Sunday, September 1, 2019

In the news, Monday, August 19, 2019


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AUG 18      INDEX      AUG 20
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from Haaretz.com

Golda Meir was of the same generation as her predecessors, Moshe Sharett and Levi Eshkol. She was the last Israeli prime minister of the left-wing Mapai party originating in the wave of pioneering emigrations to Israel. She would later pass the baton to Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, of the generation that was raised in Eretz Yisrael under the British Mandate. Meir became prime minister in March 1969. Following Israel's great victory in the Six-Day War, the Alignment (or Maarach in Hebrew) — a joint slate of Labor and Mapam, which was one of left-wing Meretz’s precursor parties — had achieved an absolute majority in parliament with 63 out of 120 Knesset seats, a feat never done by any Israeli party before. Five years later, in April 1974, Meir resigned and left public life behind her, in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War. The Likud would win the next election, held in May 1977. A year and a half later, at age 80, Meir passed away.

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from Hoover Institution
Nonprofit Organization in Stanford, California

The Power Of Retreat
On August 18, 1812, General Mikhail Kutuzov, 67 years old, took command of Russia’s army, which had been forced to retreat as Napoleon’s Grande Armée, the world’s best fighting force and three times its size, advanced into Russia. Destroying the Russian army was Napoleon’s objective. Preserving it had become the Russians’ proximate objective. The Imperial Court had sacked Michael Barclay de Tolly from command and appointed Kutuzov because they wanted something done to stop Napoleon. But, on August 18, Kutuzov reaffirmed his predecessor’s order: retreat. Why, he reasoned, confront an army bigger than one’s own but which was shrinking daily through disease and desertion as it got ever farther from its source of supplies? Two weeks later, when Napoleon’s numerical superiority had shrunk to 5/4, Kutuzov gave in to pressure and dug into defensive positions. The Battle of Borodino followed on 7 September.

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from HumanProgress.org  Education Website

Cures for Cancer Could Grow on Trees
Poorly designed regulation blocks investment in "pharming"--plant-based medications and vaccines. Politicians talk a lot about farming but seldom about “pharming,” even though the latter can also have a big impact on Americans’ pocketbooks—and their health. The punny name refers to genetically modifying plants such as corn, rice, tobacco and alfalfa to produce high concentrations of pharmaceutical ingredients. Many common medicines already come from plants, including morphine, the fiber supplement Metamucil and the cancer drug Taxol. Yet heavy-handed federal regulations have frozen out pharming efforts, making it far too difficult for researchers to use this approach to create new medications. An article this month in the journal Nature highlights pharming’s enormous promise. The authors estimate that proteins could be obtained from genetically engineered tobacco plants at 1/1,000th the cost of current methods. Compared with proteins derived from mammalian cells or chemical systems, proteins from genetically engineered plants are also easy to scale up and synthesize with other proteins, and they remain stable at room temperature for longer periods. The Food and Drug Administration has approved for marketing two human drugs obtained from genetically engineered animals—an anticoagulant secreted into goat’s milk and an enzyme to treat a rare genetic disease, obtained from the eggs of genetically engineered chickens—but none from genetically engineered plants. The primary reason is excessive regulation at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and FDA.

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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

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from The Washington Post
Newspaper in Washington, D.C.

Anthony Scaramucci: I was wrong about Trump. Here’s why.
My public praise of the man was over the top at times, but my private estimation of him was more measured. I thought Trump, despite his warts, could bring a pragmatic, entrepreneurial approach to the Oval Office. I thought he could be the reset button Washington needed to break through the partisan sclerosis. I thought he would govern in a more inclusive way than his campaign rhetoric might have indicated, and I naively thought that, by joining the administration, I could counteract the far-right voices in the room.

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