Extra, Extra
Fur Trade: “The FDA Modernization Act 2.0, signed by President Biden at the end of December with widespread bipartisan support, ends a 1938 federal mandate that experimental drugs must be tested on animals before they are used in human clinical trials. While the law doesn’t ban animal testing, it allows drugmakers to use other methods, such as microfluidic chips and miniature tissue models, which use human cells to mimic certain organ functions and structures.” Wired: The US Just Greenlit High-Tech Alternatives to Animal Testing.
+ Watching the Detectives: “The subcommittee, approved on a party-line 221-211 vote, will be empowered to investigate any federal agency that collects information about Americans, even in cases of an ongoing criminal investigation — a carve-out at odds with the Justice Department’s long-standing practice of not providing information about ongoing investigations.” Commit a crime? Why not investigate the investigators? WaPo: House Republicans form committee to investigate the government. Whatever happened to the good old days when you just threw a fall-guy under the bus and moved on? Allen Weisselberg gets 5-month jail sentence.
+ The House Has a Poster Child: “It is amazing to realize that Walker lost by only a few points, when not so long ago, a candidate with his baggage (and inability to speak in coherent sentences) would have simply dropped out of the race. Surely, we’d reached the bottom of what even the most jaded voters would tolerate. Or so I thought until I started following the improbable tale of George Santos—so far, that does seem to be his name—the weird fabulist who has been elected to the Congress of the United States of America.” It’s sort of sweet that The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols can still be surprised on the downside. Amazingly, George Santos Is a Member of Congress.
+ Drugstore Cowboys: “We want people to be uncomfortable going into a CVS that has a demonstration going on and to consider going to a different pharmacy … We also want to put enough pressure on the companies to retract this decision and not get certified to sell abortion pills.” Next frontier in the abortion wars: Your local CVS.
+ McMahon Overboard: “Last week Vince McMahon exercised his authority as the company’s controlling shareholder to fire three of the WWE’s board members and add himself and two former executives to the board. Two other WWE board members resigned following the move.” This week, his daughter Stephanie McMahon resigned.
+ Globitussin: The Golden Globes returned, and like much of the content they celebrated, the show was meh. Here are the winners. Here are the red carpet looks. And here are the video highlights. (Jerrod Carmichael’s opening monologue is about the only thing worth your time.)