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After making it through the state legislature, a bill that reschedules two medications used in abortions as “controlled dangerous substances” has now been signed into Louisiana state law, making it the first US state to make such a move.Under bill SB 276, mifepristone and misoprostol have been reclassified as Schedule IV substances – a group typically reserved for substances like Xanax and Valium – meaning that anyone found in possession of them without a prescription could be subject to fines and even jail time. Pregnant women, however, will be exempt from prosecution.The original subject of the bill was to make it a crime to give women abortion pills without their knowledge – which passed through the House and Senate – with the reclassification of the two medications later added as an amendment.Mifepristone and misoprostol can be used in combination to end a pregnancy. The former is taken first to block the body’s progesterone, which stops the pregnancy from growing. Misoprostol is then taken up to 48 hours later in order to empty out the uterus.However, they do have medical uses beyond abortion: misopristol, for example, can be used to prevent stomach ulcers, whilst mifepristone is a treatment for high blood sugar in some people with Cushing’s syndrome.Abortion is already banned in Louisiana unless under very specific circumstances, such as to save the pregnant person’s life – though rape and incest were recently rejected as exceptions. Advocates of the new law, such as Governor Jeff Landry, have argued that it “protects women across Louisiana”. Opponents are concerned that it could affect access to the pills for their other uses, and that rescheduling them has no basis in science.“They are safe and effective, and they are not dangerous drugs of abuse to be on a schedule of a controlled dangerous substance list,” emergency medicine physician Dr Jennifer Avegno, the director of the New Orleans Health Department, told NBC News. “From a medical standpoint, health care providers think this is bad science and not well-informed.”The future of access to abortion medications goes beyond Louisiana, however – it’s about to play out on the national stage. In the coming weeks, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on FDA v Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, in which the latter is arguing that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) shouldn’t have made it easier to access mifepristone.If successful – though there’s some skepticism that it will be – the FDA could be forced to make changes to the prescription rules for abortion medication, which could make the pills more difficult to access on a national scale.The current case came in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade back in 2022, ending 50 years of federal abortion rights.

Forget breaking into the housing market or the millionaire class – millennials have officially just reached even headier heights. Specifically, heaven. The Vatican announced recently that Carlo Acutis, a London-born and Milan-raised boy who died from leukemia in 2006 aged just 15, now qualifies for canonization – in other words, he’s ready to be declared a saint. He’s the first millennial to ever achieve this milestone, and that’s something you may find surprising. Not because millennials aren’t particularly saintly or anything, but because well, let's face it: picture a saint. Chances are, they're some Ancient Roman guy who's died thanks to too many arrows or not enough skin. Not a modern kid with a heavenly claim to fame for being good at programming.But despite their medieval reputation, new saints are totally a thing – in fact, the current Pope has already officially recognized more than 900 of them in the past decade or so. So how does an ambitious millennial get themselves in the chorus line?Turns out, there’s a formal process for that.Who can be a saint?First of all, some terminology: according to Catholic doctrine – as well as that of the Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, Oriental Orthodox, and Lutheran churches – anybody who is in heaven is a saint.That said, there’s a special group – currently running to over 10,000 people – who various churches believe deserve special recognition. The process for deciding who qualifies differs depending on what denomination you’re interested in, but in the Catholic church, it’s a three-step progression: first, you’re declared “venerable”, then “blessed”, and finally, the canonization of a capital-S “Saint”. Now, the process hasn’t always been so formal. Back in the first millennium CE, saints were kind of chosen the same way we choose who wins Eurovision today: “In the first five centuries of the Church, the process for recognizing a saint was based on public acclaim or the vox populi, vox Dei (voice of the people, voice of God),” explains the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). “There was no formal canonical process as understood by today's standards.” That’s partly why the earliest saints – figures like Saint Lidwina, who supposedly survived for 37 years lacking food or sleep and shed her skin; or Saint Denis, best known for the story of him picking up his own decapitated head and walking several miles through Paris, preaching a sermon on repentance – have such bizarre backstories. All it took back then was for enough people to decide “yeah, you probably could escape from a dragon’s belly by using a cross to induce extreme reflux if you were holy enough”, and boom! You’re a saint. You didn’t need to be human to be considered a saint. You didn’t even need to actually exist.Clearly, things needed to change – and change they did, on January 31, 993. It was then that Pope John XV kicked off the process of developing a formal canonization procedure when he made history’s first ever formally Pope-recognized saint, Saint Ulrich. From then on, things got more formal – and if you wanted to be officially recognized as a saint, you’d need the Pope’s approval.The devil’s advocateThe next big shake-up came in 1588 – things don’t tend to move fast in the Catholic Church – with Pope Sixtus V’s establishment of the Sacred Congregation of Rites. A lot of this was basically admin, but it also set up one of the most iconic positions in the church hierarchy: the devil’s advocate.Today, it’s a title proudly borne by some of the most annoying people on the internet, but originally, the devil’s advocate – more properly known as the Promoter of the Faith – was one of the most important people in the canonization process. “This official was appointed to argue against a proposed canonization or a beatification; that's the step right before canonization,” explained Boston Globe language columnist, Ben Zimmer, in an interview with NPR in 2013. “And in this position, the person was supposed to take a skeptical view about this candidate's saintliness, questioning were these really miracles that the candidate performed?”