Uberfuzz Jobsearch

City of Rochester to pay $12m settlement over death of Daniel Prude during police restraint

Read More

The city of Rochester in upstate New York has agreed to pay $12m to the children of Daniel Prude, a Black man who died in police custody in 2020.

The city of Rochester in upstate New York has agreed to pay $12m to the children of Daniel Prude, a Black man who died in police custody in 2020.

Israel puts military on alert after rejecting Lebanon deal

Read More

With elections looming, the government has rejected Beirut’s amendments to a US-brokered border agreement

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz ordered troops near the border with Lebanon into high readiness on Thursday, amid reports that the country has rejected Beirut’s amendments to a US-proposed border compromise. The maritime border dispute involves natural gas fields both neighbors seek to exploit.

After consultations with the general staff, Gantz ordered the Israel Defense Forces to “prepare for any scenario in which tensions increase in the northern arena – including defense and offense readiness,” according to the Jerusalem Post.

The order was an indirect confirmation of reports earlier in the day that Israel had rejected Lebanon’s amendments to the agreement, drafted by US envoy Amos Hochstein and presented to both sides last weekend.

According to Al Jazeera, Hochstein’s draft received a “mostly warm preliminary reception” from both sides. Lebanon presented its response on Tuesday, but on Thursday Israel rejected those modifications. While the deal has not been made public, Israeli media said it would have allowed the country to freely explore the Karish gas field. 

The main issue appears to be Lebanon’s reluctance to accept an Israeli-demarcated “buoy line” as a de facto international border, given the two countries are technically still at war.

Read more
Iran blames US and Israel for riots

Caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid rejected the “substantial changes” Lebanon tried to make, an Israeli official told Al Jazeera, adding that “Israel will not compromise on its security and economic interests.”

Hochstein’s original proposal was welcomed by Hezbollah and described as “on the right track to assert Lebanon’s rights over all its waters” by Lebanese PM Najib Mikati earlier this week. Beirut is reportedly still waiting for Israel’s official response to the amendments.

Gantz also argued in favor of the deal, saying it would “harm Iran” and Hezbollah. However, former PM Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “surrender agreement” and insisted Israel needs “different leadership.” Israeli elections – the fifth in four years – are scheduled for November 1.

Beirut and Jerusalem are disputing a maritime area approximately 860 square kilometers in size, believed to be rich in oil and natural gas. Negotiations have been ongoing since 2020, complicated by the fact Israel and Lebanon have no official diplomatic relations.

Israel has ordered its troops on the Lebanese border to prepare for anything, after rejecting a US-brokered maritime border deal Read Full Article at RT.com

German MEPs call for expulsion of Berlusconi

Read More

The European People’s Party is under pressure to kick out Forza Italia if it backs a right-wing government in Italy, Politico reports

Several German MEPs have called on the European Parliament’s main conservative group to kick out Silvio Berlusconi and his party if he chooses to support Giorgia Meloni and her “extreme right-wing” coalition in Italy.

In a letter published by Politico on Wednesday, three German MEPs demanded that Manfred Weber, the leader of the European People’s Party (EPP), which holds the most seats in the European Parliament, eject Forza Italia from the coalition unless its leader and former Italian PM Berlusconi abandons Meloni.

Last month, Meloni and her Brothers of Italy (FI) party led a right-wing bloc – which included Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and Matteo Salvini’s League parties – to a landslide victory in snap parliamentary elections, securing a majority in both houses of the nation’s parliament. 

Meloni is now set to form Italy’s most right-wing government since World War II and will likely become the country’s first ever female prime minister.

However, some in Brussels have grown concerned by the prospect of a right-wing group coming to power in Italy. “It is not too late to prevent a far-right government of Giorgia Meloni in Italy,” wrote the German MEPs, branding the FI party extremists and insisting that their populist positions are “incompatible with core European values.”

Read more
Italian election winner states top priority

The authors of the letter, Daniel Freund of the Greens, Katarina Barley of the Socialists & Democrats and Moritz Korner from the liberal Renew Europe, argue that members of the EPP must not be allowed to bring a “far-right government to power,” and that fundamental EU values should not be sacrificed in order to gain power. 

