Dear Commons Community,

Scientists at the University of Melbourne said Tuesday that they hope to see the extinct Tasmania tiger, or thylacine, roaming the wildness again and have partnered with Colossal Biosciences, a Texas company at the forefront of what’s known as the “de-extinction” movement. The announcement comes after a $5 million gift to help the effort earlier this year.

Professor Andrew Pask, who leads the university’s Thylacine Integrated Genetic Restoration Research, or TIGRR, lab has been working for 15 years to bring the thylacine back to life. His lab has already assembled the first complete genome for the creature using animals preserved in alcohol.

Researchers hope to use DNA editing technology from Colossal to effectively turn cells from a living species — the fat-tailed dunnart — into “thylacine”-like cells matching the creature’s genome. Those cells would be transferred into an embryo and then into an artificial womb or a surrogate creature.

Pask and his team ultimately hope to see thylacines roaming Tasmania, although any animals created in the process would first be introduced in controlled areas.

“The Tasmanian tiger is iconic in Australian culture,” he said in a statement. “We’re excited to be part of this team in bringing back this unique, cornerstone species that mankind previously eradicated from the planet.”

Pask said the effort wouldn’t just benefit the extinct Tasmanian tiger but would also reinvigorate science to save other Australian creatures at risk.

“We can now take the giant leaps to conserve Australia’s threatened marsupials and take on the grand challenge of de-extincting animals we had lost,” he said in a statement. “With this partnership, I now believe that in ten years’ time we could have our first living baby thylacine since they were hunted to extinction close to a century ago.”

Colossal said last September that they would work to resurrect the woolly mammoth, hoping to see thousands eventually roam the Siberian tundra. The announcement, which was bolstered by about $15 million in funding, prompted deep skepticism among other researchers as well as questions about the ethics of bringing back an animal humans know little about.

Researchers say the effort to de-extinct the thylacine should be easier than that of a woolly mammoth as the marsupials are smaller and have a much shorter gestation period.

An Australian film archive released colorized footage of the last known Tasmanian tiger in September 2021, 85 years after the species went extinct. The video shows a thylacine named Benjamin in Hobart, Tasmania, in 1933. The animal died three years later, and the species was declared extinct.

Rumors of thylacine sightings have spread around Australia for decades. The animal, described as a cross between a cat, fox and wolf, is a marsupial, meaning they had pouches to carry their young, like kangaroos and wallabies.

They were the largest carnivorous marsupials on the planet until their extinction.

Good luck to those involved with this project!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I just finished reading Three Ordinary Girls – The Remarkable Story of Three Dutch Teenagers Who Became Spies, Saboteurs, NAZI Assassins and WW II Heroes, by Tim Brady.

I confess I knew nothing of the lives of the three heroines, Hannie Schaft, and sisters, Truus and Freddie Oversteegen, whose stories and exploits are well-known in The Netherlands.  I found it riveting in its depictions of these teenagers (ages 19, 16, and 14) who join a resistance cell in the Dutch city of Haarlem in 1940. A main theme of the book as stated in the title, is that the three were just “ordinary” young people who came from modest backgrounds. While their initial assignments were acting as messengers and putting up protest posters, they quickly escalated to assassinations of German officers and Dutch traitors.  In retelling their own stories, while they realize that their childhoods were taken away from them, Truus and Freddie had no remorse about the murders they committed.  While I would like to say that there was a happy ending, Hannie Schaft was caught by the Germans and executed just three weeks before the end of World War II. 

Brady’s book moved me to read another book on the same subject, Seducing and Killing Nazis, by Sophie Poldermans.  Both books are consistent in telling the story of the three heroines.  I decided to read the second book mainly because it is filled with photos of the girls and others who played a role in their lives.

In sum, I found both books inspirational.   I highly recommend them.

Below is a review of Three Ordinary Girls… that appeared in the Star Tribune.

Tony

 —————————————————————————

Review: ‘Three Ordinary Girls,’ by Tim Brady

NONFICTION: The true story of three Dutch teenagers who boldly fought the Nazis through subversion and violence.

