B13 Peer Review

In a 24-10 vote, the House Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would effectively end marijuana prohibition on Wednesday. The Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act of 2019, or  H.R. 3884 , was introduced by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and currently has 55 co-sponsors. This is the first time that a congressional committee has approved a bill to make cannabis legal.  The MORE Act  would federally decriminalize cannabis by removing it from the  Controlled Substances Act , and would require the expungement of past federal cannabis convictions. The bill would also establish a Cannabis Justice Office to administer a program to reinvest resources in the communities that have been most detrimentally impacted by prohibition, funded by a 5% tax on state-legal cannabis commerce. Moreover, it will allow the Small Business Administration to provide loans and grants to cannabis-related businesses and support state a...

A case of vaccine-derived polio has paralyzed a child in Bamako, the capital of Mali, and an emergency vaccination drive is being organized to forestall an outbreak, the  World Health Organization announced  Monday. It is the first time the disease has been seen in Mali since 2011. The patient is a Guinean child whose parents traveled to Bamako seeking medical care. The child’s virus is a close genetic match to a strain last detected in a nearby region of Guinea in 2014. The child was not infected with the “wild type”  polio  virus, which the W.H.O. says has been eliminated from Africa. No cases of  paralysis  from wild virus have been found in Africa in a year, but it takes three years before a region is declared polio-free. Rather, it was a strain created when one of the three live, weakened  virus strains in the oral  polio vaccine  mutated to become dangerous again. Such mutations are a rare but persistent consequence of rel...

New York (CNN Business) A secretive   startup backed by Bill Gates has achieved a solar breakthrough aimed at saving the planet. Heliogen, a clean energy company that emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday, said it has discovered a way to use artificial intelligence and a field of mirrors to reflect so much sunlight that it generates extreme heat above 1,000 degrees Celsius. This is an existential issue for your children, for my children and our grandchildren." BIOTECH BILLIONAIRE PATRICK SOON-SHIONG Essentially, Heliogen created a solar oven — one capable of reaching temperatures that are roughly a quarter of what you'd find on the surface of the sun. The breakthrough means that, for the first time, concentrated solar energy can be used to create the extreme heat required to make cement, steel, glass and other industrial processes. In other words, carbon-free sunlight can replace fossil fuels in a heavy carbon- emitting corner of the economy that has been...

NEW YORK — The nominations for the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards were announced Wednesday. Lizzo led among nominees with eight nods. It was a good morning for music industry newcomers as freshman artists Billie Eilish and Lil Nas X scored six nominations each. Alicia Keys is set to host the ceremony and was on hand to announce some of the nominations on “CBS This Morning.” She was joined by singer Bebe Rexha and CBS’s Gayle King. Here’s a list of some of the Grammy nominees. The complete list of more than 80 categories can be found on Grammy.com . Record of the Year “Hey, Ma” — Bon Iver “Bad Guy” — Billie Eilish “7 Rings” — Ariana Grande “Hard Place” — H.E.R. “Talk” — Khalid “Old Town Road” — Lil Nas X & Billy Ray Cyrus “Truth Hurts” — Lizzo “Sunflower” — Post Malone & Swae Lee Album of the year “I,I”- Bon Iver “Norman F***ing Rockwell” — Lana Del Rey “When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go” — Billie Eilish “Thank U, Next” — Ariana Grande “I Used to Know Her” — H....