Новости за 08.12.2023

Republicans have been unable to prove that President Joe Biden is guilty of wrongdoing, and on Friday, even Fox News was forced to admit it.

Donald Trump is on to his next big, white, election-engineering whale.

A new study found that the number of people who travel out of their home state for an abortion has doubled since the nationwide right to the procedure was rolled back.

1. According to Billboard, this is the oldest English-language Christmas carol, dating back to the 1650s:

House Republicans have launched an investigation into antisemitism at MIT, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania, following a hearing with those college’s presidents that highlights the GOP’s hypocrisy when it comes to free speech.

Almost everyone has been piling on that pitiful troika of elite university presidents after their congressional testimony on Tuesday. A few other folks, people I know and respect like Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times and Jay Michaelson of The Daily Beast, have added some valuable nuance, arguing that in context, the position the presidents were defending actually had merit.

When Joe Biden was elected president, Medicare was barred by law from negotiating the prices it paid for the drugs it purchased with taxpayer dollars. For a generation, presidential candidates of both parties had pledged to kill the “noninterference clause” that was the price Big Pharma extracted in 2003 from President George W. Bush to extend Medicare coverage to drugs (“Medicare Part D”). Last year, Biden finally got rid of the noninterference clause as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, and in October... Читать дальше...

On the very first day of the United Nations’ climate change conference last week, negotiators notched an uncharacteristically early win: Nations agreed to establish a dedicated fund for loss and damage—i.e., to help countries recover from the effects of climate change.

You know what I really love reading while plutocrats turn the U.N. climate conference into meaningless blather? The onslaught of seasonal service pieces about how to make my Christmas tree more sustainable. They’re completely unhinged.

In 1927, Robert Gordon Wasson and his wife, Valentina, spent their honeymoon in the Catskills in what would turn out to be a life-altering experience. On a walk through the woods, they came across a patch of mushrooms. Wasson expressed no interest in them—his impulse was to turn away in disgust. “Like all good Anglo-Saxons,” he later wrote, “I knew nothing about the fungal world and felt that the less I knew about those putrid, treacherous excrescences the better.” But Valentina, who grew up in Russia... Читать дальше...

The House is expected to vote next week to formally open an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. At first glance, this is a redundant move, given that former Speaker Kevin McCarthy unilaterally announced the beginning of the inquiry earlier this fall—just as then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi had done when opening the inquiry into President Donald Trump in 2019, a decision much criticized by Republicans at the time.

There was never any doubt that America’s influential band of Christian Zionists would embrace the Gaza war with enthusiasm. Three days after Hamas committed its infamous October 7 atrocities, the most prominent Christian Zionist of all, John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, delivered an ecstatic YouTube sermon. “Good morning, America and the world,” he boomed in his finest Cronkite, “Israel is at war.” This was a battle between good and evil, Hagee said, before vowing to “lift up... Читать дальше...

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton threatened doctors who perform abortions with felony charges, even if a court says they can conduct the procedure.

Mike Johnson compared himself to Moses and said that becoming House speaker was part of God’s plan.