Opinion

• Additionally, the trial has activated its eighth clinical site location – one additional site beyond the seven originally planned -- in order to try to expedite the completion of the trial enrollment.
• HLHS is a congenital birth defect in which the left ventricle (one of the pumping chambers of the heart) is either severely underdeveloped or missing.
• Lomecel-B™ for HLHS has previously received Fast Track, Rare Pediatric Disease, and Orphan Drug Designations from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
• ELPIS II is being funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI; Grant numbers UG3HL148318, U24HL148316), in collaboration with Longeveron.

• It feels too soon, perhaps because in everything he wrote, he opened up new ways of thinking, writing and reading.
• From the start, he was exposed to, and immersed in, the absurdity of human culture.
• He grew up in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, then lived under Stalinist rule, where he was an active member of the Communist Party.
• I have been reading him, quoting him and teaching from his writings for decades, after bumping into his work in 1988.

Interrogating totalitarianism, with humour

• But in each novel, Kundera offers some humour – often bitter, but capable of leavening the otherwise bleak, and densely reported, content.
• But he also develops an erotic narrative that seems to suggest lighthearted sex can allow us to live fully in the moment.
• Weight and lightness, laughter and forgetting, repetition and change, politics and sex: his first four novels incorporate such dualities.

Author in exile

• In 1975, he fled his home for exile in France, and continued writing works of fiction that mostly followed the signature structure he first developed in The Joke: multi-part, multi-voiced novels, where the narrator interpolates critique, commentary and philosophical statements in the text.
• This makes for a restless story, one that shifts to and fro across locations, times and contexts.
• The focus of Kundera’s novels is their wrestle with questions of knowledge, the complexity of being and a constant uncertainty.

‘Things are not as simple as you think’

• In The Art of the Novel (1986), he outlines a history of how novelists unpacked various dimensions of existence.
• Homer never wondered whether, after all their many hand-to-hand battles, Achilles or Ajax still had all their teeth.
• But for Don Quixote and Sancho teeth are a perpetual concern – hurting teeth, missing teeth.
• Homer never wondered whether, after all their many hand-to-hand battles, Achilles or Ajax still had all their teeth.

Teller of inconvenient truths

• He won other prizes, after all, among them the Jerusalem Prize in 1985 and the Herder Prize in 2000.
• Perhaps it was his writing style that meant the Nobel committee saw him nominated on a number of occasions, but never awarded him the prize.
• Robin Ashenden suggests he “had become a teller of truths inconvenient to the modern age”, and maybe there is something in that.

• 06 July 2023
  The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today its final draft Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS) on Initial Margin Model Validation (IMMV) under the European Markets Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR).
• These draft RTS set out the supervisory procedures to ensure the prudent use of initial margin models for OTC derivatives.
• The requirements set out in the RTS envisage a phased-in implementation of the supervisory requirements to ensure a smooth model validation process.
• Jointly with the RTS, the EBA published an Opinion on IMMV, calling on co-legislators and the European Commission to consider the establishment of a centralised validation function at the EBA to ease the coordination issues linked to the validation of IM models that have industry-wide application.

• Most Americans Feel They'll Only Own a Home If they Win the Lotto, Inherit Money, or Marry Rich
  That's according to a recent survey conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Divvy Homes of 2,000 current non-homeowners.
• Of respondents, only 53% are confident in any way that they'll be able to own their own home someday.
• One in five (19%) even said they'd have to marry someone rich.
• This random double-opt-in survey of 2,000 non-homeowners was commissioned by Divvy Homes between June 5 and June 7, 2023.