By John Reinan Star Tribune

Among the deadliest fighters in Nazi-occupied Holland were a trio of schoolgirls barely out of pigtails.

Sisters Freddie and Truus Oversteegen, along with their friend Hannie Schaft, started small: stealing documents, circulating banned publications and passing along messages to underground resistance fighters.

But before long, these sweet young things — ages 14, 16 and 19 when the Nazis invaded in 1940 — had formed a lethal gang that planted bombs and gunned down German soldiers as well as Dutch collaborators.

As fresh-faced teenagers, they were unlikely to be suspected of anti-fascist activities, allowing them to operate under the noses of the Nazis and, if need be, flirt their way out of trouble.

The amazing true story is told by St. Paul author Tim Brady in “Three Ordinary Girls,” an account of the trio forced by war into roles as spies, saboteurs and assassins — heroes who traded their schoolbooks for guns.

The Nazi occupation of countries throughout Europe revealed fault lines in those societies. Who would resist the brutal invaders? Who would collaborate with them? And who would assist the Jews, their fellow citizens marked for ruthless extermination?

Brady’s subjects chose to fight. The Oversteegen sisters were raised by a single mother with fervent socialist and Communist sympathies. Schaft was a law student whose highly protective parents tried to shield their only child from the world’s encroaching evil.

Joining the resistance in their hometown of Haarlem, a city on the fringe of metropolitan Amsterdam, the young women soon distinguished themselves by the bold courage with which they carried out their assignments. In time, they became prolific “liquidators” of Nazi oppressors and the Dutch citizens who assisted the jackbooted thugs.

The girls’ signature tactic in bicycle-dependent Holland was the drive-by shooting on a bike, coolly pedaling away after gunning down their target.

Having seen the atrocities visited on their friends and fellow countrymen by the Nazis, the girls didn’t have any moral qualms about fighting back.

“It was a necessary evil,” Freddie Oversteegen recalled years later. “I felt no pity.” Her sister agreed.

“There was really only one solution,” Truus Oversteegen said. “Shooting.”

Brady paints a compelling picture of the fear, tragedy and paranoia of living in an enemy-occupied land. Heroism and betrayal exist side by side; mistakes are made in the fog of war.

The author builds drama slowly — perhaps too slowly. A prologue might have been a good idea, giving the reader an early taste of the excitement to come.

But ultimately, his book succeeds as a tale of how extraordinary circumstances call forth the unexpected strength of ordinary people.

John Reinan is a Star Tribune reporter.

Dear Commons Community,

Primaries in Wyoming and Alaska were closely watched yesterday in terms of Republican candidates who defied Donald Trump.

Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, Donald Trump’s fiercest Republican adversary in Congress, was defeated in a GOP primary, falling to a rival backed by the former president in a rout that reinforced his grip on the party’s base.

The third-term congresswoman and her allies entered the day downbeat about her prospects, aware that Trump’s backing gave Harriet Hageman considerable lift in the state where he won by the largest margin during the 2020 campaign. Cheney was already looking ahead to a political future beyond Capitol Hill that could include a 2024 presidential run, potentially putting her on another collision course with Trump.

Cheney described her loss as the beginning of a new chapter in her political career as she addressed a small collection of supporters, including her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, on the edge of a vast field flanked by mountains and bales of hay.

“Our work is far from over,” she said Tuesday evening, evoking Abraham Lincoln, who also lost congressional elections before ascending to the presidency and preserving the union.

The results — and the roughly 30-point margin — were a powerful reminder of the GOP’s rapid shift to the right. A party once dominated by national security-oriented, business-friendly conservatives like her father now belongs to Trump, animated by his populist appeal and, above all, his denial of defeat in the 2020 election.

Alaska Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski advanced from her primary along with Kelly Tshibaka, her GOP rival endorsed by former President Donald Trump, while another Trump-backed candidate, Republican Sarah Palin, was among the candidates bound for the November general election in the race for Alaska’s only House seat.

