ALBERTA
Black cowboy John Ware recognized as a person of national historic significance


BAR U RANCH NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE — The federal government has recognized John Ware, a Black cowboy in Western Canada, as a person of national historic significance.


© Provided by The Canadian PressBlack cowboy John Ware recognized as a person of national historic significance

Ware's designation was commemorated today with the unveiling of a plaque at the Bar U Ranch National Historic Site south of Calgary.

Steven Guilbeault, the minister responsible for Parks Canada, says in a news release that Ware embodied the resilience and strength of Black Canadians.

Ware arrived in the district of Alberta in 1882 on a trail crew driving thousands of cattle to the site that became known as the Bar U Ranch.

He wrangled herds of large ranching outfits then built his own ranch with his wife, Mildred, and their children, before he died in 1905.

The government says Ware had a successful ranching career despite "racism, rough frontier conditions, and having been enslaved."

The federal government, though its Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, recognizes significant people, places and events that have shaped the country as a way to help Canadians connect with their past.

It accepts nominations as part of the program.

Janet Annesley, who nominated Ware, said Canadians still have a lot to learn about the experiences of Canada's Black cowboys.

"The National Film Board's John Ware Reclaimed by Cheryl Foggo exposed some difficult aspects of Ware's story, ones we don't like to see because racism is out of line with our western Canadian values of freedom and merit," she said in the release.

"I nominated John Ware as a positive reminder that anyone of any colour or background can have a place in Canada's story. Our rich diversity has never been a threat to who we are. It makes us who we are."

Foggo, an author, playwright and filmmaker, said the acknowledgment of Ware illuminates him and his family.

"It makes his accomplishments in agriculture and his skills as a horseman visible to all who will read this plaque, while honouring the complexity of his life and situation," she said.

"It also simply acknowledges that he was here."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 6, 2022.

The Canadian Press

After years of uncertainty, Falmouth wind turbines to be demolished


Asad Jung, Cape Cod Times
Mon, June 6, 2022

The saga of Falmouth’s largest renewable energy project appears to be finally nearing a close, now that the town has hired Atlantic Coast Dismantling LLC to demolish two wind turbines.

The job will cost $39,950, but the town may have to pay more due to electric work and site restoration, said Town Manager Peter Johnson Staub.

The Massachusetts Clean Water Trust also agreed to accept a minimum payment of $975,000 from the town to resolve its loan. The initial loan the Massachusetts Clean Water Trust gave the town to build the turbines was $4,865,000.

Falmouth's two municipal turbines remained standing near the town's wastewater treatment facility in 2020.

“It’s been a contentious issue for a long time, and we’re pleased to bring it to a closure,” said Johnson-Staub.

A turbulent history

Known as Wind 1 and Wind 2, the turbines were installed in 2010 and 2013, respectively, at the wastewater treatment facility on Blacksmith Shop Road to support renewable energy initiatives. However, once the turbines were operational neighbors began filing lawsuits to shut them down due to noise and what they claimed were turbine-related health problems such as headaches, anxiety, and problems sleeping.

After years of legal battles and town debates, the Select Board voted in July 2017 to shut down the turbines.

More: Falmouth officials take step toward finally dismantling wind turbines

But the difficulties for the town didn’t stop there. Once the turbines were no longer running, the town needed to find a way to dismantle them and either find another use or dispose of them.

The town initially wanted to have the turbines moved and operated elsewhere, though that idea never got off the ground. Falmouth also faced pushback from the state which denied its request to dismantle the turbines saying they were an “energy-efficient project.”

With the recent contract award and loan forgiveness, the town has taken an important step towards relieving itself of the problem. And although the failure of the wind turbines may be a setback for Falmouth’s commitment to renewable energy, officials haven’t given up yet.

More: Falmouth Town Meeting votes push Cape Cod Country Club solar farm project forward

“Obviously it was by far the town’s largest renewable energy project, but with that said there are many opportunities that we can now explore for other renewable energy projects,” said Johnson-Staub. He mentioned a focus on solar and energy-efficiency projects.

The next step for the town will be to finalize the contract with Atlantic Coast Dismantling LLC.

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Wind turbines in Falmouth will be demolished after years of struggle

Think the Fresno region’s drought is the worst ever? Tree data will make you think again

Tim Sheehan   Mon, June 6, 2022

The San Joaquin River watersed is amid its third consecutive year of below-normal precipitation. But three dry years are merely a drop in the bucket (pardon the pun) compared to a historical record that, thanks to climate reconstructions using tree rings, stretches back more than 1,100 years in the region.

Scientists estimate that since the year 900 – when California was inhabited only by Native American tribes and centuries before it became a land of agricultural bounty – the region now known as the central San Joaquin Valley has endured 35 periods of sustained drought lasting at least four years, according to research studies available on the California Natural Resources Agency’s website.

Researchers base their calculations on precise measurements of yearly growth rings of trees in the watershed that indicate that the river’s historic median annual flow is just under 1.7 million acre-feet. That figure is the threshold for labeling a year as a wet or dry year.

Seven of those sustained drought periods have come just since 1900, and the average length of those prolonged dry spells over the past 122 years is about 5.2 years.

The longest drought period reflected through dendrochronology – the science of tree rings and what they can reveal about weather, climate and fires – was 12 years from 1450 through 1461.

That doesn’t count periods in which a string of dry years was punctuated by a single year of above-average precipitation. The 1450-1461 drought, for example, was followed by a single wet year in 1462 before the Valley was hit by four more consecutive dry years from 1463 through 1466.

“The widths of annual growth rings in trees in many locations closely track variations in moisture. Because of this, tree-ring widths can be an excellent proxy for variations in moisture measured though streamflow, precipitation, and drought indices,” according to the 2018 state Natural Resources Agency guidebook by researchers who studied tree rings in several California river watersheds including the San Joaquin River.

“Thus sequences of wide and narrow rings document wet and dry years for times prior to the recording of precipitation and streamflow through modern gages,” the report said.

“Records of precipitation and streamflow from gages are typically less than 100 years long. While this may seem like a long interval of time, these records capture only a limited number of extreme events, such as droughts,” the authors added.

