HMM: Dozens of New Cancer Drugs Do Little to Improve Survival, Frustrating Patients.

Pushed by patient advocates who want earlier access to medications, the­ Food and Drug Administration has approved a flurry of oncology drugs in recent years, giving some people with cancer a renewed sense of hope and an array of expensive new options. A few of these drugs have been clear home runs, allowing patients with limited life expectancies to live for years.

Many more drugs, however, have offered patients only marginal benefits, with no evidence that they improve survival or quality of life, said Dr. Vinay Prasad, assistant professor of medicine at the Oregon Health and Sciences University, who has written extensively about the FDA’s approval process for cancer drugs.

Overall cancer survival has barely changed over the past decade. The 72 cancer therapies approved from 2002 to 2014 gave patients only 2.1 more months of life than older drugs, according to a study in JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery.

And those are the successes.

Bleeding-edge medicine involves going down a lot of dead ends before finding the next miracle cure. But allowing patients more freedom to enter “risky” new programs might speed that process along.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Court Ruling Was ‘Intellectually Dishonest Piece of Work’

Forget it, Judge — it’s the Ninth.

PRIVACY: Vizios Aren’t the Only TVs That Are Tracking You.

STUDY: EU must shut all coal plants by 2030 to meet Paris climate pledges.

Coal’s use is falling by about 1% a year in Europe but still generates a quarter of the continent’s power – and a fifth of its greenhouse gas emissions.

If Europe’s 300 coal plants run to the end of their natural lifespans, the EU nations will exceed their carbon budget for coal by 85%, according to a report by the respected thinktank Climate Analytics. It says the EU would need to stop using coal for electricity generation by 2030.

“Not only would existing coal plants exceed the EU’s emissions budget, but the 11 planned and announced plants would raise EU emissions to almost twice the levels required to keep warming to the Paris agreement’s long term temperature goal,” said Dr Michiel Schaeffer, Climate Analytics science director.

Europe had best get busy building nuclear plants if they don’t want a repeat of “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.”

WHY BROADCAST TELEVISION IS DYING, EXHIBIT #1,000,006: ‘American Idol’ Revival Heading to NBC.

EXPEDIA CEO WHO OPPOSED TRUMP TRAVEL MORATORIUM: “Hopefully we will all be alive to see the end of next year.”

“Just a big thank you to our global employee base for an improved 2016 and certainly an improved end to the year. And hopefully we will all be alive to see the end of next year,” Khosrowshahi said on the call Thursday.

After a pause, he added: “Thank you.” Then the call ended.

While he did not explicitly mention President Trump, the unusual remarks come from a CEO who has been among the most outspoken in the tech industry against Trump.

Expedia was one of the first tech companies to file a legal challenge against Trump’s travel ban, citing the potential harm it could do its employees and customers.

Khosrowshahi is an immigrant from Iran, one of the seven Muslim-majority countries included in the travel ban. In an earlier statement, the CEO described the legal measure as a way of “standing up for our travelers and our immigrant roots.”

Expedia declined to clarify Khosrowshahi’s remarks in response to a request for comment.

That seems… overwrought.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Rochester School District to Hold ‘Black Lives Matter’ Day.

TURNAROUND? Sears maps out survival strategy, sending stock soaring.

The plan unveiled Friday thrilled investors, who drove Sears shares up 45.1% in pre-market trading to $8.04.

The latest restructuring plan does not include new closures of Sears or Kmart stores after the company recently announced plans to shutter 150 of its more than 1,300 locations.

The company estimated that its new measures would lower its debt and pension obligations by $1.5 billion and reduce annual costs by $1 billion.

The debt reduction includes a contribution from the recent sale of the company’s Craftsman brand, which was worth about $900 million, while the cost reduction includes savings from the store closures.

To be sure, the company’s sales performance remains dismal. Sales at stores open at least a year fell 10.3% in the fourth quarter, including an 8% reduction at Kmart and 12.5% at Sears.

Sooner rather than later, the company is going to run out of costs to save and assets to sell, and is going to have to get paying customers back into its stores.

L’EFFET TRUMP? The French election is now Marine Le Pen vs a collapsing French establishment.