“You know, if you've read Paradise Lost, you know that the devil is very good at arguing, very persuasive,” he added. “I guess the idea then was that there should be a position advocating a negative view, even if it was unpopular, just so that something as important as sainthood can withstand any kind of skepticism.”Indeed, it’s no coincidence the position was created when it was: by the late 16th century, people were starting to lose their medieval credulity and lean into things like logic and the scientific method. Not only that, but Catholicism was no longer the only game in town; newly emboldened Protestant sects were starting to accuse the church of illegitimacy, while local heretical movements were gaining influence across Europe among those who favored the old more mystical ways.The devil’s advocate, then, existed to do two things. First, to remind the fringe religious groups who was in charge of religious matters – viz, the Church. Second, to convince skeptics that there was at least some kind of oversight to the process – that any formally recognized Saints had been proven to be extra-holy, and they were no longer just going off the word of some bishop’s brother’s wife’s friend’s niece that her friend totally grew a beard to repel men and should therefore be canonized.While the role of the devil’s advocate was all but abolished in 1983, there’s still room for opposing views to be heard – and actively solicited – during the canonization process. And these days, it doesn’t have to be a church official, a Catholic, or even a Christian to present objections: famously, the staunchly atheist Christopher Hitchens was invited to (unsuccessfully) testify against the canonization of Mother Theresa in 2003, calling her “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.”How to become a modern saintSo, if after all this, you still want to become an officially recognized Saint, what do you need to do? Well, step one is easy enough: die.After that, you’re going to have to wait a while. “Five years must pass from the time of a candidate's death before a cause may begin,” explains the USCCB. “This is to allow greater balance and objectivity in evaluating the case and to let the emotions of the moment dissipate.”And we know: half a decade seems like a long time to languish in normal, non-saintly dead personhood. The good news is, if you’re well connected enough, your supporters might be able to convince the Pope to waive this waiting period, as was the case for Mother Theresa and Pope John Paul II. If not, however – well, just be thankful you didn’t die before 1983, when the minimum was fifty years after death. Once the waiting period is up, your supporters can contact the local bishop and ask him to open up an investigation into your life. And it is thorough: “The first thing you have to do is research anything the person has written or published, and then you begin studying anything they have left behind in terms of documentation,” Reverend Gabriel O’Donnell, a postulator for the Catholic church – that is, someone responsible for presenting cases for canonization – told PBS in 2011.“[It’s] page after page of norms,” he added, “and you have to follow each step carefully. If you miss a step the whole thing can be thrown out as invalid, and it’s happened to some causes.”Indeed, the evidence of your life can and likely will run to thousands of pages in length, all following strict Vatican guidelines. The goal is to find proof of a life of “heroic virtue” – and the bar is pretty high. “The person has to be holy on a personal level,” Reverend James Martin told PBS, “beyond just doing, you know, great deeds, beyond just founding a religious order or being pope or something like that.”Once the evidence is collected, it’s sent to the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, in the Vatican. A group of nine theologians examines the case and votes on whether you were sufficiently heroic or martyred; if they approve, it gets passed on to the cardinals and bishops of the Dicastery for their examination and approval. Should they also agree that your life or death was holy enough to qualify, they’ll send your file on to the pope, and you’ll be declared officially Venerable or Blessed – the exact title depends on what precisely makes you especially holy.Either way, you’re one step closer to sainthood – but the next hurdle is a hard one. You have to perform a miracle.And “the Vatican’s bar is very high,” Martin explained. “So, the miracle, which is usually a medical miracle or a healing, must be instantaneous, right? It must be non-recurring. It must be not attributable to any other treatment, basically, and it must just be the result of praying to that one saint.”Like the devil’s advocates of yore, there are people specifically employed to treat claims of miracles with skepticism. Any reports are reviewed by a panel of scientists and doctors tasked with finding rational explanations for the event: “The doctors and scientists basically don’t say this is a miracle or not,” Martin explained. “They say to the Vatican, ‘This is inexplicable.’”At this point, it’s up to the pope again: if he declares that a miracle has occurred thanks to your intercession, you’re eligible for beatification. For Acutis, the soon-to-be millennial saint, beatification came in 2020, when Pope Francis declared that the recovery of a seven-year-old boy from a rare pancreatic disorder after coming into contact with a shirt of Acutis' was officially miraculous.But we’re not at sainthood yet, believe it or not. For that, you need a second miracle to your name, and it has to have happened after beatification. Should you pull this off – and don’t forget, you’re dead at this point, so you can’t cheat – you can finally be canonized, and formally recognized as a saint.Get through all these steps, and you too can be a modern millennial saint, with hundreds of thousands of Catholics throwing a big party in your honor. And sure, it’s a lot more difficult than just having a pet dog or an orgasm, but hey – you gotta do what you gotta do, we suppose.All “explainer” articles are confirmed by fact checkers to be correct at time of publishing. Text, images, and links may be edited, removed, or added to at a later date to keep information current.  

