Day: May 24, 2024

Friday on the NewsHour, a multi-billion dollar settlement could compensate former NCAA players and allow current college athletes to be paid. Louisiana restricts access to abortion pills after becoming the first state to classify them as a controlled substance. Plus, Myanmar’s military regime suffers a series of defeats as brutal fighting compels thousands to flee to neighboring Thailand.

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The General Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces issued its first report detailing the circumstances and causes surrounding the recent helicopter crash resulting in the tragic loss of President Ebrahim Raisi and his accompanying delegation. 

Released on late Thursday, the report offers further insights into the incident that occurred on Sunday, claiming the lives of Raisi and his entourage, including Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, as their helicopter crashed in northwestern Iran.

On Monday, an investigative team was dispatched to the crash site to probe the incident, as stated in the report. The team, assigned with examining the wreckage, succeeded in obtaining “a significant portion” of the necessary information crucial for the investigation.

According to the report, the helicopter, following its predetermined route, crashed without deviation.

It further revealed that the aircraft burst into flames upon collision with the mountainous terrain. Remarkably, the remaining wreckage displayed no evidence of bullet holes or similar impacts.

“The complexity of the region, fog and low temperature,” slowed the search and rescue operation, forcing it to extend through the night, the investigators said. Iranian unmanned aerial vehicles pinpointed the crash site at 05:00 a.m. local time on Monday, with search teams promptly arriving thereafter.

Notably, communications exchanged between the aircraft and ground control prior to the incident did not contain any “suspicious” content, the report highlighted, promising to disclose any subsequent findings in due course.

Tehran has declared June 28 as the date for the upcoming presidential election. In the interim, Vice President Mohammad Mokhber has assumed the role of acting president.

Protest movements that reject political parties have an unintended consequence, according to new research from the University of Notre Dame: They empower savvy politicians who channel them to shake up the status quo.

The findings provide a framework for understanding recent global political realignments and offer lessons for activists who want to make a meaningful impact. They are particularly relevant in an era when mass protests have become an increasingly common tool to voice dissent with powerful institutions and draw attention to overlooked issues ranging from climate and conflict to inequality and human rights.

Ann Mische, associate professor of sociology and peace studies at the Keough School of Global Affairs at Notre Dame, and Tomás Gold, a Notre Dame doctoral candidate and doctoral fellow at the Keough School’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies, co-authored the study, published in the American Journal of Sociology. The authors received funding from the Kellogg Institute and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, as well as Notre Dame’s Graduate School.

“Despite protesters’ strong rejection of parties, political parties have not ignored the protesters,” Mische said. “In fact, many partisan actors have found ways to use this hostility to their advantage, disrupting ‘politics as usual’ and contributing to political reconfigurations that surprised both actors and spectators.”

Mische and Gold analyzed data from the Varieties of Democracy Project, which provides several authoritative ways to measure democracy. The international project, widely cited by scholars, is affiliated with the Keough School’s Kellogg Institute.

Using the data, Mische and Gold analyzed 12 case studies across Europe, Asia, and North and South America between 2008 and 2016, amid the fallout of the global financial crisis and the ongoing rejection of parties that were seen as unable or unwilling to confront it.

They found that in response to massive anti-partisan protests, these countries generally experienced one of four outcomes: internal factional challenges within highly established parties (e.g., Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom); the emergence of new or renovated parties (Podemos, or “We Can,” an anti-austerity Spanish party); the formation of new anti-incumbent party coalitions (the Broad Front UNEN and Cambiemos coalitions in Argentina); and the rise of extreme populist leaders (such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil).

Mische and Gold said these varied outcomes could be explained by looking at the project’s data measuring parties’ institutional strength, the degree to which parties were cohesive or fragmented, and the overall numbers of viable political parties competing for power.

They used a comparative approach that bridged insights from sociology and political science, drawing on datasets to determine how the combination of these three variables generated different opportunities for political actors to navigate the challenges to the status quo. They complemented this analysis with a process-oriented account of how party-movement interactions contributed to these diverging pathways.