Similar patterns are revealed by tree rings studied from sites across the system of tributaries – the Merced, Stanislaus and Tuolumne rivers – that feed into the San Joaquin as it flows north to the Delta.

An acre-foot is the volume of water it takes to cover one acre of land under one foot of water. That’s about 326,000 gallons. To think of it another way, an American football field including the end zones is about 1.32 acres, so submerging the turf to a depth of 12 inches would require 1.32 acre-feet, or more than 430,000 gallons.

The following interactive charts show 1,122 years of fluctuations in the estimated annual flow of water in the San Joaquin River, using tree ring analyses conducted for the state Department of Water Resources through 1945, and calculated flows since 1945 based on observations and estimates by the Department of Water Resources and the San Joaquin River Restoration Project.

Estimates for those post-World War II years calculate the river’s natural flow as though unimpeded by Friant Dam, which was built in between 1939 and 1942 northeast of Fresno, and other water diversion projects.

Each of the first five charts covers a 200-year span of time: 900-1100, 1101-1300, 1301-1500, 1501-1700, and 1701-1900. The sixth chart covers 1901 through 2021. Each marker on the charts indicates the estimated flow of the San Joaquin River in that year, in acre-feet.

Millerton Lake, formed by the San Joaquin River behind Friant Dam northeast of Fresno, is shown at full capacity in this 2019 file photo, the most recent year in which the river’s natural flow, unimpeded by the dam, would have been above a 1,100-year historic median.

A cutaway piece of a 1,000-plus year-old giant sequoia tree from Kings Canyon National Park in eastern Fresno County has arrows on its rings to show where fire burned the tree about every 12 years on average. The width of annual tree rings an also show the abundance or lack of water in a given year.

FIFTIES FLASHBACK

Rep. Mike Rogers rolls out measure to withdraw US from United Nations, World Health Organization

Brooke Singman

FOX NEWS
Mon, June 6, 2022, 11:48 AM·4 min read

EXCLUSIVE: The top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers, introduced a measure that would withdraw the United States from the United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO), claiming the bodies have been soft on China.

Rogers, R-Ala., told Fox News that the U.N. has "repeatedly proven itself to be an utterly useless organization."

The introduction of the bill comes after the U.N.'s human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, landed in China to begin an inquiry into abuses against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang last month, but Chinese authorities severely limited the trip with COVID-19 measures.

Prior to her arrival, Bachelet said the trip was not an "investigation," and agreed to visit just two locations within the Xinjiang region where China's human rights abuses against Uyghurs have been widely documented.

"The Charter of the United Nations states the U.N.’s mission to ‘reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small,’" Rogers said. "However, Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, has proven herself to be nothing more than a puppet for the Chinese Communist Party – aiding the CCP in playing down the very real and horrifying genocide being carried out against Uyghurs."

Rogers added that it is "unconscionable that China continues to sit on the U.N. Human Rights Council even as it carries out this disturbing genocide on top of its numerous and daily violations of basic human rights."

"It’s clear the U.N. has abandoned the ideals set in its founding charter and that’s why, among many other reasons, I’ve reintroduced legislation to withdraw the United States from the U.N.," Rogers said.

Rogers re-introduced the American Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2022, which would withdraw the U.S. from the U.N., and "the corrupt World Health Organization."

Rogers first introduced similar legislation in 2015. Aides in Rogers' office told Fox News the bill, at the time, was referred to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, but "unfortunately never made it to the floor."

"We believe that the jarring and public capitulations to the CCP by the U.N. and the WHO in the past two years will bring a renewed interest in Rep. Rogers' bill," the aide said.

The new legislation would block funds from being authorized to be appropriated to the United Nations or any agency and commission associated with it.

China has been accused of wrongfully imprisoning up to three million Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region, as well as carrying out forced sterilizations and abortions. Chinese authorities claim camps in the region are "re-education" facilities combating Islamic extremism.

There is overwhelming evidence to suggest China is in fact carrying out a cultural genocide against Uyghurs, and the Biden administration has condemned China for such abuses.

Congress passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in December, a bipartisan piece of legislation that prevents the importation of goods made via forced labor in the Xinjiang region.

Rogers told Fox News that the WHO "lost all credibility when they chose to put public health second to the Chinese Communist Party by helping the CCP cover up the origins of COVID-19."

Meanwhile, activists and others had called on Bachelet to condemn what the U.S. and others have called the genocide of Uyghur Muslims in the region. China has claimed it is engaged in anti-radicalization and counterterrorism, but activists and governments have pointed instead to evidence of mass detention, forced sterilizations, bans on religious and cultural practices, and torture.

Bachelet touted China's "tremendous achievements" in poverty alleviation and universal health care, as well as China’s "valued" support on the U.N.’s 2030 multilateral Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals.

On the regime’s human rights abuses, she said she had "raised questions and concerns" about Xinjiang as she also appeared to accept Chinese claims that the policies were designed to tackle terrorism and radicalization.

"I encouraged the government to undertake a review of all counterterrorism and deradicalization policies to ensure they fully comply with international human rights standards, and in particular that they are not applied in an arbitrary and discriminatory way," she said.

Even the Biden administration, which rejoined the Human Rights Council this year, expressed concern about Bachelet’s visit – noting the many restrictions placed on the visit by Beijing.

"While we continue to raise our concerns about China’s human rights abuses directly with Beijing and support others who do so, we are concerned the conditions Beijing authorities imposed on the visit did not enable a complete and independent assessment of the human rights environment in the PRC, including in Xinjiang, where genocide and crimes against humanity are ongoing," Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement.

Poland, with near-total abortion ban, to record pregnancies


A group of women's rights activists protest against Poland's strict anti-abortion law, outside the top constitutional court, in Warsaw, Poland, Jan. 26, 2022. The government of Poland, where a near-total abortion ban is in place, faced accusations Monday, June 6, 2022, of creating a “pregnancy register” as the country expands the amount of medical data being digitally saved on patients.

 (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski, File)More


VANESSA GERA
Mon, June 6, 2022

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — The government of Poland, where a near-total abortion ban is in place, faced accusations Monday of creating a “pregnancy register” as the country expands the amount of medical data being digitally saved on patients.

