“7 stories to know” is a new Monday series showcasing stories that may have been ignored in the crush of news over the past few weeks, and stories that have continued to evolve over the weekend. Expect to read coverage about health, science, and climate that frequently take second chair to what’s happening at the top of the page, plus information from local sources that the national media may have overlooked.
1. Republicans are making it harder and harder to register new voters
While new voters or voters who have recently moved to a new location can register at any time, there are usually big drives to get people registered ahead of each election. Both parties make an outreach to new voters, but with Democrats holding a 28-point margin among the youngest group of voters, it’s understandable that registration drives tend to be slightly more exciting on the left than on the right.
However, as NPR reports, in this election cycle groups trying to register those new voters are facing a frightening set of obstacles. If Republicans can’t find new voters, they want to make sure no one can.
Since the 2020 election, at least six states have passed legislation cracking down on voter registration drives. Many groups view the laws—enacted by Republicans in Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Missouri, Montana and Tennessee—as an existential threat to their work, and several have shut down operations rather than risk financial penalties or prison time.
To justify these new rules, Republicans have been spreading unfounded claims about Democrats attempting to register undocumented immigrants. Claims about noncitizen voting have reached the U.S. House in the form of unfounded fears spread by Speaker Mike Johnson, and they’ve been blasted around social media with the help of Elon Musk.
Backed by these ridiculous, racist, and self-serving claims, Republicans have drafted new limits on voter registration that are truly draconian. In Kansas, if a potential voter mistakes someone offering to register them to vote for an election official, that person can be charged with a felony.
“If you're [convicted of] a felony, you lose your right to vote. So you could lose your right to vote for registering voters," Davis Hammet of the group Loud Light said.
In Florida, legislators bumped the maximum fine for making a mistake during voter registration from $1,000 to $50,000. Then they bumped it again to $250,000, while imposing additional restrictions on how organizations can register voters. It was enough to force even long-established groups like the League of Women Voters of Florida to hang up their registration clipboards.
More new voters means more new Democrats. Republicans know that. So they’re throwing up all the obstacles they can and justifying them with a smokescreen of fear.
All of which makes 2024 more difficult. And more important.
2. Arkansas voters are getting very tired of Sarah Huckabee Sanders
Sarah Huckabee Sanders was elected governor of Arkansas in 2022. And yes, it does seem longer. The people of Arkansas agree.
Since being elected, Sanders’ biggest accomplishment is buying a $19,000 podium and spending months trying to justify this pointless extravagance. But as Politico reports, Arkansans' major gripe with their Donald Trump-loving governor isn’t her taste in custom cabinetry.
It’s how much time she spends courting national attention and how little time she spares for her state.
She cruises between events in a black SUV with tinted windows, accompanied by a state police detail in suits and a comms director who worked for Trump and his 2020 presidential campaign. At open-press events, she takes so few questions, Arkansas reporters are fatalistic about the idea of asking many.
Sanders would rather be found talking up Trump on Fox News and reminding people that she has appeared on several lists of vice presidential prospects. But among the people who pay her salary, her approval rating has dropped more than any other governor’s over the last two years.
As the former communications director for her father put it, “We are in a weird position of having a governor in this state who doesn’t seem to have much interest in governing Arkansas.”
3. Overturning Roe has young men lining up for vasectomies
If Republicans were expecting a second baby boom in the wake of overturning Roe v. Wade, they might need to look up a very special law:the Law of Unintended Consequences. While they’ve done everything in their power to force women to have to carry any pregnancy to term, no matter how dire the circumstances, it seems as if they’ve triggered a countering effect.
As the Los Angeles Times reports, doctors are seeing more young men seeking vasectomies.
“The thing that actually triggered it was the court decision,” [24-year-old Kori] Thompson said. …
“If [abortion is] effectively illegal,” Thompson said, “then I felt that this was necessary.” His girlfriend also disliked the effects of hormonal birth control, “so now I’ve decided to go on permanent birth control. It’s way easier.”
Doctors also report an increase in tubal ligations, as women seek to protect themselves against the threat of getting pregnant and having no options. And there’s no doubt about the cause.
The University of Utah researchers found that before the Supreme Court ruling, vasectomy rates were consistently higher in states categorized as “hostile” or “illegal” for abortion by the Center for Reproductive Rights, compared with states that were not as restrictive. The same was true after the ruling.
Republicans may get their wish for fewer abortions. At the cost of fewer kids in states that take rights away from women.
