Make My Day!!!! Oo-rah!!!

 

Nothing like a great review to make my day!!!

Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2025 on Amazon

"Beyond the Black Stump pulls no punches. Set against the tense backdrop of Northern Ireland, this thriller blends espionage, terrorism, and military intrigue with razor-sharp precision. The plot moves fast, with Mahaney’s suspicions unraveling a dangerous web tied to the SAS and a looming threat to the Royal Family. Jack, Mick, and Walking Bear add depth and camaraderie to the action, grounding the political drama in human emotion. This is the kind of story that makes you think as much as it thrills. Fans of realistic international intrigue and morally complex decisions will find plenty to enjoy here."

Click the following link to get your copy.    http://tiny.cc/667o001

A Reader from Spain Enjoys Oo-roo!! ( Aboriginal term for "see ya." )

Click here to buy your copy.

Vittoria Ceretti

4,0 su 5 stelle Interessante mix di lavoro di spionaggio ed emozioni, ma a volte un po' difficile da seguire

Recensito in Italia il 23 giugno 2025

Formato: Formato Kindle

Mi è piaciuto il modo in cui questa storia mescola l'azione con momenti più profondi sull'amicizia e l'amore. Mick e Jack sembrano reali e le scene a Dublino e in Oregon danno alla storia un bel mix di tensione e calore. Tuttavia, in alcune parti è stato un po' difficile seguire il filo del discorso, soprattutto per i continui passaggi da un luogo all'altro. Si tratta comunque di un thriller riflessivo con cuore e svolte inaspettate.

 Translation:

Vittoria Ceretti

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting mix of spy work and emotion, but a little hard to follow at times

Reviewed in Italy on June 23, 2025

Format: Kindle Edition

I liked how this story mixed action with deeper moments about friendship and love. Mick and Jack feel real and the scenes in Dublin and Oregon give the story a nice mix of tension and warmth. However, there were parts that were a little hard to follow, especially with the constant switching between locations. It is still a thoughtful thriller with heart and unexpected twists.

How an intellegent leader shares his thoughts.Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney

PM Carney at NATO.

Good News on Medication for Blood Cancer patients.

 WASHINGTON, (June 20, 2025) – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a new tablet formulation of zanubrutinib (Brukinsa®) which is used to treat chronic lymphocytic leukemia and four types on non-Hodgkin lymphoma (follicular, mantle cell, marginal zone and Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia). The new formulation will be available starting in October 2025.

Presently I take four Brukinsa tablets daily.
I have had no problems with that, but this is great news for many patients.
LLS research and support has saved many, including me!!

“With this new formulation, patients have the option to take two easier-to-swallow tablets instead of the previous four capsules,” says Lore Gruenbaum, Ph.D., LLS Chief Scientific Officer. “This is a benefit for all patients, especially those who have trouble swallowing.  Oral targeted therapies like zanubrutinib have truly revolutionized blood cancer treatment, and now we’re seeing improvements that make them easier to take.”

Zanubrutinib is one of four Bruton’s tyrosine kinase (or BTK) inhibitors approved for use in the United States. These drugs work by targeting the activity of BTK, a protein that many blood cancers need to survive.  

BTK inhibitors are second generation drugs that were developed after earlier Tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKI). The first ever targeted therapy is a TKI called imatinib (Gleevec®), which was discovered and developed with LLS support, ushering in a new era in cancer treatment.  

“Before targeted treatments, patients had limited options. Their best hope was chemotherapy, which is generally harder on the body and often less effective than targeted treatments,” says Dr. Gruenbaum. “The move to targeted treatment significantly improved quality of life for patients—and more amazing is that now we’re finding ways to improve on those treatments.”

If you or a loved one need personalized disease, treatment or support information, you can contact one of our Information Specialists: https://www.lls.org/support-resources/information-specialists 

Holy Water Couldn’t Save My Husband. MAHA Wouldn’t Have, Either. ( Make America Healthy Again )

As I have two Cancers I was very interested in reading the following article.
This photo was taken in front of many who firefighters were climbing Seattle's Columbia Center in memory of.

 "On a sunny spring morning in 2006, while my husband, Mike, was showering, I secretly sprinkled his bath towel with holy water I had gotten from a friend who had used holy water from the same source on her husband. Her husband went on to survive his cancer, so I happily accepted the plastic container filled with water from a sacred site in Europe. It couldn’t hurt, right? Watching Mike dry himself off, I tapped into my childhood Catholicism and faith in a benevolent God as I pictured the magic water covering him with a protective layer. I never told Mike I did this. And I still feel guilty that I did. Neither of us went to church; we were agnostics. He would have been very annoyed. 

He didn’t believe in magic.

But we were six months into multiple brain surgeries and complications stemming from what was described to us as a benign tumor that had nonetheless taken over his midbrain. Thanks to hours on the internet, I had tried to Nancy Drew my way to the cause of his tumor, which devolved into my dabbling in conspiracy theories, and now I was out of options.

