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Daily Archives: July 18, 2017
Snip, snip, curecorrecting defects in the genetic blueprint – Phys.Org
Posted: July 18, 2017 at 3:44 am
July 17, 2017 Credit: The District
Gene editing using 'molecular scissors' that snip out and replace faulty DNA could provide an almost unimaginable future for some patients: a complete cure. Cambridge researchers are working towards making the technology cheap and safe, as well as examining the ethical and legal issues surrounding one of the most exciting medical advances of recent times.
Dr James Thaventhiran points to a diagram of a 14-year-old boy's family tree. Some of the symbols are shaded black.
"These family members have a very severe form of immunodeficiency. The children get infections and chest problems, the adults have bowel problems, and the father died from cancer during the study. The boy himself had a donor bone marrow transplant when he was a teenager, but he remains very unwell, with limited treatment options."
To understand the cause of the immunodeficiency, Thaventhiran, a clinical immunologist in Cambridge's Department of Medicine, has been working with colleagues at the Great Northern Children's Hospital in Newcastle, where the family is being treated.
Theirs is a rare disease, which means the condition affects fewer than 1 in 2,000 people. Most rare diseases are caused by a defect in the genetic blueprint that carries the instruction manual for life. Sometimes the mistake can be as small as a single letter in the three billion letters that make up the genome, yet it can have devastating consequences.
When Thaventhiran and colleagues carried out whole genome sequencing on the boy's DNA, they discovered a defect that could explain the immunodeficiency. "We believe that just one wrong letter causes a malfunction in an immune cell called a dendritic cell, which is needed to detect infections and cancerous cells."
Now, hope for an eventual cure for family members affected by the faulty gene is taking shape in the form of 'molecular scissors' called CRISPR-Cas9. Discovered in bacteria, the CRISPR-Cas9 system is part of the armoury that bacteria use to protect themselves from the harmful effects of viruses. Today it is being co-opted by scientists worldwide as a way of removing and replacing gene defects.
One part of the CRISPR-Cas9 system acts like a GPS locator that can be programmed to go to an exact place in the genome. The other part the 'molecular scissors' cuts both strands of the faulty DNA and replaces it with DNA that doesn't have the defect.
The video will load shortly
"It's like rewriting DNA with precision," explains Dr Alasdair Russell. "Unlike other forms of gene therapy, in which cells are given a new working gene but without being able to direct where it ends up in the genome, this technology changes just the faulty gene. It's precise and it's 'scarless' in that no evidence of the therapy is left within the repaired genome."
Russell heads up a specialised team in the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute to provide a centralised hub for state-of-the-art genome-editing technologies.
"By concentrating skills in one area, it means scientists in different labs don't reinvent the wheel each time and can keep pace with the field," he explains. "At full capacity, we aim to be capable of running up to 30 gene-editing projects in parallel.
"What I find amazing about the technology is that it's tearing down traditional barriers between different disciplines, allowing us to collaborate with clinicians, synthetic biologists, physicists, engineers, computational analysts and industry, on a global scale. The technology gives you the opportunity to innovate, rather than imitate. I tell my wife I sometimes feel like Q in James Bond and she laughs."
Russell's team is using the technology both to understand disease and to treat it. Together with Cambridge spin-out DefiniGEN, they are rewriting the DNA of a very special type of cell called an induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC). These are cells that are taken from the skin of a patient and 'reprogrammed' to act like one of the body's stem cells, which have the capacity to develop into almost any other cell of the body.
In this case, they are turning the boy's skin cells into iPSCs, using CRISPR-Cas9 to correct the defect, and then allowing these corrected cells to develop into the cell type that is affected by the disease the dendritic cell. "It's a patient-specific model of the cure in a Petri dish," says Russell.
The boy's family members are among a handful of patients worldwide who are reported to have the same condition and among around 3,500 in the UK who have similar types of immunodeficiency caused by other gene defects. With such a rare group of diseases, explains Thaventhiran, it's important to locate other patients to increase the chance of understanding what happens and how to treat it.
He and Professor Ken Smith in the Department of Medicine lead a programme to find, sequence, research and provide diagnostic services to these patients. So far, 2,000 patients (around 60% of the total affected in the UK) have been recruited, making it the largest worldwide cohort of patients with primary immunodeficiency.
The video will load shortly
"We've now made 12 iPSC lines from different patients with immunodeficiency," adds Thaventhiran, who has started a programme for gene editing all of the lines. "This means that for the first time we'll be able to investigate whether correcting the mutation corrects the defect it'll open up new avenues of research into the mechanisms underlying these diseases."
But it's the possibility of using the gene-edited cells to cure patients that excites Thaventhiran and Russell. They explain that one option might be to give a patient repeated treatments of their own gene-edited iPSCs. Another would be to take the patient's blood stem cells, edit them and then return them to the patient.
The researchers are quick to point out that although the technologies are converging on this possibility of truly personalised medicine, there are still many issues to consider in the fields of ethics, regulation and law.
