Migrant groups launch lawsuits against Border Patrol over camping conditions near San Diego

 By Monica Showalter

It's not enough that the food isn't good enough in New York for migrants, who are reportedly wasting tons of it. Nor is it enough that migrants are getting any shelter at all, as the same migrants demonstrated in the streets with demands for permanent housing.

Now migrant open-borders groups are complaining about holding-camp conditions for illegal border crossers, hitting the Border Patrol with two lawsuits in San Diego.

According to the San Diego Union-Tribune:

Immigrant rights groups say that the Border Patrol is continuing to violate federal standards by holding migrants in open-air detention sites after they cross the U.S.-Mexico border — a situation they say has recently worsened at sites in the East County desert, according to a complaint filed with a watchdog arm of Homeland Security this week.

 

For months, thousands of migrants who have crossed the border, many of them seeking asylum, have been directed by Border Patrol to remain in open-air holding sites before being processed by the federal agency, according to the complaint and interviews with several migrants. The migrants wait hours or sometimes a few days at the camps before being picked up and taken to a processing facility.

The complaint, filed to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, alleges that Border Patrol agents are forcing migrants to wait at the camps without providing adequate food, water, shelter, restrooms or medical care. The groups say this is a violation of Customs and Border Protection’s standards on caring for detained individuals, as well as a violation of migrants’ rights under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

 

It’s the second complaint filed against the agency for conditions at the sites, though the first complaint in May focused on the camps located between layers of border wall near San Ysidro. This new complaint — filed by seven immigrant rights groups including Al Otro Lado, Southern Border Communities Coalition and American Friends Service Committee — expands to also include open-air sites in Jacumba Hot Springs, which has seen a significant increase in migrants since September.

 

After all, didn't the migrants pay good money to cartel human smugglers, upwards of $7,000 a pop, for passage across into the U.S. with no visas or papers needed? If the cartels select a remote desert spot for migrant-dumping, the Border Patrol better be ready to house all of them, no matter how many they send, and with five-star hotel accomodations, or else lawsuits will be filed. 

It's chutzpah taken to the 11th level.

After all, they did cross illegally. And they did choose to enter the U.S. illegally in remote desert areas, not at valid ports of entry. It's undoubtedly rough. But it doesn't last long, migrants eventually get "processed" and become free to move about the country, transporting diseases, and bringing counties and cities expenses, so the bad guy is the U.S. for having such rough deserts instead of full development with fine accommodations such as migrants are used to.

To claim entitlement to comfortable housing at U.S. taxpayer expense after crossing illegally into the states through a hostile desert without papers really tends to stand out.

It's also coming as other instances of migrant ingratitude start to flood the zone.

Earlier this week, news emerged of migrants throwing out their food paid for by New York City as not good enough, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars a day.

According to the New York Times: 

New York City is paying tens of thousands of dollars a month for meals that are supposed to go to feed migrants but instead are never eaten and are thrown away, according to internal company records reviewed by The New York Times.

The meals are provided by DocGo, a medical services company that won a no-bid, $432 million contract from the city to provide broad migrant care, despite having had no experience in doing so.

DocGo receives up to $33 a day per migrant for providing three meals a day for each of the roughly 4,000 migrants in its care. From Oct. 22 to Nov. 10, more than 70,000 meals were recorded by DocGo as being “wasted,” according to internal company records obtained by The Times.

The Times blames the company for incompetence, which is probably true, but there's no question migrants are throwing the food away, too, having plenty of money for portable stoves and purchased groceries, which the Times report says they are using instead of the pro-offered food at their taxpayer-paid accommodations. 

If they can pay for that, then maybe they can start paying for all of their own food as well as their hotel rooms the way normal people do as they await their asylum claim processings.

But of course that hasn't happened: In January, migrants actually demonstrated outside their hotels in New York City, calling for "permanent housing" from Uncle Sam. I wrote about that entitlement mentality here.

As for the desert ingrates, there doesn't seem to be much recognition from their open-borders advocates that U.S. resources are limited and the alternative really needs to be to ship them back where they came from after crossing illegally. To them, the U.S. 'owes' the migrants no matter whose ox gets gored, as foreign illegal border crossers always come first. It's garbage. The migrants ought to be grateful that they are allowed to stay on our desert floor at all as they await useless "processing" on their phony asylum claims. If they wanted a more hospitable place to lay their heads, they can pay for those things, and cross at a valid port of entry where such accommodations are available. The idea that the U.S. owes them full accommodation in a remote desert outpost after they committed the crime of breaking into our country is outrageous.

