Weekend Edition. – by John Ellis

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“If I could only open one thing each morning it would be John Ellis’s News Items newsletter.” — Larry Summers, President Emeritus of Harvard University and former Secretary of the Treasury of the United States.

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1. Nature.com:

One woman and two men with severe autoimmune conditions have gone into remission after being treated with bioengineered and CRISPR-modified immune cells. The three individuals from China are the first people with autoimmune disorders to be treated with engineered immune cells created from donor cells, rather than ones collected from their own bodies. This advance is the first step towards mass production of such therapies.

One of the recipients, Mr Gong, a 57-year-old man from Shanghai, has systemic sclerosis, which affects connective tissue and can result in skin stiffening and organ damage. He says that three days after receiving the therapy, he felt his skin loosen and he could start moving his fingers and opening his mouth again. Two weeks later, he returned to his office job. “I feel very good,” he says, more than a year after receiving the treatment.

Engineered immune cells, called chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells, have shown great promise in treating blood cancers — half a dozen products are approved in the United States — and potential for treating autoimmune conditions such as lupus and multiple sclerosis, in which rogue immune cells release autoantibodies that attack the body’s own tissue. But the therapy typically relies on a person’s own immune cells, and this personalization makes it expensive and time consuming.

That’s why researchers have started creating CAR T therapies from donated immune cells. If successful, they would allow pharmaceutical companies to scale up manufacturing, potentially slashing costs and production times. Instead of making one treatment for one person, therapies for more than a hundred people could be made from one donor’s cells, says Lin Xin, an immunologist at Tsinghua University in Beijing. (Source: nature.com)

2. The U.S. labor market strengthened in the weeks before Election Day, as job growth accelerated in September and the unemployment rate ticked lower. Employers added 254,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department said Friday. That was significantly more than the 150,000 economists expected, and marked the largest monthly increase since March. The unemployment rate slipped to 4.1%. Friday’s bumper payrolls report is likely to close the door on another half-percentage-point rate cut by the Federal Reserve at its next meeting in November. It should keep officials on track to lower rates by a quarter point. (Sources: wsj.com, bls.gov)

3. Malcolm Kyeyune:

Currently, a hurricane disaster that is significantly more challenging than Katrina is being serviced by something like a third of the resources that Louisiana called upon. And yet few people in Washington even think this is a problem. At the same time as Congress has borrowed another 10 or 20 billion dollars to hand over to Ukraine and Israel, presidential candidate Kamala Harris has announced that the victims of Helene will be able to apply for $750 in relief assistance to help them get back on their feet.

As Chernobyl was, Helene is now becoming: a point at which the sheer absurdity and uselessness of the machine becomes too obvious to ignore. Looking at the disaster unfolding in Appalachia, the winners of the Cold War are now starting to ask the same question that eventually brought down the Soviet Union: what the hell is even the point of all of this anymore? (Source: unherd.com)

4. Tropical Storm Milton has formed in the Gulf of Mexico and now poses a major hurricane threat to Florida just over a week after Helene pushed through the region. The National Hurricane Center says that “there is an increasing risk of life-threatening storm surge and wind impacts for portions of the west coast of the Florida Peninsula beginning late Tuesday or Wednesday.” Hurricane and storm surge watches will likely be required for portions of Florida on Sunday. Tropical storm watches have been issued for portions of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. (Source: weather.com)

(Source/graphic: weather.com)

5. Rane Worldview:

In recent years, water stress in the Middle East and North Africa has become a more acute threat to the stability of both individual states and the broader region amid a constant struggle for control and management of this increasingly scarce vital resource. Countries’ mismanagement of their water supplies over the decades has worsened the situation in the region, where the predominantly hot and dry climate already exacerbates water shortages. The rapid population growth many countries are experiencing has also heightened the demand for limited fresh water. Against this backdrop, access to water supplies has become an increasing driver of conflict between both states and non-state actors in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as a catalyst for social unrest. (Source: worldview.ranenetwork.com)

6. The leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, has become fatalistic after nearly a year of war in Gaza and is determined to see Israel embroiled in a wider regional conflict, U.S. officials said. Mr. Sinwar has long believed he will not survive the war, a view that has hindered negotiations to secure the release of hostages seized by his group in the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, according to U.S. intelligence assessments. His attitude has hardened in recent weeks, U.S. officials say, and American negotiators now believe that Hamas has no intention of reaching a deal with Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has also rejected proposals in the negotiations and added positions that have complicated the talks. U.S. officials assess that he is mainly concerned about his political survival and might not think a cease-fire in Gaza is in his interests. (Source: nytimes.com)

