Новости за 10.12.2021

Co-written by a molecular biology postdoc and a British viscount, the new pop science book Viral is positioned as the reasonable person’s guide to the Covid-19 “lab leak” theory. The authors bristle at the suggestion that they are trafficking in conspiracy theories. After all, they are not indulging in wild conjectures about China releasing a bioweapon in Wuhan, or the Covid-19 virus being made from HIV. They insist they are merely asking serious questions about a possible laboratory accident. Читать дальше...

The Supreme Court left most of Texas’s anti-abortion bounty law intact on Friday, ruling that abortion providers could not sue most state officials in federal court to challenge Texas Senate Bill 8. At the same time, the court ruled that the clinics had standing to sue a group of state medical regulators over the law’s enforcement, handing them a partial victory in the high-profile battle over abortion rights in Texas.

All of the competing institutions and distributed powers within our government make it impossible to say who America’s most popular politician might be at any given time. But if you had to hazard a guess right now, a pretty good case could be made for Charlie Baker.

The Senate passed Wednesday, 52-48, a measure nullifying the Biden administration’s mandate requiring workers at companies that employ more than 100 people either to get vaccinated against Covid or submit to weekly Covid testing at their own expense. The measure is unlikely to pass the House, where Democrats have a bigger majority, so it won’t become law. And even if it did, President Joe Biden would veto it.

DuckDuckGo is increasingly a rarity, when it should be the most standard kind of company in the country. It is a successful, midsize tech company that has built itself by promising to be a search engine that would give users a different interface—one with a lot of privacy protections—from the two leading search engines. But it’s a total outlier because FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) has built its power on hoarding data and then acquiring or crushing potential rivals.

The Manhattan criminal courthouse where arraignments take place is a massive structure, a 17-story Art Deco affair with high ceilings and dark wood paneling. These days, the formality of the rooms is somewhat interrupted by the plexiglass panels that encase every podium and desk. On a recent Wednesday night, there were an unusual number of spectators—eight or nine people filling the benches. Abigail Callaghan, a 29-year-old volunteer with Court Watch NYC, said that usually on a weeknight there might only be one or two people... Читать дальше...