US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8288

Congress is moving to force the Pentagon to violate a nuclear arms treaty with Russia — in yet another effort to box in President Donald Trump on relations with Moscow.

Language in key defense bills in both the House and Senate would require the military to begin developing medium-range missiles banned by a 1987 treaty that Ronald Reagan negotiated with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev during the twilight years of the Cold War.

Supporters say the move is necessary because Russian President Vladimir Putin has violated the pact. But opponents fear it could increase the chances of a nuclear confrontation at a time when relations between the two nations are at a post-Cold War low.

The legislation is also likely to stir up new friction between lawmakers and Trump, who has already accused Congress of illegally meddling in his dealings with Russia. Trump blasted Congress on Wednesday for including “clearly unconstitutional provisions” in a bipartisan bill imposing new sanctions on Putin’s regime — legislation he said he nonetheless signed "for the sake of national unity."

The OMB has slammed the House push for the new weapon, saying it “unhelpfully ties the Administration to a specific missile system, which would limit potential military response options."

The administration "is currently developing an integrated diplomatic, military, and economic response strategy that maximizes pressure on Russia,” OMB added in a recent statement.

Trump is also getting a rare assist from congressional Democrats alarmed by the potential for a newly stoked nuclear arms race. They include Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who voted to ratify the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1988.

"Now, as then, short and medium range nuclear missiles have no deterrent value, while making it more likely for miscalculations to lead to the unthinkable," Leahy, asked about the new provisions, told POLITICO in a statement.

Legal experts are also criticizing the legislation as congressional overreach, saying the Senate can only ratify treaties and the president alone can negotiate or pull out of them. The House has no role whatsoever in approving treaties.

The House’s language, included in the National Defense Authorization Act passed last month, would create a program for developing a land-based missile that is banned by the INF Treaty. The Senate will soon debate a similar provision in its version of the defense policy bill, which would set aside $65 million and also require the military to reintroduce a missile capable of traveling between 500 and 5,500 kilometers — a weapon that both Cold War rivals phased out three decades ago.

The House language specifically calls for a conventional missile, not a nuclear one, but the treaty itself — which was designed to limit weapons that could carry an atomic warhead — does not differentiate between the two.

“It exceeds the power of Congress,” said Mallory Stewart, who served as deputy assistant secretary of State in the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance until earlier this year. “It is ignoring a division of power that has been recognized since the beginning of our Constitution.”

"It is unclear whether it is even constitutional," agreed Alexandra Bell, another former State Department official.

The NSC declined to answer questions about the legality of the missile legislation. A spokeswoman said in a statement that the administration "is currently undertaking an extensive review of our policy" and will "assess the potential security implications for the United States, our allies and partners, and to develop potential response options."

Supporters of the provisions — including Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas — assert that Russia's recent deployment of an intermediate-range missile in violation of the treaty requires the U.S. to respond in kind.

On August 03 2017 11:54 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Or a way to force Trump out for the GOP i.e. Force Russia to leak more damning info and so on thus a way out before 2020 where he will want to run again.

On August 03 2017 11:57 BlueBird. wrote:
Idk forcing Russia's hand like this is something id rather avoid.

VATICAN CITY — Two close associates of Pope Francis have accused American Catholic ultraconservatives of making an alliance of “hate” with evangelical Christians to back President Trump, further alienating a group already out of the Vatican’s good graces.

The authors, writing in a Vatican-vetted journal, singled out Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, as a “supporter of an apocalyptic geopolitics” that has stymied action against climate change and exploited fears of migrants and Muslims with calls for “walls and purifying deportations.”

The article warns that conservative American Catholics have strayed dangerously into the deepening political polarization in the United States. The writers even declare that the worldview of American evangelical and hard-line Catholics, which is based on a literal interpretation of the Bible, is “not too far apart’’ from jihadists.

It is not clear if the article, appearing in La Civiltà Cattolica, received the pope’s direct blessing, but it was extraordinary coming from a journal that carries the Holy See’s seal of approval. There has apparently been no reprimand from the pope, who is not shy about disciplining dissenters, and La Civiltà Cattolica’s editor has promoted the article nearly every day since it was published in July.

The article and the backlash to it — accusations of anti-Americanism have been rife, and one prominent American prelate likened the authors to “useful idiots” — have highlighted the widening distance between Francis and American Catholic conservatives.

On August 03 2017 12:08 LegalLord wrote:

That's news to me.

On August 03 2017 12:10 Karis Vas Ryaar wrote:
Also
https://twitter.com/JamesMartinSJ/status/892824671866978304


I never got the whole Jesus wants strong boarders right wing argument. Technically aren't we all under the kingdom of heaven? and wasn't pretty much everywhere Rome when Jesus lived?

Scientists have successfully edited the DNA of human embryos to erase a heritable heart condition that is known for causing sudden death in young competitive athletes, cracking open the doors to a controversial new era in medicine.

This is the first time gene editing on human embryos has been conducted in the United States. Researchers said in interviews this week that they consider their work very basic. The embryos were allowed to grow for only a few days, and there was never any intention to implant them to create a pregnancy. But they also acknowledged that they will continue to move forward with the science, with the ultimate goal of being able to “correct” disease-causing genes in embryos that will develop into babies.

News of the remarkable experiment began to circulate last week, but details became public Wednesday with a paper in the journal Nature.

The experiment is the latest example of how the laboratory tool known as CRISPR (or Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), a type of “molecular scissors,” is pushing the boundaries of our ability to manipulate life, and it has been received with both excitement and horror.

