The GOP did terribly in the midterms. That is just a fact. We held onto the Senate, and the GOP only won the House by the skin of their teeth. It was a sound rejection of republican policy.

So one would THINK that the GOP would try to learn from their mistakes. One would think they would apply themselves to getting an education as to what the voters want and then adjust accordingly.

One would be wrong. The GOP appears thoroughly incapable of self-analysis. Again and again, they lose elections, and again and again, they take a hard pass on trying to understand WHY they lose.

We’ve brought you the story of Mike Lindell — the potential new Chair of the Republican national committee. But there’s more. Republicans have tapped a new person to help them figure out why they lost so very badly.

Normally that would equal good news. But it’s WHO the GOP has tapped that has tongues wagging. That person is losing Arizona candidate Blake Masters.

You’d be forgiven, readers, for thinking this is a joke, only it’s not. Blake Masters was one of the worst candidates Republicans could have chosen. And Arizonians knew it, which is why Masters lost so very badly.

But like a bad dream that refuses to end, Masters just won’t go away. And picking him — an election denier — to do a deep dive into Republican strategy is sort of like jumping into the eye of a tornado. It’s just not a good idea.

Masters will serve as an “advisor council,” conduct a midterm “postmortem,” and help shape the GOP message going forward.

I really feel this is a lousy decision by Republicans. Having an election denier like Masters on ANY advisory council does not bode well for the not-so-grand old party. It also shows they just never learn.

Usually, if one wants to win, one turns to — well — winners. It’s not rocket science, Republicans. Only the GOP does not seem to want to do that. Perhaps it’s because they have few winners to turn to.

The GOP has become so toxic, so stripped of ideas, that any winner likely does not want to get anywhere near them. So perhaps it was desperation that fueled this move.

Whatever motivation was behind this awful idea, it is clear that Republicans will stay the losing party unless and until they look in the mirror and do a deep dive.

The post They never learn appeared first on Palmer Report.

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A recent study may hold a clue for Jews looking to reduce their chances of dying from coronary heart disease: Start praying.

The study looked at mortality rates for nearly 12,000 Israeli Jewish men who scientists divided into  five categories of religious observance: Haredim, religious, traditional, secular and agnostic. It drew on a survey that tracked these men, between the ages of 40 and 65, for more than three decades.

The results, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, indicated that the level of religious observance among the men significantly correlated to levels of mortality from heart disease. Men in the Haredi group had a 32% lower chance of dying from heart disease than those in the agnostic group, while the religious, traditional and secular groups had odds of dying from that disease decrease by 18%, 15% and 8%, respectively. 

Heart disease is the leading cause of death for both men and women in the United States, accounting for around 1 out of 5 deaths. In 2020, just under 700,000 Americans died due to complications from the disease. 

Though data from the study was not collected after 1995, co-author Sigal Eilat-Adar, a registered nutritionist and epidemiologist at Israel’s Academic College at Wingate, said other studies indicate the results would be similar with more recent data. 

While the findings are consistent with previous studies linking increased religious observance among other religious groups to better heart health, the fact that Israeli Haredim are, on the whole, worse off economically than the other religious groups made the findings that much starker. Socioeconomic status has been widely shown to have a strong connection to overall health.

Eilat-Adar also noted that Haredim also tended to have a worse diet than the other groups, especially at the time of the study, when many indulged in meals filled with saturated fats.

“They eat a lot. There are the Holy Days and the Shabbat,” she said. “I wouldn’t say it is a healthy diet, because they drink a lot of sugary drinks.”

A Haredi edge?

In the study, Eilat-Adar pointed to several factors that could explain the lower mortality rate, including that Haredim are likely to smoke less due to Shabbat restrictions and had strong community bonds and support. While the study notes that research has shown religiosity has been connected to lower stress levels, Eilat-Adar told the Forward that might be even more apparent in Israel, where Haredim don’t have the stress that comes with mandatory military service. 

Zachary Zimmer, a professor at Mount Saint Vincent University who has written extensively on the relationship between religion and health, said the habits highlighted in the study have been observed in other religious communities, where they also have been found to contribute to lower heart disease mortality. 