Dr Kathy Liddell, who leads the Cambridge Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences, agrees: "It's easy to see the appeal of using gene editing to help patients with serious illnesses. However, new techniques could be used for many purposes, some of which are contentious. For example, the same technique that edits a disease in a child could be applied to an embryo to stop a disease being inherited, or to 'design' babies. This raises concerns about eugenics.
"The challenge is to find systems of governance that facilitate important purposes, while limiting, and preferably preventing, unethical purposes. It's actually very difficult. Rules not only have to be designed, but implemented and enforced. Meanwhile, powerful social drivers push hard against ethical boundaries, and scientific information and ideas travel easily often too easily across national borders to unregulated states."
A further challenge is the business case for carrying out these types of treatments, which are potentially curative but are costly and benefit few patients. One reason why rare diseases are also known as orphan diseases is because in the past they have rarely been adopted by drug companies.
Liddell adds: "CRISPR-Cas9 patent wars are just warming up, demonstrating some of the economic issues at stake. Two US institutions are vigorously prosecuting their own patents, and trying to overturn the others. There will also be cross-licensing battles to follow."
"The obvious place to start is by correcting diseases caused by just one gene; however, the technology allows us to scale up to several genes, making it something that could benefit many, many different diseases," adds Russell. "At the moment, the field as a whole is focused on ensuring the technology is safe before it moves into the clinic. But the advantage of it being cheap, precise and scalable should make CRISPR attractive to industry."
In ten years or so, speculates Russell, we might see bedside 'CRISPR on a chip' devices that screen for mutations and 'edit on the fly'. "I'm really excited by the frontierness of it all," says Russell. "We feel that we're right on the precipice of a new personalised medical future."
Explore further: Testing the efficacy of new gene therapies more efficiently
Using a new cellular model, innovative gene therapy approaches for the hereditary immunodeficiency Chronic Granulomatous Disease can be tested faster and cost-effectively in the lab for their efficacy. A team of researchers ...
Scientists have developed a new approach to repair a defective gene in blood-forming stem cells from patients with a rare genetic immunodeficiency disorder called X-linked chronic granulomatous disease (X-CGD). After transplant ...
Researchers at Queen's University have published new findings, providing a proof-of-concept use of genetic editing tools to treat genetic diseases. The study, published in Nature Scientific Reports, offers an important first ...
A team from the Center for Genome Engineering, within the Institute for Basic Research (IBS), succeeded in editing two genes that contribute to the fat contents of soybean oil using the new CRISPR-Cpf1 technology: an alternative ...
In recent years, science and the media have been buzzing with the term CRISPR. From speculation around reviving the woolly mammoth to promises of distant cures for cancer, the unproven potential for this genome editing tool ...
Researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) have harnessed the power of CRISPR/Cas9 to create more-potent chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells that enhance tumor rejection in mice. The unexpected findings, ...
Large tubeworms living in the cold depths of the Gulf of Mexico may be among the longest living animals in the world. This is revealed in a study in Springer's journal The Science of Nature. According to lead author Alanna ...
Scientists at the University of Washington have discovered a simple way to raise the accuracy of diagnostic tests for medicine and common assays for laboratory research. By adding polydopaminea material that was first ...
It's not quite E=mc2, but scientists unveiled Monday a simple, powerful formula that explains why some animals run, fly and swim faster than all others.
The red algae called Porphyra and its ancestors have thrived for millions of years in the harsh habitat of the intertidal zoneexposed to fluctuating temperatures, high UV radiation, severe salt stress, and desiccation.
Invasive plant species can be a source of valuable ecosystem functions where native coastal habitats such as salt marshes and oyster reefs have severely declined, a new study by scientists at Duke University and the University ...
In zebra finches, sperm velocity and morphology and hence reproductive success strongly depend on a specific mutation (an inversion) on one of the sex chromosomes, called Z. This was discovered by scientists of the Max Planck ...
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Snip, snip, curecorrecting defects in the genetic blueprint - Phys.Org
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Newly identified genetic marker may help detect high-risk flu patients – Medical Xpress
Posted: at 3:44 am
July 17, 2017 First author Kaity Sliger, PhD, and corresponding author Paul Thomas, PhD, member of the Department of Immunology, examine liquid nitrogen samples. Credit: Peter Barta / St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
Researchers have discovered an inherited genetic variation that may help identify patients at elevated risk for severe, potentially fatal influenza infections. The scientists have also linked the gene variant to a mechanism that explains the elevated risk and offers clues about the broader anti-viral immune response.
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital led the research, which appears as an advance, online publication today in the scientific journal Nature Medicine.
Researchers screened 393 flu patients ranging from infants to 70 years old. Patients with a particular inherited variation in the gene IFITM3 were more than twice as likely to develop severe, life-threatening flu symptoms as those who carried the protective version of the gene.
Working at the molecular level, the investigators showed how expression of the IFITM3 protein was reduced in killer T cells of patients with the high-risk variant compared to other patients. Researchers also found more killer T cellswhich help patients fight the infectionin the upper airways of flu patients with the protective variant compared to other patients.
