Daily Archives: June 23, 2017

ST. LOUIS Lawyers involved in the 2016 consent decree between Ferguson and the Justice Department said at a quarterly status hearing in federal court Thursday that they were making progress toward a series of reforms of municipal court and police practices, but almost a dozen citizens who also spoke said they were frustrated and impatient with the extent of that progress.

Amy Senier, a Justice Department lawyer, told U.S. District Judge Catherine Perry, who is overseeing the consent decree, the team had been hard at work. Senier said lawyers were developing a framework for recruiting and retaining a diversified and well-trained police force, for ensuring police accountability and setting guidelines for police use of force. But she said the team still faces challenges, namely the transparency of the process, including a city website that needs improvement.

We believe we are all working together in good faith, she said.

Apollo Carey, Fergusons city attorney, told Perry that since August 2014, the city has waived $1.8 million in fines, dismissed or dropped about 39,000 municipal court cases and signed up 1,381 people to perform community service instead of paying fines.

Carey said the city was still trying to figure out how to reconcile the consent decrees requirements for body cameras and in-car cameras with a voter initiative on the same subject that differs in technical ways.

He said the civilian review board will be going on police ride-alongs and receive training on use of force simulators to aid it in reviewing complaints.

Half of the citizens who spoke at the hearing expressed their frustration with the Neighborhood Policing Steering Committee, established by the consent decree to provide input to police and the city on law enforcement issues.

Speakers said membership had dropped precipitously because of disputes over how the group is to be run. Others questioned the money being spent by the court-appointed monitor of the consent decree, complained of the lack of openness of the process, and bemoaned a series of deadlines that have been missed.

It doesnt sound like a very functional group, Perry said later to a Justice Department lawyer, who said that lawyers would work to make the process more efficient.

One Ferguson resident did praise the efforts.

The consent decree was prompted by protests following the 2014 death of Michael Brown, and a Justice Department investigation that harshly criticized Fergusons police and municipal court.

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Complaints come with some progress on Ferguson consent decree - STLtoday.com

Common Dreams

Welcome to the 'Second Tier': US Failing Big League on Social Progress Common Dreams Released by the Social Progressive Imperative (SPI), the 2017 Global Social Progress Index reveals that the U.S. ranks 17th in the world when it comes to promoting the general welfare, coming in behind its Canadian neighbor to the north and far behind ... The US is 'flatlining' in social progress compared to countries like Canada and GermanyBusiness Insider 2017 Social Progress Index Reveals Actionable Insights for Decision Makers, Social Entrepreneurs, and Engaged ...Skoll Foundation Worldwide decline in personal rights hampers social progress, study showsHumanosphere The NonProfit Times -IcelandReview -TVNZ all 24 news articles »

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Welcome to the 'Second Tier': US Failing Big League on Social Progress - Common Dreams

In the two years since the Veterans Affairs Department announced its goal of closing all cybersecurity material weaknesses, the effortsdetailed in the latest audit report from the agencys inspector general seem to be making a difference.

While VA fell short of its ultimate objective of cybersecurity not being a material weakness in 2017the 18th year in a row auditors rated it that way the Office of Information and Technology (OI&T) said in its response to the IGs Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) report to Congress that it has made significant progress across all 33 recommendations, and is asking the IG to close 18 of them.

For example, the IG says VA continued to struggle with ensuring systems had an up-to-date authority to operate (ATO).

Specifically, process deficiencies allowed certain system authorizations to operate to expire and allowed other systems to be reauthorized by an official without the proper authority, the IG stated.

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But VAs chief information officers office says its Enterprise Cybersecurity Strategy Team (ECST) has updated its processes and is nowusing the ongoing authorizations approach as required by the Office of Management and Budget in the Circular A-130 update issued last fall.

By the end of calendar year 2016, systems requiring an ATO were updated to reflect the new AO, OI&Ts response stated. Updated assessment and authorization (A&A) policy and process to redefine roles and responsibilities of VAs authorizing officials (AO), and AO procedures, which will allow for oversight of systems throughout their full lifecycle. Office of Cyber Security Policy and Compliance (OCSPC) conducts routine, regularly scheduled briefings with the AO prior to issuance of ATOs on systems within their purview.

