Former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele just can't stomach voting for either major-party presidential candidate. "I was damn near puking during the debates," Steele said Thursday at a dinner in San Francisco in honor of the 40th anniversary of Mother Jones.
Steele, who led the RNC from 2009 to 2011 as the first black GOP chairman, said he won't be casting a ballot for his party's nominee Donald Trump, and he won't vote for Democrat Hillary Clinton either. He cannot support Trump because he has "captured that racist underbelly, that frustration, that angry underbelly of American life and gave voice to that," Steele said. He also argued that Trump only represents about 30 percent of the Republican Party.
Steele is the fifth former RNC chief to refuse to support the GOP nominee. Per Politico's tally, former RNC chiefs Marc Racicot, Mel Martinez, Bill Brock, and Ken Mehlman have all said they will not vote for Trump. Becca Stanek
President Trump's sudden decision to blow off a trip to Denmark, ostensibly over the prime minister's disinterest in selling him Greenland, is obviously not going over well there.
Various Danish politicians have been putting Trump on blast since he said he's postponing his planned trip there on Tuesday night; the president wrote on Twitter that it's because Denmark's prime minister said that "she would have no interest in discussing the purchase of Greenland."
"Trump lives on another planet," Danish politician Pernille Skipper tweeted in response, per The Washington Post. "Self-sufficient and disrespectful." Michael Aastrup Jensen, a member of Danish parliament, told the Post Trump's cancellation is an "insult" and that everyone there literally thought the idea of purchasing Greenland was a joke until recently; he added that the situation is a "disaster." The Danish People's Party's foreign affairs spokesperson Søren Espersen also told a Danish newspaper that Trump is like a "a spoiled child."
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen hasn't gone that far, saying in a press conference on Wednesday morning she was "disappointed and surprised" by the decision, reports The Associated Press. Trump has yet to further comment on the cancellation of this trip, although The New York Times' Maggie Haberman continues to speculate it had nothing to do with not being able to buy Greenland at all, suggesting on CNN the president maybe just didn't feel like it.
"Isn't it possible that he just doesn't want to go?" CNN's Alisyn Camerota asked, Mediaite reports. "He likes to sleep in his own bed. He doesn't love international travel. Maybe he just doesn't want to go." Haberman agreed this is a possibility. Brendan Morrow
Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh (Ill.) wants to get in the ring and work on his left jab, apparently.
Now a conservative talk radio host, Walsh is reportedly exploring a primary challenge to President Trump, and his reasons for doing so are not subtle.
"He's a bully and a coward," Walsh told The Washington Post, referring to the president. "Somebody's got to punch him in the face every single day." The former Illinois lawmaker, the Post notes, has been known for his own "incendiary comments" since he was elected to the House as part of the Tea Party wave in 2010 and served one term.
Assuming Walsh goes through with the plan, he'd reportedly take a different approach from Trump's currently lone primary challenger, former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, who leans libertarian. Instead, Walsh, an immigration hard-liner who voted for Trump in 2016, would attack Trump from the right and "on moral grounds." (It's important to note Weld is also campaigning against Trump's "outrageous racism.")
The Post also mentioned former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (R), former Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), and former Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), as possible GOP primary challengers. Flake said he has no intention of running, but did add that several Republican donors who are worried about the state of the economy have called to ask him to at least consider launching a bid. "They are wondering, if the economy isn't stellar next year, how is the party going to win?," he said. "By the president offending more people?"
Finally, there are the 2012 nostalgists, reportedly self-aware of the futility of their fantasy, who still want a certain Utah politician to throw his hat into the ring. But Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) is not expected enter the race. Read more at The Washington Post. Tim O'Donnell
Roopkund Lake is filled with hundreds of human skeletons, and no one knows why.
The high-altitude lake, which sits in India's Himalayas, has been an archaeological mystery since the morbid contents were discovered by a forest ranger during World War II. There are several extremely creepy details about the lake, which harbors an estimated 500 bodies in its depths. For one thing, "not a single skeleton found so far is intact," The Atlantic reports. For another, the bodies sometimes float back up to the surface, often with their "flesh still attached," The Independent writes.
