Новости за 30.11.2021

Omicron, the new Covid-19 variant, has put a pandemic-weary public into survival mode. Heading into our third year of this, with delta still wreaking havoc in parts of the Midwest and Northeast, the American public had already had enough. And yet the available evidence suggests that omicron is likely more transmissible than even delta was. Within two weeks of its emergence, omicron overtook all other variants to become the dominant strain in South Africa—and is spreading quickly around the world. Читать дальше...

Fox News host Pete Hegseth presents himself to viewers as the G.I. Joe of conservative commentary. Armed with a silver tongue and two Bronze Stars, the Iraq War veteran routinely weaponizes the credibility conferred through military service to cast Democrats as enemies of the troops.

Just as Bob Seger found himself on the road again, Congress must once more raise the country’s borrowing cap before it defaults on its debts and makes the economy go kaboom. If this sounds familiar to you, this is because the nation edged toward the brink of default just a few short weeks ago. In October, Congress passed a stopgap measure to raise the cap, known as the debt ceiling, by $480 billion to give the country borrowing power through early December. But we are once again approaching the... Читать дальше...

If you avidly track the byzantine ways in which Medicare reimburses health care providers for drug costs, then Tuesday’s oral arguments in American Hospital Association v. Becerra are probably your version of a NFL wild-card playoff game. Sure, it’s not the Super Bowl. That might be Congress’s ongoing discussions about vastly expanding Medicare’s drug-price negotiation powers. But Medicare nerds might still relish what will likely be a hyper-technical debate before the Supreme Court over the program’s reimbursement practices. Читать дальше...

On Monday, Joe Biden held a press conference to calm Americans concerned about the newly discovered omicron variant of Covid-19, which the World Health Organization recently described as a “variant of concern.” First sequenced in a lab in South Africa, omicron is the second strain, after the now-familiar delta, to cause alarm given its unique genetic profile. It’s the kind of mutation that’s incubated in places with particularly low vaccination rates. One way to address the omnipresent threat... Читать дальше...