That was the last morning Mike would ever shower in our home. It was the last time he would see our 1-year-old boy wake up in his crib. When Mike received his craniopharyngioma diagnosis in October 2005, he was given a 95 percent survival rate at five years out, but he was dead nine months later. He spent many of those months hospitalized, undergoing radiation therapy, blind, with no short-term memory and unable to care for himself, enduring over a dozen brain surgeries and other procedures.

I watched the disappearance of light from his eyes as this once brilliantly funny man looked up at me from his hospital bed each morning, kind but emotionally flat, unsure if I was arriving for the first time that day or if I was just returning from the bathroom. I have a picture in a small album that shows Mike in the hospital holding our son, looking down at him quizzically but unaffected, as though the baby were a strange rock or a loaf of bread.

The doctors surely tired of my asking, “When will he be back to normal?” and “When will this be over?” There is nothing quite like feeling you have no agency to affect your circumstances. Up until then, my efficacy had always paid off. I got all A’s, was editor of my public high school newspaper and landed a free ride to an Ivy League school for my Ph.D. Lots of agency.

But I could not outorganize, outresearch, outcharm or outwork a tumor. So I turned to magic. It wasn’t just the holy water. I started keeping a little heart-shaped healing stone in my pocket for luck and brought him fresh berries from home each day. I read about the anti-inflammatory properties of berries online, so I fed them to Mike and pictured the berries shrinking the golf-ball-size tumor in the middle of his head. I started praying again for the first time since middle school. You find yourself bargaining in those moments. “I’ll never ask for anything again if you just get Mike better.” Well, he didn’t. So I guess I can keep asking God for things.

At some point, all of us will experience the maddening disconnect between our human desire to make things normal again and the dissatisfying limitations of the human body and of science and medicine. Not because science and medicine are wrong but because science and medicine are not magic.

Looking to magic and intuition for agency in a moment when science and medicine are frustrating is normal and human. But I worry that these normal human impulses are being exploited by powerful people who would rather a desperate wife carry a heart-shaped rock in her pocket than allow the government to support the very research that could actually treat or cure brain tumors like Mike’s.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Make America Healthy Again movement encourage us to lean into personal intuition and common-sense solutions over scientific evidence, to embrace the spirit of American individualism (your health is up to you!) over institution-based approaches. (The fact that such wishful thinking can also invite charlatanism of the “Apple Cider Vinegar” variety is another, separate problem.) There’s an appeal to individualized, intuitive approaches to health. Carrying that little rock, feeding Mike berries and even saying prayers made me feel better. They didn’t help him, but they helped me. They made me feel I was taking action. But they weren’t actions that were going to cure him. And they weren’t going to help uncover the origins of his tumor or why it grew so fast.

It’s science and research that do that — slowly, over many years. Not fast enough to save Mike, but that’s why he was eager to be part of a scientific study, to help people in the future. His giant tumor became a part of the research on craniopharyngioma treatment that was conducted by his neurosurgeons at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. The university received about $72 million from the National Institutes of Health last year. Now this administration is trying to cut thousands of similar grants.

I see what MAHA is offering. It’s not really about making America healthy. It’s about giving people the illusion of agency in a complicated and scary world.

In between the organic berries and getting duped into a holy water bath, Mike was receiving cutting-edge science-based medical care — radiation therapy and noninvasive surgical techniques that had been developed and perfected, thanks in part to N.I.H. funding to university hospitals. The Trump administration has proposed cutting the N.I.H.’s budget by 40 percent.

One of those surgeries finally ruptured the fluid-filled cyst, relieving the pressure in Mike’s brain and bringing him back to us almost entirely — vision, memory, humor, emotions — for 24 hours. “You poor thing,” he said, stroking my cheek, “You must have been so worried.” He ate a Pat’s cheesesteak and left voice mail messages for those friends who couldn’t get to the hospital. It was a damn miracle. But of course, there are no miracles, and the postsurgical swelling triggered a sympathetic storm and multisystem organ failure. He went into a coma and died 10 days later. But Mike didn’t die because of medical malpractice. He didn’t die from surgery or science. He died from a rare, aggressive brain tumor. Because, despite the miracles of modern medicine and advances in science, the human body remains a mystery.

Because science is not magic. But magic isn’t magic, either."

Dannagal G. Young is a professor of communication and political science at the University of Delaware and a director of its Center for Political Communication. She is the author, most recently, of “Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation.”

Mysterious Ancient Humans Now Have a Face

 Fifteen years after the discovery of a new type of human, the Denisovan, scientists discovered its DNA in a fossilized skull. The key? Tooth plaque.

When Qiaomei Fu discovered a new kind of human 15 years ago, she had no idea what it looked like. There was only a fragment of a pinkie bone to go on.

The fossil chip, found in a Siberian cave called Denisova, looked as if it might have come from a 66,000-year-old relative of today’s humans, or maybe a Neanderthal. But Dr. Fu, then a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, and her colleagues found DNA in the fossil that told a different story. The bone had belonged to a girl who was part of a third human lineage never seen before. They named her people the Denisovans.