This is because France fluctuates between short spasms of change and longer periods of immobility. It has developed institutional barriers and tacit compromises to hold things steady. Its current Fifth Republic is a ‘republican monarchy’, with parliament downgraded and a powerful president supposed to unite the nation — a task sadly beyond most politicians. Another, less noticed, institution goes back even further than Enjolras’s fictional death on the barricades: the two-round ballot, designed in the 1820s to prevent hotheads like him from winning elections. It gives voters and politicians a second chance, not so much to reconsider their own choices as to react against the choices of others. In the first round you vote for the person you want; in the second you vote against the person you fear.

This evolved historically into what was called ‘republican discipline’: in the first round there could be a range of competing candidates of all shades, but in the second round all loyal republicans, from the mildest liberal to the reddest communist, would vote for the candidate best placed to beat the enemy of the republic — usually a royalist or authoritarian nationalist. The apparition of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National in the 1970s, combining traditionalist conservatives, embittered nationalists and nostalgic fascists, met the same response.

Le Pen could just become the first upstart to breach the institutional barricades around the French presidency. However, former Prime Minister (under Nicolas Sarkozy) François Fillon, running as an almost-Thatcherite reformer, is generally seen as the frontrunner.

But these days, who knows?

DEMOCRAT SENATOR JOE MANCHIN: Trump open to reviewing ‘Gang of Eight’ immigration bill.

ADMINISTRATION: White House denies report Trump is ‘open’ to ‘Gang of Eight’ immigration bill.

What game does Manchin think he’s playing here?

This might be a good time to remind you of Steve’s Corollary to the George Costanza Rule of Lying: It’s also not a lie if you don’t expect anyone else will believe it.

MICHAEL MOORE: No Country ‘Sh*ts On Their Own’ Like United States.

This from the man who wants to treat Americans to Cuban health care.

WELL, GOOD: Android privacy assistant seeks to stop unwanted data collection.

“It’s very clear that a large percentage of people are not willing to give their data to any random app,” said CMU professor Norman Sadeh. “They want to be more selective with their data, so this assistant will help them do that.”

Their Privacy Assistant is designed to automatically modify your phone’s privacy settings for you, based on your views about certain types of data collection.

For instance, when the app first starts up, it’ll ask you three to five questions to gauge your privacy preferences. How do you feel about your social media accessing your camera? Or what about game apps pulling your location data?

From those answers, the app will recommend a particular set of privacy settings you should consider. Users can then approve the recommendations or alter them, accordingly.

The assistant may sound enticing, but it comes with a catch. The software works only with Android 5.x and 6.x phones that have been rooted — which most Android users haven’t done.

Rooting your phone also leaves it more susceptible to malware, viruses, and scammers, as well as voiding your warranty. In other words, Privacy Assistant comes with risks of its own.

NOW THIS IS FAKE NEWS: You can’t make this stuff up. Well, maybe you can.

Michael Isikoff had a story recently about a website calling itself the “Center for Global Strategic Monitoring,” which runs opinion pieces – often ostensibly from well-known former government officials. The kicker is that the people whose names are attached to the articles – never wrote them. According to Yahoo News, counterfeit Op-Eds have been published in the names of people like former CIA officials Bruce Riedel and Paul Pillar, and ex-FBI counterterrorism analyst Matthew Levitt. We found a few other prominent names on the CGS website that strike us as unlikely contributors to the faux website – like former National Security Advisor Tom Donilon and former Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns. So who is making up this stuff and why? Isikoff says some of the legit articles on the site are lifted from Russian propaganda sites — RT and Sputnik News – and some folks note that the bogus pieces look like they might have been translated from Russian.

Stick with the site you can trust: Instapundit.

THE END OF KEMAL’S TURKEY: With Erdogan’s nod, Turkey set for April vote on stronger presidency.

Erdogan’s supporters see the plans to replace Turkey’s parliamentary democracy with an all-powerful presidency as a guarantee of stability at a time of turmoil. Opponents fear a lurch towards authoritarianism in a country which has seen tens of thousands of people, from journalists to military, detained since a failed coup last July.

A brief statement on the presidency web site said the bill – which would enable the president to issue decrees, declare emergency rule, appoint ministers and top state officials and dissolve parliament – had been sent to the prime minister’s office to be published and submitted to a referendum.

“With the president’s approval, eyes are now on the YSK (High Election Board). The YSK will probably announce that April 16 is the appropriate date for a referendum,” Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus told reporters.

“One man, one vote, one time” is poised to come to Turkey.

Really though, all this constitutional change would accomplish is to codify the powers Erdogan has already seized since last summer’s “failed coup.”

REMINDER: It wasn’t a failed coup, it’s a successful purge.

THIS IS NOT IN THE FORM OF A QUESTION: What to Do About George Soros.