The system authorization process has been a problem at VA for some time. Back in 2013, former VA chief information security officer Jerry Davis claimed VA was rubber stamping ATOs in order to get them completed before they expired.

After several congressional hearings and the turnover of the CIO, VAs new leadership promised to fix the long-standing cyber problems. Former VA CIO Laverne Council said when she took over the role in 2015 that her intention was to get rid of the more than two dozen cyber weaknesses over the next two years.

She created a cyber strategy, the ECST and eight domains to address the biggest problem areas.

The cyber team is playing a major role in nearly every initiative to close the IGs recommendations.

Deputy Inspector General Linda Halliday said in an email to Federal News Radio that her office will continue to review VAs progress in improving its cyber posture.

When the OIG receives evidence of appropriate corrective action, we will generally close that recommendation, Halliday said. As VA provides documentation to support the corrective actions taken on any recommendation, we will review it and make the determination on whether we can close that recommendation. Further, we continue to assess VAs progress in implementing corrective actions and their ability to sustain improvements impacting VA information security posture during our annual FISMA review in the following year.

One area where VA says it has made progress has been a long-time challenge around password management.

Over the past two years, the ECST has implemented technology to enforce password policies, mandated the use of smart identity cards and initiated single sign-on capabilities.

VA has enhanced password monitoring policies via credentialed, predictive scans and remediation processes on OI&T systems. Routine system scans are completed by the Network and Security Operations Center (NSOC). Enterprise Discovery Scans (EDS) are conducted on a quarterly basis to detect password vulnerabilities across the enterprise, OI&T told auditors. In order to improve organizationwide availability of security data, VA has enhanced the reporting of scan results and has published results with historical data on the Nessus Enterprise Web Tool (NEWT). VA is using NEWT dashboards to monitor password vulnerabilities and show trends based on the results of EDS scans. Scan results are shared with users in the enterprise who have been granted access to NEWT.

Another major problem the IG pointed out was the lack of visibility into their networks and therefore failure to identify numerous high-risk security incidents, including malware infections that were not remediated in a timely manner. Specifically, we noted these issues at three major data centers and two VA medical centers.

The CIOs office said it expects to complete the national deployment of an enterprisewide security incident and event management toolby June 30.

VAs OI&T said it is currently receiving logs from across the enterprise to include centralized logging from devices owned and managed by field operations to include Windows and Linux servers, and network infrastructure devices (routers/switches). Other log sources such as domain controllers, Domain Name Services (DNS), and ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) systems are now also included in the centralized logging repository, which helps to enrich the data lake and enhance data available for event monitoring, correlation processes and incident response. Currently, only failed logon events are being collected for infrastructure devices.

VA OI&T also expects to complete a related effort by June 30 to track and make sure patches and vulnerabilities are closed in a timely manner.

VA has an enterprise-wide scanning program performed by the NSOC on a scheduled and ad-hoc basis (when needed or requested). Results of the scans are rolled into NEWT for analysis and reporting. The analysis tool provides an enterprise view to the terminal device level (specific Internet Protocol), the offices response stated. NEWT coverage has been expanded to include Cisco and Red Hat Enterprise Linux scan results as well as trending and historical remediation efforts. VA implemented DbProtect, a database scanning tool, to gain enterprise level access and insight to the many databases that exist in the organization.

VA told the IG it expects to close eight of the remaining recommendations no later than Sept. 30 and then five more by Dec. 31.

Read more from the original source:

VA fails cyber audit for 18th straight year, but progress is evident - FederalNewsRadio.com

The death of the rap artist Prodigy (Albert Johnson, half of the duo Mobb Deep) at only 42 this week, after a lifetime of suffering from sickle cell disease, was a reminder of the devastating cost of the sometimes fatal genetic disorder and of the failure to cure it.

It has been 61 years since the discovery of the mutation responsible for sickle cell, which affects about 100,000 people in the U.S., and 30 years since scientists found a compensatory mutation one that keeps people from developing sickle cell despite inheriting the mutant genes.