“There’s a spiritual aspect to it, there’s a religious identity aspect to it, there’s sort of a cultural and community aspect to it, there’s a behavioral aspect to it,” he said. 

But, he added, the findings are not universal.

“If you go around the world to other places, in other countries, you don’t necessarily find the same relationship” because the religion and culture introduce other factors that may influence heart health. “It may be that religiosity is not as salutary as it is in certain communities and in certain countries.” 

A host of factors can lead people who are more observant to having healthier hearts, but the actual mechanisms connecting cause and effect are still poorly understood, said Ananya Banerjee, an assistant professor at Montreal’s McGill University who studies social determinants of health. 

“There’s aspects of religion that can be abstract and hard to measure,” she said. “I think that’s the reason why there isn’t a huge program of research or an institution that is really looking at how protective religion and being religious is in chronic diseases and mental health conditions.”

(For Jews specifically, part of the answer for the reduced risk of dying from heart disease could be an unexpected one: A 2018 study found that wearing tefillin had a positive effect on blood flow.)

Caveats

Eilat-Adar acknowledged the study’s limitations. Chief among them is that the data came from a survey of employed Israelis and therefore could not take into account the sizable population of Haredim who dedicate themselves to studying Torah full time. 

As for whether secular Jews can benefit from becoming more observant, Zimmer said the health benefits of belief are clear, but not limited to organized religion. He noted that similarly positive results have been observed in people who devote themselves to non-denominational spirituality or to a musical instrument or a cause.

Eilat-Adar said that a bond with something greater than yourself can only be beneficial. 

“​​Believing in something really helps you. You don’t have to pray. You can pray in your heart, I don’t know,” she said. “But believing in something, it’s not the attendance to the prayer. It’s the spirituality that helps you.”

Asked whether some kind of divine intervention can be at play — that Jews who prayed for good health received it due to their devotion, for example — Zimmer said the question falls outside the scope of scientific research.

“I find that divine intervention and science don’t often mix that well,” he said.

The post New study of Jewish men links heart health with religious lifestyle appeared first on The Forward.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister-designate, sought Wednesday to preempt growing concern about the sixth government he is expected to lead, which will include far-right extremists in senior cabinet positions. 

“I think there’s a greater chance that will happen under my leadership,” Netanyahu said about the prospects of peace with the Palestinians in a virtual appearance at The New York Times DealBook summit, an annual daylong gathering with power brokers in the finance, markets and political industries, at New York’s Lincoln Center. 

The head of the right-wing Likud Party said in a 40-minute conversation with columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin that he has the “credibility” to make peace with Arab nations in the Middle East and Gulf region, which he said would “ultimately lead to the immediate peace with the Palestinians.” 

And in a podcast interview with Bari Weiss, a former opinion editor at The New York Times, Netanyahu said that the “doom projections” of a danger to Israel’s democracy are unwarranted. “The main policy or the overriding policy of the government is determined by the Likud and frankly, by me,” he said. “I think I have more than a modest influence on it.” 

The incoming Israeli leader hasn’t granted any interviews to the mainstream Israeli media in recent months, but has addressed a diverse range of American audiences, predominantly discussing his recently-published memoir, Bibi: My Story.

The Wednesday session by The New York Times, called “Return to office: How Netanyahu may change global politics (again),” focused primarily on Israeli foreign policy with regard to Iran, Russia and China. Earlier in the day at the conference, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pleaded for Israeli military assistance. The last two governments that were solely headed by Netanyahu, in coalition with some centrist parties, frequently feuded with the U.S. administration officials. Democratic members of Congress criticized him for publicly opposing former President Barack Obama’s Iran policy and for failing to make progress on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

The conference convened as Netanyahu negotiates with right-wing partners to cobble together a governing coalition, which he aims to complete in the coming weeks. Netanyahu has already agreed to make Itamar Ben-Gvir, a provocateur with extremist views, as national security minister with authority over border police in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem.

Andrew Ross Sorkin speaks with Israeli Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu at The New York Times DealBook Summit on Nov. 30, 2022. Photo by Jacob Kornbluh

His Likud Party, which has 32 seats in the 120-seat chamber, also signed a deal with the anti-LGBT party Noam, giving its sole member control over immigration from the Soviet Union and how the state defines “Jewish identity.” He is also in the final stages of an agreement with far-right Knesset member Bezalel Smotrich, an advocate for extending Israeli sovereignty in the occupied West Bank, to appoint him as finance minister for the next two years. 

Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer and Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. peace negotiator, urged the Biden administration in an op-ed in The Washington Post on Tuesday to limit their interaction with Ben-Gvir and Smotrich and to stop providing Israel offensive weapons or security assistance to the incoming government for actions in the occupied territories.

In the podcast interview with Weiss, which was also featured in her Substack newsletter, Netanyahu, referring to the views of his religious and Haredi partners, said: “This Israel is not going to be governed by Talmudic law. We’re not going to ban LGBT forums.” He added, “We don’t adopt the prohibition of rights to people who deserve it under Israeli law.”

Relationship with Trump

Netanyahu also criticized former President Donald Trump’s meeting with Kanye West, the rapper who changed his name to Ye and who has spewed antisemitic conspiracies, and Nick Fuentes, one of America’s most prominent young white supremacists. 

“I thought that was just wrong and misplaced,” he said. “I think he made a mistake. I hope it’s not repeated.”

Netanyahu and Trump had a rocky relationship when they were in power, but one that led to the moving of the U.S embassy to Jerusalem, the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, the recognition of Israeli control of the Golan Heights and to normalization deals between Israel and several Arab nations.

Following the election of Joe Biden, Netanyahu tweeted his congratulations to the then-president-elect while Trump was still contesting the results, though Netanyahu waited for weeks for a return call after Biden entered office. Trump made profane remarks about Netanyahu’s outreach, calling it a “betrayal.” 

On Wednesday, Netanyahu said his views about Trump haven’t changed since both leaders left office. 

To Weiss, Netanyahu described Trump as “irreverent.” He also noted that the former president, who recently announced that he will run for the White House in 2024, “has been a tremendous supporter of Israel” and “very supportive of the Jewish people.”

The post Netanyahu seeks to assuage concerns about the new government in outreach to American audiences appeared first on The Forward.

Indiana’s attorney general on Wednesday asked the state’s medical board to discipline an Indiana doctor who performed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio in a case that became a flashpoint in the debate over access to the procedure.

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, a Republican, accused Dr. Caitlin Bernard of “violating a patient’s privacy rights” and the obligation to immediately report child abuse to Indiana authorities.

Rokita has been investigating whether Dr. Bernard followed state law requiring doctors to report abortions, even though public records showed Dr. Bernard promptly reported the abortion as required.

His office asked the state’s medical licensing board to determine the appropriate penalty for Dr. Bernard, ranging from a letter of reprimand to permanent revocation of her medical license.

Kathleen DeLaney, Dr. Bernard’s lawyer, said in a statement on Wednesday that her client had complied with all reporting requirements and had discussed the girl’s case “within the bounds of applicable privacy laws.”

“The Administrative Action filed today by Mr. Rokita is clearly a last-ditch effort to intimidate Dr. Bernard and other providers of abortion care,” DeLaney said.

The doctor has said the child was referred to her for an abortion just three days after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that had guaranteed federal abortion rights.

Ohio was among the states that quickly enforced strict limits on abortion in the wake of the June ruling, sometimes without exceptions for cases of rape or incest.

The attorney general is not questioning whether the girl met the Indiana statutory requirement that she be no more than 22 weeks pregnant. When Dr. Bernard learned of the situation, the girl was three days past the six-week limit in Ohio.

News of the 10-year-old’s case launched a bitter legal battle between Dr. Bernard and Rokita.

Dr. Bernard and her medical partner sued Rokita earlier this month, demanding an end to investigations seeking medical records about patients and their abortions. The lawsuit accused Rokita’s investigation of being a “sham” and said it violated requirements that investigations be based on merit, narrowly focused and kept confidential. read more

Dr. Bernard’s suit said the subpoenas she had received from the attorney general were based on complaints from people who had only heard of the case on the news and repeated the false claim that Dr. Bernard failed to submit a report.

(This story has been corrected to say weeks, instead of months, in paragraph 9)

Wall Street equities closed sharply higher on Wednesday while U.S. Treasury yields declined and the dollar sank after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the central bank could slow the pace of interest rate hikes “as soon as December,” even as he cautioned that inflation was still too high.

