Stephan: Here is some exciting and dramatic news about cancer treatments. This looks really promising.
This 2021 photo shows Doug Olson of Pleasanton, Calif, in Bend, Ore. Credit: Family Photo via AP
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – In 2010, doctors treated Doug Olson’s leukemia with an experimental gene therapy that transformed some of his blood cells into cancer killers. More than a decade later, there’s no sign of cancer in his body.
The treatment cured Olson and a second patient, according to the University of Pennsylvania doctors, who said it was the first time the therapy had been studied for so long.
“I’m doing great right now. I’m still very active. I was running half marathons until 2018,” said Olson, 75, who lives in Pleasanton, California. “This is a cure. And they don’t use the word lightly.”
His doctors describe the two cases in a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. They say the two examples show the treatment, called CAR-T cell therapy, can attack cancer immediately, then stay inside the body for years and evolve there to keep the disease at bay. Such so-called “living drugs” are now used by thousands around the […]
Stephan: Here is some good news from North Carolina about voting fairness in that state. In spite of everything the Republican legislature and the Republicans on the North Carolina Supreme Court could do to sustain blatant racist gerrymandering, the court as a whole ruled against the Republicans, “Achieving partisan advantage incommensurate with a political party’s level of statewide voter support is neither a compelling nor a legitimate governmental interest.”
A lawmaker studies a district map during a joint select committee meeting on redistricting in Raleigh, N.C. on July 26, 2017. Credit: Gerry Broome/AP
North Carolina’s state Supreme Court handed Democrats one of their biggest legal victories yet in the fight over redistricting, striking down a GOP-drawn congressional map that could have given Republicans control of 11 of the state’s 14 districts.
In a ruling released Friday evening, the justices split 4-3 along party lines in deeming the current map an illegal partisan gerrymander that is “unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt.” The state Supreme Court gave the General Assembly until Feb. 18 to submit a new redistricting proposal to the court — or a trial court will approve a new plan.
The decision is a resounding win for Democrats — and the latest sign yet that their legal strategy is equalizing the House battlefield and giving them a check over Republicans in several key states. It’s left Democratic operatives optimistic that they will emerge from redistricting in 2022 in better […]
Stephan: The American death rate from Covid is appalling, particularly when compared with other developed nations. And I think it is important to realize why this is happening. It is my view there are two reasons. First, is the inadequacy of the illness profit system of healthcare in the United States. Covid has proven to anyone who can see past their ideology to the actual facts that universal birthright publicly funded healthcare is the way to go. It is more efficient, more effective, nicer to live under, more productive, and much much cheaper.
Second, this death rate is directly correlated to the politicization and weaponization of anti-science throughout MAGAt world. Anti-vaxxers, and Anti-maskers, usually the same people, have made fidelity to a fact-free, but emotionally satisfying reality, more important than life itself, and created the first American death cult.
As of Friday, more than 900,000 people in the United States have died of Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.Experts believe the true burden of disease to be much higher. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the number of Covid-19 deaths in the US was about 32% higher than reported between February 2020 and September 2021.For the past two weeks, there have been more than 2,000 new Covid-19 deaths reported each day in the US, according to Johns Hopkins.
The World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020.
The US reported its first 100,000 deaths about two and a half months later, by May 23, 2020, according to Johns Hopkins.
There had been 200,000 deaths reported by about four months after that, by September 22, 2020.
There were 300,000 deaths reported less than three months after that, by December 12, 2020.
There were 400,000 deaths reported about a month later, by January 17, 2021.
There were 500,000 deaths reported about another month after that, […]
Stephan: This has always been my problem with Israel. The Jews who created Israel came out of the Holocaust after centuries of being consigned to live in walled off ghettos, blocked from higher education, often unable to own land. And yet as soon as they were given a country the strategy they chose to pursue was to recreate the same conditions again for the Palestinians. Who are responding exactly as one would expect.
Palestinians climb over the separation barrier with Israel at al-Ram on their way to pray in Jerusalem during Ramadan in 2014. Credit: Majdi Mohammed/AP
Amnesty International accused Israel of “committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians” in a report released Tuesday, echoing a growing consensus among leading human rights groups and drawing a fierce rebuke from Israel’s government, which lambasted the finding and called for its withdrawal after lobbying to block its release.
London-based Amnesty International said Israel’s “system of oppression and domination against the Palestinian people,” both in the occupied Palestinian territories and within its internationally recognized borders, fit the legal definition of apartheid and constituted “a crime against humanity.”
“Whether they live in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, or Israel itself, Palestinians are treated as an inferior racial group and systematically deprived of their rights,” Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnès Callamard said in a statement.
Citing Israel’s “policies of segregation, dispossession and exclusion” toward Palestinians, Callamard said […]
Jonathan Weisman and Reid J. Epstein, - The Washington Post
Stephan: It is the consensually chosen view of the Republican Party that January 6th, whose details everyone should know by now, was "legitimate political discourse." How much clearer could they make their anti-democracy prejudice.
Representative Liz Cheney has said Republican leaders “have made themselves willing hostages” to former President Donald J. Trump. Credit: Al Drago/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The Republican Party on Friday officially declared the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and events that led to it “legitimate political discourse,” and rebuked two lawmakers in the party who have been most outspoken in condemning the deadly riot and the role of Donald J. Trump in spreading the election lies that fueled it.
The Republican National Committee’s voice vote to censure Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois at its winter meeting in Salt Lake City culminated more than a year of vacillation, which started with party leaders condemning the Capitol attack and Mr. Trump’s conduct, then shifted to downplaying and denying it.
On Friday, the party went further in a resolution slamming Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger for taking part in the House investigation of the assault, saying they were participating in “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