“The firewall against right-wing enemies of democracy” cannot be allowed to crumble, the MEPs proclaimed.

“We therefore ask you, as president of the European People’s Party, to communicate to your members in Italy that there must be no EPP participation in a far-right government in Italy,” the three parliamentarians urged Weber, stressing that if Forza Italia decides to co-elect Meloni as PM, the party should have “no future” in the EPP.

EPP Secretary General Thanasis Bakolas responded to the letter, calling it “a direct and absolute insult to the democratic will of the Italian people” who he said would be the judges of Meloni’s coalition.

He vowed that the EPP was “absolutely committed” to Forza Italia and “all it is doing to ensure that Italy’s next government serves the best interests of its people.”

A group of German MEPs have called on the European People’s Party to expel Silvio Berlusconi’s party if he backs Italy’s Giorgia Meloni Read Full Article at RT.com

Former Uber executive convicted of data breach cover-up

Read More

Joe Sullivan attempted to suppress a leak that exposed more than 50 million company users, the US Justice Department said

Uber’s former chief security officer has been found guilty of attempting to conceal a 2016 data breach, which affected tens of millions users, as well as paying off hackers to keep a lid on the matter, the US Department of Justice announced on Wednesday.

Joe Sullivan was convicted by a San Francisco jury of obstructing an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and attempting to cover up a security breach which resulted in the theft of approximately 57 million Uber users’ data and 600,000 driver license numbers. The sentence faced by the ex-Uber executive is unclear, but he may get up to eight years in prison.

According to the Justice Department, Sullivan was hired several months before the breach. In November 2016, following the successful attack on Uber, hackers contacted the security chief and demanded a huge ransom for deleting the stolen data.

However, instead of reporting the attack to the authorities, Sullivan did all he could to “prevent any knowledge of the breach from reaching the FTC,” a DOJ statement read. According to the department, at one point he told his subordinate that they “can’t let this get out.”

Read more
Uber secret deals exposed – what we know so far

Following the attack, the former executive paid the hackers $100,000 in bitcoin while the culprits signed non-disclosure agreements in which they promised not to share the information about the hack to anyone. Later, both hackers were identified, prosecuted and pleaded guilty to the attack.

The firm did not publicly disclose the incident or inform the FTC until new management took the reins in 2017. Although Sullivan tried to lie about the data breach to the new CEO and outsource lawyers, which were investigating the hack, the company’s management finally learned the truth.

In November 2017, it made its findings public, triggering a number of cases against the company. The ride-hailing giant had to pay $148 million to settle a case on concealing the data breach and was fined nearly $1.2 million in total by UK and Dutch data protection authorities.

“The message in today’s guilty verdict is clear: Companies storing their customers’ data have a responsibility to protect that data and do the right thing when breaches occur,” said FBI Special Agent In Charge Robert Tripp.

Uber’s former security chief attempted to cover up a data leak that involved tens of millions users, according to the US Justice Department Read Full Article at RT.com

Trump boasts that claim he assaulted Secret Service agent made him look ‘tough’

Read More

Trump says ‘a lot of people’ have said an ex-aide’s account of him allegedly assaulting a Secret Service agent made him appear ‘physically tough’

Trump says ‘a lot of people’ have said an ex-aide’s account of him allegedly assaulting a Secret Service agent made him appear ‘physically tough’

The Race to Make a Vaccine for Breast Cancer

Read More

When Karen Lynch was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 44, it was a shock, but not a complete surprise. “My family history is just riddled with cancer; my father had prostate cancer and died from stomach and esophageal cancer, and his five sisters passed from breast cancer,” she says. “My mother died from pancreatic cancer.” It was 1996, and genetic testing was not as routine as it is now, so it wasn’t until nine years after her diagnosis and treatment with lumpectomy and radiation that Lynch learned she carried the BRCA1 mutation, which increases her risk of breast cancer and ovarian cancer. She decided to have a bilateral mastectomy and hysterectomy to reduce her risk of having a recurrence or a new cancer in her ovaries.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

“I had no problem with the hysterectomy, since I was 54,” says Lynch, who lives in Glenolden, Penn. and works as a paralegal. “But it was hard to wrap my head around having a preventive mastectomy, even though my doctors said it was not a case of, ‘will’ you get breast cancer again, but ‘when.’’” After three years of consideration and research, Lynch had the surgery, knowing it was her best chance to avoid getting cancer again and to live a long, healthy life.