Not long before he died, Henry Kissinger wisely pointed out the "grave mistake" of Europe admitting unlimited numbers of unvetted illegal migrants, carefully pointing out that once in, they always become a politicized special interest pressure group.

The same dynamic is clearly happening here. Illegals have become just another special interest group, claiming its cut of the taxpayer pie against all other possible uses for it, whether schools, cops, the military, education, or whatever the government spends money on.

It's another argument to kick them all out if they can't stop issuing demands and damages.

The U.S. owes them absolutely nothing. Time to end this farce, now.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/12/migrant_groups_launch_lawsuits_against_border_patrol_over_camping_conditions_near_san_diego.html

Migrants could 'destabilize', 'overwhelm' countries- UK PM

 Speaking at a political event in Rome organized by his Italian counterpart Giorgia Meloni's right-wing party, Sunak said hostile powers would use illegal migration as a "weapon" to destabilize societies.

"If we do not tackle this problem, the numbers will only grow. It will overwhelm our countries and our capacity to help those who actually need our help the most," Sunak said.

"Making that deterrent credible will mean doing things differently, breaking from consensus, and both Giorgia and I are prepared to do that."

Sunak survived a major threat to his leadership on Tuesday (December 12) when he won a vote in parliament on an emergency bill to revive his plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, thwarting a rebellion from some of his lawmakers.

https://news.yahoo.com/migrants-could-destabilize-overwhelm-countries-175227979.html

Private Equity’s New Way to Defer M&A Debt Costs

 

• Buyout firms seek ability to delay all interest expense
• KKR asks private credit to allow payment-in-kind for Cotiviti

Private equity giants are turning to a new take on an old solution to higher debt costs for M&A deals: borrow all of the money they can and defer paying it back.

KKR & Co. is asking private credit funds for a so-called payment-in-kind feature that would allow it to push off all cash interest payments if and when it purchases a 50% stake in health care analytics company Cotiviti Inc. The company is looking for $5 billion to $6 billion of debt for the deal.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-16/private-equity-s-solution-to-higher-debt-costs-is-to-borrow-and-defer-payments

Is your cat trying to kill you? They’ve already been caught eating more than 2,000 species — and counting

 They’re natural born killers.

Just about everything is on the table for a cat’s diet, a new study found — domesticated felines are happy to nosh on much more than the occasional bird or mouse they leave at your doorstep. Reptiles, amphibians, insects and other mammals have all been known to tickle their whiskers.

Researchers from Auburn University spent two decades documenting the various cuisine that cats will eat, finding taht more than 2,000 different species could be — and should be — considered standard fare.

“It sure seems there’s not a lot that a cat would pass up,” study author Chris Lepczyk told Anthropocene Magazine.

The study, published in the journal Nature this week, found that a cat’s diet is so diverse, that they dine on animals from every continent, accounting for approximately 9% of known birds, 6% of mammals and 4% of reptiles. The most common prey of choice ends up being fairly predictable, however — the house mouse, European rabbit, black rat, house sparrow and brown rat.

The research team also found 119 species of insects that are devoured by the ferocious felines — although Lepczyk believes that number is much higher, given the remains are difficult to identify in the gut or fecal matter of a cat.

“If there are invertebrates there and they can capture them, they will eat them,” he said.

And they don’t just stick to tiny pests — felines were found to scavenge for already-perished, large vertebrate species such as American bullfrogs, emu, green sea turtles and even cows, meaning humans could, in theory, make the list.

“That’s not a topic I want to touch,” Lepczyk told a reporter.

Cats were found to eat large vertebrates, including emus and cows.Evrymmnt – stock.adobe.com

And while cat lovers may rejoice at the demise of rodents and insects by way of a hungry, hungry kitty, cats’ diverse palettes have been known to impact conservation.