And for another, the best working theory for explaining why there is a lake full of human bones in the first place just got completely blown out of the water.
Until recently, archaeologists had believed that Roopkund Lake was the site of a massive tragedy that took place some 1,000 years ago — perhaps the skeletons belonged to a group of travelers who had gotten caught in a storm and perished. That theory was swiftly disproven in a new study released Tuesday in Nature Communications, which analyzed the DNA of 37 of the skeletons.
It turns out that while the people indeed perished some 1,000 years ago, it didn't happen all at once. It happened sporadically over time, and as recently as the early 1800s. Plus the bodies weren't South Asian, as one might expect at a lake in India; their DNA makeup was more akin to people from the Mediterranean region, some thousands of miles away.
On the one hand, this is pretty cool for geneticists, who study patterns of human migration. On the other hand, a creepy lake filled with dead bodies just got way harder to explain. Read some of the new theories at The Atlantic. Jeva Lange
Is there still a chance that Spider-Man could swing back home into the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Potentially, although it's not looking good.
Reports emerged on Tuesday that Disney and Sony failed to reach an agreement that would allow them to continue sharing ownership of the Spider-Man character, with Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige no longer set to be involved in the upcoming sequels starring Tom Holland.
This would likely mean that Spider-Man would exit the Marvel Cinematic Universe completely, no longer being able to interact with any of the Avengers in future films. Considering Spider-Man was just recently set up as a crucial component to the rest of the Marvel franchise, and effectively the next Iron Man, this would be a radical shift.
Sony in a statement now says that "we are disappointed but respect Disney's decision." The point of contention, according to Deadline's Tuesday report, was Disney wanting a 50-50 co-financing arrangement on future Spider-Man films. This was reportedly far too high for Sony, which made counteroffers that Disney turned down. The current deal sees Marvel get five percent of the first-dollar gross.
In its response, though, Sony suggests the issue is actually that Feige does not have "time" to work on a movie series not owned by Disney due to his "many new responsibilities," but Deadline writes that this "seems like spin."
Sony also says that "we hope this might change in the future," leaving the door open for a deal to still happen. Indeed, Variety cites a source as saying a deal remains possible, although talks are not currently ongoing. But The Wrap reports that Disney "considers the matter closed," even as Sony believes that "negotiations are ongoing."
If director James Gunn can be re-hired nearly eight months after his public firing, anything's possible when it comes to Marvel. But should nothing change, don't expect Spider-Man to do whatever an Avenger can. Brendan Morrow
Top federal scientists warned about an opioid crisis in 2006. It's not clear why nothing came of it.
The heads of the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) correctly identified the nascent opioid abuse epidemic in March 2006 and nearly convinced then-Surgeon General Richard Carmona to issue an official call to action, the most potent tool the surgeon general has to alert the public, Politico reported Wednesday. But for reasons that aren't fully clear, "the effort didn't lead to any real action, and the toll of death and addiction climbed."
"Why it then didn’t happen is still a mystery to me," Geoffrey Laredo, a former senior NIDA adviser who worked closely on the call to action, tells Politico. "We were facing what we believed was a public health crisis that needed to be addressed and we had what we thought was an agreement with the surgeon general to do a thing. We produced that thing ... and then it never saw the light of day."
Carmona told Politico he held a number of meetings about the call to action with Health and Human Services Department officials and the George W. Bush White House Domestic Policy Council, but his office was dealing with other big crises, like obesity and bioterrorism. "The [opioid] crisis was in its infancy," he said. "It wasn't like we dropped the ball." His term ended a few months after NIDA Director Nora Volkow pressed him for urgent action, and when an acting surgeon general took over, "what little momentum had built for a public warning evaporated," Politico says.
"Had the call to action succeeded it would have been the first major attempt by the federal government to counteract the aggressive marketing of pharmaceutical companies that had led doctors to liberally — too liberally, in retrospect — prescribe the painkillers," Politico reports. Instead, "more than 133,000 people have died from prescription opioids since then — and hundreds of thousands more from street drugs including heroin and illicit fentanyl." Read more about the failed warnings at Politico. Peter Weber