7. Iran’s barrage of ballistic missiles this week appears to have overwhelmed Israel’s air defenses in some places, despite causing limited damage, said independent researchers who examined emerging satellite imagery. The assessment means that any new Iranian strikes against Israel, if launched, could have much more serious consequences if they target civilian infrastructure or heavily populated residential areas. That is an important consideration as Israel contemplates its military response. Tehran has threatened strikes on Israeli power plants and oil refineries if Israel hits Iranian territory in a counterattack expected in the coming days. (Source: wsj.com)

8. Financial Times “Big Read”:

On Thursday, (President) Biden admitted he was in discussion with Netanyahu about an Israeli strike on Iran’s oilfields. Iran has in the past signaled that it would retaliate to any such strike with attacks on oil infrastructure in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. The Brent price of oil has already risen from $70 a barrel on Monday to $78 by Friday. A new round of strikes could send it hurtling towards $100.

Asked about such a prospect, all Biden could do was interrupt himself. “I think that would be a little . . . anyway,” he replied. What Biden may have stopped himself from adding is that such an escalation could badly damage Kamala Harris’s chances of beating Donald Trump next month.

Yet it is Netanyahu, not Biden, who will decide what happens next. Recent history shows that Israel’s prime minister is unlikely to pay heed to whatever restraint Biden is urging on him in private.

“Netanyahu is riding high,” says Marwan al-Muasher, Jordan’s former foreign minister, now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “He won’t want to do anything to help Harris’s election prospects.” (Source: ft.com)

9. The US military conducted multiple strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen on Friday, resuming offensive action there as fears grow of a wider war in the Middle East. US Central Command said it carried out strikes on 15 Houthi targets at a number of locations around the country. “These actions were taken to protect freedom of navigation and make international waters safer and more secure for US, coalition and merchant vessels,” Centcom said in a statement. The strikes against the Houthis, who have controlled Yemen’s populous north since seizing the capital Sana’a and ousting the government in 2015, came as Iran and the wider region braced for Israel’s response to this week’s Iranian missile barrage against the country. (Source: ft.com)

10. A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of U.S. broadband providers, potentially accessing information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized network wiretapping requests. For months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful U.S. requests for communications data, according to people familiar with the matter, which amounts to a major national security risk. The attackers also had access to other tranches of more generic internet traffic, they said. Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies are among the companies whose networks were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the people said. (Source: wsj.com)

11. Over 80 police personnel have been injured in clashes with supporters of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan taking part in a march near Islamabad, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said on Saturday. The march, which is being led by the head of the northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, where Khan’s party remains in power, aims to gather in the capital, defying a ban on congregations, to press for Khan’s release and agitate against the ruling coalition. “The convoy, led by the chief minister, fired on the police and continuously used teargas against law-enforcers,” Naqvi told journalists. He said more than 80 police officers had been treated for injuries since Friday, when clashes broke out just outside the city during an anti-government rally. (Source: reuters.com)

12. Voting in Tunisia’s presidential election has opened with no real opposition to incumbent Kais Saied, widely tipped to win as his most prominent critics, including a key contender, are behind bars. Three years after a sweeping power grab by Saied, the election on Sunday is seen as a closing chapter in Tunisia’s experiment with democracy. (Source: aljazeera.com)

13. A criminal gang gunned down civilians and torched homes in a small farming town in Haiti, killing at least 70 people including women and babies, the United Nations said Friday. The attack by the notorious Gran Grif gang on the town of Pont Sondé was one of the worst massacres in recent years in a country shaken by political instability and violence. Gangs that already control most of the capital of Port-au-Prince have been expanding to rural areas once deemed relatively safe. About 10 women and three infants were killed in the massacre, the U.N.’s human rights office said. A doctor at the nearby Saint-Nicolas Hospital said the facility was overwhelmed with injured victims who had been slashed with machetes. (Source: wsj.com)

14. This is exceptionally bad news:

Rwanda’s fragile health care system could become overwhelmed by the deadly Marburg virus, doctors fear, because most of those currently infected are medical professionals, and some have already died.

Since the first outbreak in the country in September, at least 30 medical workers have been infected, and at least four have died. Among the infected are two of the country’s scarce anesthesiologists. More medical staff members are isolated in hospital wards in the capital, Kigali. The health care system, with approximately 1,500 doctors and under 40 anesthesiologists for a nation of just over 13 million people, could face significant strain.