In fact, 327 species eaten by cats are on the International Union for Conservation and Culture Red List as “near threatened,” “threatened” or “extinct,” meaning that Lepczyk’s extensive index could help conservationists in the future.

https://nypost.com/2023/12/16/lifestyle/is-your-cat-trying-to-kill-you-turns-out-theyll-eat-almost-anything/

Scalable human embryo model displays earliest stages of blood cell production

 Scientists have grown a scalable new embryo-like model that unshrouds some mysteries of early human development, including blood cell formation, or hematopoiesis—a first for the field. 

In an article published Dec. 13 in Nature, a team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh described how they created so-called heX-Embryoids, which are self-organizing structures smaller than the tip of a sewing needle. The models will be used to understand the first stages of blood cell development in humans, to perform toxicology studies and to figure out how to grow cells more effectively for therapeutic applications such as blood transfusions or cell therapies, among other potential uses. 

“Our embryo-like model will unlock the ‘black-box’ of human development, which could help solve the mystery of why 60% of pregnancies fail in the first two weeks—before the mother even misses a menstrual period—and pave the way for new therapies,” Mo Ebrahimkhani, M.D., senior author, said in a press release. 

The development is the second major triumph this year in the quest to design a model of the human embryo, a pursuit that has sparked both excitement and ethical concerns among the scientific community and the public. In September, researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel published an article in Nature describing how they created a human embryo model that recapitulated the basic structure of real ones from implantation to around 14 days post-fertilization. That model even secreted hormones that turned pregnancy tests positive. 

The Weizmann Institute’s development marked a turning point in the field, as it was the first time scientists had truly toed the line between embryo model and actual embryo, some unaffiliated researchers said. But the heX-Embryoids may ruffle fewer feathers: Unlike the earlier models, they don’t have the components necessary for forming a placenta, nor a closed yolk sac. Both features are necessary for implantation and growth into a “real” embryo. 

“[heX-Embyroids] do not mirror the biology of the full integrated embryo and can provide a possibility for additional in vitro follow-ups with limited ethical concerns,” the researchers wrote in their paper. 

The scientists grew the models from human adult skin cells that had been induced to revert to pluripotent stem cells, also known as iPSCs. The iPSCs’ genes were edited to express a pattern that could stimulate early tissue development when combined with the antibiotic doxycycline.

When the edited iPSCs were mixed with unedited iPSCs and doxycycline in a lab dish containing standard culture media—a departure from other methods that require complex concoctions of growth factors—they developed into an open yolk sac and embryonic tissue. 

Unlike other embryo models, the structures also contained functional blood islands, or sites on the yolk sac where hematopoiesis takes place. Starting 16 days after the iPSCs were cultured, the blood islands began producing waves of precursor cells to bone marrow, red blood cells, and lymphoid cells like white blood cells. 

heX-Embryoids could be grown from any human skin cell, the researchers noted in the paper, making it possible to create embryo models with a wide range of genetic diversity. Given that the models grew efficiently with a relatively uncomplicated protocol, they may make it possible to run studies on early human development that were previously very challenging to facilitate, they added. 

“As such, this model will provide new routes for drug testing, developmental toxicology, tractable disease modeling and the generation of cells for regenerative therapies in a human context,” the scientists wrote.

https://www.fiercebiotech.com/research/scalable-human-embryo-model-displays-earliest-stages-blood-cell-production

Senators call for congressional investigation into FDA’s handling of device recalls

 Following the publication of a report suggesting that the FDA has a history of taking a lax approach to enforcing regulations around medical device recalls, a pair of senators have requested an investigation into the agency’s actions.

Dick Durbin of Illinois and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, both Democratic senators, sent a letter this week to Gene Dodaro, who heads up the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), asking him to open a probe into the FDA so his office can update an existing report dating back to 2011 that called on the agency to “enhance its oversight of recalls.”

As they wrote in the letter (PDF), their request was spurred by a report from ProPublic and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last week. It argued not only that the FDA had overlooked a decade’s worth of warnings before Philips began its wide-ranging respiratory device recall in 2021 and failed to penalize Philips for its own alleged missteps in handling the recall—but also that those actions are part of a larger pattern for the FDA. According to the report, the agency has often failed to act swiftly on early information about other device malfunctions and stopped short of taking permitted legal actions against devicemakers.

The GAO’s 2011 report found several failures in the FDA’s oversight of medical device recalls, and its findings helped to inform certain provisions in the 2012 FDA Safety and Innovation Act. But, Durbin and Blumenthal wrote in their letter, “given recent reporting and the dramatic increase in recalls since then, it is clear that GAO and Congress must examine FDA’s oversight of medical device recalls once again.”