But she is eager to do more. In January, she joined a groundbreaking study at Penn Medicine, where she is treated, to test a vaccine that could potentially prevent breast cancer from recurring. “If there is something out there like a vaccine that will prevent me from having cancer again, and, more importantly, help my children—it was an easy decision,” she says of joining the trial. “I’m hoping that this is something that works so my children can have this vaccine and won’t have to worry about this devastating disease.”

Vaccines are often called the miracle of modern medicine for their ability to target the immune system against disease-causing viruses and bacteria. Since they work against infectious diseases, why not against other conditions that have long plagued humanity—like cancer?

“To say that we are working on a vaccine to prevent cancers for the rest of people’s lives sounds like something from Star Wars,” says Dr. Robert Vonderheide, director of the Abramson Cancer Center at Penn Medicine. “But it’s not a concept that’s totally uncharted.”

Vaccines for cancer already exist. Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines, for example, largely prevent cervical cancer by targeting the HPV strains that trigger tumor growths. But most types of cancer aren’t caused by viruses, so the holy grail would be to train the body to recognize tumor cells instead. Researchers have been investigating ways to do this, starting with immunizing people who have already developed cancer in order to reduce their risk of recurrences. Improvements in the accuracy and speed of genetic sequencing have provided a clearer window into what makes cancer cells start to grow abnormally, and new drug therapies that target those genetic changes have also transformed the way doctors treat the disease. For instance, recently developed treatments can teach the immune system to seek out and destroy cancer cells.

To date, however, these immunotherapy treatments have been focused mostly on patients with advanced disease that has spread throughout their bodies, and vaccines to target those widespread cancer cells have generally been a last-resort effort to control the disease. Such therapeutic cancer vaccines remain a work in progress, but their limited success, along with new understanding of the genetic drivers behind cancer growth, have made the idea of a vaccine that could actually prevent cancer more realistic.

Increasingly, scientists are using vaccines to treat cancer earlier, and they have started to score some victories in training the immune system to attack lung, skin, and kidney cancers to prevent them from emerging again in recovered patients.

Those strategies, however, haven’t worked as well with breast cancer. “A lot of breast tumors do not attract the immune system, so there is very little in the way of an immune response,” says Vonderheide. “That’s where vaccines come in, because they are designed to start an immune response that can then be elaborated.”

Vonderheide and others are looking to use vaccines in their truest function: to optimize the immune response against cancer by training cells to recognize tumors as foreign. Once that happens in breast cancer, Vonderheide says it may be possible to not only prevent recurrences in people who have already had cancer, like Lynch, but to even protect people from developing the cancer in the first place.

A breakthrough like that can’t come soon enough, say breast cancer advocates. “I was diagnosed in 1987, and I wasn’t treated much differently from what is available today, in terms of surgery and chemotherapy,” says Fran Visco, president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, an advocacy organization. “Yes, there is a lot of focus on immunotherapy, and that’s exciting from a research perspective. But it hasn’t really made a difference in women’s lives yet.”

While rates of breast cancer in the U.S. had been holding steady in recent decades, beginning in the 2000s, they started inching upward again by about 0.5% a year. Breast cancer accounts for a third of cancer cases in women and kills 43,000 people annually.

To make an immediate impact on people’s lives, says Visco, “we believe that a vaccine approach is certainly the key in preventing people from getting breast cancer to begin with.”

“The whole idea, just like with an infectious disease vaccine, is to identify what’s foreign in the tumor as much as possible and to craft a vaccine that targets what’s foreign,” says Keith Knutson, an immunologist at Mayo Clinic, who along with his colleagues is testing this type of preventive vaccine. “That’s where we’re going to see the power of the immune response in shrinking or preventing cancer.”