"A genetic marker of flu risk could make a life-saving difference, particularly during severe flu outbreaks, by helping prioritize high-risk patients for vaccination, drug therapy and other interventions," said corresponding author Paul Thomas, Ph.D., an associate member of the St. Jude Department of Immunology. "These results raise hopes that this newly identified IFITM3 variant might provide such a marker."
Estimated U.S. flu-related deaths in recent years have ranged from 12,000 to 56,000, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Factors like age, obesity, pregnancy and such chronic health conditions as asthma, chronic lung disease and heart disease are associated with an elevated risk of flu complications and death. However, there are no proven genetic markers of flu risk with an established mechanism of action.
IFITM3 is an anti-viral protein that helps to block flu infection of lung cells and to promote survival of the killer T cells that help clear flu infection in the airways. Previous research from other scientists had reported an association between another IFITM3 variant (rs12252) and flu severity in Han Chinese patients. The underlying mechanism has remained unclear, and the rs12252 variant is rare in individuals of European ancestry.
Thomas and his colleagues began this study by searching for other possible IFITM3 variants that correlated with gene expression, levels of the IFITM3 proteins and were common in flu patients in the U.S. The search led to an IFITM3 variant known as rs34481144.
Researchers screened three different groups of U.S. flu patients and found those with the high-risk version of IFITM3 rs34481144 were likely to become infected with flu more rapidly and to develop more severe symptoms than those with another variant. For example, researchers checked 86 children and adults in Memphis with confirmed flu infections and found two-thirds of patients with the most severe symptoms carried at least one copy of the newly identified high-risk IFITM3 variant. The high-risk variant was found in just 32 percent of patients with milder symptoms.
Researchers also found an association between the newly identified high-risk variant and severe and fatal flu infections in 265 critically ill pediatric flu patients hospitalized in one of 31 intensive care units nationwide. The patients did not have health problems that put them at high risk for severe flu. Of the 17 patients in this group who died from the infection, 14 carried at least one copy of the newly identified high-risk variant. "When we looked at patients of European descent who died, they all carried at least one copy of the high-risk variant," Thomas said.
The predictive value of the newly identified IFITM3 variant is now being studied in flu patients in other countries.
The newly identified variation is found in the region of IFITM3 involved in regulation of gene expression through the binding of proteins and other chemicals that promote or suppress gene activity. Working in the laboratory, researchers showed how binding of proteins like CTCF, which can suppress gene activity, differed between the high-risk and protective variants.
Further study revealed how binding differed between the high-risk and protective variants. Those differences led to lower levels of the IFITM3 protein in ndividuals with two copies of the high-risk gene variant compared to other patients, researchers said. The Memphis flu patients also had fewer of the killer T cells in their upper airways.
"While this research focused on flu infections, the mechanism we identified has implications for regulating many genes involved in anti-viral activity," Thomas said. "CTCF has gained prominence in recent years as a master regulator of genomic organization. Evidence in this study suggests the high-risk variant we identified may be part of a larger network of CTCF binding sites involved in regulation in other genes with anti-viral activity."
Explore further: Genetic variant linked to overactive inflammatory response
More information: E Kaitlynn Allen et al, SNP-mediated disruption of CTCF binding at the IFITM3 promoter is associated with risk of severe influenza in humans, Nature Medicine (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nm.4370
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Newly identified genetic marker may help detect high-risk flu patients - Medical Xpress
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Circadian Rhythm Algorithm Could Lead to More Effective Dosing for Many Existing Drugs – Sleep Review
Posted: at 3:44 am
Circadian rhythm is reflected in human behavior and in the molecular workings of our cells. Now scientists from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a powerful tool for detecting and characterizing those molecular rhythmsa tool that could have many new medical applications, such as more accurate dosing for existing medications.
The tool is a machine learning-type algorithm called CYCLOPS that can sift through existing data on gene activity in human tissue samples to identify genes whose activity varies with a daily rhythm. (The acronym CYCLOPS stands for CYCLic Ordering by Periodic Structure.)
We can take advantage of that information potentially in many ways, for example to find times when it is easier to detect cancers and other diseases, and also to improve the dosing of many existing drugs by changing the time of day they are given, says lead author Ron C. Anafi, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of sleep medicine, in a release.
Described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, CYCLOPS at least partly overcomes what has been one of the major obstacles to studying circadian rhythms in humans.
Its just impractical and dangerous to take tissue samples from an individual around the clock to see how gene activity in a particular cell type varies, Anafi says.
CYCLOPS instead is meant to use the enormous amount of existing data on gene activity in different human tissues and cellsdata obtained from people at biopsies and autopsies, in scientific as well as medical settings.
Such data almost never includes the time of day when tissue samples were taken. But CYCLOPS doesnt need to know sampling times. If the dataset is large enough, it can detect any strong 24-hour pattern in the activity level of a given gene, and can then assign a likely clock time to each measurement in the dataset.
