RUTHFULLY YOURS

The gunman who killed 26 people Sunday at a Texas church was discharged from the Air Force for bad conduct, according to court documents.

Authorities identified Devin Patrick Kelley, 26 years old, as the shooter. He was clad in black and wearing a ballistic vest when he opened fire at a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, authorities said. Twenty people were injured in the attack.

Kelley fled the scene and was later found dead in his vehicle, police said. Police were investigating the circumstances of his death.

Kelley served in the U.S. Air Force but was court-martialed in 2012 and ultimately received a “bad conduct discharge,” according to court records. He was sentenced to confinement for 12 months and a reduction in rank to E-1.

Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek confirmed that Devin P. Kelley served in Logistics Readiness at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico from 2010 until his discharge in 2014.

Kelley was court-martialed in 2012 for two counts of assault on his spouse and on their child, Ms. Stefanek said.

Kelley lived in lived in the New Braunfels, Texas, area northeast of San Antonio, where he graduated from high school in 2009.

SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Texas—A young man clad in black and wearing a ballistic vest blasted his way into a Baptist church in this south Texas town on Sunday with an assault-type rifle, leaving at least 26 people dead and 20 others injured.

The gunman fled in a vehicle and died following a pursuit, law-enforcement officials said, adding that it wasn’t known whether he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound or was shot by someone else. Wilson County Commissioner Ernest “Skip” Hajek confirmed his identity as Devin Patrick Kelley. He said Kelley lived in the New Braunfels, Texas, area northeast of San Antonio.

Among those killed were a woman in the third trimester of her pregnancy and the 14-year-old daughter of Pastor Frank Pomeroy, according to family members of the victims. Twenty-three people were killed at the church, two outside and one died en route to the hospital, officials said.

For the future of medicine and treatment of infections, it is scary news. A pair of scientists, Catriona Harkins and Matthew Holden at the University of St. Andrews, have now determined bacteria can evolve resistance to antibiotics that the bacteria has never seen or interacted with.

According to an article in The Atlantic, the duo sequenced the DNA of 209 samples of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, that were collected between 1960 and 1989. They discovered that “methicillin use was not the original driving factor in the evolution of MRSA as previously thought.” Instead, it was penicillin. According to the research, when penicillin became popular, it likely helped the rise of staph strains that carried mecA, and were already resistant to methicillin.

This revelation makes MRSA even more frightening than previously thought. In 1959, Margaret Patricia Jevons had isolated three strains of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, which has since become a global problem. The bacteria had become a cautionary tale for how quickly bacteria can quickly evolve to resist popular drugs, especially when overprescribed.

But a few questions remained. MRSA appeared in India and some Eastern European countries before the countries had started using the antibiotic methicillin. So how did the bacteria evolve to resist a drug it had never encountered before?

This new study provides an answer, and many new consequences. According to MRSA researcher Hsu Li Yang, from the National University of Singapore, it demonstrates that “antibiotic resistance is a web of unintended consequences, rather than a simplistic cause-effect model that we often find (too much) comfort in.” Read https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/bacteria-can-evolve-resistance-to-drugs-before-those-drugs-are-used/544355/

It’s always important to understand how you know what you know, or what you think you know. It’s particularly important in the case of the Trump dossier.

Consider the increasing number of claims that the incendiary allegations of the dossier “check out,” in the words of New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.

Bankrolled by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC, guided by the dirt-digging opposition research firm Fusion GPS, and compiled by the former British spy Christopher Steele, the dossier’s key allegation is this: “There was a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership.” Steele attributed that claim to “Source E,” whom he described as “an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.”

“What’s relevant is [Steele’s] credibility, the reliability of his sources and the truthfulness of their claims,” Stephens wrote recently. “These check out.”

But do they? In reality, most reasonable people not named Mueller would have to say we don’t know.

“As it relates to the Steele dossier, unfortunately the committee has hit a wall,” Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr noted last month. The committee’s investigation, the best probe outside of the Mueller special prosecutor operation, has not even been able to discover who Steele’s sources were, Burr said.

So how do outsiders conclude that the document’s key allegations check out? How do they know what they know?

Consider one of the dossier’s underlying claims in support of the “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and the Russians. In a section of the dossier dated July 19, 2016, Steele wrote Carter Page, who was briefly on Trump’s little-used foreign policy advisory team, held secret meetings with two high-ranking Russians, one in the Putin government and one the head of Rosneft, the state-owned oil company, during a visit to Moscow early in the month of July. Here are the relevant portions of the dossier, written in spy style, from the July 19 Steele memo:

Speaking in July 2016, a Russian source close to Rosneft President, PUTIN close associate and US-sanctioned individual, Igor SECHIN, confided the details of a recent secret meeting between him and visiting Foreign Affairs Advisor to Republican presidential candidate Donald TRUMP, Carter PAGE.
According to SECHIN’s associate, the Rosneft President (CEO) had raised with PAGE the issues of future bilateral energy cooperation and prospects for an associated move to lift Ukraine-related Western sanctions against Russia. PAGE had reacted positively to this demarche by SECHIN but had been generally non-committal in his response.
Speaking separately, also in July 2016, an official close to Presidential Administration Head, S. IVANOV, confided in a compatriot that a senior colleague in the Internal Department of the PA, DIVYEKIN (nfd) also had met secretly with PAGE on his recent visit. Their agenda had included DIVYEKIN raising a dossier of ‘kompromat’ the Kremlin possessed on TRUMP’s Democratic presidential rival, Hillary CLINTON, and its possible release to the Republican’s campaign team.