Women's rights advocates and opposition politicians fear women face unprecedented surveillance given the conservative views of a ruling party that has already tightened what was one of Europe's most restrictive abortion laws.

They fear the new data could be used by police and prosecutors against women whose pregnancies end, even in cases of miscarriage, or that women could be tracked by the state if they order abortion pills or travel abroad for an abortion.

“A pregnancy registry in a country with an almost complete ban on abortion is terrifying,” said Agnieszka Dziemianowicz-Bąk, a left-wing lawmaker.


The matter gained attention Monday after Health Minister Adam Niedzielski signed an ordinance Friday expanding the amount of information to be saved in a central database on patients, including information on allergies, blood type and pregnancies.

The health ministry spokesman, Wojciech Andrusiewicz, sought to allay concerns, saying only medical professionals will have access to the data, and that the changes are being made at the recommendation of the European Union.

The effort, he said, is meant to improve the medical treatment of patients, including if they seek treatment elsewhere in the 27-member EU. In the case of pregnant women, he said this will help doctors immediately know which women should not get X-rays or certain medicines.

“Nobody is creating a pregnancy register in Poland,” he told the TVN24 all-news station.

But Marta Lempart, the leader of a women's rights group, Women's Strike, said she does not trust the government to keep information on women's pregnancies from the police and prosecutors. She told The Associated Press that police in Poland are already questioning women on how their pregnancies end, tipped off by disgruntled partners.

“Being pregnant means that police can come to you any time and prosecutors can come to you to ask you questions about your pregnancy,” Lempart said.

The new system means many Polish women will now avoid the state medical system during their pregnancies, with wealthier women seeking private treatment or traveling abroad, even for prenatal care.

Meanwhile, poorer women in Poland will face an increased risk of medical problems or even death by avoiding prenatal care, Lempart fears.

Lempart also worries that information gained by police could be shared with state media to harm people's reputations.

She already knows how that can happen. In 2020, Lempart tested positive for COVID-19, and the information was reported by state television even before she got her results.

Poland — a predominantly Catholic country — bans abortion in almost all cases, with exceptions only when a woman’s life or health is endangered or if the pregnancy results from rape or incest.

For years, abortion was allowed in the case of fetuses with congenital defects. That exception was struck down by the constitutional court in 2020.

In practice, Polish women seeking to terminate their pregnancies order abortions pills or travel to Germany, the Czech Republic and other countries where the procedure is allowed. While self-administering abortion pills is legal, helping someone else is not.

Activist Justyna Wydrzyńska is facing up to three years in prison for helping a victim of domestic violence access abortion pills. Amnesty International says it is the first such case in Europe.

Not only Putin's war': Why some say the Russian people are also culpable for the Ukraine conflict

Tom Blackwell - Saturday, June 4,2022

POSTMEDIA

People walk past a gift shop in Moscow on May 17, 2022, next to t-shirts showing Vladimir Putin or bearing the letter Z, which has become a symbol of support for Russian military action in Ukraine. Polls suggest that more than half of Russia's population supports Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

When a reporter for the CurrentTime TV channel asked Russians in March about the war in Ukraine, she tried to show them pictures of the destruction wrought by their troops.

They weren’t having it.

“I won’t look at those photos,” said one woman before striding off. “I support Putin in all respects.”

An elderly man was equally dismissive: “No one is bombing Kyiv. I don’t believe it.”

A second woman acknowledged the invasion would probably bring sanctions and hardship but said, “I think Putin is a smart man and he knows what he’s doing…. This is what has to be done.”

When Western leaders clash with misbehaving nations, they’re often careful to declare that their grievance is with the country’s authoritarian government, not its downtrodden people.

But as Russia prosecutes a brutal war of aggression against its neighbour, it seems less than clear if that equation applies.

Polls suggest there’s broad Russian support for what is officially termed a “special military operation.” President Vladimir Putin himself surged in popularity as his tanks rumbled across the border in February, much as occurred when he first attacked Ukraine eight years ago, when he invaded Georgia, and during brutal wars in Chechnya. Meanwhile, low-ranking Russian soldiers have perpetrated random acts of cruelty against civilians, while shipping Ukrainians’ personal possessions back to grateful wives in Russia.

It all raises the question: in this particular conflict are the Russian people — not just their mercurial leader, his close aides and military commanders — also culpable for the death and destruction?

The answer invokes debate about the reliability of those polls and the impact of a repressive regime with almost total information control, but some analysts say ordinary Russians can’t be let off the hook.

The West shouldn’t go overboard in vilifying private citizens, but the people’s longstanding support for their president did, in fact, lay the groundwork for this war, argues Eastern-Europe specialist Robert Austin.

“What always disappointed me about Russia and Russians is how easily they slipped into his dictatorship,” said the professor with the University of Toronto’s Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies. “They really bought the Putin program early on.”

“They do have to bear some responsibility for this…. The easy embrace of Putin and Putinism leads directly to where we are now.”

In what has become essentially a totalitarian regime, it’s difficult to know how important popular backing is to Putin’s decision-making process. But it appears the president is acutely interested in his people’s opinions.

Elena Koneva, who used to be a leading Russian pollster before moving to Cyprus in 2016, said in an interview that insiders have told her that Russia’s state-run polling organization has recently been conducting daily surveys of 1,600 people each, and that Putin demands to see a report on the findings every day.

Many Russians are opposed to the invasion of Ukraine so it would be wrong to say the whole population “has blood on its hands,” says Maria Popova, an Eastern-Europe specialist and professor at McGill University. But the evidence suggests those dissenters account for less than a majority, while Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and incursion into eastern Ukraine were widely backed, she said.

“It’s definitely not only Putin’s war, it’s wider than this,” said Popova. “Russian society as a whole is responsible, not just Putin .”

Even so, censuring private Russians, as well as the Kremlin and its hangers-on, has proven at times controversial .

When visiting classical musicians were barred from performing with some Western ensembles, like pianist Alexander Malofeev at the Montreal symphony orchestra, critics said they were being arbitrarily “cancelled.”

When the All England Lawn Tennis Club turned away Russian players from this year’s Wimbledon championship, the professional tours cried discrimination and retaliated by saying no one could earn all-important ranking points in the tournament this year.

