GOP derails Senate Dems’ bill boosting vets benefits amid disputes over spending, Iran
WASHINGTON — A divided Senate on Thursday derailed Democratic legislation that would have provided $21 billion for medical, education and job-training benefits for the nation’s veterans. The bill fell victim to election-year disputes over spending and fresh penalties against Iran.
Each party covets the allegiance of the country’s 22 million veterans and their families, and each party blamed the other for turning the effort into a chess match aimed at forcing politically embarrassing votes.
Republicans used a procedural move to block the bill after Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., chided GOP lawmakers about their priorities.
“I personally, I have to say this honestly, have a hard time understanding how anyone could vote for tax breaks for billionaires, for millionaires, for large corporations and then say we don’t have the resources to protect our veterans,” said Sanders, the measure’s chief author.
Democrats noted that more than two dozen veterans groups supported the legislation. But Republicans said they still favor helping veterans while also wanting to be prudent about federal spending.
LDS church: Members not taught they’ll get planet in afterlife, as told in ‘The Book of Mormon’
SALT LAKE CITY — The Mormon church is pushing back against the notion that members of the faith are taught they’ll get their own planet in the afterlife, a misconception popularized in pop culture most recently by the Broadway show “The Book of Mormon.”
A newly posted article affirms the faith’s belief that humans can become like God in eternity, but says the “cartoonish image of people receiving their own planets” is not how members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints envision it.
“While few Latter-day Saints would identify with caricatures of having their own planet, most would agree that the awe inspired by creation hints at our creative potential in the eternities,” the article says.
The expectation of exaltation is more figurative and ambiguous than boiling it down to living on one planet, it says.
“Church members imagine exaltation less through images of what they will get and more through the relationships they have now and how those relationships might be purified and elevated,” the article says.
Teen survives rare cancer and then wants to study it, helping scientists find gene mutation
WASHINGTON — First the teenager survived a rare cancer. Then she wanted to study it, spurring a study that helped scientists find a weird gene flaw that might play a role in how the tumor strikes.
Age 18 is pretty young to be listed as an author of a study in the prestigious journal Science. But the industrious high school student’s efforts are bringing new attention to this mysterious disease.
“It’s crazy that I’ve been able to do this,” said Elana Simon of New York City, describing her idea to study the extremely rare form of liver cancer that mostly hits adolescents and young adults.
Making that idea work required a lot of help from real scientists: Her father, who runs a cellular biophysics lab at the Rockefeller University; her surgeon at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; and gene specialists at the New York Genome Center. A second survivor of this cancer, who the journal said didn’t want to be identified, also co-authored the study.
Together, the team reported Thursday that they uncovered an oddity: A break in genetic material that left the “head” of one gene fused to the “body” of another. That results in an abnormal protein that forms inside the tumors but not in normal liver tissue, suggesting it might fuel cancer growth, the researchers wrote. They’ve found the evidence in all 15 of the tumors tested so far.
By wire sources