4. First human trial of a ‘universal’ COVID vaccine shows promising results
The title of this paper from British medical journal The Lancet may be difficult to parse, but it covers the first human trials of a new COVID-19 vaccine. This isn’t an RNA vaccine or any of the other types of vaccines we’ve seen so far. It’s a (take a deep breath) “self-assembling SARS-CoV-2 WA-1 recombinant spike ferritin nanoparticle (SpFN)” vaccine. Whew.
The advantage of such vaccines is that, rather than addressing a small portion of the spike protein that is subject to change among variants of COVID-19, these vaccines provide larger “stabilized” nanoparticles containing more of the virus’ genetic sequence. The result is, hopefully, a vaccine that’s effective against the forms of COVID-19 we have today and the ones we’ll have tomorrow. It’s not the only approach to a universal vaccine in the works. A “cocktail” vaccine containing many different versions of the spike protein is also under development. However, that one is still in animal trials.
SpFN vaccines have been in the pipeline for some time. That includes early research at the National Institutes of Health in 2021. As with a lot of new vaccine types, it’s taken some time to move from in vitro and animal testing and make it to the first human trial.
This first trial was small, with only 24 people receiving the vaccine (5 others got a placebo). As with most Phase One testing, it’s hard to tell exactly how effective the vaccine was, especially now that the rate of COVID-19 infections is down from previous peaks. The researchers also admit that their statistical samples were too small to tell what amount of the vaccine was most effective. For now, they can only tell that the vaccine was well tolerated, with only a few minor side effects.
They can also tell that the vaccine did stimulate an immune response, and that’s enough for them to proceed to the next step in bringing a universal COVID-19 vaccine to the public.
5. North Carolina moves to make it illegal to wear a mask for health reasons
If the vaccine news represents one step forward, North Carolina took a giant hop back into the realm of MAGA conspiracy land. As Ars Technica reports, the North Carolina Senate voted along straight party lines last week in favor of a Republican bill that would make wearing a mask to protect your health illegal.
The proposed ban on health-based masking is part of a larger bill otherwise aimed at increasing penalties for people wearing masks to conceal their identity while committing a crime or impeding traffic. …
But the bill, House Bill 237, goes a step further by making it illegal to wear a mask in public for health and safety reasons, either to protect the wearer, those around them, or both. Specifically, the bill repeals a 2020 legal exemption enacted amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which allowed for public health-based masking for the first time in decades.
Republicans claimed the bill was necessary because of masks worn by pro-Palestinian protestors on college campuses. However, a portion of the bill that would have protected those wearing masks for health or safety reasons was explicitly struck before the bill was passed.
Republicans struck protecting health from the acceptable reasons to wear a mask
Fortunately, the bill still allows people to wear masks while riding a motorcycle or participating in a Mardi Gras parade. At least until someone starts a rumor that Mardi gras is anti-Trump.
6. Who owns the moon?
In a 1950 novella, science fiction author Robert Heinlein introduced Delos David "D. D." Harriman, who defied the expectations of naysayers by creating a private mission to the moon based on dozens of often conflicting promises made to various investors. Harriman is the proto-typical Heinlein hero: brilliant, daring, hyper-capitalistic, and pretty much the definition of an a-hole. But while “The Man Who Sold the Moon” dealt with the fictional prospects of making money on the moon, the immediate future is going to be a big decade in Space Law.
With both the U.S. and China set on having astronauts on the lunar surface before the end of the decade, and the guy who already owns the majority of satellites in orbit promising to send his new giant rocket on a crewed round-the-moon mission financed by a Japanese billionaire, there are several potential issues ahead.
Multiple agreements have been signed, including a 1979 U.N. resolution and the more recent Artemis Accords, but as NOTUS reports, there is still a lot of scrambling underway.
Tens of billions of dollars in government funds and key geopolitical interests are at stake. The United States has tapped private industry to establish a presence on the moon — crucially, it wants to accomplish this before China, which has a stated goal of returning to the moon by the end of the decade. China launched a rocket this month to collect samples from the moon’s far side, prompting NASA administrator Bill Nelson to warn once again that “we are in a race” against the country’s secretive space program, which could involve building a lunar military base.
7. This is why English spelling sucks
Rob Words is a YouTube channel for “lovers and learned of English” from British linguist Rob Watts. It’s a fantastic source to learn about the quirks and our incredibly large and frustratingly inconsistent language.