Regular Russian people are no more culpable for the bloodshed in Ukraine than Americans were for the Iraq war or ordinary Canadians for the residential school system, says Seva Gunitsky, a University of Toronto political science professor. To hold them accountable would be to adopt the thinking of terrorists, who consider it acceptable to attack civilians because of the actions of their governments, he said.

“This is really slippery terrain from a moral perspective,” said Gunitsky by email. “I do hope people don’t associate the Russian people with the regime. Collective guilt is a terrible place to go.”

The level of repression imposed by Putin recently should also not be underestimated, he said, suggesting the country went from “middle-income hybrid autocracy” to something like North Korean despotism in a matter of days.

Political scientist Lisa Sundstrom said she’s also loathe to blame ordinary Russians. It’s exceedingly difficult for them to express dissident views, a challenge that’s prompted thousands to abandon the country in recent weeks, the University of British Columbia professor noted.

But Sundstrom said her opinions are evolving after hearing from Russian opposition activists convinced that their fellow citizens are, in fact, partly to blame. They cite a widespread persistence in believing and backing the regime when alternative information sources are available, she said by email.

Indeed, opinion surveys arguably blur the division between state and population when it comes to the Ukraine war.

In a fairly typical recent poll from the Levada Center , one of Russia’s few independent pollsters, 74 per cent of respondents said they supported the actions of their armed forces in Ukraine.

Putin’s approval rating, just 62 per cent last November, had risen to 82 by April, its highest since 2017, according to Levada polling.

The president’s popularity similarly soared from the low 60s to 90 per cent in the months after Russian troops occupied Crimea in 2014 and backed separatist fighters in eastern Ukraine.

That said, academics argue that fear of retaliation — partly stemming from a new law that punishes criticism of the military by up to 15 years in prison — can affect people’s poll responses, something called “preference falsification.”

To try to filter out that effect, European social scientists Philipp Chapkovski and Max Schaub set up what’s called a list experiment . They asked respondents a direct question about support for the war, and also to indicate how many of a selection of statements — including one about backing the invasion — they endorsed, without having to reveal specifically which ones they chose. By statistical analysis of the responses, they came up with what they say is a more accurate reflection of Russians’ opinions.

The result? Even when they didn’t have to expose their true sentiments, just over half — 53 per cent — of people still voiced backing for the attack on Ukraine, a result the researchers described as “extremely concerning.”

Koneva, the Russian-born pollster, started non-profit ExtremeScan after the war started and has been surveying her former compatriots (as well as people in Belarus and Ukraine), offering them the option of not answering a question about support for the war as a way to identify those afraid to reveal their true feelings. ExtremeScan concludes as a result that 64 per cent of Russians back the military incursion.

More specifically, the research suggests that about 30 per cent are hard-core enthusiasts who understand what’s really happening, while another 30 are “light” supporters who’ve been swayed by Kremlin propaganda and vague beliefs that a Russian victory will improve their lives. About 25 per cent actually oppose the war, said Koneva.

She argues more generally that widespread, deep-seated backing for Russia’s imperialist ambitions make the people “100-per-cent responsible.”

But if the polls are accurate and many Russians do have Putin’s back and may even have given him a mandate to invade Ukraine, it raises another question: Why, exactly? Why approve of an unprovoked military offensive that was designed to topple a democratically elected government — and has been marked by evidence of extensive war crimes?

The Kremlin’s tight control on news about the conflict and misleading rhetoric about its motivations and aims are undoubtedly a factor.

Austin points to a longer-term phenomenon. Putin, he says, has been skilled at exploiting the chaotic 1990s — when post-Soviet Russia fell into economic collapse and disarray — and blaming those ills on the West, while intimating the country is still threatened from outside as Europe and NATO spread eastward.

“He was able … to portray Russia as a country that was under siege and surrounded by enemies,” said the U of T professor. “The notion of revival and undoing humiliation is very important.”

Popova cites the fact that after the Soviet Union fell, Russia never properly confronted its Communist past and the subjugation of Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact nations, the way Germany came to terms with its actions in the Second World War.

Nor did Russia properly dissect its own war history. Just like the Soviets, she said, today’s Russian authorities continue to glorify the “great patriotic war,” while obscuring facts like Moscow’s initial pact with Hitler, the Katyn massacre of Polish military officers and intelligentsia and atrocities the Red Army committed in its sweep toward Berlin.

Putin has extended that popular war narrative with his unfounded claims that he’s battling another “Nazi” government in Kyiv, said Popova. But if Russia had openly debated such issues after the Soviet Union’s demise, it “might be on a different path,” she said.

There remains, of course, a hope that the people of Russia will eventually turn on Putin, whether because of distaste for the war or the bite of sanctions.

Given that support appears somewhat lower than the polls show, regime change “may not be completely implausible,” say Chapkovski and Schaub of the list experiment.

On the other hand, the result could be the opposite, providing Putin even more popular encouragement for his military adventures, said Popova.

“If unity in the West cracks and Ukraine doesn’t get enough support and enough weapons, this war may end with victory for Putin and for Russia,” said the McGill professor. “And then his regime would be strengthened.”

A Cancer Trial's Unexpected Result: Remission in Every Patient

Gina Kolata

NEW YORK TIMES
Mon, June 6, 2022

It was a small trial, just 18 rectal cancer patients, every one of whom took the same drug.

But the results were astonishing. The cancer vanished in every single patient, undetectable by physical exam; endoscopy; positron emission tomography, or PET scans; or MRI scans.

Dr. Luis A. Diaz Jr. of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, an author of a paper published Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine describing the results, which were sponsored by drug company GlaxoSmithKline, said he knew of no other study in which a treatment completely obliterated a cancer in every patient.

“I believe this is the first time this has happened in the history of cancer,” Diaz said.

Dr. Alan P. Venook, a colorectal cancer specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved with the study, said he also thought this was a first.

A complete remission in every single patient is “unheard-of,” he said.

These rectal cancer patients had faced grueling treatments — chemotherapy, radiation and, most likely, life-altering surgery that could result in bowel, urinary and sexual dysfunction. Some would need colostomy bags.