In an initial demonstration, Anafi and colleagues used CYCLOPS to analyze a dataset on gene activity levels in mouse liver cellsa dataset for which sampling times were available. The algorithm was able to put data on cycling genes into the correct clock-time sequence even though it had no access to actual sampling times.
The algorithm performed best when restricting its analysis to genes whose activity is known to cycle in most mouse tissuesand under this condition it was able to correctly order samples for all mouse tissues. Focusing on human genes that are related to strongly cycling mouse genes, CYCLOPS also was able to correctly order samples taken from human brains at autopsy. It effectively provided an independent, accurate prediction of the time of death, Anafi says.
Next the researchers used CYCLOPS to generate new scientific data on human molecular rhythms. In a first-ever analysis of human lung and liver tissue, the algorithm revealed the strongly cyclic activity in thousands of lung-cell and liver-cell genes. These included hundreds of drug targets and disease genes.
For many of these genes, the daily variability in activity turned out to be larger than the variability due to all other environmental and genetic factors, says study co-author John Hogenesch, a former professor of Pharmacology at Penn Medicine now at the Cincinnati Childrens Hospital Medical Center.
Underscoring the potential medical relevance of this research, CYCLOPS found strong cycling in several genes whose protein products are targeted by common drugs. In one case, CYCLOPS detected a strong circadian-type rhythm in the activity of the gene for angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE), a protein in lung vessels that is targeted by blood pressure-lowering drugs. Prior studies have found that ACE inhibitor drugs appear to work better at controlling blood pressure when given at night. Our discovery of daily cycling in the ACE gene could explain those findings, Anafi says.
He and his colleagues applied CYCLOPS to liver cell gene activity data, and again found many genes with strong circadian rhythms. Comparing normal liver tissue samples with those from primary liver cancers, they found that about 15% of the normally cycling genes they identified lost their rhythmic activity in the cancerous cellswhich suggests that there are times of day when cancer cells can be more readily targeted while avoiding injury to normal tissue.
One of the strongly cycling genes CYCLOPS detected in liver cells was SLC2A2, which encodes a glucose transporting protein, GLUT2. The pancreatic cancer drug streptozocin interacts with GLUT2 in a way that tends to be toxic to cells that express itsometimes toxic enough to kill patients receiving the drug. Anafi and colleagues showed that by giving mice streptozocin at a time of day when liver GLUT2 levels are lowest, they were able to significantly reduce the drugs toxicity, without impairing its ability to hit its intended targets.
Anafi and his colleagues are now using CYCLOPS to generate an atlas of cycling genes in different human tissues, in order to find other drugs whose dosing could be optimized by altering the time of day they are given.
The researchers also plan to use CYCLOPS to study gene activity cycling in cancerous cells, which could one day enable doctors to detect cancers more sensitively as well as to optimize the dosing of cancer therapies.
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Circadian Rhythm Algorithm Could Lead to More Effective Dosing for Many Existing Drugs - Sleep Review
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How Trump’s latest Russia spin contradicts his claims during the campaign – Washington Post
Posted: at 3:43 am
Theres a transition point that comes in many scandals when the facts make it impossible to sustain the argument the administrations allies had been using. Specifically, it requires them to go from saying, These accusations are false; it never happened to saying, Sure, it happened, but theres nothing wrong with it.
That is where Republicans now find themselves, and theres a deep irony at work. Donald Trump rode into office on the widespread belief that politics is corrupt and only an outsider like him could clean it up. Now, it looks like his all-purpose excuse for his own misdeeds and those of his family and advisers will be, Hey, dont blame me we all know politics is corrupt!
You can see it in this tweet President Trump sent this morning:
As numerous politicians and political professionals from both parties have attested since the story of the meeting between Don Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and a group of Russians who were explicitly presented to them as acting on behalf of the Kremlin, thats not just untrue but absurd. When a hostile foreign government offers you help in your campaign, what you do is call the FBI.
The idea animating Trumps position is that during a presidential campaign there is virtually no sin or even crime that cant be justified on the grounds that, well, its a campaign. As Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro saidin defending Trump, As someone whos run for office five times, if the devil called me and said he wanted to set up a meeting to give me opposition research on my opponent, Id be on the first trolley to Hell to get it. Or in the words of Sean Hannity, It always happens. And if anyone says it doesnt, its a lie.
So having spent months claiming that the accusation that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government in its attempt to swing the election to Trump was ridiculous, now their position is that theres nothing wrong with collusion. Forget it, Jake. Its Chinatown.
This can become a handy excuse for almost anything. Did Trump fire FBI Director James B. Comey to shut down the Russia investigation? Its politics! Is Trump using the office of the presidency to enrich himself and his family? Its politics! Having convinced his supporters that Washington is an irredeemable swamp of corruption that he will clean up, Trump now holds himself blameless for any malfeasance, because look at what a swamp this place is.
