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As Protestant Christians became more extreme, the Republican Party was similarly becoming more extreme.

“So, one thing that has happened, and one thing that has led the Republican Party to fantasy and wishful untruth more and more into its approach to policy…are now in the Republican mainstream,” Andersen argued.

Falsehoods like President Barack Obama is a secret Muslim or climate change is a Chinese hoax are all issues that are easy to believe if “fantasy and wishful untruths” are the norm. That makes it easier to accept conspiracy theories or fake news.

Anderson explained that he doesn’t care if people believe what they want to believe in private. However, when religious belief “bleeds over into how we manage and construct our economy and our society,” there’s a problem that will cause lasting trouble for the country.

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The Randolph hairstylist said her two young children — a 5-year-old girl and an 8-year-old boy — had been behaving badly “due to evil spirits,’’ so last month she took them to two sisters who she claimed could cast out the demons.

During a five-day period in an East Bridgewater apartment, according to police documents, one of the sisters threatened to cut off the boy’s head. They allegedly blew fire into the girl’s face, burning her and inflicting permanent disfigurement. And on two occasions, the sisters and the girl’s mother held her down, and used a sharp object resembling a needle to cut her arm and collarbone area.

Police charged the women with abusing the children but the sisters said they were practicing their religion, Haitian voodoo.

What are the clinical implications of this technique? Could you highlight a few specific conditions that this could prevent in the future?

Aneuploidy is a human genetic disorder related to the addition or deletion of a chromosome, leading to significant morbidity and mortality during infancy or childhood, including Down’s syndrome (an extra 21), Klinefelter Syndrome (an extra X) or XYY syndrome. Using CRISPR/Cas9 – mediated targeted chromosome elimination, an extra chromosome could be selectively eliminated in cultured cells, embryos, and, more importantly, tissues in vivo, providing a potential therapeutic approach for aneuploidy diseases. However, when one of two homologous X chromosome was deleted by this approach, we found that the remaining X chromosome was also mutated. We believe these mutations in the remaining one (XXY and XYY syndrome) or two chromosomes (Down’s syndrome) could be avoided by using sgRNAs that target only one of the two or one of the three homologous chromosomes, based on single nucleotide polymorphism. Aneuploidy is also a hallmark of cancer. CRISPR/Cas9 – mediated targeted chromosome elimination offers a new approach for studying aneuploidy in tumorigenesis and a potential treatment strategy against a broad spectrum of human tumors.

Hillary Clinton on Tuesday expressed regret for not having fired a senior adviser on her 2008 presidential campaign who was accused of repeatedly sexually harassing a young subordinate.

In a lengthy Facebook post, the Democrat sought to explain her decision to deliver a less severe punishment to Burns Strider, who was her faith adviser, despite a recommendation from her campaign manager that Strider be fired.

"I very much understand the question I'm being asked as to why I let an employee on my 2008 campaign keep his job despite his inappropriate workplace behavior," Clinton wrote. "The short answer is this: If I had it to do again, I wouldn't."

Her Facebook post came four days after the New York Times first published an account of the episode and shortly before President Trump delivered his first State of the Union address on Capitol Hill.

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For the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment, insofar as it exists, that’s a good thing. If interpreted correctly, this Clinton report will function much the same as “Your Fave Is Problematic,” the blog that launched a popular catchphrase for beloved celebrities doing and saying dastardly (usually racist, sexist, or homophobic) things. It is, in other words, evidence that sexual harassment can thrive even in a workplace that is the culture’s most on-the-nose symbol of women’s empowerment. It disproves the comforting and false idea that people can be easily sorted into piles of good and bad actors when, in fact, there are a thousand degrees in between. And it is a striking reminder that women, too—to protect their own careers, friends, or self-image—sometimes help male abusers keep up their abuse.

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There is value in this opportunity to evaluate the distance between Clinton’s words and actions. A culture-wide, generations-long epidemic of workplace sexual harassment and assault doesn’t persist without a broad network of complicity, composed of individuals with varying degrees of knowledge and culpability. For any movement against sexual misconduct to succeed, and for observers to fully grasp the machinations of abuse, that network must be scrutinized as thoroughly as the abusers themselves. The New York Times’ reporting on Harvey Weinstein revealed a slew of female executives willing to lure women to meet alone with Weinstein, in addition to a whole class of female assistants employed specifically to facilitate the producer’s bathrobe-and-hotel scheme. Some of those women might be considered victims themselves. That’s not the case with Clinton, who appears to have willingly put her friend’s career and her campaign’s immediate PR concerns above the safety of her female employees. Still, both Clinton and the likes of Weinstein’s assistants belong somewhere in the web of non-abusers who grease the wheels of abuse. We are only starting to understand how those wheels move.

This entry in the ongoing #MeToo saga may frustrate progressives, as did the assault allegations against former Minnesota senator Al Franken, for their illumination of the higher standards for left-leaning politicians. It would hardly be news if a Republican presidential candidate allowed a harasser to keep his job; it would be astonishing news if there wasn’t rampant harassment in, say, the ranks of the Donald Trump campaign. On Friday, the Republican National Committee was silent after its finance chair, Steve Wynn, was accused by dozens of women of sexual misconduct in a Wall Street Journal report. And few were surprised to hear the allegations against Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, and the rest of the Fox News crew, because Fox News displayed just as much contempt for women on air as its male stars did behind the scenes.


But, as I argued when Franken resigned, holding Democrats to a higher standard is a good thing if it means fewer instances in which a woman who’s harassed by a higher-up gets reassigned while her harasser gets a slap on the wrist. According to the Times, in previous months, no former Clinton campaign staffers would speak about the 2008 incident. “That changed in the wake of the #MeToo movement,” the piece says. Today’s brighter spotlight on harassment and abuse is already encouraging progressives to point fingers at one of the most powerful figures on their side. The shame of this public showing of ethical dissonance should be enough to scare them into transforming their own workplaces, too.

There will be a showdown with Satan on Tuesday in the Missouri Supreme Court.

Not with Lucifer himself, but with a group called the Satanic Temple that is going to bat for a woman identified as "Mary Doe." She contends the state’s informed consent law, which required her to wait 72 hours before having an abortion in May 2015, violated her religious beliefs.

Specifically, the woman — identified in the case summary as a "Greene County resident" — says she was forced to view an ultrasound of her fetus and pledge that she read a booklet stating that the “life of every human being begins at conception.”

This despite the fact that Doe advised the doctors at the St. Louis clinic that "she adheres to principles of the Satanic temple and has sincerely held religious beliefs different from the information in the informed consent booklet," the case summary states.

Dozens of people spoke out Monday against a homework assignment made at an Elgin-area U46 school in which it was asserted Christian, Muslim and Jewish faiths all believe in the same God.

One month after the assignment was criticized by U46 school board member Jeanette Ward, people who identified themselves as part of the Christian community attended the school board meeting Monday to add their opposition.

Several people attacked the assignment, quoting Bible and Quran verses to support their argument that Christians do not follow the same God as Muslims. Some of those who spoke live outside the U46 boundaries, including one person who came from Florida.

"To say that Allah of the Quran and the God of the Bible are the same is simply absurd," said Art Ellingsen, a church pastor from Arlington Heights.