Last year, when STAT examined the lack of progress, scientists and hospital officials were frank about one reason for it: Other genetic disorders, notably cystic fibrosis, attracted piles of money that led to cures, but sickle cell strikes the wrong kind of people, including African-Americans, and so has historically been starved for funds.

The genetic mutation that causes sickle cell allows red blood cells to cramp up in a way that impedes their flow through blood vessels. Those who have the condition can suffer anemia, infections, fatal organ failure, tissue damage, strokes, and intense pain.

In healthy people, blood cells are round and flexible. But in people with sickle cell disease, blood cells are deformed and cause a range of health problems. Video by Hyacinth Empinado/STAT

In the last 12 months, there have been glimmers of progress against the disease. There are huge numbers of drug companies finally putting money into this, said Dr. Mitchell Weiss, chairman of hematology at St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital, who is developing a genome-editing approach, using CRISPR-Cas9, to cure sickle cell. As for the National Institutes of Health, the chief funder of basic biomedical research, I wouldnt say NIH is showering [sickle cell research] with money, but theyre trying to help.

READ MORE: Weve known for 50 years what causes sickle cell disease. Wheres the cure?

CRISPR, by making genome-editing easier than ever, is responsible for much of the hope surrounding sickle cell.

On Friday, at a meeting of the European Hematology Association in Madrid, scientists at CRISPR Therapeutics and their academic collaborators will present preliminary results of a study using it to create the compensatory mechanism that protects some sickle cell patients. Basically, that mechanism keeps the body producing fetal hemoglobin, which ordinarily vanishes soon after birth. But even in sickle cell patients, fetal hemoglobin is normal rather than deformed like adult hemoglobin. Scientists have identified several genetic routes to keeping fetal hemoglobin turned on, and even to turning it on again after the body has turned it off in infancy.

CRISPR Therapeutics does not reveal which gene it targeted, but the results were promising. Starting with blood-forming cells from both healthy volunteers and sickle cell patients, it created CRISPR-Cas9 molecules targeting regions of DNA involved in the fetal-to-adult hemoglobin switch. An impressive 85 percent of cells were successfully edited, which kept fetal hemoglobin production humming. Result: Scientists re-created genetic variants linked to high [fetal hemoglobin] levels in blood-forming cells from both healthy donors and those with sickle cell, the company said in a summary of the study. It compared how well different DNA edits increased production of fetal hemoglobin in red blood cells in lab dishes, getting 25 percent to 45 percent in the cells taken from six sickle cell patients.

The scientists then put the edited cells into lab mice, finding that they homed in on the bone marrow, as they would have to do in a patient to effect a cure. They also measured what are called off-target effects, or edits of genes that werent intended, and found none at the more than 5,000 sites deemed most likely to have them.

CRISPR Therapeutics said it had used several editing strategies to turn on production of fetal hemoglobin, underlining the accelerating progress in taking that approach to develop a cure. Weiss, for instance, is trying to turn on fetal hemoglobin by tapping into the very complicated genetics of fetal hemoglobin.

Cells have molecules that act like Victorian lamplighters: They roam the genome, turning genes on and off. One such lamplighter (in biology-speak, a transcription factor) is called BCL11A; it turns off production of fetal hemoglobin. Weiss is not targeting BCL11A itself (other scientists are considering that); rather, he is using CRISPR to disrupt where BCL11A lands. Just as a lamplighter cant turn off a light he cant reach, so BCL11A cant turn off a gene it cant reach. Expected result: Fetal hemoglobin stays on and patients have enough healthy hemoglobin to compensate for the sickled kind.

READ MORE: One boys cure raises hopes and questions about gene therapy for sickle cell disease

After making progress with this approach editing cells in lab dishes, Weiss said, he and his colleagues hope to launch a clinical trial in three to four years, using money raised by St. Jude but, so far, they have no commercial partner. At Boston Childrens Hospital, Dr. David Williams said he hopes to open his clinical trial, also using gene therapy to target sickle cell, this summer, and is just waiting on final safety testing of the virus that will be used to deliver the therapy.