“We focused on how political elites can take advantage of the fact that they are rejected by protesters,” Gold said. “That paradox lies at the heart of this paper.”

Ultimately, Mische and Gold said, the study could serve as a cautionary tale to protesters who reject political parties rather than trying to negotiate with them. This rejection can paradoxically undermine activist goals by amplifying distrust in institutions and paving the way for populist demagogues.

“Sometimes you need social movements to challenge entrenched systems and respond to the needs and aspirations of the people,” Mische said, adding that further research could help explore the dynamics of insider-outsider coalitions for enacting reforms.

“But if you reject working with the state, then you cannot influence the development of policies that are important for the things that you care about. You may, instead, empower autocrats who don’t share your values but are adept at weaponizing institutional distrust. Understanding this dynamic is important to working for change and to strengthening global democracy at a time when institutions are increasingly under attack.”

The stress of heart failure is remembered by the body and appears to lead to recurrent failure, along with other related health issues, according to new research. Researchers have found that heart failure leaves a “stress memory” in the form of changes to the DNA modification of hematopoietic stem cells, which are involved in the production of blood and immune cells called macrophages.

These immune cells play an important role in protecting heart health. However, a key signaling pathway (a chain of molecules which relays signals inside a cell), called transforming growth factor beta (TGF-β), in the hematopoietic stem cells was suppressed during heart failure, negatively affecting macrophage production. Improving TGF-β levels could be a new avenue for treating recurrent heart failure, while detecting accumulating stress memory could provide an early warning system before it occurs.

Healthier lives and improved well-being are among the United Nations’ global Sustainable Development Goals. Positively, a recent study shows that life expectancy worldwide is projected to increase by about 4.5 years by 2050. Much of this is thanks to public health efforts to prevent disease and improved survival from illnesses, such as cardiovascular disorders. However, heart disease is still the leading cause of death worldwide, with 26 million people estimated to be affected by heart failure. 

Once heart failure has occurred, it has a tendency to reoccur along with other health issues, such as kidney and muscle problems. Researchers in Japan wanted to understand what causes this recurrence and the deterioration of other organs, and whether it can be prevented.

“Based on our earlier research, we hypothesized that recurrence may be caused by stress experienced during heart failure accumulating in the body, particularly in hematopoietic stem cells,” explained Project Professor Katsuhito Fujiu from the Graduate School of Medicine at the University of Tokyo. Hematopoietic stem cells are found in bone marrow and are the source of blood cells and a type of immune cell called macrophages, which help to protect heart health.

By studying mice with heart failure, the researchers found evidence of stress imprinting on the epigenome, that is, chemical changes occurred to the mice’s DNA. An important signaling pathway, called the transforming growth factor beta, which is involved in regulating many cellular processes, was suppressed in the hematopoietic stem cells of mice with heart failure, leading to the production of dysfunctional immune cells. 

This change persisted over an extended period of time, so when the team transplanted bone marrow from mice with heart failure into healthy mice, they found that the stem cells continued to produce dysfunctional immune cells. The latter mice later developed heart failure and became prone to organ damage.

“We termed this phenomenon stress memory because the stress from heart failure is remembered for an extended period and continues to affect the entire body. Although various other types of stress might also imprint this stress memory, we believe that the stress induced by heart failure is particularly significant,” said Fujiu.

The good news is that by identifying and understanding these changes to the TGF-β signaling pathway, new avenues are now open for potential future treatments. “Completely new therapies could be considered to prevent the accumulation of this stress memory during hospitalization for heart failure,” said Fujiu. “In animals with heart failure, supplementing additional active TGF-β has been shown to be a potential treatment. Correcting the epigenome of hematopoietic stem cells could also be a way to deplete stress memory.” 

Now that it has been identified, the team hopes to develop a system that can detect and prevent the accumulation of stress memory in humans, with a long-term goal of being able to not only prevent the recurrence of heart failure, but also catch the condition before it can fully develop.