The people who actually have experience in politics agree that there are ethical limits to what you may do in pursuit of your political goals. But Trump, believing his own caricature of what politics is, feels constrained by no limits whatsoever. He approaches governing as though it were professional wrestling, not something with any substantive meaning but a series of staged fights you perform so your side cheers. Sure, there are rules, but theyre no more important than the rule that youre not supposed to hit your opponent with a folding chair. If its part of the show, you do it.
In the context of that show, theres no such thing as a political opponent with whom you still share some things in common, like a commitment to the countrys founding ideals. There are just enemies, and the war against them has to be total. If Russia wants to help you fight your true enemy (Hillary Clinton), then you welcome the help.
And there are a certain number of Trumps supporters for whom the fight is its own reward, just as his 2016 campaign was its own reward even before he won. It was thrilling and liberating, allowing them to stop hiding their thoughts and give vent to their feelings, no matter how politically incorrect they might be. No need to worry anymore about some liberal calling you racist or sexist just put on your Trump That Bitch T-shirt, tell somebody with a Spanish accent what you think of immigrants, and let it rip. Who cares if he actually accomplishes anything on policy or makes anyones life better? As one Republican voter tells the Des Moines Register, I just want him to annoy the hell out of everybody, and hes done that.
Just to be clear, there are Republicans criticizing the Don Jr./Jared/Manafort meeting and no doubt dreading what the next revelation will bring. Trumps approval is down to the mid-30s, and when the latest Post/ABC News poll asked about the meeting, only 48 percent of Republicans said it was appropriate, hardly unified support for the White Houses position.
Theres obviously a great risk for Trump and his allies in using the Its politics defense. As pollster Guy Molyneux recently explained in the American Prospect, while we use the word populism to describe both Trumps appeal to working-class voters and that of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, unlike those Democrats Trump made an argument focused not on economic elites but on politicians and Washington, and his voters responded. But hes now saying that hes no different from any other politician, and the people he brought with him (including his own family) are simply adopting the mores and standards of Washington.
Even if that excuse were to fly, it wouldnt leave him a lot of room to claim in 2020 that he had transformed politics, drained the swamp and fulfilled the promise of his 2016 campaign. Most of his supporters might decide that its enough for him to have the right enemies. But they may not be as excited to get out to the polls again if he keeps telling them that what he does is just politics.
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How Trump's latest Russia spin contradicts his claims during the campaign - Washington Post
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What to do with the narcissist’s children – Washington Times
Posted: at 3:43 am
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Pity the poor presidents. Its not enough for presidents to deal with enemies foreign and domestic, conduct warfare with Congress and dispense lollipops. Sometimes they have to deal with help from sons, daughters, brothers, in-laws and other hangers-on to the bully furniture at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Sometimes its a son or daughter who just wants to help the old man, but at other times its an in-law who just wants to help himself to whatevers available. A grateful child, offering help from a big heart and an untutored brain, can be the greatest threat of all.
The current president, like most fathers, thinks his kids are the greatest. He has described his son Donald Jr. as a lad like he once was, smart, clever, ambitious and a man who subscribes to the gospel of famous football coaches that winning isnt the most important thing, its the only thing.
Psychologists are lately brought in to diagnose the Donalds various failings. One of them is that he suffers narcissism, a common affliction of politicians. Even doctors of voodoo can make a diagnosis that sounds, if not profound, at least plausible.
The witch doctors have concluded that Mr. Trump sees his adult children, particularly Ivanka, his daughter, and Donald Jr., as extensions of himself, like most fathers, only more so. They are his world because they are him, says Elan Golomb, author of Trapped in the Mirror: Adult Children of Narcissists in Their Struggle for Self. Such children, she says, dont exist in their fathers eyes as separate persons. To a narcissist, the child is seen as me.
Even [Mr. Trumps] children agree that there is little separation between themselves and their celebrity father, writes Marc Fisher in a psychological autopsy in The Washington Post. Weve all made peace with the fact that we will never achieve any level of autonomy from him, Ivanka told an interviewer. No wonder [the president] places them in positions of power.
A simpler explanation of why the president indulges his children, even as they distract attention from what he is trying to do as president, is that theyre the only people in town whom he can trust, fully and completely. Every president yearns for someone like that. If you want a friend in Washington, Harry S. Truman once remarked, get a dog. That goes double for presidents.
John F. Kennedy braved considerable criticism when he appointed his brother, Robert, to be his attorney general. Robert was a lawyer picked green and of limited accomplishment, but he was a brother whom the president could trust. Bobby was thus more important than a million dollars worth of Harvard lawyers, who are usually worth only what theyre paid.
Its not just the kids and other relatives in official positions who can be a distraction, or worse, for a president. Jimmy Carter, full of piety and rectitude, was embarrassed by his beer-swilling brother Billy, who more often exhibited the familys common sense and street smarts. Bill Clinton not only had to abide Hillary, but his half-brother Roger, a drug dealer whom he pardoned to get him out of the pokey.