An even more basic approach to curing sickle cell targets the causative mutation directly. The most encouraging human data so far have come from a genetic therapy being tested by Cambridge, Mass.-based Bluebird Bio. In March, the company reported that a boy who received the gene therapy in October 2014, when he was 13, had been able to stop taking medication that helps alleviate symptoms and has not needed to be hospitalized with a sickle cell crisis (as Prodigy was in the days before he died). Nor has he suffered the crushing pain or bone and tissue damage that results from the inability of sickled blood cells to carry oxygen.

Bluebird uses viruses to carry the healthy hemoglobin gene into blood-making bone marrow cells taken from patients, which is the original form of gene therapy. If healthy genes insert into the DNA of enough cells, which are infused back into the patient, the marrow makes enough healthy blood cells to cure sickle cell.

With the sudden surge of activity, said Dr. Charles Abrams of the University of Pennsylvania and past president of the American Society of Hematology, people say were within 10 years of reaching the goal of a cure, and maybe less.

This article is reproduced with permission from STAT. It was first published on June 21, 2017. Find the original story here.

See more here:

Prodigy's death shines light on slow progress against sickle cell ... - PBS NewsHour

French Guiana

Arianespace is the French company that fires off huge rocket ships blasting great big things so far up into the sky that they dont come down again. Or, to put it in bland corporate language, Arianespace is the worlds leading commercial satellite launch provider.

And the corporation provided me with an excellent satellite launch. I was invited by my friend Aaron Lewis, Arianespaces director of media and government relations and former staffer for congressman Dana Rohrabacher, longtime chair of the House space and aeronautics subcommittee.

Aaron and Iand about 70 engineers, scientists, and executives involved with the rocket and its payloadflew to the Centre Spatial Guyanais, the European spaceport in French Guiana.

At 10 p.m. we went to an elevated viewing platform five kilometers from the launchpad, deep in a cinematically perfect jungle complete with strange bird calls and thick hanging vines. Of course this is French jungle. Me Tarzan. Toi joli femme de serveuse avec le plat de hors doeuvres de foie gras et caviar.

In the distance, brightly spotlit and towering over the triple canopy rainforest was the massive Ariane 5 launch vehicle. The Ariane 5 is a full stack, as rocketeers say. It has a main stage, upper stage, and payload capsule standing nearly 180 feet high, as tall as a 20-story building. This is flanked by a pair of 102-foot solid fuel boosters. The whole thing weighs 1,720,000 pounds (in case you were thinking of getting an Ariane 5 for use around the house).

The countdown began, naturellement in French, dix . . . neuf . . . huit . . . sept . . . six . . . cinq . . . quatre . . .

An earth-bound cumulus cloud enveloped the launchpad. Huge hoses were spraying the rocket engines to dampen the convulsive vibration of lift-off and protect the payload contents from the spacequake of almost three million pounds of rocket thrust.

And then . . .

Ill bet I was the only person on the viewing platform thinking about Adam Smith.

Here, with the Ariane 5, was progress incarnate. Progress is impossible without the three elemental human activities identified by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations: pursuit of self-interest, division of labor, and trade. Therefore progress cannot be made except through the exercise of market freedoms.

The market freedoms may be exercised imperfectly, like my own exercise program. But the triathlon of capitalism must be run, swum, and cycled in some way, shape, or form. Otherwise progress comes to a halt. Venezuela. Cuba. North Korea. Q.E.D.

Arianespace pursues self-interest. It may have gotten its startup funding with French government and European Space Agency money, but its no NASA. Arianespace was always intended to make money, and it does. More than half of the commercial satellites in orbit today were put there by Arianespaces rockets.

Those rocketsthe light-payload Vega, the medium-payload Soyuz (a hot-rod version of the Russian launch vehicle), and the heavy-payload Ariane 5are division of labor perfectly exemplified. An individual could not build a rocket like these, no matter what his wealth or how much time he was allotted.