They entered the study thinking that, when it was over, they would have to undergo those procedures because no one really expected their tumors to disappear.

But they got a surprise: No further treatment was necessary.

“There were a lot of happy tears,” said Dr. Andrea Cercek, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and a co-author of the paper, which was presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

Another surprise, Venook added, was that none of the patients had clinically significant complications.

On average, 1 in 5 patients have some sort of adverse reaction to drugs like the one the patients took, dostarlimab, known as checkpoint inhibitors. The medication was given every three weeks for six months and cost about $11,000 per dose. It unmasks cancer cells, allowing the immune system to identify and destroy them.

While most adverse reactions are easily managed, as many as 3% to 5% of patients who take checkpoint inhibitors have more severe complications that, in some cases, result in muscle weakness and difficulty swallowing and chewing.

The absence of significant side effects, Venook said, means that “either they did not treat enough patients or, somehow, these cancers are just plain different.”

In an editorial accompanying the paper, Dr. Hanna K. Sanoff of the University of North Carolina’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, who was not involved in the study, called it “small but compelling.” She added, though, that it is not clear if the patients are cured.

“Very little is known about the duration of time needed to find out whether a clinical complete response to dostarlimab equates to cure,” Sanoff said in the editorial.

Dr. Kimmie Ng, a colorectal cancer expert at Harvard Medical School, said that while the results were “remarkable” and “unprecedented,” they would need to be replicated.

The inspiration for the rectal cancer study came from a clinical trial Diaz led in 2017 that Merck, the drugmaker, funded. It involved 86 people with metastatic cancer that originated in various parts of their bodies. But the cancers all shared a gene mutation that prevented cells from repairing damage to DNA. These mutations occur in 4% of all cancer patients.

Patients in that trial took a Merck checkpoint inhibitor, pembrolizumab, for up to two years. Tumors shrank or stabilized in about one-third to one-half of the patients, and they lived longer. Tumors vanished in 10% of the trial’s participants.

That led Cercek and Diaz to ask: What would happen if the drug were used much earlier in the course of disease, before the cancer had a chance to spread?

They settled on a study of patients with locally advanced rectal cancer — tumors that had spread in the rectum and sometimes to the lymph nodes but not to other organs. Cercek had noticed that chemotherapy was not helping a portion of patients who had the same mutations that affected the patients in the 2017 trial. Instead of shrinking during treatment, their rectal tumors grew.

Perhaps, Cercek and Diaz reasoned, immunotherapy with a checkpoint inhibitor would allow such patients to avoid chemotherapy, radiation and surgery.

Diaz began asking companies that made checkpoint inhibitors if they would sponsor a small trial. They turned him down, saying the trial was too risky. He and Cercek wanted to give the drug to patients who could be cured with standard treatments. What the researchers were proposing might end up allowing the cancers to grow beyond the point at which they could be cured.

“It is very hard to alter the standard of care,” Diaz said. “The whole standard-of-care machinery wants to do the surgery.”

Finally, a small biotechnology firm, Tesaro, agreed to sponsor the study. Tesaro was bought by GlaxoSmithKline, and Diaz said he had to remind the larger company that they were doing the study — company executives had all but forgotten about the small trial.

Their first patient was Sascha Roth, then 38. She first noticed some rectal bleeding in 2019 but otherwise felt fine — she is a runner and helps manage a family furniture store in Bethesda, Maryland.

During a sigmoidoscopy, she recalled, her gastroenterologist said, “Oh no. I was not expecting this!”

The next day, the doctor called Roth. He had had the tumor biopsied. “It’s definitely cancer,” he told her.

“I completely melted down,” she said.

Soon, she was scheduled to start chemotherapy at Georgetown University, but a friend had insisted she first see Dr. Philip Paty at Memorial Sloan Kettering. Paty told her he was almost certain her cancer included the mutation that made it unlikely to respond well to chemotherapy. It turned out, though, that Roth was eligible to enter the clinical trial. If she had started chemotherapy, she would not have been.

Not expecting a complete response to dostarlimab, Roth had planned to move to New York for radiation, chemotherapy and possibly surgery after the trial ended. To preserve her fertility after the expected radiation treatment, she had her ovaries removed and put back under her ribs.

After the trial, Cercek gave her the news.

“We looked at your scans,” she said. “There is absolutely no cancer.” She did not need any further treatment.

“I told my family,” Roth said. “They didn’t believe me.”

But two years later, she still does not have a trace of cancer.

© 2022 The New York Times Company

Analysis - 'Sitting above a bomb': Bangladesh's missed fire-safety lessons

By Krishna N. Das and Ruma Paul 

© Reuters/AL MAHMUD BSFILE PHOTO: Smoke rises from the spot after a massive fire broke out in an inland container depot at Sitakunda, near the port city Chittagong

DHAKA (Reuters) - A deadly fire at a container depot in Bangladesh has laid bare the dangers still facing millions of the country's workers a decade after a series of tragedies in the export-focussed garment industry spurred a safety revolution.

Intense scrutiny of Bangladesh and the major international clothing retailers that rely on it for supplies has helped prevent further disasters in the garment sector since a fire in 2012 and a building collapse in 2013 together killed more than 1,200 workers.

But in other industries, mainly catering to Bangladesh's booming domestic economy and without an equal emphasis on safety, hundreds have died in fires in recent years.

At least 41 people burned to death in a depot blaze that erupted on Saturday and has yet to be extinguished. Nearby containers loaded with chemicals pose a risk of further life-threatening explosions.

Bangladesh saw its last major garments factory fire in early 2017 in which six workers were killed. But fires in other commercial settings or factories, making everything from fans to fruit juices, have killed at least 200 since then and injured many more, according to a Reuters count.

"The safety is more in the garments sector than in other industries because there is an international compliance-monitoring system, and no compliance means no orders," said Jewel Das, general secretary of the Bangladesh Association of Fire Consultants that works with the government on fire audits.

"But in other sectors, there is no international monitoring system and the national monitoring system is not strong."

Unlike established garment businesses which have their power systems including diesel generators located away from their factories, many other units are built right on top of their power sources.

"Because most fires start from the electrical systems, it's like sitting above a bomb," Das said.

