You make the call:

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Ben, who grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, returns home to start his professional career.

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Not here to take one side of another but my family was talking about the subject yesterday.

Do you believe in spirits or demons and stuff like that and why?

Anyone that would share a story or experience, would be interested to hear that as well.

Spoke with a source and an NIL lawyer to put this one together. Iowa's still over the limit -- so how can they get their scholarship numbers down and add scholarship quality talent out of the portal before August?

STORY:

Is testing done at any level of wrestling? Should it?

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I'm still undecided. I liked Fury Road and I like Anya Taylor-Joy, but something about her in this role doesn't seem right. To me, the trailer comes across like an unfunny SNL parody video. It looks like they opted for more CGI in this one rather than the practical effects of Fury Road. Makes it look cheap.

House Republicans are seeking to unite their unruly majority around an evergreen conservative cause, devising a strict response to the wave of pro-Palestinian protests that have roiled college campuses across the country in recent weeks.

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GOP leaders this week announced plans for new oversight investigations of elite universities where — in the words of House Republican Whip Tom Emmer (Minn.) — “pro-terrorist anti-Semites [are] taking over.” And on Wednesday they prepared to pass a bill they said would empower the federal government to crack down on anti-Israel protests on campuses by codifying a definition of antisemitism that encompasses not just threats against Jews, but also certain criticisms of Israel itself.

“We must give the Department of Education the tools to … hold college administrators accountable for refusing to address antisemitism on their campuses,” said Rep. Michael Lawler (R-N.Y.), the bill’s lead sponsor.


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College protests over Gaza war​

Waves of antiwar protests are spreading across colleges campuses, with growing police arrests as graduation season approaches. See the universities where protests are intensifying.
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Lawler’s bill, the Antisemitism Awareness Act, with 61 co-sponsors — including 15 Democrats — would create “a clear definition of antisemitism” in U.S. law that the Education Department could then use to cut off funding to academic institutions found to tolerate such behaviors. The definition, however, has drawn fierce opposition from First Amendment advocates such as the American Civil Liberties Union and liberal Democrats, who say it veers sharply into the realm of restricting political views.
It’s unclear what the bill’s prospects are in the Democratic-controlled Senate or how the White House views it. Previous iterations failed to muster sufficient support in Congress, but both its supporters and opponents say the ongoing protests and a rise in antisemitism since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel have injected fresh momentum.
If it does become law, the federal definition of antisemitism, adopted from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, would include such speech as “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor”; “applying double standards” to Israel that are “not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”; and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”



The idea is that student-held signs, for example, like those displayed at Columbia University in New York this week, calling for “revolution” or “intifada” — which means “uprising” — would amount to antisemitism under the law. The Education Department, in turn, could then revoke federal research grants and other funding to a university that fails to take punitive action toward students who express such views, the bill’s proponents say.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/world...=mc_magnet-campusprotests_inline_collection_8
http://www.washingtonpost.com/educa...mc_magnet-campusprotests_inline_collection_17

Now that we are seeing opposing groups of protestors and anti-protestors, which side do you favor or oppose more?

If you were caught in the middle and had to move to one side or the other, which side would you choose?

Cancer Supertests Are Here​

But are they really such a good idea?
By Benjamin Mazer




It takes a certain amount of confidence to call your biotech company Grail. According to its website, the Menlo Park–based firm got its name because its “co-founders believed a simple blood test could be the ‘holy GRAIL’ of cancer detection.” Now the company claims that its “first-of-its-kind” screening tool, called Galleri, “redefines what’s possible.” At the cost of a needle stick and $949, the company can check your blood for more than 50 forms of cancer all at once.

The Galleri test, as well as many others of its type that are in development, is meant to sniff out malignant DNA floating in a person’s veins, including bits of tumors that otherwise might not be identified until they’ve spread. But the rapid introduction of this new technology, which is now available through major U.S. health systems, isn’t really guaranteed to help patients. Indeed, a contentious debate about its potential benefits has been playing out in the scientific literature for the past few years. Multi-cancer-screening tools—or “cancer-finding supertests,” as Galleri has been called—aren’t yet endorsed by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, or formally approved by the Food and Drug Administration. For the moment, health-care providers can offer Galleri only through a commonly used regulatory loophole that the government is desperately trying to close. Being able to distribute the company’s “prescription-only, well-validated test” in advance of full FDA approval is a good thing, Kristen Davis, a Grail spokesperson told me, because it gives patients “timely access to an important tool in the detection of unscreened cancers and allows for important real-world evidence collection.” That’s one way to look at it. Here’s another: The rush to get Galleri and related products into doctors’ offices skips right over the most important step in clinical development: proving that they really work.


