What Happened Today: August 26, 2022
A groundbreaking organ treatment to begin testing; DOJ releases partial affidavit used for FBI sweep of Mar-a-Lago; 20 million Americans behind on utilities
The Big Story
An upcoming clinical trial for an experimental organ procedure could lead to a new breakthrough medical technology that would dramatically alter how patients with diseased organs are treated. In Boston in September, a group of 12 volunteers with end-stage liver disease will receive doses of healthy liver cells injected into specific lymph nodes, in the hopes of growing one or several mini livers inside their body. The new livers would take over core liver functions from the diseased organ and potentially generate healthy cells that would allow the bad organ to heal itself.
For the past decade, a team at LyGenesis, a medical start-up led by University of Pittsburgh biologist Eric Lagasse, has developed a treatment by injecting healthy cells into the bean-shaped lymph nodes of animals with deteriorated livers. As signals from the animal’s distressed liver are sent out, they activate the lymph nodes, which use their ready supply of blood flow to continue growing and dividing the newly injected set of healthy cells. The lymph nodes then start to incubate a new, smaller liver and in some cases send healthy new cells to the distressed liver. In one study of six pigs who grew the new, smaller livers, each animal demonstrated significant improvement to the health of their original, failing liver.
A shortage of healthy organ donors in the United States means that roughly 10% of eligible patients die before they have the chance for a live-saving transplant. Others have become too ill to be eligible for a donated organ. The cost of such a cell-based treatment remains to be determined, and the success rate for humans is entirely unknown, but even if the treatment is only partially viable, it could extend life for an untold numbers of patients who succumb to the organ diseases common among the elderly.
Read More: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/08/25/1058652/grow-new-organs/
In the Back Pages: Beach Reads
The Rest
→ Following a court order on Thursday, the Justice Department on Friday released a heavily redacted version of the affidavit used by the FBI to gain the warrant needed for the extraordinary sweep and seizure of 15 boxes of documents from former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property. Since the seizure 18 days prior, news reports have said that Trump had stored on the property information relating to U.S. national defense as well as confidential intelligence sources, some of which was top-secret and deemed to be seen in only a secure government location. “Of most significant concern was that highly classified records were unfoldered, intermixed with other records,” said an official at the National Archives and Records Administration in a report to the Justice Department that was cited in the affidavit. It remains unknown exactly what documents were most recently collected by the FBI and why Trump had kept them after leaving the White House.
→ Imran Khan, the former prime minister of Pakistan, received a reprieve after the country’s court intervened on his behalf, telling police on Wednesday not to arrest Khan before his trial, which is set for next week. Khan, who was ousted in a no-confidence vote this past April, stands accused of violating the state’s antiterrorism act after he made vague threats about current officials. “Madam magistrate,” Khan said in a recent speech, “you should also get ready, we will take action against you.” Khan’s comments come as his popularity grows—an unlikely second act for the politician that is largely the result of his combative opposition to the current prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, who is increasingly unpopular amid surging inflation and a sluggish economy. Khan is using this latest accusation and the upcoming trial as yet more fodder in his political comeback. “Pakistan is being mocked all over the world,” Mr. Khan said outside the courthouse after his hearing. He alleges that the government is part of a U.S.-backed conspiracy to silence him and that the latest accusations against him make Pakistan “look like a banana republic.” With his popularity on the rise, Khan is now calling for parliamentary elections.
→ New media outfits are finding massive audiences on the left and the right, as a report this week in Puck outlines the blockbuster success of conservative outlet The Daily Wire, the 230-employee operation that brings in $180 million in annual revenue. Founded in 2015 by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing, the podcast, the website, and the mobile app together broadcast 250 pieces of content daily to nearly a million subscribers paying between $8 and $14 a month for access. Combined with a healthy ad-revenue stream and a militant distaste for progressive ideology, The Daily Wire almost doubled the 2021 annual revenue of Axios, the brainchild of former Politico reporters that sold this month to Cox Enterprises for $525 million. Compared with Axios and The Athletic, the sports coverage site that sold recently for half a billion dollars to The New York Times, The Daily Wire could earn a valuation of at least $1 billion, either to a private bidder or in an IPO on the stock market. It would be a massive payout for Shapiro and Boreing, who have only taken in $4.7 million in seed funding. “My guess is that long term, we may have to take public capital,” said Boreing, who’s already fielded several offers from interested parties. “But I think there’s no way we will take public capital anytime soon.”
Read More: https://puck.news/the-chip-joanna-of-maga-america/
→ Number of the Day: 20 million
The number of American households currently behind on their utility bills—the most ever, as the country grapples with energy prices that are up by as much as 15% compared with 2021. “I expect a tsunami of shutoffs,” one analyst said of the summer heat that will continue to drive up demand. California reported a 40% increase in late utilities payments since 2020; New Jersey saw a 30% increase of tardy utility bills. There is a comparable crisis playing out in Europe, but there the governments are quickly working to help families pay their electricity bills; in the United States meanwhile, there has been little discussion of the issue and even less action. With families falling behind on their energy bills, it is now likely that more Americans will end up hospitalized because of the heat: Indiana University’s Energy Justice Lab notes that while 41 states have at least some program preventing utility companies from shutting off a household’s power during winter, only 19 states have such protections during the summer, when heat tends to kill dozens of people each year.
→ Star Scientific, a small lab near Sydney, has patented a technology that promises to have an enormous impact on the future of green energy. Coal plants will be converted so green hydrogen can be used to create steam power, a new tech that could upend traditional manufacturing operations, particularly for the food industry. “Thermal energy is crucial to the business of cooking food,” said Bill Heague, general manager of Mars Food Australia. “And this technology has the capability to create limitless heat without any combustion and zero emissions.” The one hurdle that the company has predicted is the need for an abundant supply of hydrogen, the production of which typically releases a good deal of carbon dioxide into the environment. “The good news,” Bloomberg notes, “is that Australia has begun to invest billions of dollars in making green hydrogen.” Indeed, Australia, which is currently the largest carbon emitter per capita in the world, is quickly funding its way into becoming a hub for green energy technologies, including this one.
