Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

The next attack on the Affordable Care Act may cost you free preventive health care

The next attack on the Affordable Care Act may cost you free preventive health care

A provision of the Affordable Care Act makes it easier for patients to receive preventive care. Jose Luis Pelaez Inc/Digital Vision via Getty Images By Paul Shafer, Boston University and Alex Hoagland, Boston University Many Americans breathed a sigh of relief when the Supreme Court left the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in place following its third major legal challenge in June 2021. This decision left widely supported policies in place, like ensuring coverage regardless of preexisting conditions, coverage for dependents…

Read More Read More

Mexico’s Supreme Court rules that criminalizing abortion is unconstitutional

Mexico’s Supreme Court rules that criminalizing abortion is unconstitutional

The New York Times reports: Criminalizing abortion is unconstitutional, Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday, setting a precedent that could lead to legalization of the procedure across this conservative Catholic country of about 130 million people. The unanimous ruling from the nation’s top court follows years of efforts by a growing women’s movement in Mexico that has repeatedly taken to the streets of major cities to demand greater rights and protections. The decision, which opens the door for Mexico to…

Read More Read More

These corporations bankrolled the sponsors of Texas’ abortion ban

These corporations bankrolled the sponsors of Texas’ abortion ban

Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria report: Texas just enacted the nation’s most draconian abortion ban, prohibiting all abortions after six weeks — before many women even know they are pregnant. There are no exceptions for rape or incest. Further, the law places a $10,000 bounty on anyone who helps a woman obtain an abortion in Texas after six weeks. Private citizens can collect the bounty by filing a lawsuit. The politicians who sponsored Texas’ abortion ban are backed by some…

Read More Read More

More than 200 health journals call for urgent action on climate crisis

More than 200 health journals call for urgent action on climate crisis

The Guardian reports: More than 200 health journals worldwide are publishing an editorial calling on leaders to take emergency action on climate change and to protect health. The British Medical Journal said it is the first time so many publications have come together to make the same statement, reflecting the severity of the situation. Doctors for Extinction Rebellion demonstrate in front of the World Health Organization in Geneva earlier this year. The editorial, which is being published before the UN…

Read More Read More

Hardliners get key posts in new Taliban government

Hardliners get key posts in new Taliban government

BBC News reports: The Taliban have announced an interim government in Afghanistan, declaring the country an “Islamic Emirate”. The new cabinet, entirely male, is made up of senior Taliban figures some of whom are notorious for attacks on US forces over the last two decades. It will be led by Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund, one of the movement’s founders, who is on a UN blacklist. The interior minister is the feared FBI-wanted leader of the Haqqani militant group, Sirajuddin Haqqani….

Read More Read More

Shot-up SUVs, teens manning checkpoints: A reporter’s return to Kabul weeks after the fall

Shot-up SUVs, teens manning checkpoints: A reporter’s return to Kabul weeks after the fall

Yaroslav Trofimov reports: Clad in body armor and helmets, Uzbekistan’s border guards took positions in the middle of the bridge spanning the wide Amu Darya river on Monday morning, examining the papers of a handful of Afghans coming their way. Beyond them, the Taliban’s new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan began. A small minivan, carrying me and three Afghan men heading home, pulled up by the customs office on the Afghan side of the river. A white Taliban flag flew above…

Read More Read More

Can progressives be persuaded that genetics matters?

Can progressives be persuaded that genetics matters?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes: [Kathryn Paige] Harden understands herself to be waging a two-front campaign. On her left are those inclined to insist that genes don’t really matter; on her right are those who suspect that genes are, in fact, the only things that matter. The history of behavior genetics is the story of each generation’s attempt to chart a middle course. When the discipline first began to coalesce, in the early nineteen-sixties, the memory of Nazi atrocities rendered the eugenics…

Read More Read More

Number of daily steps to good health

Number of daily steps to good health

Science Alert reports: In the latest study to explore this territory, a team led by physical activity epidemiologist Amanda Paluch from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst tracked a cohort of over 2,000 middle-aged Black and White men and women, sourced from four different US cities. The group, with an average age of just over 45, wore accelerometers that tracked their daily step count and step intensity during waking hours, as they went about their lives. The experiment began back in…

Read More Read More

Why ordinary Afghans gravitated towards the Taliban during the American war

Why ordinary Afghans gravitated towards the Taliban during the American war

Anand Gopal writes: Both sides of the war did make efforts to avoid civilian deaths. In addition to issuing warnings to evacuate, the Taliban kept villagers informed about which areas were seeded with improvised explosive devices, and closed roads to civilian traffic when targeting convoys. The coalition deployed laser-guided bombs, used loudspeakers to warn villagers of fighting, and dispatched helicopters ahead of battle. “They would drop leaflets saying, ‘Stay in your homes! Save yourselves!’ ” Shakira recalled. In a war…

Read More Read More

In second regime, both the Taliban and the world face a new reality

In second regime, both the Taliban and the world face a new reality

Faisal Devji writes: Most accounts of the Taliban’s emergence in the 1990s attribute it to a Saudi-funded and Pakistani-led project. Its aim was to create an Islamic state in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, one that would keep Iran at bay for the Saudis and India for the Pakistanis. This was necessary because the mujahedeen, who had routed the Soviets with help from the United States, were too riven by internecine quarrels to form a government. But the Taliban were…

Read More Read More

A generation of American men give up on college: ‘I just feel lost’

A generation of American men give up on college: ‘I just feel lost’

The Wall Street Journal reports: Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels. At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline. This…

Read More Read More

A lesson from Belgium on how to deradicalize your town

A lesson from Belgium on how to deradicalize your town

Carla Power writes: When I first went to Mechelen, Belgium, the summer was hot and angry. Leaders everywhere in 2018 seemed to be building ever-higher walls and declaring new definitions of us and them. In the United States, the Supreme Court upheld President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. In Israel, the Knesset passed a law rendering the right to self-determination in the State of Israel a privilege “unique to the Jewish people.” In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s far-right government criminalized anyone who…

Read More Read More

California firefighters ‘stretched to limit’ as devastating blazes become the norm

California firefighters ‘stretched to limit’ as devastating blazes become the norm

The Guardian reports: Before the ravenous Caldor fire laid siege to South Lake Tahoe, California’s top firefighting priority lay just to the north, where the Dixie fire scorched more land than any other single fire in state history. Together, the two behemoths have already blackened more than 1m acres (4,000 sq km) along the Sierra Nevada range. And fire season in the American west is just heating up. The climate crisis has helped create extreme fire emergencies, with huge, rapid-moving…

Read More Read More

How racism warps science

How racism warps science

Alice B. Popejoy writes: Of the ten clinical genetics labs in the United States that share the most data with the research community, seven include ‘Caucasian’ as a multiple-choice category for patients’ racial or ethnic identity, despite the term having no scientific basis. Nearly 5,000 biomedical papers since 2010 have used ‘Caucasian’ to describe European populations. This suggests that too many scientists apply the term, either unbothered by or unaware of its roots in racist taxonomies used to justify slavery…

Read More Read More