“The status quo for cancer screening remains unacceptable,” Davis said. She’s right. Even traditional early-detection tests are controversial within the medical community. As a hospital pathologist who diagnoses cancer daily, I’ve seen firsthand how mammograms and Pap smears, among other traditional procedures, save some people’s lives—and also how they cause a lot of overtreatment. (They miss many lethal cancers, too.) Blood-based cancer screening, in particular, had an ignominious start. Most men middle-aged and older in the U.S. get PSA tests, which look for abnormal levels of a protein secreted from the prostate gland that may indicate malignancy. But many of the tumors those tests identify are slow-growing, harmless ones; their discovery leads to an epidemic of unnecessary surgery and radiation—and a subsequent epidemic of incontinence and impotence. Recognizing this harm, the scientist who first identified PSA more than half a century ago expressed his regret in 2010, calling widespread screening “a profit-driven public health disaster.”

Modern blood-based cancer tests (or “liquid biopsies”), which look for a tumor’s genetic material, have been more promising. The first was approved by the FDA in 2016. It allows patients who already know that they have lung cancer to avoid an invasive tissue-collection process while still receiving the right, targeted therapy for their particular disease. Today, liquid biopsies exist for other kinds of cancer, too, and are used to tailor treatment for people who are aware of being sick.

Unleashing the same technique on the general population, in an effort to find hidden cancers in healthy-seeming people, is in principle a reasonable idea. But in 2020, when Grail started trying its technology on thousands of adults without cancer symptoms, the company found that a majority of positive signals—the signs of potential tumors that it identified—weren’t real. Dozens of healthy participants were flagged as possibly having cancer; most suffered through unnecessary laboratory and imaging follow-up. One unlucky subject described in the published study even had his testicle removed in the hunt for a malignancy that didn’t exist. Another blood-based supertest called CancerSeek—which forms the basis of a multi-cancer test now under commercial development—had shown the same problem when an early iteration of it was studied in some 10,000 women: Registered blood “abnormalities” led to confirmed cancer diagnoses less than half of the time. False positives with CancerSeek caused some patients to have operations on their ovaries, colon, or appendix.

I've seen Tulsi's name being thrown around. Seems like a woke choice when there are plenty of white men to chose from.

COVID levels are up to 19 times higher than reported, WHO says as it warns of the potential dangers of repeat reinfection: ‘We don’t know everything about this virus’​

COVID levels are 2 to 19 times higher than numbers being reported around the world, a WHO official said Friday, citing wastewater data.

The news comes as the organization warns of the yet unknown dangers of repeat COVID infection, which can occur without symptoms.

Because most people have some immunity to COVID due to vaccination and/or prior infection, “we don’t necessarily know how often we’re getting infected,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonoses unit, said at a news briefing in Geneva.

“Five years, 10 years, 20 years from now, what are we going to see in terms of cardiac impairment, pulmonary impairment, neurologic impairment? It’s year five in the pandemic, but there’s still a lot we don’t know about it.”

The concerns regarding COVID infection are multipronged, she said, and include potential acute implications like hospitalization and death, the development of long COVID, and “even longer term effects” like those she referenced.

It's estimated that 6% to 10% of those infected with COVID will go on to develop long COVID, she added.

"It's real," she said of the condition. "It's not in someone's head. This is actually a real condition that needs to be studied properly."

The pandemic continues​

Whether we acknowledge it or not, the world is still in a pandemic, Van Kerkhove said, citing the virus's lack of a seasonal pattern, as many respiratory pathogens have, and its continued, rapid-pace evolution.

What's more, hundreds of thousands around the world are currently hospitalized with the virus, and around 10,000 died from it last month, she said—and likely untold more. COVID hospitalizations and ICU admissions rose by 42% and 62%, respectively, in December.

This world is currently experiencing a surge of JN.1, a highly mutated Omicron spawn some say deserves a new Greek letter from the WHO, like Pi or Rho. In the U.S., it's currently fueling the country's second largest wave of the pandemic.

COVID's ongoing impact remains under-appreciated, Van Kerkhove said. Death figures are based on data from only 50 countries and territories still reporting to the WHO, out of 234, she said. Hospitalization figures come from only 29. And only 21—less than 9%—still report ICU data.

Of the 10,000 COVID deaths reported to the WHO in December, "more than half were from the U.S., and 1,000 were from Italy," she added. "We are missing deaths in countries from around the world. Just because countries aren't reporting deaths doesn't mean they're not happening."

