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New Study Provides Ominous Outlook About Future of Antibiotic Treatments Scientists have learned bacteria can develop resistance to antibiotics without exposure to them. By Rebecca Gibian

Posted By on November 6th, 2017

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/

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Byron York: Spinning in circles on the Trump dossier by Byron York

Posted By on November 6th, 2017

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.

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A Century Since the Balfour Declaration Daniel Mandel

Posted By on November 6th, 2017

Much to celebrate, despite all the distortions and lies and misrepresentations about its meaning and significance ever since.

A mere sixty-seven words helped alter the course of history. A century years ago this past week, November 2, 1917, the Balfour Declaration was issued, declaring British support for the establishment within the then-Ottoman Empire territory of Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.

The British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James, Lord Balfour, sent the following communication to Walter, Lord Rothschild, one of the most prominent Jews in England, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland:

His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

The Balfour Declaration was the first step on the political road to reversing two millennia of Jewish statelessness and exile which had resulted in the Jews being the most dispersed and persecuted minority in history.

The British commitment did not envisage Jewish statehood in all or indeed any part of Palestine, a sparsely populated, backwater district of the soon-to-be dismembered Ottoman Empire, even though some such prospect was in the fullness of time anticipated by its proponents, especially Balfour and also the Prime Minister, David Lloyd-George. Supporters of Zionism, like South Africa’s Jan Smuts, believed as early as 1918 that a heterogeneous population like Palestine (512,000 Muslims, 66,000 Jews and 61,000 Christians at the time of the Balfour Declaration — the Jewish population had dropped by about a third due to Ottoman depredations during the War) required something other than outright autonomy, with its minorities thrown on the mercy of the majority. (Similar thinking with regard to Lebanon, with its large, multi-confessional Christian population, was also prevalent at the time.)

The Declaration resulted in the subsequent, post-war British Mandate over the territory being dedicated to the upbuilding of the Jewish national home. Even though the British later reneged on this commitment in a bid to appease the Arabs on the eve of the Second World War by drastically curtailing Jewish immigration and land purchases, the state of Israel did eventually arise when the Mandate was terminated in May 1948.

Accordingly, Israel was not anyone’s gift to the Jews. The Jews of Palestine sacrificed scarce blood and treasure to obtain and preserve their independence from five invading Arab armies and internal Palestinian Arab militias led by the war-time Nazi collaborator, Haj Amin el Husseini. One percent of Israel’s population was killed defending Israel from the invasion which all Arabs belligerents declared would result in the destruction of Israel and the massacre of all its Jews.

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Muslim Persecution of Christians, June 2017 by Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on November 5th, 2017

“They defend freedom of worship in the West in order to ban it in their homeland. They fight to build mosques in someone else’s homeland whilst destroying churches and synagogues where they have power.” — Kamel Abderrahmani, Arab journalist, Algeria.

“ISIS publicly caged and burned alive 19 Yazidi girls for refusing to have sex with ISIS fighters, according to local activists. Yazidi leaders last year showed Fox News photographs of the Islamic jihadists burning babies to death on a slab of sheet metal, photos that show tiny, roasted bodies side by side as flames engulfed them.” — ISIS in Iraq, Fox News, June 14.

The Erdogan government seized at least 50 Syriac churches, monasteries, and Christian cemeteries, many of which were still active, in Mardin province, and declared them “state property.” — Turkey.

A presidential order replaced Christian education with Islamic Studies in secondary schools. While the subject, “Christian Religious Knowledge,” no longer exists, Islamic, Arab, and French studies have been introduced in the new curriculum…. The Christian Association of Nigeria further denounced this move “to force Islamic studies down the throats of non-adherents of the religion,” as being an “agenda deliberately crafted towards Islamization.” — Nigeria.

Jesuit Father Henri Boulad, an Islamic scholar of the Egyptian Greek Melkite rite, pulled no punches in an interview concerning the motives of Islamic terror and Western responses to it. “Islam is an open-ended declaration of war against non-Muslims” and those who carry out acts of violence and intolerance are only doing what their creed requires, said the priest. The interview continues:

Those who fail to recognize the real threat posed by Islam are naïve and ignorant of history, he said, and unfortunately many in the Church fall into this category.

Citing a letter he wrote last August to Pope Francis, Father Boulad said that “on the pretext of openness, tolerance and Christian charity — the Catholic Church has fallen into the trap of the liberal left ideology which is destroying the West.”

“Anything that does not espouse this ideology is immediately stigmatized in the name of ‘political correctness,'” he said.

The priest went so far as to chastise Pope Francis himself—a fellow Jesuit—suggesting that he has fallen into this trap as well.