Harry Truman, who has become everybodys idea of a president who wont abide misfeasance and nonsense from anybody, had his burdens, too. His mother, Martha Ellen Young, had a delightfully politically incorrect tongue and to the delight of reporters, wagged it frequently. She was an unreconstructed rebel whose hatred of the Yankees was born of watching, as a 10-year-old girl in Missouri, a Union Army detail plunder and burn the family homestead. Once, when her son Harry was invited to dinner at the home of a prominent Kansas City family, she told him, When you go there, turn the silverware over and check the hallmark. Its probably ours. When she visited the White House for the first time she even refused to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom. Her heroes were Lee, Jackson and Sterling Price (you could look it up).
The Trump children, like American children of an earlier generation, are devoted to their father in a way that seems strange and even subversive in the present day, when the dysfunctional family is in fashion. You would never hear us yelling at our parents or using a tone that was inappropriate or disrespectful, Ivanka told Politico. Even a tone.
Another son, Eric, thinks he figured out why they so viciously attack the family. They cant stand that we are extremely close and will always support each other.
President Trump often boasts about his children, and hes entitled. Theyre good children, he says. Who could argue? The president owes it to them not to put them in troubled water over their heads. He should repay their loyalty by sending them home to run the family business. A swamp full of alligators is no place for worthy progeny.
Wesley Pruden is editor in chief emeritus of The Washington Times.
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Liu Xiaobo’s Death Pushes China’s Censors Into Overdrive – The … – New York Times
Posted: at 3:43 am
In one experiment, researchers at the Citizen Lab found that a photo of Liu Xiaobo posted to an international users WeChat social media feed was visible to other users abroad but was hidden from users with Chinese accounts.
The heightened yet uneven censorship in recent days has elicited frustration and confusion among Mr. Lius supporters.
On the day after Mr. Lius death, one user posted on his WeChat feed: Did you see what I just sent? No, I cant see it. For the last two days, this has been the constant question and answer among friends.
The aggressive attempt at censorship is just the latest indication of the strong grip that the Chinese government maintains on local internet companies. In addition to automatically filtering certain keywords and images, internet companies like Baidu, Sina and Tencent also employ human censors who retroactively comb through posts and delete what they deem as sensitive content, often based on government directives.
Failure to block such content can result in fines for companies or worse, revocation of their operational licenses. Censors have been on especially high alert this year in light of the Communist Partys 19th National Party Congress in the fall.
Over the years, the constant cat-and-mouse game between Chinese censors and internet users has led to the rise of a robust internet culture in which censorship is normalized and satire and veiled references are par for the course.
So even as censors stepped up scrutiny in recent days, many savvy Chinese internet users found ways to evade those efforts. In tributes to Mr. Liu, users referred to him as Brother Liu or even XXX. They posted passages from his poems and abstract illustrations of Mr. Liu and his wife, Liu Xia.
Over the weekend, however, the tributes gave way to scathing critiques as friends and supporters of Mr. Liu reacted angrily to the news of Mr. Lius cremation and sea burial under strict government oversight.
One user took to his WeChat feed on Sunday to express disgust with the use of Mr. Lius corpse in what some called a blatant propaganda exercise. Swift cremation, swift sea burial, he wrote. Scared of the living, scared of the dead, and even more scared of the dead who are immortal.
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Why China censors banned Winnie the Pooh – BBC News
Posted: at 3:43 am
BBC News | Why China censors banned Winnie the Pooh BBC News The blocking of Winnie the Pooh might seem like a bizarre move by the Chinese authorities but it is part of a struggle to restrict clever bloggers from getting around their country's censorship. When is a set of wrist watches not just a set of wrist ... Winnie the Pooh is the latest victim of censorship in China Chinese Censors Have Apparently Blocked 'Winnie the Pooh' Over a Silly Meme China censors Winnie the Pooh on social media |
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The Coming Censorship From the Left – Church Militant
Posted: at 3:43 am
After President Trump won the 2016 election, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, was hit with a wave of complaints from liberals claiming "fake news" on his social media platform had contributed to the Republican's victory. Zuckerberg responded by setting up a board to vet false reports and stacked it with left-leaning media outfits: Snopes, Politifact, FactCheck.org, ABC News and Associated Press (which just issued writing guidelines discouraging use of the phrase "pro-life" in favor of "anti-abortion").
And in May, Zuckerberg placedNew York TimesveteranAlex Hardiman at the helm of Facebook's News products, in charge of overseeing monetization and collaboration with other news organizations.
It's this same department that manipulated news content to artificially bump left-leaning causes while suppressing conservative stories. A 2016 report reveals that former Facebook staff admit they "routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readersfrom the social network's influential 'trending' news section."
Facebook news curators also claimed they were ordered to artificially inject topics into the trending section (e.g., Black Lives Matter), even when they weren't popular, while deleting articles related to the GOP. According to reporter Michael Nunez,
Facebook's news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing but it is in stark contrast to thecompany's claimsthat the trending module simply lists "topics that have recentlybecome popular on Facebook."