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) marked his seventh month in office Saturday, a lame-duck speaker hampered by conservative critics, office dysfunction, and a shadow race to replace him before he’s even gone. Staff turnover happens, and it often happens in waves. You’ll see a lot of turnover at the top of a new year, as team members look for fresh starts; you’ll see it in the spring, for those who decide to put in another six months before tapping out; and you’ll see it at the end of summer, as Capitol Hill’s denizens hedge their bets before the voters judge their work on Election Day. Still, four senior departures in two days is a terrible look, and that’s just what Johnson underwent last week, when Brittan Specht, Jason Yaworske, and Preston Hill announced they’d be joining a D.C. lobbying firm. Later the same day, reports leaked that his communications director, Raj Shah, formerly of the Trump White House, was leaving as well. ‘It’s a sign they know he's not going to be speaker at the end of the year.’ It's no secret that Johnson marked a major shift in staffing at the speaker’s office. There hadn’t been a real shake-up since Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). Speakers Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and later Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) had largely kept their predecessor’s staff on. Johnson opted to bring in a largely fresh team, a sign that gave early hope to conservatives hoping for a change in the direction of Republican leadership. Those who stayed included Specht, Yaworske, and Hill, all of whom reportedly gave time limits on their service to aid in the transition. But people don’t swim away from a happy ship, and it’s no secret that frustration has gripped a speaker’s office marred by inexperience. “You’re seeing the heavies with political experience leaving,” one longtime Senate aide and observer told Blaze News. “The people leaving are pros. It tells me maybe nobody was listening to them. It’s also a sign they know he's not going to be speaker at the end of the year.” Republican critiques frequently focus on Johnson’s chief of staff, Hayden Haynes, who was the congressman’s chief before his unexpected election, but whom many consider to be in over his head in the top staff role in Congress. For his part, Johnson’s policy director, Dan Ziegler, has reportedly struggled to predict his counterparts in negotiations between “the four corners,” or the Republican and Democrat leaders of the House and Senate. This inexperience, multiple Republicans told Blaze News, is simply exhausting for staff who can make more money working fewer hours elsewhere. “Experienced policy staff like Specht, Hill, and Yaworske added a critical backstop for a team that was otherwise relatively new to leadership,” one former Republican leadership staffer explained to Blaze News. “They are a huge loss to this team.” And pros at that level aren’t easy to come by on public funding. “There are very few people who operate at that policy level who are in the Capitol Hill system and you would be able to afford,” a top House conservative aide explained. But Johnson’s weaknesses extend much farther than staff defections. His fellow Louisianan and majority leader, Rep. Steve Scalise, has effectively launched a shadow race for the top job, taking lead on briefing conservative movement groups like the Republican Study Committee and the Conservative Action Project on the Republican reconciliation agenda. “He's basically doing a publicity tour,” an attendee at the Conservative Action Project breakfast told Blaze News. It’s an aggressive play and made actually believable after the brain drain in Johnson’s policy corner. The question for Scalise is, first, whether he can actually wrest control, and second, whether he can deliver on the things Republican candidate Donald Trump actually wants from these negotiations. The whole time he’ll be essentially shadowboxing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who doesn’t like to share. Scalise’s success aside, the writing is on the wall for Mike Johnson. And that’s not a criticism; it’s a reality. Blaze News: Desperate to kneecap Justice Alito, liberal media try tying him to Bud Light boycottSign up for the Christopher Bedford newsletterSign up to get Blaze Media senior politics editor Christopher Bedford's newsletter.IN OTHER NEWS Senators target McKinsey & Co. for playing footsie with treason Rubio, Hawley target global adviser network after they deliver a report to China on how to dominate warfare Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) sent a letter Wednesday to a McKinsey Global Management partner demanding that the company come clean on its dealings with China — and cease any future business. The company has denied a Financial Times report from February linking it to a report on how the Chinese military can outmatch the United States. The think tank that produced the report, the Urban China Initiative, was reportedly cofounded by McKinsey, shares McKinsey's Beijing address, and was hosted on a McKinsey domain. The report says it was compiled using McKinsey research, questions to the Initiative were directed to McKinsey’s China office, and the report’s forward was written by McKinsey China’s top guy, Lola Woetzel, who reportedly hand-delivered