“Many think that a certain number of your positions are aligned with this ideology and that, from complacency, you go from concessions to concessions and compromises in compromises at the expense of the truth,” the priest wrote to Francis.

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To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the Arab Spring by Ruthie Blum

Posted By on November 5th, 2017

To Hell in a Handbasket is a chilling account of how Jimmy Carter’s abandonment of a longtime U.S. ally in favor of a murderous mullah thirty years ago enabled the Islamization of Iran—and how Barack Obama’s current oblivion to and appeasement of the radical Muslim world are helping to Islamize the rest of the Middle East. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ruthie Blum, who immigrated to Israel from the United States in 1977, was a columnist, interviewer, and senior editor at The Jerusalem Post for two decades. She blogs for Israel Hayom. PRAISE: “Whether Barack Obama is another Jimmy Carter is unfortunately not just academic speculation. Carter was bad enough, especially in the Middle East, but Obama is close on his heels. A second Obama term could well bring a nuclear Iran, a militantly anti-Israeli Egypt, and the overthrow of the pro-American Arab monarchies. The United States needs to wake up to what is happening, and Ruthie Blum’s book is just the ticket. Let’s hope she doesn’t have to write a sequel.” —John Bolton Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations “The esteemed writer and commentator Ruthie Blum has produced a timely and essential account of President Obama’s betrayal of a longtime U.S. ally, former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and its consequences for America’s vital national-security interests. Just as important, by placing Obama’s mishandling of the current pan-Arab populist wave against the backdrop of then-president Jimmy Carter’s betrayal of longtime U.S. ally the shah of Iran, Blum demonstrates the timeless truth of George Santayana’s lament that ‘those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them.’ ” —Caroline B. Glick Senior contributing editor, The Jerusalem Post, and senior Middle East fellow, Center for Security Policy

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Time for an Assyrian Regional Government in Iraq by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on November 5th, 2017

As can be seen in the region every day, it is not realistic to expect the Assyrians to be quiet and accept their “fate” under the tender mercies of Shiite or Sunni rule.

The future Assyrian regional government could be an independent state or autonomous region like the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq. Even if it is city-state like Vatican City, it would be monumental in stopping the annihilation of Assyrian people and could also serve as a safe haven for other persecuted minorities.

“Thank God that Jews, a historically persecuted people just like us, now have Israel… After centuries of persecution, is it not the time for Assyrians and other persecuted Christians to finally have their own government?” — Sabri Atman, founder of the Assyrian Genocide and Research Center.

When ISIS invaded Iraq and its Nineveh Plain in 2014, one of the most victimized peoples were Assyrians, a Christian community indigenous to the region.

After the defeat of ISIS, some of the displaced Assyrians from the Nineveh Plain finally returned to their homeland, but today, they are fleeing their homes as their towns once again become a battleground — this time between Iraqi and Kurdish forces.

The Assyrian-Syriac-Chaldean people have inhabited the Middle East since the beginning of recorded history. We might now, however, be witnessing the disappearance of this community. The end of the Assyrians in Iraq means the eventual end of the Assyrians altogether.
The Threat of Iran

Christians are also increasingly facing threats from Shiite Iran as, after its gains against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, it attempts to expand its influence in the region.

“Iran is aggressively establishing schools and mosques and libraries and other structures within the main Christian towns,” said human rights lawyer Nina Shea, who once served on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

A UN- and US-protected region is needed in northern Iraq to help restrict the empowerment and Iranification of Iraq, according to experts in the region Andrew Doran, Robert Nicholson, Mark Tooley, and Stephen Hollingshead. They argue that U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley should call on the UN and US coalition allies to establish a protected zone for genocide victims in northern Iraq:

“The UN has a duty to protect Northern Iraq’s indigenous peoples. It can also promote stability and security in the Middle East by preventing Iranian expansion to the Mediterranean Sea. Such a zone would also be a bulwark against Iranian-backed militias in Northern Iraq.

“What is required for administrative, juridical, and economic functions to take hold in these communities is to be liberated from the immediate threat — Iran. The presence of a multinational coalition force would likely be sufficient to deter Iranian aggression…. There are already U.S. and other coalition forces on the ground in northern Iraq. The force required to deter external aggression would be small. It is also worth noting that these communities in Northern Iraq were rarely covered in the news from 2003 until 2014, when ISIS conquered them. This is because they were peaceful, productive, and proven allies of the United States. They have suffered much for that alliance. This is no time to abandon them to Iran.”

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Iran and ‘The Great Satan’: A Four-Decade-Old Saga by Amir Taheri

Posted By on November 5th, 2017

Right now, with marches and fiery speeches, the Islamic Republic in Iran is marking the 38th anniversary of the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran and the holding of American diplomats as hostages for 444 days.

