Month: September 2022

On the 60th anniversary of one of former President John F. Kennedy’s most famous speeches, President Joe Biden called to “end cancer as we know it and cure cancers once and for all.” Biden delivered his speech on Monday at the John F. Kennedy Library in Massachusetts to address his “Cancer Moonshot” initiative, six decades after Kennedy gave his speech at Rice University proclaiming the United States would put astronauts on the moon by the end of the 1960s.

Said Biden: “On this day in 1962, America was facing an inflection point.It was one of those times that changes everything from the day before to the day after. A shadow of world wars cast over a cold war and a march on civil rights, urgent yet uncertain.”  Biden defined America as full of possibilities and said when Kennedy “set that goal, he established a national purpose that could rally the American people around a common cause and he succeeded. Now is our time.”

In his speech, Biden announced Dr. Renee Wegrzyn as the inaugural Director of Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a new agency created to drive biomedical innovation. He also signed an executive order to launch a National Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative, an initiative to grow the strength and diversity of domestic biomanufacturing capacity. Biden also emphasized his efforts to lower prescription drug costs, including cancer drugs, through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Biden’s plan establishes the White House Cancer Cabinet, an initiative involving multiple departments across the federal government, and calls for improved and earlier cancer screenings and detection, as well as prevention and at-home screenings. The White House said in a statement on Monday that “it is a vision that will change people’s lives for the better, improve their health and decrease the burden of the disease.”

The Cancer Moonshot was originally launched when Biden was vice president under the Obama administration, and Biden relaunched the initiative in Feb. 2022 as president.  It has been an initiative that the president has personally been invested in since losing his son, Beau Biden, to an aggressive form of brain cancer in 2015.

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Three children were pronounced dead after police found them unconscious early Monday morning along the Coney Island shoreline in Brooklyn, N.Y., and authorities believe they may have been drowned by their mother.  During a news conference held on the boardwalk where officers discovered the children, New York Police Department Chief Kenneth Corey confirmed that a 7-year-old male, a 4-year-old female, and a 3-and-a-half month baby were found at the water’s edge at around 4:42 a.m. Monday.  Corey said that “the officers immediately initiated life-saving measures on the children and they were rushed to Coney Island Hospital where they were regrettably pronounced deceased.”  The children were later identified as 3-month-old Oliver Bondarev, 4-year-old Lilana Merdy, and 7-year-old Zachary Merdy. 

The situation unfolded after officers responded to an apartment at 3325 Neptune Avenue, following a 911 call placed at around 1:40 a.m. by “a concerned family member.” While inside the building, police ran into the father of one of the kids, who told police the mother and the children were on the boardwalk, and he was concerned about what she might do. NYPD Chief Corey said that “the 911 caller indicated that she was concerned that her family may have harmed her three small children. Officers responded to the apartment … the officers  later found a 30-year-old female believed to be the mother of the three children. She was accompanied by other family members but not the children. The search then intensified, with aviation units, harbor units and additional canvases of the shoreline.” 

The children’s mother, identified as 30-year-old Erin Merdy, is being questioned by detectives, but has refused to speak as of press time.  Chief Corey said that the woman was wet when officers first found her: “The mother was soaking wet. Whether she had been out in the rain or whether she had been in the water (ocean) is all speculative. She was wet, she was barefoot and she was not communicative to the officers. Right now we are looking for witnesses. We don’t know exactly what happened here. We are going to try to piece this all together.”

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/police-children-drowned-mother-nyc-beach-89742002

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Authorities in California have arrested the man accused of killing an 8-year-old girl whose body was found in his home six months ago. After a months-long search and an investigation involving the Department of Justice’s Special Operations Unit, police arrested Dhante Jackson in Newark, California, for the murder of Sophia Mason. According to a news release from the office of California Attorney General Rob Bonta, the girl’s body was found in Jackson’s Central Valley home in March a few days after her relatives reported her missing. The relatives told police they had not had contact with the girl since December, which led local police at the time to arrest Sophia’s mother, Samantha Johnson, on a warrant stemming from a child abuse case the previous year.

According to the news release from the Attorney General’s office, Johnson shared with investigators after her arrest the details of the abuse her daughter faced from Jackson before her death, which included “being forced to live in a shed in Jackson’s yard and suffering sexual and physical abuse. Jackson and Johnson had been in a romantic relationship. Court documents show that Merced police found Sophia’s body in a bathtub, inside a locked bathroom in Jackson’s home, after executing a search warrant on the property.

On Sunday, local police shared the grim news that Sophia had been dead for at least a month before she was found, and her death has been ruled a homicide by the Merced County coroner’s office. After finding Sophia’s body the Merced County District Attorney’s Office charged Johnson with child abuse and homicide for the child’s murder. Johnson has pleaded not guilty to the charges against her.

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Officials confirm that one person died and multiple people were injured after a motorboat flipped over in Grand Canyon National Park. According to the park’s Twitter account, the incident took place at Bedrock Rapid on the Colorado River at 2:12 p.m. Saturday.  Emergency personnel were dispatched to treat and transport injured patients.

It was unclear how many people on the motorboat were injured and park officials didn’t immediately send any updates Sunday.  John Dillon, the executive director of the Grand Canyon River Outfitters Association that represents the outfitters permitted in the canyon, said the boat flipped on a technical rapid when it came up against a rock.

Bedrock Rapid features a large rock island that splits the channel left and right, creating difficulty for some rafters. According to GoRafting.com, “you can get into trouble here by failing to make the move around the rock island and flipping off this feature.”

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