That’s easier said than done, however, and this type of vaccine may be at least a decade or so away. Cancer cells are normal cells that have picked up aberrant genetic messages to start dividing out of control. Targeting them may make intuitive sense, but it’s very difficult to identify the specific abnormalities that cancer cells pick up, since they’re often tightly woven with non-cancerous features, like receptors and other proteins the normal cell needs. Early attempts in recent decades to target such cancer-specific proteins proved disappointing.

But more sophisticated analyses of tumor cells’ genetic makeup is providing clues about which proteins on the surface of these cells are uniquely cancerous, and which are not. Armed with that knowledge, scientists have a better chance of training people’s immune systems to recognize and target those “foreign” cancer markers, just as they would a new virus.

Next spring, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic will start enrolling women with early stages of triple negative breast cancer—one of the most aggressive forms—to receive a vaccine so their immune responses can reduce their chance of developing advanced disease. The disease is named triple-negative because the cancer cells lack three of the main proteins that current treatments target, making it hard to treat. Ultimately, the doctors hope to treat women at high risk of the disease, but who have not yet been diagnosed, with a vaccine to lower their chances of getting cancer.

At the Mayo Clinic, Knutson and Dr. Amy Degnim, professor of surgery at Mayo, began working on a breast cancer vaccine in 2015, focused on the other end of the breast cancer spectrum. They recently began testing it in women with an early form of breast cancer called ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS. Experts have debated in recent years whether DCIS is actually cancer, since it involves lesions that remain in the ducts of the breast tissue and don’t spread throughout the breast, as other forms of breast cancer do. About 51,000 women in the U.S. are diagnosed with DCIS each year, and some of those cases will become cancerous—although doctors can’t predict which ones. “There’s quite a bit of evidence that a lot of DCIS may not progress to become invasive cancer, but we don’t know for any individual patient if that’s true or not,” says Degnim. Many women with the condition therefore opt to have radiation and surgery to remove the lesions to avoid the risk of developing cancer. If the immune system could be trained to attack DCIS, “maybe we can scale back our treatments,” Degnim says.

Degnim and her team began testing the vaccine by giving it to people with advanced breast cancer first, targeting a specific protein called HER2 that is found on the surface of 20% of all breast cancers and is more common in DCIS. The encouraging immune responses they saw in that study justified trying the approach in women earlier in the disease process.

Now, in a trial that began in 2019, the team is giving about 43 women with DCIS one of three vaccine doses. All of the women will then be treated with surgery to remove their DCIS, and Degnim and Knutson will evaluate the lesions for any signs of immune response. They will also take blood samples to determine if the patients mounted an immune response against the DCIS—and if so, how much of one.

Other recent advances have also nudged researchers one step closer to a truly preventive breast cancer vaccine. Scientists have gained a more detailed view of how, exactly, tumors co-opt the immune system. It turns out that while cancer cells start to grow uncontrollably, they protect themselves from immune cells by throwing up a wall of protection to disguise their presence. That immune suppression acts like a force field, allowing tumors to continue growing and spreading undetected from one tissue to another.

But in 2015, doctors developed a powerful way to break down that tumor wall. Drugs called immune checkpoint inhibitors effectively rip off cancer cells’ disguise and expose them for the immune system to see and attack. Combining these drugs with a vaccine that targets the right cancer features represents new hope in immunizing people against cancer. “I think the first opportunity that we’re going to see some kind of vaccine approved is probably going to be in combination with an immune checkpoint inhibitor in people with advanced cancer,” says Knutson. “We’re going to be able to look in real time if the tumor is shrinking, and that’s going to answer—much faster—the question of how effective the vaccine might be.”

The proteins covering breast cancer cells aren’t the only targets for a cancer vaccine. So is the DNA of breast cancer cells. The most successful COVID-19 shots, from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, used genetic material in the form of mRNA from the SARS-CoV-2 virus to build immunity, and scientists think a similar approach, using the genetic material DNA, could work for breast cancer.

