reports of numerous injuries and deaths are coming in and we will give you an update on this serious situation. plus the u.s. supreme court is faced with a special patent case today what's the patent for human genes you know that kind that make up your d.n.a. will investigate whether or not corporations can truly take ownership of the building blocks of life. and the people of venezuela elected a new president over the weekend. handpicked successor a nicolas maduro won in a razor thin victory war on the election results coming up. it is monday april fifteenth five pm in washington d.c. i make a locus and you are watching our t.v. well we begin this hour with breaking news out of boston two explosions went off this afternoon near the finish line of the boston marathon and we are just getting word from the police commissioner in a press conference that just ended moments ago saying that there was another

explosion outside of the j.f.k. library in boston as well here's some new video that we got into the r t newsroom the boston globe is reporting that two people are dead and more than sixty four people are injured those numbers are expected to change now news of the blast started appearing on twitter just before three pm this afternoon and then numerous photos from those in the area started appearing online as well now w b z a local t.v. station in boston said that numerous people have been taken from the scene on stretchers as well as in wheelchairs many of those people have actually lost their limbs witnesses have said that there were two explosions just a few seconds apart the explosions happened about three pm this afternoon after the winner of the marathon had already crossed the finish line but there were still runners on the course so just to recap there's been some type of explosions in the boston area. at the finish line of the boston marathon as well as one explosion

outside of the j.f.k. library in boston now as you can imagine these explosions have put the entire country on high alert president obama himself called the boston police department to find out what the situation was that was announced by the police commissioner in that hearing and the white house is closed right now we will continue to follow this story and update you on any new developments throughout the night for up to date for up to the minute updates go to our website or to dot com slash usa and we will be joining our to correspondent marina porter with the latest information in just a little bit so hang on and we'll get his that news in just a little bit. now the point of patents is to make sure that the people who spend the time and the money developing a new product get the opportunity to profit off of their hard work but what if the new product is up for that is up for a patent is your own d.n.a. that's right today the supreme court heard a case about whether the biotechnology company known as myriad can patent

a human gene it links to ovarian and breast cancer now myriad actually claims that it discovered this gene but meanwhile a group of scientists doctors and patients argue that the company's patent puts the box on affordable testing and potential cures for cancer so at what point should we put people's health over profits or the two inevitably intertwined archie correspondent liz wall is at the supreme court with more. well the big question at the supreme court today as of whether or not you can a human it sounds like a simple question but it has done quite complicated the plaintiffs in this case are medical societies and patient advocacy groups cases against a biotech company called the myriad genetics now this company has patents on two deeds called b.r.c.a. one and b.r.c.a. two tests for these two genes the mutation of these two genes can determine if a patient is at risk for developing breast cancer myriad says they spend billions

of dollars over the span of decades on research and testing and identifying in the but opponents of these genes in say that no one person no company has the rights. to the human body and they are saying that doing so is preventing and blocking other companies from moving forward with their own research with their own development and possibly creating treatments to breast cancer we haven't had breast cancer patients coming forward saying that the patents on these genes have prevented them from getting the test that they need and leading to a possible diagnosis and getting the treatment that they need now the question today is whether or not the supreme court. can consider isolated g. and a product of nature typically receives the supreme court sided with pat and with patent laws but today it played out differently and that is because we are talking about the human body we haven't had justice sonia sotomayor saying that the

leaves of plants or gold naturally found in nature that they are made in nature that they are naturally occurring and therefore you can't put a patent on those substances so. it seemed as if the justices were leaning towards the plaintiffs in this case now we should point out that times on human genes they have been happening for decades so a decision in this case could have huge implications on medical research for decades. in decades to come a ruling in this case is expected before the end of summer and for the supreme court here liz well. all right we want to go back now to that breaking news that's coming out of boston two explosions went off this afternoon near the finish line of the boston marathon it happened at around three pm and we just got word from the police commissioner that there was another explosion outside of the j.f.k. library in the boston area as well now here's some new video that we just got into