WELL, YES: Obamacare Exchanges Were in Big Trouble Before Trump.

As many readers will recall, 2016 brought hefty premium hikes to make up for years of losses on the exchanges. Going into this year’s open enrollment period, there seemed to be a significant risk that we’d see what economists call “adverse selection”: People who were getting good value out of their insurance (because they used a lot of services) would keep paying the premiums, even if they grumbled a bit, but people who didn’t use a lot of health care would decide that at those prices, they might as well go uninsured. When those people exited the market, the average cost to cover each person remaining in the pool would be higher … and insurers still wouldn’t make money, forcing them to raise premiums again next year. This process is known as the “adverse selection death spiral.”

December’s numbers seemed to indicate that people were still willing to buy insurance at the new, higher prices. January’s numbers suggest that maybe they aren’t. Most worryingly, young people, who don’t worry that much about the health insurance they rarely use, tend to sign up fairly late in the game, so a rise in December and a decline in January means that the pool could end up substantially older and sicker than last year’s.

That has been the trend from the start.

And:

You can argue that the problem was not the advertising, but the fact that the Trump administration was obviously against Obamacare. And I suppose that’s possible — except that Trump won in November, so how come people only reacted in late January? It’s not as if it was exactly a secret that Republicans wanted to repeal the thing. Nor do I find it plausible that potential customers were following the play-by-play of fiddling changes to health care policy during the last 10 days of the month — in part because the news was completely dominated by other things, but mostly because I’ve never seen evidence that these consumers were following this sort of deep-in-the-weeds wonkplay at any time in the history of the program.

Besides, there’s another mechanism that’s just as plausible: Young and healthy people tend to sign up late, and young and healthy people are the ones who are most likely to have balked at higher premiums.

The ObamaCare exchanges are a great deal for people too old or sick to be insurable anywhere else. For everyone else, not even the certainty of paying a penalty (“It’s a tax!”) and the risk of going without insurance makes them a good deal.

The failure was baked in at the start.

DISEASE: With 404 cases, Washington mumps outbreak continues to grow.

Approximately 25% of the total infections occurred among people within the 14 to 18 age group, 22% in the 10 to 13 age group, 14% in the 5 to 9 age group, 5% in the 19 to 24 age group and 3% in the infant to 4 age group. People over 25 made up the remaining reported infections. No deaths have been reported.

“It’s been a continuous upwards track of new cases. However, until we reach a point where no more vulnerable people are exposed, it may continue to grow,” said Dave Johnson, a spokesman for the Washington State Department of Health.
…
Each year, the number of mumps cases fluctuates within a range of a couple hundred to a couple thousand cases, according to Dr. Manisha Patel, a medical officer at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During 2016, a “high” year, 46 states and the District of Columbia reported 5,311 total cases but only a handful of states pushed the numbers above average. Arkansas, Iowa, Oklahoma, New York and Illinois each confirmed more than 300 cases.
…
Though he doesn’t have a crystal ball, Haselow said, “based on the way the epidemic curve is going down, if it continues on that trend, we may be lucky enough to be out of this in a couple of months.” A mumps outbreak is over, he explained, when a state has a period of a full 26 days without any cases, the longest potential incubation period.

“This is the second-largest outbreak of mumps in the US in the last 25 years, and it is by far the most diverse outbreak,” he said.

There is no proven causation between getting the mumps vaccine and autism, but there is a proven causation between not getting the mumps vaccine and getting the mumps.

CONTINUITY: Trump Tells Xi Jinping U.S. Will Honor ‘One China’ Policy.

In a statement, the White House said Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi “discussed numerous topics, and President Trump agreed, at the request of President Xi, to honor our One China policy.” It described the call as “extremely cordial” and said the leaders had invited each other to visit.

The concession was clearly designed to put an end to an extended chill in the relationship between China and the United States. Mr. Xi, stung by Mr. Trump’s unorthodox telephone call with the president of Taiwan in December and his subsequent assertion that the United States might no longer abide by the One China policy, had not spoken to Mr. Trump since Nov. 14, the week after he was elected.

“One China” is one of those impossible, but polite fictions which make it easier to keep the peace.

GIMME S’MORES: This guy tried to give Girl Scouts vodka for cookies.

A boozed-up bozo proved he wasn’t the smartest cookie when he allegedly offered to trade some vodka for Girl Scout cookies in Oklahoma.