In the years since, Dr. Fu has helped to discover more Denisovan DNA: in teeth and bone fragments from the Denisova cave, in the sediment of a cave floor in Tibet and even in people living today in Asia and the Pacific — evidence of interbreeding tens of thousands of years ago.

But without clues from a skeleton or a skull, the physical appearance of these humans remained a mystery, said Dr. Fu, now a geneticist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. “After 15 years, people want to know, who are the Denisovans?”

Now she can put a face to the name.

Dr. Fu and her colleagues announced Wednesday that a skull found in China contains both Denisovan DNA and Denisovan protein. “This moment is special to me,” Dr. Fu said.

Image

An illustrated reconstruction of the Denisovan’s face.

Credit...

Chuang Zhao

It’s all the more special because the skull was nearly lost to science. In 1933, a laborer in the city of Harbin, China, discovered it on a construction site and, suspecting it was valuable, hid it in an abandoned well. But he never returned to retrieve it and did not breathe a word of it until shortly before his death. He told his family about the skull, and they fished it out of the well in 2018 and donated it to Hebei GEO University.

There, Qiang Ji, a paleoanthropologist, and other scientists analyzed the chemistry of the fossil and concluded that it dated back at least 146,000 years — perhaps far longer.

After reconstructing the face of the Harbin skull, the scientists concluded that it belonged to an enormous male with flat cheeks, a broad mouth and no chin. An imposing brow hung over his deep-set eyes and bulbous nose. And within his massive skull was a massive brain, measuring about 7 percent larger than the average brain of a living human.

Dr. Ji and his colleagues concluded that the Harbin skull, with all its distinctive traits, belonged to a species of its own. In 2021, they named the species Homo longi, for Long Jiang, the region where the skull was found.

But some scientists, including Dr. Fu, wondered if it was a Denisovan. To find out, she got permission to study the Harbin skull. She had spent years inspecting skulls and other fossils in Chinese museums for Denisovan DNA but had come up empty every time.

To test the Harbin skull, Dr. Fu and her colleagues removed tiny samples from a tooth and from the bone that houses the inner ear — typically the best places in a skull to look for genetic material.

They found no ancient DNA. But the bone contained 95 proteins, a tremendous number for an ancient fossil and enough to determine what it was: a Denisovan.

As exciting as that discovery was, Dr. Fu said, their failure to find DNA “was still painful.” DNA is more complex than proteins, with the potential to reveal more secrets about the fossils it comes from.

So Dr. Fu decided to look once more for DNA, this time in the plaque on the Harbin skull’s teeth. As plaque builds up, it traps bacteria and, sometimes, also a few cells from the mouth. She knew it was a long shot but figured it was worth a try.

Image

Scientists at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing studied tiny samples from a tooth in the Harbin skull, and from the bone that encases the inner ear.Credit...Qiaomei Fu

When Dr. Fu and her colleagues inspected a sample of the dental plaque, they discovered DNA. As expected, most of it came from bacteria. But a tiny fraction came from the mouth’s cells. And when they analyzed that DNA, they discovered that it was Denisovan.

Janet Kelso, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute who was not involved in the study, said the discovery was remarkable, because fossilized plaque harbors minuscule amounts of DNA at best.

“It is fascinating that the hardened plaque layer preserved enough of the DNA of the Harbin individual for them to successfully determine that the individual was Denisovan,” she said.

ohn Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the studies delivered a definitive answer to the question of the Harbin skull’s identity. “Mystery solved,” he said.

The DNA in the Harbin plaque also allowed Dr. Fu and her colleagues to place the Harbin skull on a Denisovan family tree. Modern humans share a common ancestor with both Neanderthals and Denisovans that lived in Africa about 600,000 years ago. The forerunners of Neanderthals and Denisovans migrated out of Africa and then split into the two lineages about 400,000 years ago.

Neanderthals spread from the Middle East to Western Europe, while Denisovans spread from Siberia eastward. Over thousands of generations, the Denisovans split into new branches.

Dr. Fu and her colleagues found that the Harbin skull belonged to the same branch as the oldest Denisovans found in the Denisova cave, whose fossils dated back about 200,000 years. A separate branch gave rise to the 66,000-year-old Denisovan girl whose pinkie bone was found there.

Given all the genetic diversity documented in Denisovan DNA, Dr. Fu can’t say whether the Harbin skull reveals a typical Denisovan face. “For now, it’s just one case,” she said.

She hopes to inspect more fossils found in China and other parts of Asia to search for Denisovan DNA and proteins. “If in the future we can get additional skulls, we’ll be able to understand what the common Denisovans looked like,” she said.

For now, the discovery leaves scientists divided about what to call the lineage that includes the Harbin skull and the girl from Denisova. “Homo longi is the appropriate species name for this group,” said Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the study.

But Dr. Hawks still calls them Denisovans. The fact that they could interbreed with our own ancestors, he argues, makes them a lineage in our own species, along with Neanderthals.

“I’m pretty confident saying these are all Homo sapiens,” he said.