 around how companies secure the accounts of privileged users, like system administrators. CISA senior technical adviser Bob Lord said the agency is encouraging tech vendors to be more transparent about their security practices. “We want to shift the burden to the organizations that are best positioned to really drive improvements,” Lord said. “For those of you who are vendors? What would it look like for my organization to take real ownership of the security outcomes of all of my valued customers?”
The Pentagon’s research arm is looking to cross new frontiers in its pursuit of artificial intelligence. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is launching an Artificial Intelligence Reinforcements program. DARPA said the “AIR” project aims to advance how autonomous systems can adapt to changing conditions in real-world environments. The agency will host a classified proposer’s day on November 14 to discuss the effort in greater detail.
The Postal Service said it’s ready to handle another busy election season. USPS already delivered more than 51 million ballots to-and-from voters during this year’s primary election season. On average, it took USPS less than two days to deliver ballots. USPS faces an upcoming overhaul of its nationwide delivery network. But USPS Chief Customer and Marketing Officer Steve Monteith said this remains in the planning stages and won’t hamper mail delivery this election season. “Ultimately, we believe it will help us improve reliability for all of our customers, including election officials and voters,” Monteith said. (Federal News Network)
Two years after Congress passed a law to expand telehealth services at the Veterans Affairs Department, Senate VA Committee leaders said the agency is taking too long to act. The Hannon Act, signed in 2020, requires the VA to create or expand partnerships to increase the number of locations where VA telehealth is available at non-VA facilities. But Committee Chairman Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Ranking Member Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) said they are concerned the VA will not award its first telehealth grants, under this legislation, until the fall of fiscal 2025. The senators are asking VA for an update on the status of the telehealth grant program and what its plans might be to fast-track its implementation.
The Trump organization charged the Secret Service more than $1.4 million to protect the former president at properties he and his family own during his administration. That’s according to documents obtained by the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) said that in 2017 the Trump organization charged Secret Service agents as much as $1,185 dollars a night, nearly five times the government rate at the time. Maloney is asking the Secret Service to provide the committee with a complete list of all spending at Trump-owned properties.
USPS ready to implement ‘extraordinary measures’ delivering ballots for 2022 midterm elections
Air Force Air Force All News cybersecurity Defense Defense News DoD Inspector General Federal Drive Federal Newscast Tom TeminKhelse de Prado is a healthy young woman with no history of smoking, no detectable genetic mutations, and no family history of blood clots. Yet she is a six-time thrombosis survivor.
Khelse was diagnosed with her first blood clot in enero 2018, just two weeks after starting a hormonal oral contraceptive — her only known risk factor.
The next day she went to work—luckily, at a college of medicine and children’s hospital—where she asked one of the doctors if her symptoms were normal. The doctor sent her straight to the adult emergency center.
After seven hours in triage, she was diagnosed with the rare condition ‘portal vein thrombosis’ (PVT). Portal veins bring blood to the liver from the intestines; Khelse’s left portal vein and all of its branches were completely blocked, while the right portal vein and its branches were mostly blocked.
After spending about a week in the hospital, she was discharged, given a therapeutic dose of anticoagulants, and went back to work. She regularly checked in with her team of doctors, including a hematologist/oncologist, a hepatologist, a gastroenterologist, and her primary care physician. After many months with no sign of another clot, her doctors gave her permission to discontinue the medication.
At the emergency center, the doctors diagnosed her with a pulmonary embolism (PE). Khelse spent two weeks at Texas Medical Center recovering from the PE—only to be diagnosed with two more deep vein thromboses (DVT), one in each leg, plus a superficial clot in one leg.
Khelse was shocked—she had had no symptoms of DVT or superficial clots, had gone off oral contraceptives and taken other steps to reduce her risk of clotting again. Her doctors had told her the chance of recurrence was only 10 percent.
After being diagnosed with the PVT, PE, DVT and superficial clots, her doctors advised her to stay on anticoagulants for the remainder of her life and advised her on the risks associated with pregnancy, long-haul travel and sitting for long periods.