As the US Congress seeks new ways of tightening the screws on Iran, the Tehran leadership remains prisoner to old illusions. Most of those illusions are centered on the United States, which has frightened and fascinated the mullahs since they seized power almost 40 years ago.

The mullahs are frightened of the US because their view of history is shaped by their belief in conspiracy theories. They regard the US as a heavily-centralized diabolical machine controlled by a small coterie of conspirators, determined to rule the world. Internal political fights in the US are seen as part of a carefully scripted scenario to confuse the outside world.

According to one prominent mullah, President Donald Trump is “playing mad on advice from Henry Kissinger, with the aim of frightening the Muslims.” According to another leading mullah, even the duel between Trump and Hillary Clinton was “nothing but a show to confuse the world.”

At times, the US is depicted as “on the verge of destruction” because of its “lack of morality and deep-rooted corruption”. At other times, it is the “Great Satan”, as powerful and just as deadly as the diabolical personage depicted in scriptures.

For some mullahs, including Ayatollah Imami Kashani, hating the US is part of “true belief.” For others, for example Ayatollah Qara’ati, no prayer could be regarded as validated until it ends with “Death to America!” Every day, President Hassan Rouhani, a mid-ranking mullah, and all members of his Cabinet trample the US flag under feet before they enter their offices.

Since the mullahs seized power, hardly a day has passed without the Islamic Republic holding some US hostages. The raid on the US Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979 is dubbed “The Second Revolution” and marked with government-sponsored marches and seminars, exhibitions and propaganda campaigns across the nation.

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#NYCWrong New York’s political class talks a good game about resilience but won’t describe the terrorist threat honestly. Bob McManus

Posted By on November 5th, 2017

Just in case New Yorkers have never noticed that they’re “strong,” “resilient,” and “undeterred” in the face of terrorism, a swarm of elected leaders reminded them after Tuesday’s attack in Lower Manhattan. But those officials never talked about the terrorist himself, Sayfullo Saipovm, his cause, or the specific nature of the threat posed by his co-religionists worldwide. Nor did they seem much interested in the hard work of protecting the city.

“Terror won’t beat New York because we get back up stronger every time,” said Governor Andrew Cuomo. “New Yorkers are smarter and stronger and better than those who seek to harm us.”

“An act of terror was intended to break our spirit,” chirped Mayor Bill de Blasio, “but we know New Yorkers are strong and resilient.”

“We will not be intimidated. We will not be deterred,” insisted Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

“I am appalled and horrified at this deliberate act of terrorism,” said City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito. “We are a resilient city and we will not be deterred by these cowardly acts.”

Mark-Viverito herself certainly wasn’t deterred by the cowardly acts of convicted terrorist Oscar Lopez-Rivera, when she arranged—with the assistance of Schneiderman and the acquiescence of Cuomo and de Blasio—to honor him at last spring’s annual Puerto Rican Day parade. Lopez-Rivera and his confederates maimed and murdered New Yorkers in Lower Manhattan 40-some years ago, crimes that fundamentally differed from Tuesday’s attack only in objective: back then, it was Marxism. Today, it’s Islamism. But you would scarcely know what motivated Tuesday’s attacker from listening to Gotham’s elected class mouth their platitudes.

Tuesday’s pickup-truck slaughter was the third fatal terrorist attack in New York City’s 1st police precinct since 1993, preceded by the first World Trade Center bombing and 9/11—each one carried out on behalf of radical Islam. The elected officials made no mention of this because candor would conflict with their political goals, undermining arguments supporting minimal national border security and “sanctuary cities.” Hard-core New York progressives like de Blasio, Schneiderman, Mark-Viverito, and, increasingly, Cuomo himself, won’t let that happen. De Blasio, in particular, disdains aggressive counterterrorism efforts—he began dismantling a hugely successful NYPD anti-terror unit soon after taking office. So, empty rhetoric rules.

In practical terms, of course, there’s only so much that any city can do to protect itself from the kind of threat New York weathered Tuesday. But Cuomo’s insistence that the terrorist was a “lone wolf” is sheer excuse-mongering, suggesting helplessness while ignoring reality: the Islamist threat is an intricate, Internet-centric, near-transcendental presence that bloody-minded individuals—acting alone, but hardly lone wolves—can step into or slip out of at will.