Jerry Swanson, 45, was busted by police in Ardmore after trying to make the harebrained deal with Girl Scouts who were selling boxes at a mall last Saturday.

Police said Swanson was so drunk at the time, he had no clue what was going on.

Apparently.

FAKE NEWS: Huffington Post Slam of Ted Cruz Accidentally Proves Him Right.

Forget it, Ted — it’s HuffPo.

GOOD LORD: Single mother arrested, kids taken after she began homeschooling them—and one official is ticked off.

Harris told the station Child Protective Services called a week later wondering why her kids weren’t in school.

“I told them that my kids were homeschooled now and that I could furnish the documents if they need to see them,” Harris told WKBW.

Then she told the station that less than a month later CPS officials and police confronted her and said they had a court order to take her children.

Harris told WKBW she asked to see the court order, and when that didn’t happen, she refused to give up her kids — so she said she was arrested for obstruction and her children were placed in foster care. But in a video Harris posted to Facebook on Jan. 18, she said she was handed a court order, noting charges of “neglect.”

Buffalo Councilman Ulysees O. Wingo Sr. is calling on Family Court to return Harris’ children to her immediately, WKBW-TV reported in a separate story. He added that it’s “utterly unacceptable” that a mother was arrested for “educational neglect” because she decided to homeschool her children.

“Someone, somewhere messed up,” Wingo said at a Buffalo Common Council meeting Tuesday afternoon, the station said, “and that someone needs to face the music.”

Good and loud, so to speak.

Homeschooling parents need legal protection from this kind of harassment, and stiff punishment for the harassers — perhaps codify it as the equivalent of criminal mischief.

BETTER THREE YEARS LATE THAN NEVER, I SUPPOSE: ISIS Now Has ‘Too Many Problems for Them to Solve’

“We’re not gonna give the exact timing of the effort to seize the city, but we do believe that excellent progress is being made and we’ll continue to pressure the enemy on multiple fronts,” he said.

“…They’re completely surrounded in Mosul. So what we see is the enemy being overwhelmed anywhere that they are. It’s too many problems for them to solve at any given time.”

On America’s role, Dorrian said the coalition has trained “more than 70,000 forces of various types — army, police, tribal fighters, popular mobilization fighters — that we can vet and work with.”

“And we continue to do all of that as Mosul is liberated,” he said. “Because ultimately, when we talk about dealing ISIL a lasting defeat, it’s all these forces that go in behind our forces and the Iraqi security forces that are going to make sure that ISIL is not able to re-infiltrated; they’re not able to get any traction on any type of insurgency effort.”

Faster is better. The longer ISIS is seen “bravely resisting,” the longer and more effective their recruiting goes.

SALMONELLA, IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T… WAIT, WHAT? GM Salmonella destroys cancer.

Using mice and cultures of human cancer cells, a South Korean-led scientific team demonstrated that Salmonella typhimurium engineered to make a foreign protein caused immune cells called macrophages and neutralizes to mobilize against the cancer.

The bacterium came from an attenuated strain that has little infectious potential. Such strains have been tested as vaccines. The protein, called FlaB, is made by a gene in the estuarine bacterium Vibrio vulnificus, a close relative of the cholera bacterium, Vibrio cholerae.

Tumors shrank below detectable levels in 11 out of 20 mice injected with the modified Salmonella, said the study, published in Science Translational Medicine.

Faster, please.

TRIBUTE: Soccer Ball From Challenger Explosion Makes It to Space 31 Years Later.

According to the NASA’s website, Ellison Onizuka, one of the seven astronauts who died in the accident, stashed the item aboard the shuttle in 1986, before the craft’s external fuel tank ruptured.

The ball was from his daughter’s high school soccer team at Clear Lake High School in Houston.

“It was amazing, the condition it was in after the explosion,” Janelle Onizuka, the astronaut’s daughter, told ABC News affiliate KTRK on Tuesday.

“By virtue of the catastrophic days that followed, it is quite literally my last fond memory of my dad face to face,” she said.

NASA returned the soccer ball to the Onizuka family after it was discovered in the Atlantic Ocean among the shuttle’s wreckage.

It was on display at Clear Lake High School until astronaut Shane Kimbrough, whose daughter now attends the school, asked if it wanted anything sent up when he launched in October to the International Space Station, according to KTRK.

Last week Kimbrough posted a picture of the ball, finally in space.

It really isn’t possible to add anything to that.

LIGHT READING: 12th Dead Sea Scrolls Cave Found in Israel.