Murkowski had expressed confidence that she would advance and earlier in the day told reporters that “what matters is winning in November.” Tshibaka called the results “the first step in breaking the Murkowski monarchy’s grip on Alaska.” Tshibaka also said she was thankful “for the strong and unwavering support President Trump has shown Alaska.”

A Murkowski has held the Senate seat since 1981. Before Lisa Murkowski, who has been in the Senate since late 2002, it was her father, Frank Murkowski.

Under a voter-approved elections process being used for the first time in Alaska elections this year, party primaries have been scrapped and ranked choice voting is being used in general elections. The top four vote-getters in a primary race, regardless of party affiliation, are to advance to the general election.

The other two places in the Senate race were too early to call.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) announced yesterday that it would cancel nearly $4 billion in federal loans owed by more than 200,000 students who attended an ITT Technical Institute campus from 2005 to 2016, when the company shut down.  As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education and The New York Times.

USDOE’s action was based on findings by federal and state investigators that the chain of for-profit colleges “engaged in widespread and pervasive misrepresentations related to the ability of students to get a job or transfer credits, and lying about the programmatic accreditation of ITT’s associate degree in nursing,” the department said in a news release.

The Biden administration in recent months has made a concerted effort to cancel large amounts of student-loan debt for borrowers who say they were defrauded or misled by for-profit colleges they attended.

Tens of thousands of ITT’s former students had already applied to have their federal student loans forgiven, under the “borrower defense to repayment” regulation. But Tuesday’s action will apply to all students who borrowed to attend the colleges during the 11-year period.

The move is similar to the department’s June action to cancel nearly $6 billion in federal student loans for former students of Corinthian Colleges, another chain of for-profit institutions that closed during the Obama administration.

The department has also notified another for-profit educator, DeVry University, that it must repay the government at least $24 million for borrower-defense claims filed by students who attended from 2008 to 2015. In February the department announced it had already approved more than $71 million in claims against DeVry from 1,800 students, because of the university’s “widespread substantial misrepresentations about its job-placement rates.”

DeVry was the first — and so far, only — still-operating school at which the Education Department has approved claims through a relief system known as “borrower defense to repayment.” The program lets borrowers who attended schools that broke consumer protection laws seek to have their federal loan debts wiped out.

DeVry fraudulently lured in applicants with vastly inflated claims about their career prospects, the Education Department said. The school advertised that 90 percent of its graduates who actively sought work landed jobs in their fields within six months, but its actual placement rate was around 58 percent, agency officials said.

During that period DeVry was owned by Adtalem Global Education, which runs for-profit trade schools. Adtalem sold the school in 2018 to Cogswell Capital, an investment firm owned by the venture capitalist and financier Bradley Palmer. The department is pursuing Cogswell, the current owner, for payment, officials said.

While the administration continues to wrestle with whether and how to provide a blanket forgiveness of student loans, it has canceled nearly $32 billion in student loans since 2021. That amount includes about $13 billion for borrower-defense claims, $9.6 billion for public-service loan forgiveness, and $9 billion for those who are permanently disabled.

The USDOE has to continue to be aggressive in going after for-profit colleges that have preyed on students.

Tony

Mike Nicholson, professor of transplant surgery at the University of Cambridge, working on a perfusing kidney. Photograph: Kidney Research UK/PA

Dear Commons Community,

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have successfully altered the blood type of donor kidneys in a discovery that could increase the supply of the organs for transplant.  As reported by the BBC.

The breakthrough has particular implications for minority groups, who often find it harder to find a match.

A kidney from someone with blood type A cannot be given to someone with type B, and vice versa.

But changing the blood type of a kidney to the universal type O will mean it can be transplanted into any patient.

People from black and other ethnic minority groups often have to wait a year longer for a transplant than white patients because they are more likely to have the rarer B-type blood group.

Rates of organ donation among those populations is also lower. In 2020/21, just over 9% of total organ donations came from black and other minority ethnic donors, while people from those communities make up 33% of the kidney transplant waiting list.