→ Fedex and the thousands of contractors the company hires to help with its shipments are in an escalating dispute that might lead to contractors walking off the job on Black Friday in November. “My business is losing money every day,” said the CEO of one of Fedex’s largest contractors. “And my business will not be able to continue operation past Nov. 25.”
As many as 30% of the contractors working with Fedex claim they have been losing money since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing larger shipments and far higher costs for deliveries.
Fedex Ground, meanwhile, has seen a 60% increase in profits since the start of the pandemic.
While the contractors cannot coordinate a work stoppage due to antitrust laws, rumors about a Black Friday shutdown are circulating across the industry.
Fedex has acknowledged that 10% of its contractors have sought relief; the company did not say how many of those contractors found any.
→ After being bombed repeatedly, Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear reactor—one of the largest in Europe—caught fire on Thursday and needed to be cut off from the country’s grid. “The world must understand what a threat this is,” Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a televised address following the fire. “If the diesel generators did not turn on, if the automation and our station staff did not work after the blackout, then we would already be forced to overcome the consequences of the radiation accident.” With officials now declaring the reactor safe, politicians in Ukraine and Russia have begun pointing fingers, each accusing the other of shelling the area and causing the nearly catastrophic fire. While such disputes about who bombed whom have become commonplace in this war, the presence of the nuclear reactor makes the back-and-forth all the more worrisome. “Almost every day there is a new incident at or near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant,” said the general director of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency. “I’m determined to personally lead an IAEA mission to the plant in the next few days to help stabilize the nuclear safety and security situation there.”
→ Despite tens of millions of dollars spent over the past year on ad buys aimed at bringing in new investors to the crypto space, the new investors never came, according to new data from the Pew Research Center. “Attempts to bring in new buyers to the market didn’t seem to move the needle at all,” said Lee Rainie, Pew Research Center’s director of internet and technology research. The news is especially bad for the crypto market given the currency’s reliance on new investors to create growth and increase value. “Although there is a sucker born every minute,” said Nicholas Weaver, a computer-security expert at the University of California at Berkeley, “that is still a limited pool of suckers.”
—Programming note: The Scroll team will be on a summer break next week and back in your inbox on Sept. 6, following the Labor Day weekend. See you then.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
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Beach Reads
Tablet Magazine is winding down its two weeks of Beach Reads that collect some of our best deep dives. For the offline enthusiasts, the whole series has been bound together in a special edition of our printer-friendly weekly digest: an amazing free 113-page anthology for you and your hammock.
Below is one such Beach Read, from author and podcaster Dara Horn. In Cities of Ice, Horn files a dispatch from frozen Harbin, where Jews once flourished—and melted away.
Illustration: Ilya Milstein
One of my strange and vivid memories from my first trip to Israel, when I was 9 years old, is of a brief cartoon I watched at the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv. The cartoon described the travels of Benjamin of Tudela, a 12th-century Spanish Jewish merchant who documented his six-year journey traversing the known world, across the Mediterranean to Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia, and reporting on India and China, and sharing crowded boats and wagons in-between. The Diaspora Museum has since been revamped and rebranded as the Museum of the Jewish People, but in 1986 it was a dark and openly depressing place, its dour displays all leading to a “Scrolls of Fire” atrium describing how hapless Jews were expelled or burned alive.
But the cartoon was bright and curious. Benjamin was a ridiculous bowling-pin figure with googly eyes, bobbing across the screen and cheerfully reporting on thriving Jewish communities around the world—the Jews in France who inexplicably lived in a castle, the Jews in Babylonia who had their own googly eyed king, the Jews in Yemen who joined local Arab armies and stampeded with them in a cloud of dust, the Jews in Syria who pacified wiggly eyebrowed assassins with free silk scarves. For reasons I could not articulate at the age of 9, I was utterly enchanted.
I feel that same enchantment now when I am seduced by the travel industry’s branding of the world as an amazing place full of welcoming people who beneath it all are actually the same. My personal experience as a tourist in over 50 countries has contradicted this hopeful messaging entirely—in reality, the more time I spend in any place, the more I notice the differences between myself and the inhabitants, and the more alienated, uncomfortable, and anxious I become. Yet colorful photos of exotic places on TripAdvisor lure me every time.
So it is not surprising that I was eager to make my way to a city called Harbin in a remote province of northeastern China, south of Siberia and north of North Korea, where the temperature hovers around minus 30 Celsius for much of the year, and where every winter, over 10,000 workers construct an entire massive city out of blocks of ice. I’d seen photos and videos of the Harbin Ice Festival, which dwarfs similar displays in Canada and Japan by orders of magnitude, its enormous ice buildings laced through with LED lighting and sometimes replicating famous monuments at or near life size. It attracts over 2 million visitors a year, because it’s the kind of thing that needs to be seen to be believed. As I considered whether a trip to Harbin was worth it, my mindless travel-industry scrolling took me to a list of other local tourist attractions, including synagogues.
Yes, synagogues. Plural. And then I discovered something deeply strange: The city of Harbin was built by Jews.
Only later would I discover that the ice city and the Jewish city were actually the same, and that I was being actively lured to both, in ways more disturbing than I could have possibly imagined. Like a googly eyed Benjamin of Tudela, I had to go.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/cities-of-ice
Thank you for your work. I appreciate all you do to present world news. Have a happy and restful holiday, and look forward to your news when you come back.
The 113 pages of supplement are daunting but amazing reads. Thank you.