our team newsroom the boston police department tweeted just a short time ago that two people are dead and at least sixty four more injured the sixty four injured number comes from the boston herald those numbers are expected to change we hear or see or having a number of videos tweets and whatnot come in to tell us more about this incident now at the boston marathon is something that is somewhat of a tradition inside of boston it is a huge tradition so obviously to have an explosion like this it affected both the runners as well as the spectators and we have correspondent. bringing us the very latest marina what are you hearing. well what we're hearing right now i mean obviously the story is evolving minute by minute we do know that the boston police commissioner gave a press conference just recently asking everyone to stay indoors we know that cell phone service has been shut down now it's this would be to prevent any remote vaccinations of explosives that the police have not yet found we know that there

was those two explosives that went off by the finish line of the marathon then there was another blast at the j.f.k. library that now the boston police say they are not sure if it's related to the two original blast but they are treating it as if it is related to u.s. president barack obama has now instructed government officials to aid boston boston officials as as. he supports i'm going to pause here story right there we just got some very shocking video coming in you can actually hear the explosions now this video is from the boston globe let's bring that video up and we'll show you and then i will come back out and speak with you marina.

so as you heard there two explosions obviously j.f.k. library one was a little bit farther away marina talk to me more about what have you heard about this explosions after j.f.k. library well according to police they do not know if the explosions at the j.f.k. library is related to the ones taking place that took place of the finish line of the boston marathon the one we just saw a video of on the screens we saw that the debris flying in one of the runners collapsing to the ground what we do know now this is according to the new york post that a twenty year old saudi national is now in custody and is being treated as a suspect. in connection to the explosives that took place by the finish line of the boston marathon we're still waiting to get that confirmed but that is according to the new york post other news outlets are also reporting that there is video surveillance video of a man walking in to the scene of where the bombs went off twenty minutes before

they exploded with a backpack so of course this is a huge puzzle that needs to be pieced together and of course the saddest part of it is that you have so many innocent victims that have been caught in this scenario we're talking about some twenty twenty seven thousand people that were participating in this marathon that traveled from all over the world tens of thousands out in the streets watching as spectators cheering them on we had police officers in the streets e.m.'s workers in the streets news crews in the streets and then these explosions go off and if you look at that video you see the white poofs of smoke in the sky everybody running to save their lives scared extremely scared we saw some video of you know blood really soaking into the concrete in certain parts of the area some images that have been posted online by news outlets and even on twitter show some victims with some limbs gone and there have been some

severe injuries from this this sad sad day taking place in the midst of the boston marathon an hour and i was actually listening in to the press conference that they were holding that they are in the process of securing the area and obviously within all the chaos people were leaving their bags behind so they're trying to determine what is just an innocent person the bag versus what is a potential bomb or another bomb but beyond boston the country is on high alert i was reporting earlier about the fact that. the white house is shut down what are you hearing both in new york and across the country that's right as you as you said the white house said that in the surrounding area there's some. been a lockdown to to to prevent any kind of suspicious behavior to keep anyone that's not unfamiliar away from the white house what we also do know is the new york city police department shortly after these events took place in boston immediately said that the city is on high alert and that security is being beefed up

counterterrorism teams have been now deployed to new york city landmarks and some trucks have been stationed outside of certain certain hotels you know our office is located on the east side of midtown manhattan and in the past few hours i've heard many sirens going back and forth all over the city so clearly this is had a tremendous effect on the way the new york city police department is responding that's not surprising you know the you know this is where the september eleventh attacks took place were this the center of it and those those scars are deep and you don't have to give the new york city police department a huge reason to to beef up security and in response to what some are speculating looks like a terrorist attack in boston the new york city police department is responding full force beefing up security and merino we do know that there's been a lot of confusion obviously and chaos going on in boston there was questions over

