Creating new vaccines for these diseases will cost billions, but it may be worth it to avoid the next Spanish flu. One of the best ways to save humanity from a global pandemic in the future is by developing infectious disease vaccines now. But research has been sluggish, partly because no one knows how much producing such vaccines would cost.
That changed last week when researchers from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) published a
2018-10-22 18:10 | News | Vox
There’s one science-backed method to reduce anti-transgender prejudice. See for yourself how it works. Though they are often conflated by many Americans, and particularly Republicans , sex is not the same thing as gender.
Sex is determined by the biological configuration of chromosomes. Gender is our individual identity: one that can be fluid or fixed. Respecting and honoring this difference is key to respecting the rights of transgender people.
The Trump administration
2018-10-22 17:10 | News | Vox
Support for marijuana legalization just keeps climbing, according to Gallup and the Pew Research Center. Americans are divided on a lot of issues. But one topic they’re increasingly less divided on, based on polling by Gallup and the Pew Research Center, is marijuana legalization .
According to a new survey conducted by Gallup earlier in October, 66 percent of US adults — two-thirds — support legalizing marijuana, up from 64 percent in 2017.
2018-10-22 17:10 | News | Vox
Escobar will likely be the first Latina to represent Texas in Congress. She’s sure she can turn the red state blue if she can persuade traditional non-voters turn out.
This is the second in the series of New Statesman America profiles of the “Blue Wave” of new, young, progressive candidates in this year’s midterm elections.
2018-10-22 17:10 | News | NewStatesman
The United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres said on Monday he is “outraged by the continued killing and abduction of civilians by armed groups” near Beni, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)’s North Kivu region, which has been grappling with an Ebola outbreak since August.
2018-10-22 17:10 | News | UN
Time is running out and the Prime Minister just repeats herself.
It’s difficult to see how Theresa May’s statement to the House of Commons today was any different from her last, other than the fact that Jeremy Corbyn’s delivery of his response was a lot better.
Anyone who had had the privilege – or should that be misfortune? – to sit
2018-10-22 17:10 | News | NewStatesman
Supply is really what matters. Ballot initiatives are a bad idea.
Part of that badness is there simply isn’t anywhere close to enough media bandwidth to properly cover the ins and outs of all the different issues that get put on the ballot in initiative-happy states like California.
But over the weekend, a bunch of people asked me to offer my view of Proposition 10, which broadly speaking would allow California’s more left-wing localities to
2018-10-22 17:10 | News | Vox
A Turkish ruling party official described the newly released surveillance footage as evidence of a Saudi cover-up. Saudi Arabia has confirmed that journalist Jamal Khashoggi is dead.
2018-10-22 16:10 | News | NPR
The creator of the low-price skin care brand The Ordinary has been ousted after a year of erratic behavior, and now has a restraining order against him. Brandon Truaxe is the founder and CEO — though he likes to say his official title is “worker” — of Deciem, one of the buzziest skin care companies on the planet right now. When he launched the company, five years ago, it was immediately the talk of the
2018-10-22 16:10 | News | Vox
The interventions doctors recommend for kids who want to transition medically are completely safe and reversible. Alex was born with male anatomy. She grew up knowing she was “supposed to be a boy,” but as a young child, she never felt like that gender fit. When she hit puberty, she became anxious and depressed about how her body was becoming more masculine. She started dressing in gender-neutral clothing and wearing makeup, and was happy when strangers perceived her
2018-10-22 16:10 | News | Vox
Julia Conley, staff writer German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday became the first major U.S. ally to take concrete action to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, when she announced her government would halt arms sales to the kingdom and called on other countries to do the same.
2018-10-22 16:10 | News | CommonDreams
The welfare reform’s core “family first” ideology was always going to degrade women’s autonomy.
MPs are warning the government about something it knew all along – welfare changes could trap domestic abuse victims.