The senators cited data showing that there have been manifold increases in the number of recalls conducted and medical device reports submitted to the FDA since the last investigation took place. Recalls have gone up about 125%, from just under 400 events in 2012 to nearly 900 last year, while adverse event reports have risen more than 500% from almost 500,000 a decade ago to nearly 3 million in 2022.

They went on to offer up a list of 10 questions that the requested review should consider, including probes into how the FDA reacts to devicemakers who don’t begin their recalls within legally required timeframes; the extent to which the agency is using adverse event reports to improve how it handles recalls; and what types of funding or legislative support could boost the regulator’s oversight of both device reports and recalls.

The letter and request for a GAO investigation come shortly after Durbin and Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a fellow Illinois Democrat, introduced legislation in both houses of Congress aimed at improving the entire medical device recall process.

Their Medical Device Recall Improvement Act, proposed in September, would require the FDA to set up “an electronic format for medical device recall notifications” to simplify communications between the agency, devicemakers and users of affected devices, rather than relying on physical letters and emails.

In addition, the new legislation would mandate that devicemakers include in their recall notices specific information about the effects of using recalled devices, and it would also require that healthcare providers share that information directly with any patients using the devices.

In a statement at the time, Durbin called the act “an obvious solution to ensure that medical device manufacturers, FDA, and health providers can share up-to-date information as soon as possible.”

https://www.fiercebiotech.com/medtech/senators-call-congressional-investigation-fdas-handling-device-recalls

Spinal cord stimulation ups sensory link to prosthetic feet, cuts phantom limb pain in Pitt study

 After racking up more than 30 years’ worth of experience in treating chronic pain, spinal cord stimulators have recently begun to expand their remit. Even as the devices continue to tack on new indications across various forms of pain, researchers are now studying the use of the technology in restoring mobility and limb function after a stroke, paralysis or other injuries.

In the latest such example of that work, a study published Thursday in Nature Biomedical Engineering tasked spinal cord stimulation tech with improving the connections between the brain and a prosthetic foot in lower-limb amputees.

The proof-of-concept study—which included just three participants and was led by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine—proved successful, according to the study’s authors. The result paves the way for further clinical trials examining a potential new use for spinal cord stimulators.

In the study, the researchers rigged a standard spinal cord stimulation system to deliver its sensory signals—via electrodes implanted over the spinal cord in the lower back—as the participants stood or walked on their prosthetic legs. The level of stimulation was programmed to automatically change with the amount of pressure being exerted on the leg, based on transmissions from wireless sensors embedded into a shoe insole underneath the prosthetic foot.

The system proved to be an accurate mimic of the sensations associated with walking and standing, supported by marked improvements in the participants’ balance and stability. According to the study, one participant experienced a 19-point improvement on the 100-point Sensory Organization Test, which assesses balance control. In addition, one participant saw their score on the 30-point, stability-focused Functional Gait Assessment improve by five points.

On top of the improved sensory connections between the participants and their prosthetic devices, the system also helped to reduce the phantom limb pain associated with their amputated limbs. Altogether, the trio of patients reported an average reduction of 70% in their phantom limb pain—a particularly notable achievement, according to the researchers, since that form of pain is very common among lower-limb amputees and often doesn’t respond to standard pain medications.

In a Pitt press release, the researchers highlighted the fact that their system was created using commercially available technologies already widely used by doctors.

“We are leveraging those technologies to produce meaningful improvement in function and reduction of pain,” said Lee Fisher, Ph.D., senior author of the study and an associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Pitt. “That’s exciting, and we’ve been building it for a while.”

They also noted that the system proved successful across individuals who’d undergone amputation for various reasons, as two of the participants’ amputations stemmed from diabetic peripheral neuropathy, while the third’s was a traumatic case.

“We are able to produce sensations as long as the spinal cord is intact,” Fisher said in the release, adding that that broad accessibility means the system could potentially be available sooner than later: “Our approach has the potential to become an important intervention for lower-limb amputation and, with proper support from industry partners, translated into the clinic in the next five years."

https://www.fiercebiotech.com/medtech/spinal-cord-stimulation-improves-sensory-link-prosthetic-feet-cuts-phantom-limb-pain-pitt