Month: January 2016

Turing Pharmaceutical’s dramatic and rage-inducing decision to jack up the price of a life-saving drug, Daraprim, by more than 5,000 percent is now under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, according to a lawyer for the pharmaceutical company’s now former CEO, Martin Shkreli.

Shkreli’s lawyer, Baruch Weiss, disclosed the FTC investigation in a letter to the US House of Representatives' Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which had subpoenaed Shkreli to appear in a January 26 hearing to discuss the same price hike. Weiss cited the FTC probe as the reason that Shkreli would refuse to answer the committee’s questions, invoking his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself, according to Reuters, who broke the story and saw the letter.

In the letter, Weiss wrote that Shkreli would "gladly cooperate" with the House committee if it granted Shkreli immunity. However, such immunity, if granted, would unlikely be granted in time for next Tuesday’s hearing.

Women who are denied abortions set fewer positive goals for their futures.

In the US, there are many laws limiting when and how women can receive abortions. But there is almost no research on what happens to women who seek out abortions and are denied them. Now a team of health researchers at the University of California, San Francisco has completed a longitudinal study of a group they call "Turnaways," women who tried and failed to get abortions due to local laws. The researchers found that women who received abortions were over six times as likely to have and achieve positive life plans than Turnaways.

The Turnaway study

To gather their unusual Turnaway data set, the researchers spent two years interviewing 956 women who sought abortions at 30 different abortion clinics around the US. 182 of them were turned away. All the women were interviewed a week after being turned away or receiving an abortion and then again a year later to assess the longer-term outcomes of their experiences. The team has also just completed interviews with the women that will reveal where they are five years after being turned away or not.

In its first analysis of turnaway data published two years ago, the team found that women seek out abortions for complicated reasons, with the most common being a feeling of financial unpreparedness. This earlier analysis also showed that 86 percent of turnaways chose to keep their children, and 67 percent of them would up below the poverty line a year later. By comparison, 56 percent of women granted abortions in the study were below the poverty line a year later. This finding lent credibility to many turnaways' concerns that being financially unprepared would cause problems down the line.

(credit: Cyrus Farivar)

Over the winter holidays, I took some well-needed time offline, away from e-mail and social media. I hung out with friends and family, and spent hours with my nose in a massive book, Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post-9/11 Presidency. Charlie Savage’s latest book is the most essential explanation of modern-day American national security policy.

After reading it, I came away with one (fairly obvious) conclusion: keeping the republic safe is hard, and crazy complicated. Anyone who has followed current events on drone strikes, surveillance, and encryption, and other essential issues at the forefront of modern America—and wants the entire inside baseball play-by-play to go with it—will love this book. (The book is quite expansive and covers many other issues that this review will not address.)

The premise of the book is simple and intriguing. It opens with two epigraphs, both from Barack Obama.

If you’ve done some world traveling, you may know the frustration of sitting down in an Internet cafe, expecting to type out a message, only to realize that the keys on the computer’s keyboard are nothing like the ones from your home country. That quick e-mail to mom just became a hunt-and-peck chore that will send you back to the cafe’s counter a couple of times to re-up the reservation at your terminal.

This week, France’s culture and communication ministry acknowledged that residents of the country faced similar frustrations when using different keyboards within their own country, a problem the ministry said it would begin trying to solve. In a statement released this week, the ministry lamented the fact that French keyboards, which use the AZERTY layout rather than the QWERTY layout familiar to English speakers, make it unnecessarily difficult to type common symbols and letters. While the 26 letters of the alphabet as well as common accented letters like é, à, è, and ù are generally represented similarly on an AZERTY keyboard, the ministry said that the @ symbol and the € symbol are inconveniently or inconsistently placed, as are commands to capitalize accented letters like "ç".

The trouble of finding how to properly capitalize accented letters is a big issue in written French, especially for legal texts and government documents where every letter of the names of people and businesses are capitalized. Often, an accent is the only distinguishing factor between two similarly spelled words. A report from the ministry asserted that the "hardware limitations" of the French AZERTY keyboard "have even led some of our fellow citizens to think that we should not accentuate capital letters.”

There will be spoilers ahead—you have been warned!

SyFy

The crew of the Rocinante. L-R: Engineer Naomi Nagata, Mechanic Amos Burton, Captain James Holden, Pilot Alex Kamal.

5 more images in gallery

The current king of the space opera genre is James SA Corey. Corey—a pseudonym for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck—first appeared in 2011 with the critically acclaimed novel Leviathan Wakes, the first installment in an increasingly epic series called The Expanse, about war and solar system colonization. The books have recently been translated into a TV show on Syfy, and my colleague Annalee Newitz is spot on when says it's the best thing in years. But having just reread the books, seeing the story come to life on the screen has given me a little "canon shock." Even so, working through this reaction has helped me think more about how the writers on the TV series have tweaked the story to work better in a visual medium.

Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny in "Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster", episode three of the new X-Files miniseries. (credit: Ed Araquel/FOX)

Warning: The following review contains minor spoilers to the first three episodes of the X-Files miniseries. 

The first episode of the new X-Files miniseries includes some striking images of aliens and alien spacecraft. We see the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico “UFO crash” (I want to believe), an alien desperately trying to crawl away from some evil humans, and a modern-day alien reproduction vehicle (ARV) that can disappear in a flash. This isn’t unusual for the X-Files, a show about alien government conspiracies and paranormal sightings, but something is different this time. This new series' nature is all stark and obvious—no mystery, no buildup, no real suspense. In the original 1990s series, the audience desperately wanted to see aliens, to have the show confirm their existence, but we were fed teasers and snippets. The plotlines burned slowly (usually). And we hung out (some of us for nine seasons), desperate to find out the truth.

It seems that the truth at the end of this new, six-episode miniseries on Fox is that the X-Files closed a long time ago. It’s apparently painful to try to bring them back. I hope I am proven wrong; I have only seen the first three episodes of the new series, which premieres on Sunday. The next three episodes could very well be mind-blowing television. Again, I want to believe. But if that’s the case, the miniseries has a lot of work to do.

The game industry is a quick-moving beast. Before you even have a chance to really dive into all the good games that come out in a year, another January is upon us with the promise of 12 more months of great titles. So almost immediately after we made our decisions on the best games of 2015, we started looking ahead to what games are worth paying attention to in 2016.

It's too easy to simply fill these kinds of lists with sequels, reboots, and remakes of the big-name game franchises you already know and love. That's not very illuminating, though. For the most part, if you liked the previous games, you'll look forward to the sequels. For our list, we'll instead focus on original games with the potential to start franchises of their own (with one exception that we felt justified itself as a comprehensive reboot).

As such, these are the completely new titles we'll be looking forward to most until 2017 comes along.