Universal Credit is designed to roll all benefits into one monthly payment for a single bank account, putting women at risk of financially-controlling partners, and effectively depriving them of the
2018-10-22 16:10 | News | NewStatesman
Here’s what experts in managing risks to human civilization think we should be doing instead. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns us that climate change could be shaping up to be even more catastrophic than we feared . Too many world governments are still armed with nuclear weapons that they’ve nearly deployed by accident on occasion. We’re unprepared for pandemics , and technological advancement is bringing within reach new threats
2018-10-22 15:10 | News | Vox
Despite Trump’s promises, his administration’s anti-LGBTQ record just keeps growing and growing. President Donald Trump’s administration is working on yet another anti-LGBTQ policy, the New York Times reported over the weekend.
According to Erica Green, Katie Benner, and Robert Pear at the Times , Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is considering an interpretation of Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans sex discrimination in federally funded schools, that “would define sex
2018-10-22 15:10 | News | Vox
An Israeli ministerial committee has approved a bill to deny visits to Hamas members in Israeli prisons, Anadolu Agency (AA) reported citing Israeli media on Monday.
2018-10-22 15:10 | News | IINA
A media delegation will arrive Monday in Azerbaijan, as part of the Media Delegation Program of the Union of OIC News Agencies (UNA), which was launched on June 26 with a visit to Tunisia.
2018-10-22 15:10 | News | IINA
Sudan and the United Nations on Sunday signed an agreement worth $21 million to support the South Sudanese refugees and their host communities in Sudan's border State of White Nile.
2018-10-22 15:10 | News | IINA
Trump embraces physical attacks on journalists because he wants to get away with lying. Jamal Khashoggi’s murder at the hands of the government of Saudi Arabia provoked America’s normally studiously neutral journalists into an uncommon posture of agitation and straight-talk. So did the related matters of Donald Trump’s incredible credulity about the Saudi government’s role in Khashoggi’s murder and his contemporaneous decision to fly to Montana and specifically praise Republican Rep. Greg Gianforte for physically assaulting
2018-10-22 15:10 | News | Vox
Jake Johnson, staff writer After kicking off a rare public appearance on Monday by answering a series of laughable softball questions from CNN's Van Jones—"How did you get this job? You have like the dopest job in the world"—President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner said the White House is still in a "fact-finding phase" regarding Saudi Arabia's murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi but declared that whatever the facts reveal, the
2018-10-22 15:10 | News | CommonDreams
Although the casting is more diverse, the show feels closer to its traditional shape than it has for a long time.
Doctor Who stories come in three flavours: alien or unworldly forces come to Earth in the present-day; the Doctor and friends visit the far future or a distant planet; and the historical, adventures in the Earth’s past. In fact,
2018-10-22 15:10 | News | NewStatesman
Is there really an “exhausted majority” of Americans against partisanship? Probably not. To most political observers, it seems obvious that political polarization is on the rise. The parties are becoming more hardline and their bases more ideologically unified . Partisan affiliation is now more important than ever in shaping the way Americans think about everything, even down to whom they want their kids to marry.
But a new genre of political punditry
2018-10-22 15:10 | News | Vox
Roenneberg was just 23 when his team of resistance fighters parachuted into a mountain range in Norway. They skied to a plant making heavy water and blew Hitler's atomic plans off-schedule.
2018-10-22 15:10 | News | NPR
Though widely prescribed in hospital intensive care units to treat hallucinations and other signs of delirium, Haldol and similar drugs are no better than a placebo for such patients, a study finds.
2018-10-22 15:10 | News | NPR
The impact of foreign arms sales on the US economy is minuscule. President Donald Trump wants America to think that tons of US jobs depend on the sale of US military weapons to Saudi Arabia and other shady regimes. But they really don’t.
The president has been pushing back against public pressure to cancel weapon sales to Saudi Arabia in light of recent news that the Saudi government killed a US resident and journalist who
2018-10-22 15:10 | News | Vox
A new poll finds a third of voters don’t see their midterm vote as a verdict on the president. President Donald Trump ’s approval rating has improved with Americans — but voters still want Democrats to win in the 2018 midterm elections .