Yet, not even six months later, on 31 de mayo, 2019, another DVT had formed in Khelse’s left arm, despite her being on anticoagulant medication. Khelse was heartbroken—she had never missed a dose of her medication and had done everything possible to avoid another clot.
Today, Khelse knows that the chances of the clot traveling from her arm to a vital organ are low, but she continues to keep active and take anticoagulants to avoid any bad consequences.
Khelse eventually found World Thrombosis Day and wanted to share her story to emphasize that even people who are young, active and otherwise healthy can be diagnosed with thrombosis.A tomato kinesin-like protein is associated with Tobacco mosaic virus infection

Abstract Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) causes severe damage and economic losses of tomato in crop yield production and quality worldwide. Tomato plants infected with TMV usually show a mosaic pattern and chlorosis symptoms that result from affected chloroplasts. To elucidate tomato–TMV interactions, the transcriptional profiles of tomato tissues at different time intervals were analysed using a differential display-polymerase chain reaction technique. Compared to mock-inoculated plants, and based on gene expression changes in tomato plants, the representative down- and up-regulated genes were selected for further analysis. The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI-BLAST) analysis revealed that the three up-regulated gene transcripts at 15 days post-inoculation were coding for chloroplast (MG565980 and MG565979) and kinesin-like proteins (MG565981). Additionally, the down-regulated gene was a chloroplast-related gene (MG565978). Interestingly, the two chloroplast genes, MG565978 and MG565980, shared more than 96% sequence identity, and their transmembrane profiles were nearly identical. On the other hand, many protein kinase C phosphorylation, casein kinase II phosphorylation and N-myristoylation sites were detected within the MG565981 gene. Moreover, the high similarity between the kinesin gene and many Arabidopsis defensin genes indicated that it might play an important role in the plant defence system against TMV infection. It should be stressed that studies of the pathways in which chloroplast and kinesin-like protein genes are involved may elucidate the mechanisms of tomato tolerance to viral infection and can lead us to a more comprehensive understanding of tomato–TMV interactions.


Introduction
Plant diseases, especially plant viruses, cause a variety of problems and are responsible for huge losses of crop production and quality throughout the world [1]. Thus, viral infections must be controlled in order to keep up the standard and abundance of food, fibre and feed produced by farmers around the globe [2]. Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) is the second most important cultivated and consumed vegetable crop after potato, worldwide [3,4]. Due to their suitability for genome manipulation, tomato plants are used as a model plant for scientific research in order to study the metabolic and fundamental biological processes and analyse plant-pathogen interactions [5].
Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV, genus Tobamovirus) is one of the most economically relevant viral threats to many economically important plants such as tobacco, tomato, pepper and potato, worldwide [6]. Many plant virologists consider it the most vital and serious plant virus [7]. Tomato plants are systemically infected, resulting in mosaic and chlorosis symptoms, often associated with plant deformations or altered structure and morphology. Moreover, many characteristics and gene expression level changes similar to stress and defence responses have been reported after viral infection [8].
Chloroplasts are plastids, one of the foremost dynamic organelles of plant cells. Chloroplasts perform photosynthesis, synthesise major phytohormones and are crucial for inter-organelle signalling [9]. Chloroplasts, as the main target for viruses, play a crucial role in the defence response and undergo enormous structural and functional damage during viral infection [9,10]. There is abundant and increasing evidence that chloroplast-associated genes are the most affected genes during viral infection [11].
The differential display-polymerase chain reaction (DD-PCR) technique provides a robust methodology for the fast identification of differentially expressed genes through scanning the differentially expressed mRNA in pathogen-infected plants [19][20][21][22]. Many studies on virus-host interactions use DD-PCR to isolate and characterise genes related to virus resistance [1,23,24]. Consequently, through using the DD-PCR technique, this study determined whether there were differentially expressed up-and/or down-regulated genes during tomato-TMV interactions, which are essential to better understand the tomato immune defence system against TMV infection