Scientists at Cambridge were able to use a normothermic perfusion machine – a device used to pass oxygenated blood through a kidney to help preserve it – to flush blood infused with an enzyme through a donor kidney.

The enzyme removes the blood-type markers that line the blood vessels of the organ, effectively changing its blood type to type O. The process took a matter of hours when it was successfully performed on three donor kidneys.

Serena MacMillan, a PhD student who worked on the study, said it was “very exciting to think about how this could potentially impact so many lives”.

The next step is to see how the kidneys react when given a normal supply of blood from their new blood group, something which can again be tested using a machine before the kidney is transplanted into a patient.

The research, which is funded by charity Kidney Research UK, is due to be published in the British Journal of Surgery in the coming months.

Dr Aisling McMahon, executive director of research at the charity, called the work “potentially game-changing”.

This is a fascinating and compelling idea, but it’s impact on organ transplantation is still unproven.

There are questions about the science and how much more it can increase the availability of organs for donation.

It will take further tests to see how these tweaked organs perform when actually dealing with formerly mismatched blood. And to ensure there process does not damage the kidneys in any way.

This will have to be tested in the laboratory and then in small numbers of patients.

Also blood group is only one of three ways kidneys are matched before transplant and half the population are already either O positive or O negative (whose kidneys can be donated to anybody).

Tissue matching and cross matching (in which the blood of donor and recipient are mixed to see if there’s a reaction) will still be a factor, particularly in ethnic groups.

This sounds like a potential game changer.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education had a featured article yesterday entitled, “The Shrinking of Higher Ed” that portends that colleges will not be able to grow their way out of the coming enrollment crisis.  Here is an excerpt.

“In the past, colleges grew their way out of enrollment crises. This time looks different.

Nearly 1.3 million students have disappeared from American colleges during the Covid-19 pandemic, raising alarms that the enrollment emergency projected to arrive a few years from now is already here.

High-school seniors uninterested in studying online chose to defer. Working parents strained by the demands of full-time pandemic child care put their studies on hold. International students couldn’t get visas. Those in majors with hands-on practicums or lab work found they couldn’t register for courses required for their degrees.

Enrollment numbers continue to look bleak as the pandemic drags on, even though in-person classes have become the norm and consulates have reopened. College attendance among undergraduates has fallen almost 10 percent since Covid emerged in early 2020; this spring, enrollment dropped 4.7 percent from the year before, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, a deeper-than-expected decline.

The persistence of the enrollment contraction has sparked fears that many students are not simply missing but gone for good. Research shows that if students stop out, they may not continue with their studies, and that’s particularly true for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. “We have to act now,” said Courtney Brown, vice president for impact and planning at the Lumina Foundation. “This is a crisis moment.”

The pandemic enrollment slide has heightened worries at colleges about finances, especially among those dependent on tuition revenue to meet their bottom lines. Even before the Covid outbreak, the financial resiliency of a third of American colleges was poor, according to a new report from Bain & Company.

Inflation is driving up colleges’ operating costs, and a volatile stock market is eating into endowment returns. Small private colleges, regional public universities, and rural institutions all face strong headwinds, according to the bond agency Fitch Ratings. Federal stimulus funds that helped many colleges avert closures are running out. The outlook, said Emily Wadhwani, senior director and sector lead for higher education at Fitch, is “weak getting weaker.”

Of course, doomsday scenarios have been floated before. Time and time again, in recent decades, American higher education has grown its way out of crises. Colleges have expanded access to underrepresented groups, added academic programs and amenities to attract students and charge them higher tuition, and struck private-sector deals to tap new markets.

This time looks different. Higher ed may have reached the limits of Houdini-ing its way out of decline by getting bigger, and the prolonged pandemic downturn could be just one indication.