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Jihad on the Bike Path by Mark Steyn

Posted By on November 5th, 2017

Fourteen years ago, I wrote a column for The Wall Street Journal on “The Bike-Path Left”:

There was a revealing moment on MSNBC the other night. Chris Matthews asked [Howard] Dean whether Osama bin Laden should be tried in an American court or at The Hague. “I don’t think it makes a lot of difference,” said the governor airily. Mr. Matthews pressed once more. “It doesn’t make a lot of difference to me,” he said again… So how about Saddam? The Hague “suits me fine,” he said, the very model of ennui. Saddam? Osama? Whatever, dude.

So what does get the Dean juices going? A few days later, the governor was on CNN and Judy Woodruff asked him about his admission that he’d left the Episcopal Church and become a Congregationalist because “I had a big fight with a local Episcopal church over the bike path.” I hasten to add that, in contrast to current Anglican controversies over gay marriage in British Columbia and gay bishops in New Hampshire, this does not appear to have been a gay bike path: its orientation was not an issue; it would seem to be a rare example of a non-gay controversy in the Anglican Communion. But nevertheless it provoked Howard into “a big fight.” “I was fighting to have public access to the waterfront, and we were fighting very hard in the citizens group,” he told Judy Woodruff. Fighting, fighting, fighting.

And that’s our pugnacious little Democrat. On Osama bin Laden, he’s Mister Insouciant. But he gets mad about bike paths. Destroy the World Trade Center and he’s languid and laconic and blasé. Obstruct plans to convert the ravaged site into a memorial bike path and he’ll hunt you down wherever you are.

The Hudson River Greenway is not, formally, a 9/11 “memorial bike path”. But it does run within 300 feet or so of the World Trade Center as it begins its progress up the West Side Highway toward the Bronx. So close enough. Yet on the central point I was wrong. The “bike-path left” will surrender the bike path as they surrender everything else.

As I write, eight are dead – all men, five Argentines, one Belgian, all in the path of an Uzbek Muslim who decided to take a Home Depot pick-up truck down the bike path for 20 blocks mowing down bicycle after bicycle after bicycle before exiting the vehicle and yelling – go on, take a wild guess – “Allahu Akbar!” Well, I never! You could knock me over with a feather duster – which the Mohammedans will no doubt find a way of weaponizing any day now.

So two hours after the attack, Governor Cuomo, Mayor de Blasio and other New York bigwigs assembled for the usual press conference to give the usual passive shrug – this is the way we live now, nothing to be done about it, etc, etc. Every so often in New York, as in London as in Stockholm as in Berlin as in Nice as in Brussels as in Paris as in Manchester as in Orlando, your loved one will leave the home and never return because he went to a pop concert or a gay club or a restaurant or an airport, or just strolled the sidewalk or bicycled the bike path. “Allahu Akbar”? That’s Arabic for “Nothing can be done”. So Andrew Cuomo ended with some generic boilerplate about how they’ll never change us:

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U.S. Embassies Around World Still Refuse to Hang Trump Portrait, Swamp Still in Control By J. Christian Adams

Posted By on November 5th, 2017

In multiple embassies around the world, particularly those staffed entirely by career Foreign Service officers, no portrait of President Trump or Vice President Pence has been hung. Up until last week, the swamp had an excuse – there was no official portrait and the swamp refused to go to the trouble to find unofficial ones.

But it’s not just the entrances to embassies where it seems the 2016 election never happened. All throughout the government, Obama holdovers who rabidly oppose President Trump and his policies still hold positions of extraordinary power. The swamp is alive and well.

Consider the National Security Council, where Fernando Cutz is enabling Trump’s most mortal enemies – George Soros and the globalist Left – to threaten to topple the pro-American government of one of America’s closest allies, Guatemala.

Cutz is the director of South American policy at the National Security Council. He is a graduate of the Clinton School of Public Service, managed Obama’s cozying up to the Communists in Cuba, was on the Obama National Security Council staff in the “global engagement” office, and is a committed swamp creature of the foreign service genus.

Back to Guatemala. George Soros money and United Nations officials are attempting to use an activist leftist “Constitutional Court” in Guatemala to undermine, and perhaps ultimately remove, President Jimmy Morales. One effect of this judicial coup is to impair the rights of American mining interests in the country. The Guatemalan government has been very helpful in stemming human trafficking and drugs that ultimately wind up in the United States.

Instead of defending American interests and the Guatemalan government against coordinated Soros-driven attacks, the American embassy, with Cutz’s support and oversight, has enabled it. Cutz controls the information flow to Trump loyalists. A maelstrom of swamp bureaucrats at State are in full agreement.

The irony is thick. Soros money and international leftists are Trump’s most mortal political foes at home, while abroad the same gang is seeking to undermine one of America’s strongest allies, and yet a man who enables this Soros agenda — Cutz — works in the National Security Council.