The most recent work is particularly sensitive because it involves changes to the germ line — that is, genes that could be passed on to future generations. The United States forbids the use of federal funds for embryo research, and the Food and Drug Administration is prohibited from considering any clinical trials involving genetic modifications that can be inherited. A report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in February urged caution in applying CRISPR to human germ-line editing but laid out conditions by which research should continue. The new study abides by those recommendations.

Shoukhrat Mitalipov, one of the lead authors of the paper and a researcher at Oregon Health & Science University, said that he is conscious of the need for a larger ethical and legal discussion about genetic modification of humans but that his team's work is justified because it involves “correcting” genes rather than changing them.

“Really we didn’t edit anything. Neither did we modify anything,” Mitalipov said. “Our program is toward correcting mutant genes.”

Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who is co-chair of the National Academies committee that looked at gene editing, said that concerns about the work that have been circulating in recent days are overblown.

“What this represents is a fascinating, important and rather impressive incremental step toward learning how to edit embryos safely and precisely,” she said. However, “no matter what anybody says, this is not the dawn of the era of the designer baby.” She said that characteristics that some parents might desire, such as intelligence and athleticism, are influenced by multiple genes and that researchers don't understand all the components of how such characteristics are inherited, much less have the ability to redesign them.

The research involved eggs from 12 healthy female donors and sperm from a male volunteer who carries the MYBPC3 gene, which causes hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. HCM is a disease of that causes an abnormal thickening of the heart muscle but can cause no symptoms and remain undetected until it causes sudden cardiac death. There's no way to prevent or cure it, and it affects 1 in 500 people worldwide.

Around the time the sperm was injected into the eggs, researchers snipped out the gene that causes the disease. The result was far more successful than the researchers expected: As the embryo's cells began to divide and multiply, a huge number appeared to be repairing themselves by using the normal, non-mutated copy of the gene from the women's genetic material. In all, they saw that about 72 percent were corrected, a very high number. Researchers also noticed that there didn't seem to be any “off-target” changes in the DNA, which has been a major safety concern of gene-editing research.

Mitalipov said he hoped the technique could one day be applied to a wide variety of genetic diseases and that one of the team's next targets may be the BRCA gene mutation, which is associated with breast cancer.

The first published work involving human embryos, reported in 2015, was done in China and targeted a gene that leads to the blood disorder beta thalassemia. But those embryos were abnormal and nonviable, and there were far fewer than the number used in the U.S. study.

Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a researcher at the Salk Institute who is also a co-author on the new study, said that there are many advantages to treating an embryo rather than a child or an adult. When dealing with an embryo in its earliest stages, only a few cells are involved, while in a more mature human being there are trillions of cells in the body and potentially millions that must be corrected to eradicate traces of a disease.

Izpisua Belmonte said that even if the technology is perfected, it could deal with only a small subset of human diseases.

“I don’t want to be negative with our own discoveries, but it is important to inform the public of what this means,” he said. “In my opinion the percentage of people that would benefit from this at the current way the world is is rather small.” For the process to make a difference, the child would have to be born through in vitro fertilization or IVF and the parents would have to know the child has the gene for a disease to get it changed. But the vast majority of children are conceived the natural way, and this correction technology would not work in utero.

For years, some policymakers, historians and scientists have been calling for a voluntary moratorium on the modification of the DNA of human reproductive cells. The most prominent expression of concern came in the form of a 2015 letter signed by CRISPR co-inventor Jennifer Doudna, Nobel laureate David Baltimore and 16 other prominent scientists. They warned that eliminating a genetic disease could have unintended consequences — on human genetics, society and even the environment — far into the future.

On Wednesday, Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, said warned that the O.H.S.U. research would result in fertility clinics offering "'genetic upgrades' to those able to afford them."

“Once those commercial dynamics kick in, we could all too easily find ourselves in a world where some people’s children are considered biologically superior to the rest of us," she said in a statement. "We need to ask ourselves whether we want to add that new kind of excuse for extreme social disparities to the ones we already tolerate.”

Researchers who worked on the heart-condition experiment appear to have differing views on where their work is headed.

Paula Amato, a reproductive endocrinologist with O.H.S.U., was excited about the idea of being able to edit out diseases before birth. She said that while pre-implantation genetic screening of embryos is now available, it isn't perfect. She talked about how one of her patients went through three cycles of in vitro fertilization but all of the eggs that were harvested had the gene mutation that causes a diseases.

With gene correction technology, Amato said, “we could have rescued some of those embryos.”

But Izpisua Belmonte said he is focusing on using the findings from this study to further research into gene modifications during a pregnancy or after birth into adulthood.

“I feel that the practical thing to do is deal with the diseases people have, not with the disease they may have,” he said.

On August 03 2017 12:59 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
Gattica. We're headed for Gattica. Too bad I can't die and be reborn when this is commonplace.

In terms of avoiding genetic diseases, it’s not conceptually different from PGD, which is already widely used. The bigger worry is that gene-editing could be used to make people stronger, smarter, or taller, paving the way for a new eugenics, and widening the already substantial gaps between the wealthy and poor. But many geneticists believe that such a future is fundamentally unlikely because complex traits like height and intelligence are the work of hundreds or thousands of genes, each of which have a tiny effect. The prospect of editing them all is implausible. And since genes are so thoroughly interconnected, it may be impossible to edit one particular trait without also affecting many others.

“There’s the worry that this could be used for enhancement, so society has to draw a line,” says Mitalipov. “But this is pretty complex technology and it wouldn’t be hard to regulate it.”
...

“It’s not so much about designer babies as it is about geographical location,” says Charo. “It’s happening in the United States, and everything here around embryo research has high sensitivity.” She and others worry that the early report about the study, before the actual details were available for scrutiny, could lead to unnecessary panic. “Panic reactions often lead to panic-driven policy ... which is usually bad policy,” wrote Greely.