The Wall Street Journalreported in 2016 that Facebook had been caughtcensoring conservative, pro-Israel postswhile allowing liberal, pro-Palestinian content.
Even more concerning, in 2015 Zuckerberg wascaught agreeing to German Chancellor Angela Merkel's requesttohelp get rid of anti-immigration posts on social media.
The conversation, caught on a hot mic, involved messages about the refugee crisis, with Zuckerberg admitting "we need to do some work" on the issue.
"Are you working on this?" Merkel asked him.
"Yeah," Zuckerberg answered.
Shortly after, Facebook implemented its "Initiative for Civil Courage Online" to delete what it deemed "racist" or "xenophobic" comments. But Douglas Murray at the Gatestone Institute warned it was a tool for further censorship of legitimate conservative voices.
"The sinister thing about what Facebook is doing is that it is now removing speech that presumably almost everybody might consider racist,"said Murray, "along with speech that only someone at Facebook decides is 'racist.'"
Last year, WikiLeaks exposed anattempted meet-up between Zuckerberg and the Clinton campaignin order to give the entrepreneur advice on how to "move the needle on the specific public policy issues he cares most about."
Although Zuckerberg hasnever publicly identified as Republican or Democrat, and has contributed to candidates of both parties in the past, according to Federal Election Committee records, his political action committee made its biggest one-time donation to the Democratic Party in San Francisco in 2015 when it wrote a check for $10,000. He's also been open about his criticism of Trump and his immigration policies.
And it's not just Facebook. Other internet giants are also in on the conservative targeting: Google, Vimeo, YouTube, Twitter.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in June 2016 that Google was "directly engaged in Hillary Clinton's campaign."
"The chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, set up a company to run the digital component of Hillary Clinton's campaign," Assange declared at a journalism forum in May 2016. A number of Google employees appear in theWikiLeaks Clinton email archives, noting a cozy relationship with the Democrat leader. Evidence shows the search engineskewed resultsfor hits pertaining to Clinton's health back when it was a hot topic.
Google also had a close association with Obama: It was the single most frequent visitor to his White House, averaging one visit per week.
"Google controls 80 percent of the smartphone market through its control of Android," Assange noted, "and if you control the device itself that people use to read then anything that they connect to through that device you have control over as well."
The video hosting platform Vimeo is also targeting voices that don't fit the leftist narrative. Over the course of two years, it's deleted content and shut down accounts of ministries that help homosexuals leave the gay lifestyle.
In March, Vimeo deleted without warning 850 videos from Christian ex-homosexualDavid Kyle Foster's website. When Foster wrote to ask why,Vimeo responded, "To put it plainly, we don't believe that homosexuality requires a cure and we don't allow videos on our platform that espouse this point of view. ... We also consider this basic viewpoint to display a demeaning attitude toward a specific group, which is something that we do not allow."
And last year, Vimeo took down the account of Restored Hope, a group of ministries that help rid individuals of unwanted same-sex desires. It also closed down the account of theNational Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, headed by the late Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, a pioneer in reparative therapy.
Foster has called Vimeo's actions "pure religious bigotry and censorship."
Social media giant Twitter has displayedbias against the pro-life message, censoring ads critical of Planned Parenthood while giving the abortion giant free rein to spread its misinformation online.
"Planned Parenthoodis allowed to promote their pro-abortion and misleading messages, whileLive Actionis barred from promoting any content exposing abortion andPlanned Parenthood," said Live Action CEO Lila Rose in June, after Twitter removed the pro-life group's ability to advertise.
Contents of banned ads were benign, including a tweet that declared thatPlanned Parenthoodis "about abortion, not women's health care," accompanied by a brief, all-text video casting doubt on the abortion conglomerate's "healthcare services."
More than ever, conservatives are at the mercy of those controlling the organs of social communication, and must find a way to preserve their voice on the internet in the face of increasing encroachments. Church Militant relies heavily on various online platforms to publish and promote our content, and we recognize the growing threat of censorship from the powers that be, most who hate the message of the Catholic faith.
Just this past week, Church Militant was the target of hackers, who were able to take down the site for a full day. Although no internal information was compromised, our message the message of Christ in His Church was kept from being disseminated to the millions who regularly view our programming as well as to new viewers who need to hear the truth.
Church Militant has taken beginning steps to protect the apostolate and its content by purchasing our own internal server but it comes at a cost $50,000, to be precise. If you believe in the mission of Church Militant and want us to continue spreading the light of the Faith, reporting on issues that matter to Catholics, and being the voice for authentic reform in the Church, consider donating to ourPreserving Catholics campaignto cover the cost of our server. We're grateful for any amount, large or small. We are especially grateful for your prayers in support of our work.
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To tackle online crime, Israel approves web censorship law – The Times of Israel
Posted: at 3:43 am
The Knesset on Monday approved a law allowing the court-ordered blocking or removal of internet sites promoting criminal or terror activity, marking the first introduction of laws restricting the internet in Israel.
