This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner will be announced in two days. In Slate today, Joshua Keating explained the strengths and weaknesses, as it were, of top contenders ranging from high-profile newsmakers like Pope Francis to worthy but lesser-known candidates like Congolese gynecologist Denis Mukwege. In other noteworthy news:
- The Obama administration deferred to Republicans and meat-industry lobbyists and chose not to officially endorse the idea that reducing national meat intake would be good for the environment.
- Six thousand drug offenders in federal prisons are about to be freed.
- A school district in Florida settled a lawsuit involving three students who died within two months of each other in 2011 after being hypnotized by their high school principal.
- The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to scientists who figured out why we aren’t “a chemical chaos.”
- And Chinese people are wearing fake bean sprouts in their hair.
Have a good day out there!