Hed have to be three Pythagoreans of a mathematician and a hundred kinds of engineer, a physicist-on-wheels faster than those of Stephen Hawking, the sort of computer whiz whod make Bill Gates call tech support, an electrician, a metallurgist, a welder, a bomb disposal squad (that being what a rocket at blast-off is really doing), and own a very long ladder and be able to count down from ten to one (in French).

As for trade, the launch was a business deal putting two privately owned communications satellites in orbit, one from the American company ViaSat and one from its European competitor Eutelsat. The deal was made by Arianespace in cooperation with its principal rocket-building contractor Airbus and Airbuss rival Boeing, which manufactured Viasats satellite. The invisible hand of the marketplace doesnt get much more unseen than what I was looking at.

Progress is made in an amazing fashion. But the Smithian principles behind progress seem to be, currently, unfashionable.

Pursuit of self-interest is tweeted away in the White House.

Division of labor remains an undifferentiated muddle in Congress. There are 500-some key presidential appointments that need Senate confirmation. As of June 21, 43 appointees had been confirmed.

And opposition to freedom of trade is hot in the Oval Office and the House of Representatives and bothered in the Senate.

Democrats are no better. Theyre pursuing self-interest by running off the lemming cliff of leftism, failing to divvy up labor while they all do the same thingshriek at Trumpand showing furious opposition to market liberties. Charles Murray was chased off the campus of Middlebury College when he attempted to engage in some free trade in ideas.

Progress itself is out of vogue. The food Luddites urge us to eat the locally sourced, organic, pesticide-lacking, GMO-free diet of our ancestors, who had average lifespans of well over 30 years.

Modern transport is rejected in favor of the primitive bicycle. Mature adults wearing Lycra cycling shorts are as barbaric in appearance as naked early Britons painted with woad.

Medical advances are renounced as the public consults the witch doctors of health care insurance instead of the M.D.s of health care treatment.

A regression to nave child-like thinking marks the concern with animal rights. Animals will have rights when animals have responsibilities. Ill quit shooting birds when birds feel obliged to clean the hood of my car that theyve soiled. And not exploiting animals means letting animals exploit us, as snacks perhapsthe kind the saber-toothed tigers of yore enjoyed.

Due to reactionary hysteria about the invention that did the most to advance civilizationthe gunId be severely restricted in my ability to defend myself against a saber-toothed tiger trying to eat me. As it is, in some state and local jurisdictions, gun use is already so limited by law that Id have to hunt deer by reasoning with them or using kung fu.

And alternative sources of energy mean a reversion to the kind of wind power that allowed Ferdinand Magellan to sail around the world in a mere three years. While solar power rebuffs every progressive human accomplishment since Homo erectus discovered how to make fire 600,000 years ago.

The very word progressive has been stolen by the savage pagan horde of speech thieves who previously made away with liberal, climate, privilege, gender, inclusion, safe space, and the trigger warning I was going to give the saber-toothed tiger.

I blame this lack of progressor this lack of interest in making any progresson progress having become boring.

Of course progress wasnt boring for me at the moment, with the Ariane 5 about to lift off. But I was in an exceptional situation.

Looking around at the unexceptional situations of modern daily life, progress appears to be tedious indeed.

With what excitement and anticipation did people once say, Theres a machine for that.

With what apathy and indifference do people now say, Theres an app for that.

Imagine a person from even 15 years ago being told that what the future holds is humanity looking at its phone all day.

Here are our contemporary great leaps forward:

The Internet so filled with cinders and slag that searching for information there is as much fun as sifting through the ashes of the Great Library of Alexandria.

GPS giving us directions in the manner of a New Hampshire Yankee farmer leaning on a fence rail and chewing a blade of hay. Go on down to where old Maude Frick used to live and then turn right at the place where the barn burned down in 1958.

Uber. If Taxi Driver gets remade it wont star Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster, it will star Elizabeth Warren in a driverless car.

Driverless cars. Whats next, eaterless meals?

We have the means to binge-watch TV, which, speaking of eaterless meals, is as delightful as our having the means to binge-eat kale.