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released over the weekend found that 50 percent of likely voters want Democrats to control Congress after November, compared to 41 percent
2018-10-22 15:10 | News | Vox
Proponents of the chips say they're safe and largely protected from hacking, but one scientist is raising privacy concerns around the kind of personal health data that might be stored on the devices.
2018-10-22 14:10 | News | NPR
Six important facts about the voters still undecided in the 2018 midterms. Something stuck out if you looked last week across 43 recent polls of competitive House races: Almost exactly 10 percent of voters said they were undecided, on average, just a few weeks before the 2018 midterm elections .
In Michigan’s 11th Congressional District, where Obama administration alum Haley Stevens is running against Republican business executive Lena Epstein, a full 17 percent of voters
2018-10-22 14:10 | News | Vox
Doctors dream of “precision medicine” guided by our genes. But right now, research too often excludes people of color. In the future, it’s possible that when you go in for a physical, your doctor will, along with the usual blood pressure test and bloodwork, analyze your genome for health risks lurking in the code of your DNA.
It’s possible your genome will suggest you’re at high risk of developing heart disease . If you are,
2018-10-22 14:10 | News | Vox
Chancellor Angela Merkel has said Germany will stop exporting weapons to Saudi Arabia, at least for the time being. The decision comes in the wake of the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at a Saudi consulate.
2018-10-22 14:10 | News | DeutscheWelles
News Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is issuing an “incident report” about the press freedom situation in Saudi Arabia and the threat to the country's already poor ranking in the World Press Freedom Index after dissident journalist and commentator Jamal Khashoggi’s murder and the arrests of more than 15 journalists in the space of a year.
Saudi Arabia is ranked very low, 169th out of 180 countries, in the 2018 World Press Freedom Index that
2018-10-22 14:10 | News | ReportersWithoutBorders
The country's rising cocaine production has alarmed Washington, which has spent more than $10 billion over nearly two decades to attack the illegal drug trade in Colombia.
2018-10-22 14:10 | News | NPR
Julia Conley, staff writer An investigation into pregnancy discrimination in the workplace has renewed calls for a long-overdue update to the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.
2018-10-22 14:10 | News | CommonDreams
Khanzadi Mehboob lives in constant fear for her life after she married against the wishes of her family. Although honor killings are illegal, tribal customs in Pakistan often trump the rule of law. Sattar Khan reports.
2018-10-22 14:10 | News | DeutscheWelles
“We do not know what they want, they do not know themselves what they really want.”
More than 850 days after the referendum, the EU’s patience in the Brexit negotiations is running out. Last week’s European Council summit in Brussels brought no progress to the deadlock in Brexit talks and saw an increasingly isolated Theresa May facing the unanimous voice of the
2018-10-22 14:10 | News | NewStatesman
It really comes down to whether Democrats invest in voter outreach. Poll after poll now shows that Hispanic and Latino voters are increasingly souring on President Donald Trump in the wake of the administration’s controversial immigration policies and its bungled handling of Puerto Rico disaster relief.
Yet even though the president seems to be trending negative, his numbers among Hispanic and Latino voters aren’t nearly as bad as they are among some
2018-10-22 13:10 | News | Vox
Obama’s regulation czar makes the case that “the issues that most divide us are fundamentally about facts rather than values.” Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein writes a lot of books , but he says his latest, The Cost-Benefit Revolution , is special.
It’s the culmination of decades of writing and research Sunstein has done in administrative law, with particular attention to the way that agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency or the Food and
2018-10-22 13:10 | News | Vox
The chancellor must somehow increase public spending in next week ’ s budget, but Tory MPs are determined to resist most ways of achieving it.
Philip Hammond needs to increase taxes, but Conservative MPs won’t let him. That is the dilemma that the chancellor, burdened by Brexit and Theresa May’s promise to end austerity, faces ahead of next week’s budget.