He said many non-garment factories also lack fire-safety measures like the segregation of flammable materials, maintenance of fire-escape routes and clear demarcation of assembly areas in the densely populated country of more than 160 million.

Monir Hossain, a senior official at Bangladesh Fire Service and Civil Defence who was inspecting chemicals and fire standards at the depot, agreed that oversight was weak in most other industries. He feared not much would change even after the latest disaster.

"A lot has been done to improve the safety conditions in garments but other sectors still remain out of scrutiny," said Hossain.

"When something happens, there are investigations but after some time, we all forget that. Then another incident happens."

At the container depot, he said even basic fire-safety measures were missing. There were only a handful of fire extinguishers, he said, at a site storing everything from clothes to chemicals.

'NO COMPULSION, NO COMPLIANCE'

The world woke up to Bangladesh's hazardous factory conditions in 2012 when a fire at Tazreen Fashions, which made goods for Walmart Inc and Sears Holdings, killed 112 workers.

The disaster was followed by the collapse of the eight-story Rana Plaza a year later, killing 1,135 garment workers and triggering a wave of public outrage around the world about the human cost of cheap clothes.

This prompted global retailers, foreign governments and international agencies like the World Bank's International Finance Corporation (IFC) to act to help the world's second-largest garments industry improve safety and labour conditions.

The IFC said it had established a five-year, $40 million credit facility for local banks to help garments and related factories upgrade their structural, electrical, and fire safety standards.

No similar arrangements are in place for other industries which have mushroomed as the economy has grown much faster than in many other countries in the past decade.

The International Labour Organization said it was working with Bangladesh's fire, factories and other departments to improve safety across the economy.

"The lessons learned from the garment sector should be channelled towards focused interventions in other sectors based on hazards and risk to health and safety," it said.

"An effective national industrial and enterprise safety framework as well as enforcement and training system is needed in Bangladesh."

Ali Ahmed Khan, who was the chief of the fire department until a few years ago, said Bangladesh now needs to focus on the small and medium-sized industries if it wants to stop a recurrence of deadly fires.

He said industries like leather goods, pharmaceuticals and plastic goods were stepping up exports but were not fully compliant with fire-safety rules.

"Unless there is a compulsion, people will not comply," he said.

(Reporting by Krishna N. Das in New Delhi and Ruma Paul in Dhaka; Editing by Toby Chopra)

Bangladesh officials accuse depot operator over blast that killed at least 49

AFP Published June 6, 2022 -

This picture, taken on June 5, 2022, shows smoke billowing after a fire broke out at a container storage facility in Sitakunda, about 40 km from the key port of Chittagong in Bangladesh. — AFP

Bangladesh authorities accused a container depot operator on Monday of not telling firefighters about a chemical stockpile before it exploded with devastating consequences, killing at least 49 people — nine of them from the fire service.

The toll from the giant blast, which followed a fire at the BM Container Depot in Sitakunda and sent fireballs into the sky, was expected to rise further.

Some containers at the depot were still smouldering on Monday, more than 36 hours after the explosion, preventing rescuers from checking the area around them for victims.

Around a dozen of the 300 injured were in critical condition.

The nine dead firefighters are the worst toll ever for the fire department in the industrial-accident-prone country, where safety standards are lax and corruption often enables them to be ignored.

“The depot authority did not inform us that there were deadly chemicals there. Nine of our officers were killed. Two fighters are still missing. Several people are also missing,” fire department official Mohammad Kamruzzaman told AFP.

Purnachandra Mutsuddi, who led the fire-fighting effort at the 26-acre facility on Saturday night, said it “didn't have any fire safety plan” and lacked firefighting equipment to douse the blaze before it turned into an inferno.

“The safety plan lays out how the depot will fight and control a fire. But there was nothing,” Mutsuddi, an assistant director of the Chittagong fire station, told AFP.

“They also did not inform us about the chemicals. If they did, the casualties would have been much less,” he said.

The BM Container Depot in Sitakunda, an industrial town 40 kilometres from Chittagong Port, is a joint venture between Bangladeshi and Dutch businessmen with around 600 employees, and began operations in 2012.

Its chairman is named on its website as Bert Pronk, a Dutch citizen, but AFP was unable to reach him for comment. Few European businessmen operate in the country.

Local newspapers said another of its owners is a senior official of the ruling Awami League party based in Chittagong, who is also the editor of a local Bengali daily.

Police have yet to lay charges over the fire. “Our investigation is going on. We will look into everything,” said local police chief Abul Kalam Azad.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has expressed grief over the loss of lives in the incident and extended his condolences to the people of Bangladesh.

“Sad to hear about the loss of precious lives in a fire incident in Bangladesh. My heartfelt condolences & most sincere sympathies are with the government and people of Bangladesh,” he said in a tweet.



'Falling like rain'

Wisps of smoke rose into the bright morning sky from dozens of 20-foot containers at the depot on Monday.

“Some 30 to 40 containers are still smouldering,” said fire department inspector Harunur Rashid. “Fire is under control. But chemicals are main problems.”

Once the flames are entirely out, rescuers will search the area for more victims, he said.

Mujibur Rahman, a director of BM Container Depot, said the cause of the initial fire remained unknown.

The container depot held hydrogen peroxide, according to fire service chief Brigadier General Main Uddin, and witnesses said the entire town shook when the chemicals exploded.

“The explosion sent fireballs into the sky,” said Mohammad Ali, 60, who runs a nearby grocery store. “Fireballs were falling like rain.

“We were so afraid we immediately left our home to find refuge,” he added. “We thought the fire would spread to our locality as it is very densely populated.”

Elias Chowdhury, the chief doctor in Chittagong, said doctors at multiple hospitals had been called back from holidays to help treat the hundreds of injured.

Around 90 per cent of Bangladesh's roughly 100 billion dollars in trade — including clothes for H&M, Walmart and others — passes through the Chittagong port at the top of the Bay of Bengal.

Rakibul Alam Chowdhury from the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) said that about 110 million dollars worth of garments were destroyed in the fire.

“It is a huge loss for the industry,” he said.