While wearing earbuds. Theyre a sort of reverse hearing aid that block out anything worth listening to. The millennial generations motto is Huh?

You can hear millennials proclaim their slogan in the proliferation of artisanal coffee shops (although what I really need is a bar) that have replaced brick-and-mortar retail establishments because of Amazon.

Amazon has transformed shopping from a pleasurable excursion and happy social interaction into something more like going into the outhouse with a Sears catalogue to browse and use as Charmin.

Amazon also takes all the sharp, eye-for-a-bargain intelligence out of shopping. But thats okay because we dont need real intelligence. We have artificial intelligenceeverywhere.

My toaster has a brain. What a way to kick off a gloomy Monday morningbeing outsmarted by a toaster.

Then I go to work in an office cubicle rather than an office. Instead of hanging out at the water cooler gossiping, flirting with co-workers, and making sports bets, Im overwhelmed by big data flooding my personal communication devices.

And I go home, exhausted, to a smart house. It was bad enough when the house contained nothing more than kids who were getting smart with me; now theyve got the thermostat, the burglar alarm, and the toaster on their side.

Heres a statistic: In a recent survey the Pew Research Center found that 43 percent of American millennials have a positive opinion of socialism. Only 14 percent of Americans over 65 harbor such a view. But if the progress weve seen lately is what passes for progress, who can blame the kids?

Ican remember when progress was exciting. My whole family would drive out to the airport just to see jet planes take off and land. Id get up at 6 a.m. on weekends to watch the test pattern on our new TV, followed by the farm report and Mass for Shut-Ins. Skyscrapers had observation decks on their top floors, not Russian billionaires. The introduction of next years new car models was practically a national holiday. H-bombs made for glorious mushroom clouds and fun fallout shelters in which to play post office with the neighborhood girls. Sputnik produced an excitement so strong that it led to bizarre behavior. Fourth-grade boys applied themselves to multiplication tables and long divisionso besotted were we with the wonders of science. And men landed on the moon. I was a hippie in 1969 and had spent most of the past two years in outer space. But I was riveted by the Apollo 11 news coverage nonetheless.

Even prosaic aspects of progress were exciting. The glass door on the electric dryer put on a good show for a boy used to struggling to keep wet bedsheets out of the dog doo and grass clippings as he hung them on the backyard clothesline. It was all good, including the pain progress brings. A polio shot was a small price to pay for getting an infantile paralysis-panicked mom to finally let me go to the municipal swimming pool and sip from a public drinking fountain.

If we want to avoid a future full of socialists, progressives, Birkenstock-wearing women in pink pussyhats, black-clad men in Guy Fawkes masks, gender-neutral shouters of Resistance!, vegans, PETA members, Middlebury College alums, and other pests who will be starving and begging in what used to be a marketplace but has become an Occupied camp . . .

If we want to avoid all that, we must make progress exciting again. We need a Big Bang theory of capitalism.

And that was what I was getting, not in theory but in fact, from Ariane 5. Trois . . . deux . . . un . . .

And there was light, The light of the world, or as close as mortals can do to radiate it. Vast luminosity reflected from the low cloud cover over French Guiana and night was made day.

I could have read print so small that it would have made for a Moby-Dick pocket edition.

The Ariane seemed still for a moment, like a mother phoenix brooding over her nest of fire. Then the 2,935,000 pounds of thrust took hold. The jungle was perfectly silent for 4.1 seconds, the time it took the sound waves to reach us.

When they did it was like nothing Ive ever listened to before. The uproar was not so much loud as deep, a swelling, a surging, a rolling more felt than heard. Sound waves are waves. It was a pounding surf of a noise.

The Ariane streaked toward orbit atop an arch of brazen fire supporting the firmament.

But, as Melville said in Moby-Dick, There is no steady unretracing progress in this life. And we wouldnt call the time we live in the Age of Irony if it lacked the ironic. The progress produced by the communication satellites atop the Ariane 5 is broadband WiFi connections for luxury cruise ships.

P.J. ORourke is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.

Excerpt from:

Make Progress Exciting Again - The Weekly Standard