The
2018-10-22 12:10 | News | NewStatesman
Shortly after Israel announced a new "zero tolerance" policy toward demonstrations in Gaza, some 130 Palestinians were injured Friday while protesting ongoing Israeli occupation and demanding the right of return. Four paramedics and 25 children were among the injured. Ten thousand protesters gathered along Israel's heavily militarized separation barrier with Gaza as part of the weekly Great March of Return protests that began March 30. Since then, Israeli forces have killed at least 170 Palestinians, including more than 30 children,
2018-10-22 12:10 | News | DemocracyNow
A difficult conversation about the state of political journalism. I’m a political journalist. I’ve been a political journalist for 15 years. I believe in my profession. But right now, I’m worried we’re failing. I’m worried we’re making American politics worse, not better.
That’s not because journalists aren’t doing remarkable, courageous, heroic work. Look at the #MeToo movement, the investigations of Donald Trump’s finances, the remarkable reporting that journalists do every day in the midst of war zones
2018-10-22 12:10 | News | Vox
Sarah Perry’s Melmoth is a gothic examination of what it means to bear witness. The best word to describe Melmoth , the latest novel from Essex Serpent author Sarah Perry, is lush . This is a novel where every sentence has been wrapped in layer upon layer of velvet, in which every word is unctuous, in which every image is just on the verge of feeling overripe. It
2018-10-22 12:10 | News | Vox
The New York Times reports that the Trump administration is attempting to eliminate the rights of transgender people by creating a narrow legal definition of gender. Citing a government memo, the Times reveals that the Department of Health and Human Services has undertaken an effort across several government agencies to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans discrimination on the basis of sex. That definition would be either male or female,
2018-10-22 12:10 | News | DemocracyNow
The flagship reform is a toxic combination of social engineering and austerity.
Universal Credit’s critics are split: is it a good idea, badly funded, or simply a bad idea? Among Conservative MPs, most think it’s the former: that if it were properly funded, Universal Credit will be an improvement on the legacy benefits system. Opposition MPs are split: some think that Universal
2018-10-22 12:10 | News | NewStatesman
Jake Johnson, staff writer "This is nothing more than an open and brazen attempt to use the threat of criminal prosecution to intimidate minority voters, an old and familiar tactic that dates back to the Jim Crow era."
2018-10-22 12:10 | News | CommonDreams
The medication used in self-managed abortions is safe for most women less than 10 weeks pregnant. With the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the future of Roe v. Wade is looking increasingly grim.
But even while the landmark law remains in place, the rollback of abortion access across the US is already well underway — and women who want to safely terminate their pregnancies
2018-10-22 12:10 | News | Vox
President Trump has announced plans to pull the United States out of a landmark nuclear arms pact with Russia, in a move that could spark a new arms race. President Ronald Reagan and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 1987. The INF banned all nuclear and non-nuclear missiles with short and medium ranges. The treaty helped to eliminate thousands of land-based missiles. On Saturday, Trump vowed to build new nuclear weapons. We speak
2018-10-22 12:10 | News | DemocracyNow
Jordan on Sunday informed Israel of its decision to cancel annexes of Baqura and Ghamr areas from the peace treaty signed between them on 26 October 1994.
2018-10-22 12:10 | News | IINA
Even by Mogadishu standards, late September was particularly violent.
Amino Hussein Hassan, a female law student, was shot dead on her university campus. Yahye Amir, a prominent economics professor and political analyst, escaped an assassination attempt when a bomb strapped to his car exploded, killing his brother. And Ahmed Mukhtar Salah from the minority Bantu ethnic group was beaten and burnt to death by a mob after his nephew married a woman from an “inferior” clan.
2018-10-22 12:10 | News | IrinNews
Author Sarah Churchwell on the entangled history of America’s most loaded phrases. “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this moment on, it’s going to be America First.”
That’s how President Donald Trump summed up his governing philosophy during his inaugural address last January. The phrase “America First” has been a feature of Trump’s rhetorical shtick since he began campaigning for the White House, but the phrase itself has a
2018-10-22 12:10 | News | Vox