Co. showed that of the uninsured eligible to sign up for an ObamaCare private plan, just 10 percent said they had done so. Further, it found that just a quarter of those who did sign up for coverage in the marketplaces were previously uninsured. That suggests the bulk of those signing up are simply switching from one plan to another.
HHS and supporters of the health care law countered Republicans’ skepticism with a more upbeat view. “Now that over 4.2 million Americans have enrolled in private coverage through the Health Insurance Marketplace, on top of the millions who have received coverage through Medicaid, more and more Americans are gaining the peace of mind and financial security that comes with having health insurance,” Anne Filipic, president of Enroll America, said in a statement. “With 83% of consumers receiving financial assistance to help pay for their plans, quality health care has finally become a reality for millions, and we’re confident that enrollment will continue to accelerate as we approach the March 31st deadline for coverage.”
While millions are joining through the state and federal insurance exchanges, millions more are signing up through Medicaid. In another wrinkle to emerge from the law’s implementation, prison inmates are apparently being signed up via the expanded Medicaid as well.
The New York Times reported this week that jails and prisons are taking advantage of the new Medicaid criteria to cover single, childless inmates for certain hospital stays — in turn transferring the cost from the states to the federal government. Those individuals can also remain covered once they leave jail or prison.
WHAT WOULD YOU DO FOR $20?
An Oklahoma man was left trapped underground for two days after chasing a $20 (£11.96) bill he dropped into a drain. The Lawton resident, who has not been named, told police he badly needed the money and so was forced to go in after the note. But he quickly got lost in the vast underground network of drains and was unable to find his way out, KSWO reported. The police finally rescued the man but the $20 bill is still missing.
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THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Money is the root of all evil, but everyone seems to be rooting for it.
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CHRISTIAN NEWS FROM RAY – TOP STORIES OF THE EVENING March 11, 2014