FIFTY YEARS OF COMING SOON PROMISES 
MIT Is Joining Forces With a Bill Gates-Backed Startup to Bring Fusion to the Masses

Caroline Delbert - POPMECH

A tokamak designed at MIT works by using proprietary superconducting magnets.
Students will continue to refine the tokamak by working with Commonwealth Fusion System.
There are still many questions to answer about how the tokamak will succeed—like how to build a reactor that can handle extreme heat.

An MIT spinoff partly funded by Bill Gates signed a new agreement last month to continue its nuclear fusion research for at least the next five years in a bid to make commercial nuclear fusion a reality.

The Commonwealth Fusion System (CFS), named for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, will continue its established collaboration with MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), a research lab devoted to the study of plasmas, fusion science, and technology. This type of partnership style is pretty common in cutting-edge scientific research where there are patents and proprietary technologies at play.

CFS and MIT have collaborated for years on research surrounding a superconducting magnet they believe will make it possible to reach the ignition threshold for nuclear fusion energy. Last September, the partnership achieved the most powerful high-temperature magnetic field ever created on Earth, using the high-temperature superconducting electromagnet to create a field strength of 20 teslas.


The magnets go into a device called a tokamak, which is a space-age reactor that uses an astonishing amount of energy in an effort to produce at least slightly more energy than the machine consumes. A tokamak is a donut-shaped or spherical reactor in which a stream of plasma is swirled. The plasma is far too hot for a traditional material to contain, so a powerful magnetic field holds it in place. This is where CFS’s superconducting magnets come in, because electromagnets use a lot of power in tokamak designs. A superconducting magnet is one that operates without any resistance, which could cut down on the amount of power required to hold the magnetic field together.

There’s still a high energy cost, though, because the magnets must be cooled to extremely low temperatures in order to operate. This helps to explain why, despite efforts around the world on a variety of scales, nuclear fusion has yet to generate more energy than it requires to power these complex tokamak machines. All nuclear fusion technologies rely on some kind of extreme in temperature, in pressure, or in speed, matching the conditions in which fusion naturally occurs in outer space.

Companies like CFS are often started at research institutions or even government laboratories; that’s because these lab like to focus on developing new ideas and giving researchers something to study firsthand. Startup companies that aren’t in the business of conducting scholarly research typically end up handling the nitty gritty of turning those cutting-edge ideas into, for example, commercial power plants.


© Gretchen Ertl, CFS/MIT-PSFC, 2021High-temperature superconducting (HTS) fusion electromagnet with record-setting field strength of 20 tesla.

In this case, the partnership is a bit of both, with MIT supplying a steady stream of graduate students and postdocs who want to work on the continuing refinement of CFS’s tokamak technology. “CFS will build [the tokamak] SPARC and develop a commercial fusion product, while MIT PSFC will focus on its core mission of cutting-edge research and education,” PSFC director Dennis Whyte says in a statement. Whyte is a nuclear physicist whose work at MIT is the basis for SPARC.

While the kernel of that work is established—the fusion reaction, the idea of the tokamak, and CFS’s superconducting magnets—much of the logistics remains to be worked out, like how to build a commercial reactor whose materials will be able to transfer the extreme heat.

'Ghost heart': Built from the scaffolding of a pig and the patient's cells, this cardiac breakthrough may soon be ready for transplant into humans

Sandee LaMotte - CNN

The first time molecular biologist Doris Taylor saw heart stem cells beat in unison in a petri dish, she was spellbound.

“It actually changed my life,” said Taylor, who directed regenerative medicine research at Texas Heart Institute in Houston until 2020. “I said to myself, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s life.’ I wanted to figure out the how and why, and re-create that to save lives.”

That goal has become reality. On Wednesday at the Life Itself conference, a health and wellness event presented in partnership with CNN, Taylor showed the audience the scaffolding of a pig’s heart infused with human stem cells – creating a viable, beating human heart the body will not reject. Why? Because it’s made from that person’s own tissues.

“Now we can truly imagine building a personalized human heart, taking heart transplants from an emergency procedure where you’re so sick, to a planned procedure,” Taylor told the audience.

“That reduces your risk by eliminating the need for (antirejection) drugs, by using your own cells to build that heart it reduces the cost … and you aren’t in the hospital as often so it improves your quality of life,” she said.

Debuting on stage with her was BAB, a robot Taylor painstakingly taught to inject stem cells into the chambers of ghost hearts inside a sterile environment. As the audience at Life Itself watched BAB functioning in a sterile environment, Taylor showed videos of the pearly white mass called a “ghost heart” begin to pinken.

“It’s the first shot at truly curing the number one killer of men, women and children worldwide – heart disease. And then I want to make it available to everyone,” said Taylor to audience applause.

“She never gave up,” said Michael Golway, lead inventor of BAB and president and CEO of Advanced Solutions, which designs and creates platforms for building human tissues.

“At any point, Dr. Taylor could have easily said ‘I’m done, this just isn’t going to work. But she persisted for years, fighting setbacks to find the right type of cells in the right quantities and right conditions to enable those cells to be happy and grow.”
Giving birth to a heart

Taylor’s fascination with growing hearts began in 1998, when she was part of a team at Duke University that injected cells into a rabbit’s failed heart, creating new heart muscle. As trials began in humans, however, the process was hit or miss.

“We were putting cells into damaged or scarred regions of the heart and hoping that would overcome the existing damage,” she told CNN. “I started thinking: What if we could get rid of that bad environment and rebuild the house?”

Taylor’s first success came in 2008 when she and a team at the University of Minnesota washed the cells out of a rat’s heart and began to work with the translucent skeleton left behind.

Soon, she graduated to using pig’s hearts, due to their anatomical similarity to human hearts.

“We took a pig’s heart, and we washed out all the cells with a gentle baby shampoo,” she said. “What was left was an extracellular matrix, a transparent framework we called the ‘ghost heart.’

“Then we infused blood vessel cells and let them grow on the matrix for a couple of weeks,” Taylor said. “That built a way to feed the cells we were going to add because we’d reestablished the blood vessels to the heart.”

The next step was to begin injecting the immature stem cells into the different regions of the scaffold, “and then we had to teach the cells how to grow up.”