whether this was just some type of natural disaster how was this information being disseminated and what it when are we going to find out more. look i have to you know you have to give it some time everybody wants to know everything instantly of course with social media with twenty four hour news but this this is an incident event that is unfolding and the police are trying to investigate and figure out themselves what is taking place they the shut down cells cell phone service there to make sure that no explosives would go off if they haven't even found all of the explosives if you know from from one standpoint and some experts security experts have say this looks like something that was. planned this doesn't look like a man made disaster doesn't look like a manhole cover exploded if you look at this scene looks like a bomb went off and then it looks like it was a coordinated now the police say they found some explosives that that they detonated on their own or they're trying to take apart maybe those are explosives

that were meant to go off and didn't go off you know i am not an investigator i'm not there but this clearly doesn't look like a natural disaster i could see. washington is responding in new york city's responding just underscores how serious of an event this is and of course there are so many that have been injured so many with critical injuries so many that you know are least two that have lost their lives but that number may grow our to correspondent and i i'm sure you're going to be following us please keep us updated with the latest well just six weeks after long time venezuelan ruler chavez passed away voters headed to the polls to elect a new leader this past weekend and what is being described as a razor thin victory java's his hand-picked successor known as moto actually won the election on sunday night meeting opposition leader enrique. ski by fifty point

six percent to forty nine point one percent now do it all begins a six year term and he already has a lot on his plate from the country's energy ventures to its economy r t international correspondent tess are silla has more. the campaign has not been long but neither has it been short on passion well we're here in a district that really has support for the. so-called successor as you can see from all the graffiti here the people really having a very festive attitude and a lot of them selling paraphernalia haley get shot this is really a bastion of chavez a support many people tell me of the kind of benefit that they have gained from fourteen years of having taught us as president talking about education talking about the social mischa's which really is a cornerstone of his popularity and the people here are very enthusiastic about giving their opinion about why they support chavez let's talk to the gentleman over here we have

a lot on. he was chosen by. revolution we can go forward with but we've got. to clear that for many people here who are staunch supporters of chavez a huge part playing here is the loyalty they have. voting for. well over on the other side of the city where here in the district where the main opposition candidate is the governor and expected he has a lot of support here most of the people that you see now on the street here have told me that they have indeed voted for a couple listen when you asked him why they did so the word that really comes so repeatedly from their answers is they want a change or let's talk to one of those who actually voted for this. why did you. vote for a couple years because i think that. he is the only one that give us

a better future i don't know. so as you heard her say actually that opinion is repeated in resonated among the supporters of said they say that they again they want change from after fourteen years of chavez and also it's noticeable that a lot of students and a lot of younger people who are also coming out into districts supporting him and voting for him. a new man is now at the helm and he inherits child this is socialist legacy a country with some of the world's largest oil reserves and also a nation plagued with longstanding problems such as crumbling infrastructure and double digit inflation of which its citizens are all too aware the lack of security skill in us and statistics prove many people have died at night you can't leave your home this is a serious problem. i want change by corruption that's the brahman but that's where the corruption the base of the broader economy. grow old but rolling would have

been it's really the corruption the oil price the high. the government you know. probably it's spending so we are in a lot of that we now know the winner but the narrow victory has left venezuela polarized the new leader to us faces an uphill battle not just to mend the country's economy and improve living standards but also to match up to his charismatic predecessor who casts a very long shadow not just within the country but beyond its borders as well yes or sylvia r.t. . for more i was joined earlier by our to international correspondent tess are cell ashes in caracas venezuela i started off by asking her what venezuelans are waking up to this morning. well right now it's the results of these elections are really being heavily contested by the opposition such

a slim margin less than two percent and kopitar us who is the main opposition he says he's not accepting these results and he's actually calling on his supporters to go out and protest if nothing is done or nothing is change is calling for a recount which nicolas maduro who is who had to lead is this a campaign that had the results he says he's willing to have a recount the final whether they will actually go how far they're going to go if this is going to become a legal battle that we have to yet to see that but this is clearly the opposition is contesting this they are not accepting the results and this election was unexpectedly close as you had mentioned now i have to ask you obviously nicolas maduro was a huge supporter of chavez he said some extremist kind of comments in the past he actually called chavez the son of christ when it comes to the accent of christ on a come to the poor and now it isn't my don't always alexion essentially an