Public confidence in college is sinking, and students and parents think tuition is too high. Skepticism is mounting toward the idea that a college education should be the prerequisite for well-paying jobs, and in a tight labor market clamoring for workers, some people are landing them without a degree. Already, nearly seven in 10 high-school graduates immediately go on to pursue, although not necessarily complete, some sort of postsecondary education, and the remainder may be difficult to recruit. The students left out of higher education have been notoriously difficult for colleges to reach and serve. And then there’s the looming demographic cliff created by the sharp drop in birth rates that began in 2007.

“There really is an arithmetic problem here,” said Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Center for Higher Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University. “There aren’t going to be enough students to go around.”

Reasons to worry!

Tony

George Conway Tells Acosta ‘Shortest Distance Between Trump and an Orange Jumpsuit’ is This Classified Info Investigation, and Trump Knows It https://t.co/JYlgDIN3E1 via @mediaite pic.twitter.com/wDuCg2L0OT

— Natalie Korach (@NatalieKorach) August 13, 2022

Dear Commons Community,

The current investigation of White House documents seized last week by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago is the “shortest distance between Donald Trump and an orange [prison] jumpsuit,” conservative attorney George Conway told CNN’s Jim Acosta yesterday (see video above).

Conway noted that the potential case against Trump appears “so simple.” In particular, if the documents contain material about national security and nuclear weapons, as has been reported, “I don’t know what the defense” could be.

“And we haven’t really heard anything remotely approaching a rationale, logical defense” about why Trump stashed boxes of “unauthorized” documents from the White House that should legally have been held by the National Archives, he added. As reported in the Huffington Post.

FBI agents last Monday collected around 20 boxes of items from Trump’s residence, including 11 sets of classified information, some of it top secret material.

The former president is now being probed for possible violation of the Espionage Act, obstruction of an investigation, and removing or destroying records.

Trump has offered a carousel of excuses for why the boxes were stashed at his Mar-a-Lago residence and golf resort, claiming he would have returned them if asked, because he takes work home like everyone else, and he had already declassified everything, anyway. (White House documents belong to the National Archives, under the Presidential Records Act, declassified or not.)

Conway, the husband of former Trump White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, said he believes the “craziness” of some of those desperate claims indicates that Trump may “realize the jeopardy he’s in.”

Acosta wondered why Trump has not yet explained why he had the documents’ information in the first place.

Conway responded: “There’s no valid reason.” He’s a “narcissist,” who believes “everything belongs to him,” Conway added.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been pulling a political stunt called Operation Lone Star that has resulted in 6,500 immigrants being transported north on buses. Abbott has said that “New York City is the ideal destination for these migrants, who can receive the abundance of city services and housing that Mayor Eric Adams has boasted about within the sanctuary city. I hope he follows through on his promise of welcoming all migrants with open arms so that our overrun and overwhelmed border towns can find relief.” 

Karen Snyder had an opinion piece in yesterday’s Daily News suggesting that:

“New York should greet these people with open arms. After all, we are a nation of immigrants. Most of these people are seeking a better life. They will contribute to our greatness.

Abbott has just signed some bills regarding gun control. He said, ‘Politicians from the federal level to the local level have threatened to take guns from law-abiding citizens — but we will not let that happen in Texas. Texas will always be the leader in defending the Second Amendment.’

Since Abbott feels so strongly about defending the Second Amendment, I would like to suggest that NYC ship people convicted of illegal gun use to Texas. This way, Texas can welcome people who love using guns. This will allow the state to enjoy more people who believe in the unrestricted use of firearms. This should balance out the shipping of immigrants to NYC without asking Texans to give up their Second Amendment rights.”

Interesting suggestion – a stunt for a stunt!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Huffington Post has an article this morning commenting on former President Donald Trump’s lies about the FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago residence.  Here is an excerpt. 

“First, he suggested the FBI could have planted the top-secret material it found at his South Florida residence. Then he shifted focus to his predecessor, Barack Obama, whom he said had done the same thing, only worse ― a claim the National Archives was moved to debunk on Friday.