“We must electrically stimulate them, like a pacemaker, but very gently at first, until they get stronger and stronger. First, cells in one spot will twitch, then cells in another spot twitch, but they aren’t together,” Taylor said. “Over time they start connecting to each other in the matrix and by about a month, they start beating together as a heart. And let me tell you, it’s a ‘wow’ moment!”


© Provided by CNN

'Ghost heart': Built from the scaffolding of a pig and the patient's cells, this cardiac breakthrough may soon be ready for transplant into humansThis "ghost heart," created by using the scaffolding of a pig's heart and injected it with human stem cells, may soon be ready for human clinical trials. - Advanced Solutions Life Sciences

But that’s not the end of the “mothering” Taylor and her team had to do. Now she must nurture the emerging heart by giving it a blood pressure and teaching it to pump.

“We fill the heart chambers with artificial blood and let the heart cells squeeze against it. But we must help them with electrical pumps, or they will die,” she explained.

The cells are also fed oxygen from artificial lungs. In the early days all of these steps had to be monitored and coordinated by hand 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, Taylor said.

“The heart has to eat every day, and until we built the pieces that made it possible to electronically monitor the hearts someone had to do it person – and it didn’t matter if it was Christmas or New Year’s Day or your birthday,” she said. “It’s taken extraordinary groups of people who have worked with me over the years to make this happen.”

But once Taylor and her team saw the results of their parenting, any sacrifices they made became insignificant, “because then the beauty happens, the magic,” she said.

“We’ve injected the same type of cells everywhere in the heart, so they all started off alike,” Taylor said. “But now when we look in the left ventricle, we find left ventricle heart cells. If we look in the atrium, they look like atrial heart cells, and if we look in the right ventricle, they are right ventricle heart cells,” she said.

“So over time they’ve developed based on where they find themselves and grown up to work together and become a heart. Nature is amazing, isn’t she?”
Billions and billions of stem cells

As her creation came to life, Taylor began to dream about a day when her prototypical hearts could be mass produced for the thousands of people on transplant lists, many of whom die while waiting. But how do you scale a heart?

“I realized that for every gram of heart tissue we built, we needed a billion heart cells,” Taylor said. “That meant for an adult-sized human heart we would need up to 400 billion individual cells. Now, most labs work with a million or so cells, and heart cells don’t divide, which left us with the dilemma: Where will these cells come from?”

The answer arrived when Japanese biomedical researcher Dr. Shinya Yamanaka discovered human adult skin cells could be reprogrammed to behave like embryonic or “pluripotent” stem cells, capable of developing into any cell in the body. The 2007 discovery won the scientist a Nobel Prize, and his “induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS),” soon became known as “Yamanaka factors.”

“Now for the first time we could take blood, bone marrow or skin from a person and grow cells from that individual that could turn into heart cells,” Taylor said. “But the scale was still huge: We needed tens of billions of cells. It took us another 10 years to develop the techniques to do that.”

The solution? A bee-like honeycomb of fiber, with thousands of microscopic holes where the cells could attach and be nourished.

“The fiber soaks up the nutrients just like a coffee filter, the cells have access to food all around them and that lets them grow in much larger numbers. We can go from about 50 million cells to a billion cells in a week,” Taylor said. “But we need 40 billion or 50 billion or 100 billion, so part of our science over the last few years has been scaling up the number of cells we can grow.”

Another issue: Each heart needed a pristine environment free of contaminants for each step of the process. Every time an intervention had to be done, she and her team ran the risk of opening the heart up to infection – and death.

“Do you know how long it takes to inject 350 billion cells by hand?” Taylor asked the Life Itself audience. “What if you touch something? You just contaminated the whole heart.”

Once her lab suffered an electrical malfunction and all of the hearts died. Taylor and her team were nearly inconsolable.

“When something happens to one of these hearts, it’s devastating to all of us,” Taylor said. “And this is going to sound weird coming from a scientist, but I had to learn to bolster my own heart emotionally, mentally, spiritually and physically to get through this process.”


© Provided by CNN

'Ghost heart': Built from the scaffolding of a pig and the patient's cells, this cardiac breakthrough may soon be ready for transplant into humansDr. Doris Taylor (left) is teaching BAB the robot how to properly inject stem cells into a ghost heart. - Advanced Solutions Life Sciences

Enter BAB, short for BioAssemblyBot, and an “uber-sterile” cradle created by Advance Solutions that could hold the heart and transport it between each step of the process while preserving a germ-free environment. Taylor has now taught BAB the specific process of injecting the cells she has painstakingly developed over the last decade.

“When Dr. Taylor is injecting cells, it has taken her years to figure out where to inject, how much pressure to put on the syringe, and the best speed and pace to add the cells,” said BAB’s creator Golway.

“A robot can do that quickly and precisely. And as we know, no two hearts are the same, so BAB can use ultrasound to see inside the vascular pathway of that specific heart, where Dr. Taylor is working blind, so to speak,” Golway added. “It’s exhilarating to watch – there are times where the hair on the back of my neck literally stands up.”

Taylor left academia in 2020 and is currently working with private investors to bring her creation to the masses. If transplants into humans in upcoming clinical trials are successful, Taylor’s personalized hybrid hearts could be used to save thousands of lives around the world.

In the US alone, some 3,500 people were on the heart transplant waiting list in 2021.

“That’s not counting the people who never make it on the list, due to their age or heath,” Taylor said. “If you’re a small woman, if you’re an underrepresented minority, if you’re a child, the chances of getting an organ that matches your body are low.

If you do get a heart, many people get sick or otherwise lose their new heart within a decade. We can reduce cost, we can increase access, and we can decrease side effects. It’s a win-win-win.”

Taylor can even envision a day when people bank their own stem cells at a young age, taking them out of storage when needed to grow a heart – and one day even a lung, liver or kidney.

“Say they have heart disease in their family,” she said. “We can plan ahead: Grow their cells to the numbers we need and freeze them, then when they are diagnosed with heart failure pull a scaffold off the shelf and build the heart within two months.

“I’m just humbled and privileged to do this work, and proud of where we are,” she added. “The technology is ready. I hope everyone is going to be along with us for the ride because this is game-changing.”