While roughly in line with previous comments, Powell’s words were a relief for investors who had feared more hawkishness. Still, Powell warned that the fight against inflation was far from over and that key questions remained unanswered, including how high rates will ultimately need to rise, and for how long.

After waiting “with bated breath” for any clarification on Fed tightening, Wednesday’s comments provided relief to the market, according to Chuck Carlson, Chief Executive Officer at Horizon Investment Services in Hammond, Indiana.

“And anything that gives hope to the idea the Fed is becoming less hawkish is viewed as a positive for stocks, at least on a short-term basis,” said Carlson.

The S&P had fallen in the previous three sessions with strategists attributing the caution to pre-speech jitters. After Wednesday’s rally it was still down 14.4% year-to-date.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (.DJI) rose 737.24 points, or 2.18%, to 34,589.77, the S&P 500 (.SPX) gained 122.48 points, or 3.09%, to 4,080.11 and the Nasdaq Composite (.IXIC) added 484.22 points, or 4.41%, to 11,468.00.

All three of Wall Street’s major averages showed their second monthly advance in a row with a 5.4% gain for the S&P, compared with a 5.7% monthly gain for the Dow and the Nasdaq’s 4.4% increase.

MSCI’s gauge of stocks across the globe (.MIWD00000PUS) gained 2.47% and showed a gain of 7.9% for November, its strongest monthly advance since November 2020.

U.S. Treasury yields retreated across the board after trading higher for most of the session before Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell struck a more dovish tone than the market expected, implying slower rate hikes as soon as December.

“Generally, the market seems to have priced in the worst of it already, and just sort of getting the event volatility out of play is sort of helping risk assets,” said John Luke Tyner, fixed income portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors in Fairhope, Alabama.

Benchmark 10-year notes were down 12.6 basis points to 3.622%, from 3.748% late on Monday. The 30-year bond was last down 4.7 basis points to yield 3.7546%, from 3.802%. The 2-year note was last was down 13.6 basis points to yield 4.337%, from 4.473%.

The dollar also lost ground in response to Powell’s comments and was on track for its biggest monthly percentage decline against the euro since Sept. 2010.

Powell’s mention of slowing rate hikes “gave permission for stocks to take off and the dollar to turn lower,” said Joe Perry, senior market analyst at FOREX.COM in New York.

The dollar index fell 0.795%, with the euro up 0.75% to $1.0404.

The Japanese yen strengthened 0.47% versus the greenback at 138.07 per dollar, while Sterling was last trading at $1.2048, up 0.79% on the day.

Oil prices rallied to settle up by over $2 per barrel on signs of tighter supply, a weaker dollar and optimism over a Chinese demand recovery. Capping gains, though, was the OPEC+ decision to hold its Dec. 4 meeting virtually that signals little likelihood of a policy change, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Wednesday.

U.S. crude settled up 3% at $80.55 per barrel while Brent finished at $85.43, up 2.8% on the day.

Gold prices rose as the non-yielding asset showing its biggest monthly gain since July 2020.

Spot gold added 1.1% to $1,768.65 an ounce. U.S. gold futures gained 1.20% to $1,769.40 an ounce.

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The U.S. health regulator on Wednesday approved Switzerland-based Ferring Pharmaceuticals’ fecal transplant-based therapy to reduce the recurrence of a bacterial infection, making it the first therapy of its kind to be cleared in the United States.

The therapy, Rebyota, targets Clostridium difficile, or C. difficile – a superbug responsible for infections that can cause serious and life-threatening diarrhea. In the United States, the infection is associated with 15,000-30,000 deaths annually.

While this is the first such therapy approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for recurrent C. difficile infections, fecal microbiota transplants – classified by the regulator as investigational – have long been the standard of care in the U.S. for this condition.

Rebyota is delivered through an enema and works by replenishing good gut bacteria through samples of microbes distilled from faeces of healthy donors.

“As the first FDA-approved fecal microbiota product, (the) action represents an important milestone, as it provides an additional approved option to prevent recurrent CDI,” said Peter Marks, director of the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.