the report to Chinese then-Premier Li Keqiang, the second-highest-ranking Chinese official before his retirement. McKinsey’s business with the Department of Defense, FBI, CIA, NSA, and Director of National intelligence runs deep. According to a November 2023 report obtained by Blaze News:The Department of Defense (DOD) has paid McKinsey approximately $450 million since 2008. The firm has received these revenues while executing 90 prime contracts for the Department, plus an additional 15 subcontracts. It has also made at least $17 million from the FBI, as well as undisclosed amounts from the CIA, NSA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Its DOD projects have focused on the F-35 fighter jet program, missile defense systems, and advanced microelectronics. McKinsey is currently still under contract with the Department of Defense. McKinsey has worked for dozens of Chinese state-owned entities, with such organizations reportedly accounting for 30% of all the firm’s Chinese engagements. It counts several influential and controversial companies among its SOE clients, including COSCO Shipping, whose maritime fleet has allegedly aided the Chinese navy in its overseas expansion; as well as China Communications Construction Company and China Unicom, both of which have allegedly aided Chinese development of artificial islands to support dubious territorial claims in the South China Sea."Your company's inability to come clean about its dealings with China,” the two Republicans wrote, “disqualifies it from future work with the United States government — a government your company has worked to undermine both economically and militarily at the behest of our national's primary geopolitical adversary." Financial Times: McKinsey-led think-tank advised China on policy that fed US tensions THE FIRE RISES: Tablet: ‘What Nellie saw’ The Free Press’ Nellie Bowles’ new book, “Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History,” has been panned by all the usual commissars. The New York Times Book Review accused her of the awful crime of not wanting homeless vagrants taking over her city park. The New Yorker and Washington Post were furious that she’d criticize the grand new experiment. So, what was so bad about it all? Tablet reports on what this liberal apostate really saw:Early-2020s wokeism exerts a dismal fascination in part because it was (is?) more a patchwork than a consistent ideology. In this way it resembles liberalism, conservatism, and a few other -isms, only more so. Wokeism began in the wake of the Floyd murder with a neo-Puritan practice of self-examination geared toward the spiritual regeneration of enlightened “white people.” This project merged with a patrolling of speech engineered by academic elites who were carting around a barrelful of new phraseology. When the pandemic hit, the protesters cast their lot with the surveillance state and the powers that be, since social change could only be dictated from above. Wokeism immediately added a contrary aspect, though—heavily-armed liberated zones in West Coast cities run by violent male youths who, instead of being agonized by their skin color (mostly super-pale, this being the Pacific Northwest), ran rampant like bite-sized made men hoisting their AKs. Those anarchist spaces were short-lived—people got killed. So, wokeism pivoted to milder forms of self-expression, like queering yourself in inventive ways, even if you were purely vanilla. (Bowles describes the speech given by Michaela Kennedy-Cuomo, Andrew Cuomo’s daughter, when she came out as “demisexual,” meaning she only wants to have sex with people she’s emotionally attached to.) Somewhere in there came the genius inspiration of Tema Okun, a middle-aged white woman, who said that Black kids, and maybe white kids too, shouldn’t try to get the right answers in school, since objectivity was toxic whiteness. Oh, and there was also that business of ending prison sentences for theft, pulling down public monuments and paintings of “white men,” helping drug addicts get high, and other interesting stuff. Puritanism and libertarianism, of the somewhat unhinged Murray Rothbard sort, were the strange bedfellows of the wokeist movement. In the 1960s Rothbard had urged getting rid of the police, since vigilantes would do a much better job in a free market. But the new woke libertarianism was clothed in utopian social welfare garb, which made it all the more confusing. Cops would be replaced not by armed gangs but by social service professionals who would eliminate all crime, since people are inherently good and do bad things only because of social oppression. Yet there was still room for healthy mayhem, as long as it was left-wing violence directed at the police and others deemed to be “fascists.” Over time, the Puritan side of wokeism faded, and the urge to mortify white flesh gave way to a vogue for trans-humanist gender expression, coupled with an admiration of the noble “bodies of culture” that remained nonwhite. (Bowles quotes a professor on the radio claiming that “rape did not exist among Native nations” before contact with white people.) It has ended, at least for now, with the adulation of the decidedly nonwhite Hamas with the noble hang gliders, bravely resisting the white Jews whom they burn and rape.

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