Lynch is hoping such vaccines can change the course of breast cancer, if not for her then for future generations. One of her daughters, who also has the BRCA1 mutation, was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 26 and opted to have both breasts removed. Because of her young age, she also underwent fertility treatments to improve her chances of later getting pregnant. “I want my children and their children to be safe from this disease,” Lynch says. In February, Lynch joined the trial at Penn Medicine conducted by Dr. Susan Domchek to explore the safety of a vaccine targeting an enzyme, called telomerase, that breast cancer cells use to regulate how many times they divide. The enzyme is most active in cells that are aggressively dividing, such as cancer cells, and less active in normally functioning cells. A vaccine including snippets of DNA coding for key parts of telomerase trains a group of immune cells in the body known as T cells to recognize and target cancer cells that are using too much telomerase. They “stalk the blood to attack and kill those [cancer] cells before anyone even knew they were there,” says Domchek. Vonderheide, who is collaborating with Domchek on the trial, says that training the T cells against cancer could be critical to making an effective breast cancer vaccine. “We think the best vaccines for cancer will be those that generated T cells,” he says, because those responses could last longer and ultimately generate a surge of immune cells that could more immediately recognize and eliminate cancer cells. The study is part of Penn’s new Basser Cancer Interception Institute, which is focused on intervening in BRCA1 and BRCA2 cancers as early as possible to alter the normal progression of disease.

The team at Penn Medicine is currently enrolling 16 people who, like Lynch, have been diagnosed with cancer and who have the genetic mutations BRCA1 or BRCA2, which put them at higher risk of developing breast cancer, to see if vaccinating them will lower their chance of recurrence. The researchers also plan to study 28 people with the genetic risk—but who have not yet been diagnosed with cancer—to see if the vaccine could lower their risk of developing the disease. Lynch has completed her four injections and will provide blood for Domchek and her team to study every 16 weeks for nearly two years.

If the vaccine can show decreased risk of recurrence, or a significantly reduced risk of developing cancer at all, says Domchek, “it’s a game changer.” Currently, doctors recommend that women who carry the BRCA mutations get screened throughout their lives for any lesions, and, if found, to undergo surgery; some women even elect to have a preventative mastectomy as a way to avoid developing cancer. BRCA mutations also put women at higher risk ovarian cancer, and because there is no effective way to screen for that disease, some women decide to have their ovaries removed, which triggers early menopause. “We have not had great options, apart from surgical options, for women with BRCA mutations,” Domchek says. “But this concept of being able to use the immune system to change the natural history for these people is so critical.”

A lot is riding on the outcomes of these trials, but scientists are cautiously optimistic that breast cancer care will look markedly different over the next few years—and that vaccines for cancer will move away from treating advanced disease to making a difference at earlier stages. “I think we are probably at the end of the era of using cancer vaccines with great hope in a patient who has already been treated with everything,” says Vonderheide, “to using these vaccines in people who are at risk of relapse, or in individuals who are simply at high risk for cancer and want to prevent it. Prevention and survivorship is what cancer is going to be about in 10 years, and I think vaccines will play a part in ensuring that’s the case.”

Lynch is counting on that. Her aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer that recurred 25 years later and spread to the brain. Lynch’s goal was to survive at least that long without cancer, and this October, she surpassed that milestone. “I wanted to be a 26-year survivor,” she says. “I made it, and I want to make it even longer.”

Scientists are working on vaccines that train cells to see tumors as foreign, in hopes of one day making breast cancer preventable.

Biden says Opec+ production cut ‘shows there are problems’ with US-Saudi relationship

Read More

The president says he and his advisers ‘haven’t made up our minds’ on pursuing ‘alternatives’ including easing sanctions on Venezuela

The president says he and his advisers ‘haven’t made up our minds’ on pursuing ‘alternatives’ including easing sanctions on Venezuela

Kidnapped twice by the same man years apart – the staggering real-life story of Jan Broberg

Read More

A new Peacock drama is based on a mind-boggling 1970s kidnap case in Idaho when a trusted church member and father of five abducted an adolescent family friend twice. Victim Jan Broberg, who told her story to Sheila Flynn, appears onscreen before the first episode to warn viewers that similar crimes can happen anywhere

A new Peacock drama is based on a mind-boggling 1970s kidnap case in Idaho when a trusted church member and father of five abducted an adolescent family friend twice. Victim Jan Broberg, who told her story to Sheila Flynn, appears onscreen before the first episode to warn viewers that similar crimes can happen anywhere