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at the end of the day, once you decide that everyone, regardless of age or medical condition, should be able to buy health insurance at an affordable price, you have essentially bought into the idea that young and healthy people have an obligation to subsidize the older and sicker people in some fashion. And once you do that, it’s sort of inevitable you end up where every health-reform plan has ended up since the days of Richard Nixon. You end up with some variation on Obamacare.

if you want to scrap guaranteed issue, scrap community rating, scrap the individual mandate and scrap the subsidies, as Republicans propose, then you end up where the country was in 2008: with a market system that inevitably gives way to an insurance spiral in which steadily rising premiums cause a steadily rising percentage of Americans without health insurance.

The Defense Department destroyed nearly half a billion dollars worth of defective Italian aircraft that U.S. taxpayers bought for Afghanistan and then sold the scrap for $32,000, according to an agency watchdog.

In a letter last week to James, Sopko expressed concern that defense officials “may not have considered other possible alternatives in order to salvage taxpayer dollars.”

Senators have moved to salvage Obamacare following Donald Trump’s decision last week to scrap critical subsidies that underpin the health law.

The president – who last week announced he was ending the subsidies to insurance companies while claiming the ACA was “imploding” – said he approved of the plan and that the White House had been involved in the negotiations.

Democrats have accused him of scrapping them to “sabotage” Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law following repeated failed attempts by Republicans to repeal it, and the president’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon has praised him because the decision is “gonna blow that thing [Obamacare] up”.

President Donald Trump is likely to scrap the Iran nuclear deal, French President Emanuel Macron said, adding that he is working on containing the damage with an ambitious new diplomatic framework.Macron made the comments during a roundtable with reporters Wednesday night on the eve of his trip home following three days of high-stakes meetings with Trump about the thorniest foreign policy issues facing the two leaders.

acron said he told Trump during their private talks that killing the deal “would open Pandora’s box,” adding: “I don’t think your president wants to make war with Iran.

Macron acknowledged that, while he has had talks with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, he does not know how Iran would respond given deep divisions in the regim

The new US administration has not yet decided what to do about the 2015 Iran nuclear deal

They are looking “not only at that issue but also at many other issues. So it is very early for them to give their assessment,

Trump said while campaigning for the presidency that he wanted to “dismantle” the July 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and six major powers including the United States.

My own Twitter feed has been full of triumphant liberals celebrating the theater’s revived ability to effect political change and unmask Trump as a tetchy crybully; and triumphant conservatives celebrating how smug, moralizing and clueless this whole incident revealed liberals to be.

Both sides had so much fun patting themselves on the back that they sometimes failed to notice how much attention they drew away from the Trump University fraud settlement, the legalized bribery happening as foreign diplomats book stays at Trump-owned hotels, and rabidly bad administration picks.

no matter how unfailingly polite and pointed the production crafted its statement to be, when those words came on the heels of audience jeers, they still unwittingly played directly into Trump’s hands.

Senate scraps No Child Left Behind; education battle moves to states

The Senate sent a bill to the president’s desk Wednesday that replaces much of the widely disliked No Child Left Behind Act and shifts more power over education to states and school district

The bill — which the president is scheduled to sign Thursday — would dump the current law’s intense focus on test scores and the well-intentioned but impossible goal of having all students reading and calculating at grade level.

A World War I cannon was stolen from outside a Veterans of Foreign Wars building in Michigan, and an official is concerned it could be sold for scrap metal.

The vintage piece of military hardware was hauled away earlier this week from outside VFW Post 1137 in Benton Township in southwestern Michigan, The Herald-Palladium of St. Joseph reported (http://bit.ly/1NXqHgd ) Thursday.

The 12- to 14-foot-long cannon has a heavy metal barrel, wooden wheel spokes and sat on a concrete slab. It had been displayed since 1976 at the post. The non-working cannon doesn't have a firing pin.

In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.

Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.

Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.

s anyone who reads the news knows, Donald Trump will decide by May 12 whether to “withdraw from” or “pull out of” or “abandon” or “scrap” or “jettison” (the synonyms keep coming) the nuclear deal with Iran. Why May 12? Because last October, Trump declared that Iran isn’t complying with the agreement. Under a law passed by Congress, that “decertification” means Trump can reimpose the sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear activities that were waived as part of the deal. Trump hasn’t reimposed those sanctions yet. But he’s demanded that Iran make vast new concessions. And he’s threatened that if Iran does not do so by May 12, “American nuclear sanctions would automatically resume.”