Besides Ferring, other companies including Seres Therapeutics (MCRB.O), which is developing an oral treatment, are working on similar therapies based on fecal microbiota transplantation.

In science fiction – think films and TV like “Interstellar” and “Star Trek” – wormholes in the cosmos serve as portals through space and time for spacecraft to traverse unimaginable distances with ease. If only it were that simple.

Scientists have long pursued a deeper understanding of wormholes and now appear to be making progress. Researchers announced on Wednesday that they forged two miniscule simulated black holes – those extraordinarily dense celestial objects with gravity so powerful that not even light can escape – in a quantum computer and transmitted a message between them through what amounted to a tunnel in space-time.

It was a “baby wormhole,” according to Caltech physicist Maria Spiropulu, a co-author of the research published in the journal Nature. But scientists are a long way from being able to send people or other living beings through such a portal, she said.

“Experimentally, for me, I will tell you that it’s very, very far away. People come to me and they ask me, ‘Can you put your dog in the wormhole?’ So, no,” Spiropulu told reporters during a video briefing. “…That’s a huge leap.”

“There’s a difference between something being possible in principle and possible in reality,” added physicist and study co-author Joseph Lykken of Fermilab, America’s particle physics and accelerator laboratory. “So don’t hold your breath about sending your dog through the wormhole. But you have to start somewhere. And I think to me it’s just exciting that we’re able to get our hands on this at all.”

The researchers observed the wormhole dynamics on a quantum device at Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O) called the Sycamore quantum processor.

A wormhole – a rupture in space and time – is considered a bridge between two remote regions in the universe. Scientists refer to them as Einstein–Rosen bridges after the two physicists who described them – Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen.

Such wormholes are consistent with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which focuses on gravity, one of the fundamental forces in the universe. The term “wormhole” was coined by physicist John Wheeler in the 1950s.

Spiropulu said the researchers found a quantum system that exhibits key properties of a gravitational wormhole but was small enough to implement on existing quantum hardware.

“It looks like a duck, it walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck. So that’s what we can say at this point – that we have something that in terms of the properties we look at, it looks like a wormhole,” Lykken said.

The researchers said no rupture of space and time was created in physical space in the experiment, though a traversable wormhole appeared to have emerged based on quantum information teleported using quantum codes on the quantum processor.

“These ideas have been around for a long time and they’re very powerful ideas,” Lykken said.

“But in the end, we’re in experimental science, and we’ve been struggling now for a very long time to find a way to explore these ideas in the laboratory. And that’s what’s really exciting about this. It’s not just, ‘Well, wormholes are cool.’ This is a way to actually look at these very fundamental problems of our universe in a laboratory setting.”

The threat environment in the United States will remain heightened in coming months, with lone offenders and groups motivated by a range of ideologies posing a danger, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said on Wednesday.

Threat actors could exploit several upcoming events to justify or commit acts of violence, including certifications related to the midterm elections, the holiday season and associated large gatherings and the marking of two years since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, the DHS said in a bulletin.

Wednesday’s bulletin, called the “National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin”, was issued to provide the public with information about the threat landscape facing country and how to stay safe.

“Our homeland continues to face a heightened threat environment – as we have seen, tragically, in recent acts of targeted violence – and is driven by violent extremists seeking to further a political or social goal or act on a grievance,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said.

The threat assessment follows the recent Thanksgiving holiday in a week overshadowed by gun violence with two deadly shootings – one where an attacker opened fire in an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, killing five people; and the other wherein a Walmart employee gunned down six coworkers and turned the gun on himself in Chesapeake, Virginia.

It was the seventh such advisory issued by DHS since January 2021, when officials turned fresh attention to domestic threats after supporters of then-President Donald Trump had attacked the U.S. Capitol.

“Targets of potential violence include public gatherings, faith-based institutions, the LGBTQI+ community, schools, racial and religious minorities, government facilities and personnel, U.S. critical infrastructure, the media, and perceived ideological opponents,” the department said in the bulletin.

The Ukrainian leadership and the armed service are analyzing the intentions of the Russian invaders and are planning a countermeasure – even more highly effective than now.

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The post President says Ukraine analyzing intentions of occupiers, preparing countermeasure appeared first on Ukraine Intelligence.