Because so many countries are failing to report their data but some still produce and publish reports, "unfortunately, we're back to sort of scraping the web, finding each report, and adding them to our dashboard," she said.

As of Dec. 31, the pandemic's official death count sat at 7 million. But the true total is likely at least three times higher, she said.

In the near term, at least, hospitalizations and ICU admissions should still rise due to viral transmission during recent holiday gatherings. The WHO fears that COVID—when combined with other seasonal respiratory pathogens like the flu, RSV, parainfluenzas, and the like, and infections from bacteria like mycoplasma pneumoniae—places "far too much burden on countries." Much of the burden, however, could be prevented with mitigation measures like vaccination, according to Van Kerkhove.

A more severe variant still possible​

When queried about studies published in the journal Cell this week that pointed to the potential for more severe disease from highly mutated variant BA.2.86—"parent" of the globally dominant variant JN.1—Van Kerkhove said that the WHO had seen the data before it issued its risk assessment about BA.2.86 in November. That risk assessment said the variant posed a "low" global risk.


The studies were based on pseudoviruses, or lab-created versions of the virus, she pointed out. Viruses sometimes behave differently in the real world, when met with factors like existing population immunity and human behavior.

"We don't have any indication in people that there's a change in severity for JN.1," she said. While hospitalizations and deaths are rising, experts are unclear if it's due to the severity of a particular variant or waning population immunity, which begins to decline three to six months after infection or vaccination, on average.

Still, the world isn't prepared for a more severe variant of the virus, should one evolve, because countries no longer see COVID as a global threat, she said. Consequently, there's no agility to "scale up and scale down" the flow of tests, antivirals, medical oxygen, and other necessary supplies.


"We are concerned—deeply concerned—that this virus is circulating unchecked around the world, and that we could have a variant at any time that would increase severity," she said. "This is not meant to be a scare tactic. This is a scenario we plan for."

The WHO's Technical Advisory Group on SARS-CoV-2 Virus Evolution (TAG-VE)—in charge of designating variants of concern and assigning Greek letters—meets again Monday, she added.

In an exclusive interview Dec. 30, Van Kerkhove told Fortune that the WHO is ready to assign a new Greek letter on a moment’s notice, if necessary. But the organization is holding out for a variant that is “truly different,” she said at the time—one that impacts public health.

“If we were to see any change in severity, for example, we wouldn’t hesitate to call this a VOC, or the next one a VOC,” she said. “But phenotypically, we’re really seeing similar behavior to the other circulating variants.”

TAG-VE is devising a new variant classification system it hopes to debut later this year, Van Kerkhove said. It’s discussing various ways to group variants, taking into account how genetically similar they are, which key mutations they possess, and the symptoms they cause.

But for now, labeling variants the WHO deems concerning as VOCs—something the organization hasn’t done since November 2021—works “really well, should there be something that is really, really different, really severe,” she said.

“If we were to see a variant that fell within our classification of a VOC, we would call it in a day,” she added. “We would do that immediately, no hesitation whatsoever. … Just because we’re not giving it a name does not mean it’s not a threat.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/ot...E&cvid=37add9af45534181e7e7392323c9e1a6&ei=27

Must be election Year

OR

Still haven't heard from our Elon stan about this.

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A coalition of 21 conservative states, co-led by Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird, has filed a lawsuit challenging a new federal rule regulating licenses for gun dealers.

The rule is meant to clarify definitions and help implement the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022, which the White House has called the “only significant expansion of the background check requirement” since 1993.

The rule broadens the definition of when a person is considered a firearms dealer and therefore must be licensed and required to run background checks on the people they sell guns to, according to the rule adopted on April 19.

"It is clear that Biden will stop at nothing to criminalize law-abiding citizens for exercising their Second Amendment rights,” Bird said in a press release. “… It is wrong for Biden to force Iowans to become licensed firearms dealers just to sell a gun to a friend or family member. I am taking Biden to court to stand up for Iowans’ Second Amendment rights.”



At a news conference Wednesday, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin called the rule an "attempt to do what … the administration couldn't get through the Congress" as well as "arbitrary and capricious."

"They do not have the power to do this unilaterally via fiat," Griffin said.



"This proposed rule does not help clarify anything" and "should have to go through the Congress," he said.

Griffin and Bird are co-leading the suit with Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach as part of a 21-state coalition. The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Little Rock.

The other states include Montana, Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming, as well as several individuals and a gun collector group.

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FedEx stepped up with $5 million a year over the next 5 years to Memphis' NIL for FB, MBB, WBB and other women's sports.

Anybody else checked it out? I thought the first episode was pretty good. It also had a nice Ed Asner appearance.

52 second video

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