Rwanda’s health minister, Dr. Sabin Nsanzimana, has said the country is seeking experimental vaccines and treatments, and hopes to address the outbreak with candidate drugs and shots — those in preclinical or clinical trial phases.

“We are determined to halt this outbreak before it spreads to other areas within the country, the region or beyond,” he told reporters on Thursday. (Source: nytimes.com)

15. Google’s grip on the nearly $300 billion search advertising business is loosening. For years, the tech giant has seemed invincible in this corner of the ad market, which is the foundation of its business. Now, rivals are beginning to eat into its lead, and new offerings—fueled by the rise of artificial intelligence and social video—threaten to reshape the landscape. TikTok, the wildly popular short-form video platform, has recently started allowing brands to target ads based on users’ search queries—a direct challenge to Google’s core business. Perplexity, an AI search startup backed by Jeff Bezos, plans to introduce ads later this month under its AI-generated answers. Until now, it has made revenue mostly from a $20-a-month subscription offering that grants access to more-powerful AI technology. (Source: wsj.com. Editor’s Note: We use Perplexity (a lot) and recommend it. We have no relationship with the company, formal or informal.)

16. Meta (formerly Facebook):

Today, we’re excited to premiere Meta Movie Gen, our breakthrough generative AI research for media, which includes modalities like image, video, and audio. Our latest research demonstrates how you can use simple text inputs to produce custom videos and sounds, edit existing videos, and transform your personal image into a unique video. Movie Gen outperforms similar models in the industry across these tasks when evaluated by humans.

Whatever one thinks of Meta, this technology is amazing. (Source: ai.meta.com)

17. Big companies around the world are pushing back against rapidly rising legal bills, railing against hourly lawyer rates they say are the product of law-firm excess. Lawyers’ hourly rates rose almost 9% in the first half of 2024, according to data from Wells Fargo legal specialty group, which surveys large law firms quarterly. That’s on top of an 8.3% increase in rates last year. Historically, fees would rise about 4% each year, Wells Fargo says. Lawyers’ pay is skyrocketing. Brutal poaching wars for talent are now common, and top lawyers expect to be paid like investment bankers and private-equity principals. (Source: wsj.com)

18. Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks have built the most powerful political machine in Texas — a network of think-tanks, media organizations, political-action committees and nonprofits that work in lock step to purge the Legislature of Republicans whose votes they can’t rely on. Cycle after cycle, their relentless maneuvering has pushed the Statehouse so far to the right that consultants like to joke that Karl Rove couldn’t win a local race these days. Brandon Darby, the editor of Breitbart Texas, is one of several conservatives who has compared Dunn and Wilks to Russian oligarchs. “They go into other communities and unseat people unwilling to do their bidding,” he says. “You kiss the ring or you’re out.” (Sources: texastribune.org, nytimes.com)

19. A solid majority of likely California voters support Proposition 36, the November ballot measure that would impose stricter penalties for retail theft and crimes involving fentanyl, according to a new UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll co-sponsored by The Los Angeles Times. Imposing harsher punishment on repeat offenders drove that support, far outweighing voters’ desire to increase overall prosecutions or deter future crime, the survey found. (Source: latimes.com)

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Quick Links: Ukraine’s Donbas strategy: Retreat slowly and maximize Russia’s losses. Russia has made “a principle decision” to remove the Taliban — “a trusted ally” — from its list of terrorist organizations. Mossad’s pager operation: Inside Israel’s penetration of Hezbollah. The growing effects of climate change and water scarcity will increase tensions between Central Asian states in the years to come. As war and religion rages, Israel’s secular elite contemplate a ‘silent departure’. Inside the powerful Peter Thiel network that anointed JD Vance. Political News Items’s take on “where things stand” in the presidential race. Harris is running a much bigger campaign than Trump. She spends three times as much, employs hundreds more staff and dominates the ad war. But the race is effectively tied. The Economist: Dismantling Google is a terrible idea. Fighting back against data centers, one small town at a time. China is big business for Western consulting firms. The American guns that Mexican cartels covet. Phoenix, Arizona: 100+ degrees Fahrenheit for 113 days (in a row). We may have passed peak obesity. Do you dream in color or black and white? An interview with one of the world’s foremost mathematicians, Terence Tao, often called ‘the Mozart of math’. Professor Tao (UCLA) won the Fields Medal in 2006. He was 31 years old at the time. Trap game!: Vanderbilt stuns Alabama. Let’s go Mets. The incomparable Shohei Ohtani lights up Dodger Stadium.