Psyche: When does a human embryo have the moral status of a person?

 As these arguments rage on, technological breakthroughs in embryo culture that make it easier to keep embryos alive in the lab for longer are putting greater pressure on the 14-day rule. For decades, the rule was relatively academic. In reality, sustaining an embryo outside of the human body beyond seven days was long considered a near-impossible feat. But this has begun to change. In 2016, scientists in both New York and Cambridge grew human embryos for 13 days, pushing against the limit of the regulations. Then in November 2019, a group of scientists at the Yunnan Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research in the Chinese city of Kunming published a study that sent reverberations throughout the world of reproductive medicine – they’d successfully cultivated monkey embryos for 20 days. [...]

So, the benefits to human health of extending the 14-day rule could be sizeable, but those who oppose the change fear that it will be a slippery slope towards an ever-increasing time window for human embryo research, and also lead to the approval of other reproductive technologies that remain highly contentious. For instance, concerns were raised at a discussion held by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics in 2017 that extending the 14-day rule could help pave the way for the legalisation of human germline engineering, which would allow clinics to create genetically modified babies via the editing of embryo genomes. Giulia Cavaliere, a bioethicist at Lancaster University, is among those warning that extending the limit for embryo research could risk undermining public trust in scientists and regulators. [...]

In this debate, the ultimate dilemma has to do with the moral status that we attribute to embryos. Some people feel that any embryo, from the point of fertilisation, has the same right to protection as a newborn baby, and so cultivating it purely for research would be wrong. Others maintain that embryos are simply a ball of cells, and so don’t warrant any special rules. Somewhere in the middle lies the gradualist viewpoint whereby an embryo is seen as growing in moral value as it develops, eventually acquiring, at some point before birth, the status of a person.

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Wendover Productions: Why Long-Haul Low-Cost Airlines Always Go Bankrupt

 

Vox: Why government agencies should move from DC to the Midwest

Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and other former industrial powerhouses in the Midwest are struggling. The industries that have supported those cities have gone away, leaving them overbuilt and underpopulated. Meanwhile, coastal cities like New York and Washington, DC are overcrowded and absurdly expensive. So, why not relocate some well-paying federal jobs from the capitol area to the Midwest? Vox's Matt Yglesias explains how such a plan might work.

Deutsche Welle: Moroccan-Israeli peace rapprochement: An (un)expected surprise?

Morocco's reconnection with Israel marks the return to their previous low-level diplomatic relations which had developed in the context of the Oslo accords in the 1990s and had ended with the Second Intifada in 2000. However, cultural ties date back to the pre-Roman Jewish colonies of Mauretania Tingitana around 2,000 years ago.

Despite major waves of migration from Morocco to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s, Morocco is still home to the largest remaining Jewish community in North Africa, while Jews with Moroccan heritage make up the largest minority group of Jewish immigrants in Israel, totaling around 900,000. [...]

In Israel, however, the destiny of the Sahrawi nation does not appear to be a priority. On Thursday, the first day of the Jewish holiday Hanukkah, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu focused on celebrating the new ties with Morocco.

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Social Europe: The rule of law: a simple phrase with exacting demands

 How is it then that two EU governments venture to prolong the anguish of some half a billion Europeans, harming their own populations, by refusing to subject themselves to rule-of-law requirements? This cannot be dismissed as the position of two unhinged autocrats, since their veto has significant popular support in these countries, including 57 per cent approval in Poland. [...]

This has been evident in several instances—from lack of concern with the Silvio Berlusconi media monopoly in Italy to France’s semi-permanent state of emergency, Malta’s and Slovakia’s complacency with political murder and the Spanish government’s response to the 2017 independence referendum in Catalonia. Often, the EU is content with narrowly reducing the remit of the rule of law to a simple matter of legality—ignoring routine violations of core values, such as the right to peaceful assembly, freedom of speech or even the right to liberty and life itself.

Has the EU not thereby set itself up for the current crisis, supplying the ammunition for autocrats to try to absolve themselves from compliance with the rule of law? In turning a blind eye, the European Commission has harmed the union’s very normative foundation, endorsing the blatant abuse of power by the leaders of several of its member states.

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