We are closing an enforcement gap of many years during which the existing law was disconnected from the migration of crime to the internet, said Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan, whose office oversees the Israel Police. The new law will give the police the necessary tools to fight criminals, felons, and inciters who have moved their activities online.
The law targets illegal gambling websites, prostitution and child pornography advertisements, online dealing of hard drugs and synthetic cannabinoids and the websites of terror groups.
Clearing the Knesset plenum in its second and third reading with 63 lawmakers in favor and 10 opposed, the law stipulates that a district court judge who has received special permission by the court president may issue an order to internet providers to block websites linked to criminal activity.
Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan attends a meeting at the Knesset, Jerusalem, May 17, 2017. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
An internet provider that does not comply with the court order will be imprisoned for two years, the law says.
The court order may only be issued if it is essential to halting the criminal activity taking place online; or essential to prevent the exposure of the Israeli user to an activity that, would it be done in Israel, would be a crime, and the websites activity has some connection to Israel; or if the website belongs to a terror organization.
In certain cases, if the owner of the website is Israel-based, the court may order the provider to seek the websites removal, rather than merely restricting access, it said.
The courts may also order search engines to remove the websites from their search results and may rely on classified government testimony to make their decision. All affected parties must be present in court, the law said, unless they were summoned and failed to appear.
Due to warnings from rights groups that the law poses a slippery slope toward additional censorship, the final version of the legislation dictates that rights groups may appeal the decisions. It said the Justice Ministry must report to the Knessets Justice, Law and Constitution Committee once a year the number of requests for court orders to restrict internet content and for what crimes.
In addition to the law, lawmakers over the past year have been seeking so far unsuccessfully to advance legislation for court-mandated removal of Facebook content calling for violence against Israelis, as well as a law that would restrict access to online pornography.
The Knesset plenum on Monday also approved a bill in its first reading that would allow police to block cellphone users from their service providers for 30-day periods if there is a reasonable basis to assume the device is being used for criminal activity such as drug-dealing or prostitution. The bill was approved with 27 MKs in favor, with none opposed, and requires two more readings to become law.
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Ron Paul: Big Military Budget Threatens America | FITSNews – FITSNews
Posted: at 3:42 am
THIS ISNT MAKING U.S. SAFE
On Fridaythe U.S. House overwhelmingly approved a massive increase in military spending, passing a $696 billion National Defense Authorization bill for 2018. President Donald Trumps request already included a huge fifty or so billion dollar spending increase, but the Republican-led House found even that to be far too small. They added another $30 billion to the bill for good measure. Even President Trump, in his official statement, expressed some concern over spending in the House-passed bill.
According to the already weak limitations on military spending increases in the 2011 sequestration law, the base military budget for 2018 would be $72 billion more than allowed.
Dont worry, theyll find a way to get around that!
The big explosion in military spending comes as the US is planning to dramatically increase its military actions overseas. The president is expected to send thousands more troops back to Afghanistan, the longest war in U.S. history. After nearly 16 years, the Taliban controls more territory than at anytime since the initial American invasion and ISIS is seeping into the cracks created by constant U.S. military action in the country.
The Pentagon and Defense Secretary James Mattis are already telling us that even when ISIS is finally defeated in Iraq, the U.S. military doesnt dare end its occupation of the country again. Look for a very expensive array of permanent U.S. military bases throughout the country. So much for our 2003 invasion creating a stable democracy, as the neocons promised.
In Syria, the United States has currently established at least eight military bases even though it has no permission to do so from the Syrian government nor does it have a UN resolution authorizing the U.S. military presence there. Pentagon officials have made it clear they will continue to occupy Syrian territory even after ISIS is defeated, to stabilize the region.
And lets not forget that Washington is planning to send the U.S. military back to Libya, another American intervention we were promised would be stabilizing but that turned out to be a disaster.
Also, the drone wars continue in Somalia and elsewhere, as does the U.S. participation in Saudi Arabias horrific two year war on impoverished Yemen.
President Trump often makes encouraging statements suggesting that he shares some of our non-interventionist views. For example while Congress was shoveling billions into an already bloated military budget last week, President Trump said that he did not want to spent trillions more dollars in the Middle East where we get nothing for our efforts. Hed rather fix roads here in the U.S., he said. The only reason we are there, he said, was to get rid of terrorists, after which we can focus on our problems at home.
Unfortunately President Trump seems to be incapable of understanding that it is U.S. intervention and occupation of foreign countries that creates instability and feeds terrorism. Continuing to do the same thing for more than 17 years more U.S. bombs to stabilize the Middle East and expecting different results is hardly a sensible foreign policy. It is insanity. Until he realizes that our military empire is the source of rather than the solution to our problems, we will continue to wildly spend on our military empire until the dollar collapses and we are brought to our knees. Then what?
Ron Paulis a former U.S. Congressman from Texas and the leader of the pro-liberty, pro-free market movement in the United States. His weekly column reprinted with permission can be foundhere.
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