The Trump administration has likely been violating these clauses. The Washington Post reported that at a NATO summit last May, “Trump tried to persuade European partners to stop making trade and business deals with Iran.” Then, in July, Trump’s director of legislative affairs boasted that at a G20 summit in Germany, Trump had “underscored the need for nations … to stop doing business with nations that sponsor terrorism, especially Iran.” Both of these lobbying efforts appear to violate America’s pledge to “refrain from any policy specifically intended to directly and adversely affect the normalisation of trade and economic relations with Iran.”

The Trump administration still issues licenses for routine personal divestment transactions: for instance, people who want to sell off their property or close their bank accounts in Iran. But as far as Ferrari can tell, the Trump administration has issued few, if any, licenses for commercial transactions. That’s hard to verify: There is no public database of OFAC licenses, and the Treasury Department didn’t respond to my request for comment. But in recent months, two close observers of the Iran deal have echoed Ferrari’s observation. As the pro–nuclear deal National Iranian American Council’s Reza Marashi reported earlier this year, “To hear senior Western diplomats tell it, the Trump administration has not approved a single Iran-related OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) license since taking office.” If true, this too likely violates the Iran deal.

Trump won just 8 percent of Black voters in 2016 and has talked more about criminals than criminal justice in the closing days of the campaign. He did, however, sign the bipartisan First Step Act and has granted 28 pardons and 16 sentence commutations.

Former President Barack Obama tapped two Black attorneys general to serve in his administration, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, and he used his executive authority to create a task force on 21st century policing and granted clemency to more than 1,900 people, the highest figure since Harry Truman’s administration granted clemency to more than 2,000 people.

“Black voters are looking for a comprehensive agenda that will get at the structural barriers blocking Black mobility in this country,”

Washington, DC (CNN)Videos and photos are surfacing of thousands of Uber's Jump bikes and scooters stripped of parts and crammed into trucks to be scrapped.

Roughly 20,000 to 30,000 Jump vehicles have now disappeared from streets nationwide in recent weeks, according to estimates from four former Jump employees. Uber confirmed that tens of thousands of its bikes and scooters are being "recycled."

Asked why Lime did not take all of Jump's bikes, the spokesman said the company took the newest bikes that will allow it to offer a quality bikeshare service over the long term. The rest were left for Uber to deal with.

In his interview, Zhong optimistically appeared to suggest a return to pre-pandemic life in China within months.“I was asked when our lives can return to where we were in 2019. My view is that in the first half of next year after March,” he said, according to the South China Morning Post.

Seemingly in response, many of those restrictions have been abruptly shelved. Videos spread on social media showed abandoned quarantine centres and testing sites, littered with the refuse of the former policy. State media and health messaging has pivoted to emphasising the low severity of Omicron, and urging individual responsibility. One official video which shows people removing their face masks with apparent relief was criticised over its suggestion to ease mask wearing just as Covid begins to spread uncontrolled.

“If you take a fresh strawberry after processing, it’s nothing. It tastes like nothing,” said Wright, as a way of explaining why the food industry is so reliant on the $12 billion global flavoring industry.

When I asked Dave Adams, the food scientist who founded Savoury Systems, why actual meat is such an inferior source for the chicken flavor that, strangely enough, goes into chicken, he gave me the same answer Wright did. Modern chicken, he grumbled, has no flavor. “They grow them so fast, they don’t have time to develop flavor,” he said. And chicken — even tasteless, scrap stuff — is more expensive than soy.

The flavoring game wasn’t always so sophisticated. When it began in Europe in the 19th century, companies imported spices and procured plants such as lemongrass, which yielded citronella oil, ideal for concentrating into lemon flavor. These essential oils went mostly into fragrances, medicines and candies. As the field of chemistry progressed in the latter half of the century, European scientists, particularly Germans, figured out how to synthesize flavors and fragrances from chemicals instead of having to wrench them from natural materials.