extension of the child as paul says beyond the grave. is that that's actually in part what had helped him when he was running a campaign really where who got chavez was at the core he says he wants to continue this a bully very and revolution and those who had supported model basically were voting for google chavis however that also was something that had turned some voters against him they say that model had does not have his own personality they he is not to go chop is clearly and they don't know if he if he is at the helm he will actually continue the kind of the revolution that chavis was beating so it was a double edged sword for him and clearly the results which appeared to be very very close clearly it showed that this kind of strategy that he had adopted had played both in his favor and against his favor but yes google chavez was a central figure those voters who had voted for mother little or is actually voting for which office and off. as i had mentioned earlier to our viewers while we are waiting to get contact with you well what job has been in power since one thousand

nine hundred nine and he actually as you were saying he talked a lot about chavez in his re-election campaign but i have to ask you chavez is gone now and obviously the u.s. and president obama had a lot of criticisms about chavez is there a possibility that relations will heat up between the u.s. and then a swell and now that john this is gone. yeah that's interesting because of the fourteen years of chavez it was like a cornerstone of this anti imperialism if you will and to u.s. sentiment and let's not forget that under cha this model was a foreign minister and he had had some dialogue with the u.s. state department it was sort of the back door on dialogue and he had signaled that he may be willing to exchange this foreign policy towards the u.s. that has to be to be seen because it could also pose a conflict on those hard core supporters of chavez who who look at dutch office as a legacy as a confrontation with the u.s. so how is he going to manage wanting to improve possibly relations with the u.s.

versus appeasing that base that the base that had remained loyal to him because they were loyal to chavez and his policies and we will have to see in the coming days weeks and years how nicolas maduro actually shapes his policies whether he will follow the best or actually define himself differently r.t. international correspondent tess are still alive from caracas venezuela. well it's become something of a laughing stock among transparency advocates they stop trading congressional a knowledge act better known as a stock act was supposed to clear the way for a more open government when it comes to wall street and the potential of insider trading but critics call the act an invasion of privacy and a threat to national security interests as a result president obama has signed a repeal saying that the data does need to be public but not necessarily on the internet in other words security through obscurity now to talk about this i was joined earlier by author les leopold he wrote the book currently and he just wrote the book about is now on the shelves called how to make

a million dollars an hour and i asked him what's the point of the stock act if we aren't really reaping the benefits of the law well the point is public relations the point is to try to make it seem as if disclosing without disclosing ok so what does it do any more does it do anything other than bolster the reputation and it's hard to argue that it does that even isn't it well we don't disclose it we can't get our hands on it but you know what's really behind this is a much more serious problem. people are supposed to go into public life in order to serve they don't they're not supposed to go into public life in order to make a ton of money so when you think about there's no reason for them to have these complex financial portfolios to be nothing to hide to begin with so i think this is a you know they want to they want to make money you know what's the point left of having it as having this obscurity through secure security through obscurity excuse me i mean it's still available so if it really is

a threat to national security interests then why not close the documents altogether . look they're coming up with excuses to leave the implementation as long as they can and they'll come up with another excuse a year from now when they're supposed to implement it in the year after that because they don't want to disclose it's embarrassing just like it was embarrassing to governor romney in the last election but at the same time we have congressional members that are signing on to this bill this act saying that they don't want this information to be public but it is directly against the congressional members their staffers and arguably the executive branch and the executive branch sarah first so how can we expect them to roll fairly and with no bias on this law when they're the ones that was entering hurt i don't think we can expect them to rule fairly i mean that's one of the problems with the credit credibility in general we have this incredible interlocking network between washington and wall street and other large