Trump now appears to have landed on an old standby, claiming victimhood because he supposedly didn’t do anything wrong to begin with. He had already declassified everything that had been taken to Mar-a-Lago, Trump argued on Truth Social.

On Friday evening, Trump’s camp sent a statement to Fox News elaborating on that defense.

“As we can all relate to, everyone ends up having to bring home their work from time to time. American presidents are no different,” the statement read.

It continued: “President Trump, in order to prepare for work the next day, often took documents, including classified documents, to the residence. He had a standing order that documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them.”

Trump has not held the job of president of the United States, however, in more than 18 months, a point the statement did not seem to address.

Although presidents can declassify certain information, there is a formal process for doing so, and it is not clear whether Trump followed it…

… Whether or not the Mar-a-Lago materials were technically classified or declassified, however, could be beside the point.

The unsealed warrant revealed that the Department of Justice was investigating Trump under several statutes. None of them require that the information be classified, former U.S. attorney and legal commentator Barb McQuade pointed out in an early Saturday appearance on MSNBC.

“Classification is irrelevant. Government documents that pertain to the national defense may not be withheld from the government upon request for return,” McQuade said in a tweet. “The obstruction charge in the warrant suggests Trump tried to conceal what he had.

The liar in chief and his GOP enablers are pathetic in trying to defend his behavior!

Tony

Salman Rushdie and photos of attack

Dear Commons Community,

Author Salman Rushdie — the subject of a decades-old death threat from Iranian Muslim clerics — was knifed in the neck Friday in an attack as he prepared to deliver a lecture in western New York.

Rushdie, 75, was taken off a ventilator yesterday, his agent, Andrew Wylie said. He has a damaged liver, severed nerves in one arm and is likely to lose an eye, the agent said. Rushdie was flown to a hospital in Erie, Pa., where he underwent surgery.  As reported by the Associated Press.

Dr. Martin Haskell, one of the people one the scene who rushed to help, described the prolific and controversial author’s wounds as “serious but recoverable.”

At the scene, cops arrested 24-year-old Hadi Matar of Fairview, N.J., a town in Bergen County across the Hudson River from Manhattan.

Rushdie was set to speak as part of an event held at the Chautauqua Institution, a nonprofit center near Lake Erie. The institution, about 55 miles southwest of Buffalo, describes itself as “a community of artists, educators, thinkers, faith leaders and friends dedicated to exploring the best in humanity.”

Instead, the audience saw a stunning display of the worst in humanity.

Rushdie was being introduced around 11 a.m. when a man rushed the stage and then began punching and stabbing him, sending shockwaves through audience members gathered together to participate in the lecture series, titled “More than Shelter.”

Matar managed to knock Rushdie off his feet and stab him at least once in the neck and once in the abdomen before he was detained by a state trooper assigned to the event, according to New York State Police. The amphitheater was quickly evacuated.

Photos taken on the scene show a small crowd of people huddled around Rushdie, some of who can be seen tending to his injuries. Blood can also be seen on the ground near Rushdie and on the chair he was sitting in just prior to the attack.

Gov. Hochul praised the speedy action by New York State Police and all those who responded following the stabbing.

“Our thoughts are with Salman and his loved ones following this horrific event,” she said. “I have directed State Police to further assist however needed in the investigation.

Rabbi Charles Savenor was among the hundreds of people in the audience at the time. He said the attack lasted about 20 seconds.

“This guy ran on to platform and started pounding on Mr. Rushdie,” Savenor said. “At first you’re like, ‘What’s going on?’ And then it became abundantly clear in a few seconds that he was being beaten.”

While a motive for the attack was unclear on Friday evening, the Mumbai-born writer has faced much controversy over the course of his decades-long career.

Rushdie — the author of 14 novels, four works of nonfiction and a collection of short stories — is perhaps best known for penning “The Satanic Verses.” The piece was dubbed blasphemous by many Muslims and has been banned in Iran since 1988. The following year, the nation’s late leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death.

Iran has also offered a $3 million reward to anyone able to kill Rushdie.

Tony