corporations as well and that has to be broken up the disclosure laws would help but they don't go nearly far enough they should not be able to amass these fortunes while they're holding public office ok so let's talk about your new book now in your new book it is the millionaires dollars and million dollars in our book you talk about that hedge fund gift and the ways that they not only make business but the business lies in breaking the rules and lying can you explain how how you got to this conclusion in this book well i wanted to figure out i came across a statistic that kind of blew my mind when i found out that the top hedge fund earner made as much in one hour as the average family made in forty seven years one hour equals forty seven years a lot of money that's a lot of money that's very impressive so i want to figure out well one how did they do it to do they really produce an economic value for the society and economy for all for all that money and when i explore those two questions what i found out was

. a lot of what they do is beer. really legal some of it is outright illegal and certainly the rest of us would think that much of what they do is is just an ethical cheating and i started. i just stumbled into one method after the other from insider trading to this high frequency trading to the. manipulation of media feeding you a false rumor so i can make money on the side for my hedge fund and i think we've given them a free ride the reason i wrote this book was to mystify it so that the rest of us could figure out how do these these are the richest of the rich they make one hundred times a thousand times more than c.e.o.'s normal c.e.o.'s make what are they doing how do they do it how does it benefit the economy in the answer is it's dangerous one of the most amazing one i stumbled into was this. they actually design products.

so that they will fail securities are designed to fail so they can collect the insurance money and. no place else in capitalism is that allowed slowly but let me ask you what makes hedge funds unique i mean obviously the financial crisis of two thousand and eight showed that big banks like bank of america citi j.p. morgan chase goldman sachs etc were lying both to regulators as well as to their customers so what makes flying of hedge fund managers really that unique or is it where you're making a good point hedge funds exist also inside of the large financial institutions they call proprietary trading desk but they're basically the same thing what makes them together what makes them incredibly unique is there are unbelievably dangerous to the rest of the economy. the ones that are outside the banks are have very few regulations on them and with they do is basically proprietary so we don't know what

it is they're doing we don't know what markets they're jumping in and out of we don't know how the details of how they could be destabilizing the economy and we don't know until after it happens and i think something's got to be done about it now one of the people that you actually brought up is the n.b.c. host jim cramer he was a hedge fund manager for quite a long amount of time and he talked at length and to the surprise of a lot of people about just what he did when he was managing this fund but to date he is one of the only people that is talking about this so why know how can we find other evidence as to how can we learn to regulate against or prevent this if no one else is talking about it and there's very little evidence. first of all he didn't start talking until ten years after he knew he was the one that was and he basically says you shouldn't be in the business unless you're willing to cheat and he just says that how we are starting to catch some of them based on their insider trading you know they've. wired them up they've got people to quote about seventy

people so far. those things it's very hard to catch them but the way you can connect with our previous conversation you catch them by shining a bright light on them when you shine a bright light on them then we start to ask the basic questions about what whether what they're doing is illegal and some of it is definitely unethical and should be outlawed so that's what the book's about and it is on the bookshelves right now how to make a million dollars an hour less leopold offer thank you so much for joining us thanks for having me. now as we told you there are been two explosions in boston at the finish line of the boston marathon this has caused these to up security around the country including at the white house correspondent liz wahl reports well one thing is clear walking around the city washington d.c. is under heightened security where i'm standing right now on pennsylvania avenue which is the closest that we can get to the white house as you can see there is

yellow caution tape surrounding the perimeter of the white house as you know it is tourist season so usually there are throngs of people throngs of tourists in this area on the pedestrian walk viewing the white house i spoke to a member of the secret service asked him why the execute he said that this is in response to the tragedy that happened today in boston and even just walking around the city you can get a sense i saw members of law enforcement with bomb sniffing dogs so clearly sense of security here now of course we did hear from the white house we know that they are aware of the situation and we know that. the administration is in contact with state and local authorities but from what i understand the extra security is not in response to any direct threat but these are just precautionary measures that are now being taken here in washington liz wall. and that's going to do it for now i make a lopez see you right back here at eight pm.