Monday. Morning News from the Weekend.

Partial Reprint from the Dispatch.

• The Senate on Sunday passed the $750 billion Inflation Reduction Act in a 51-50 party-line vote, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the tie. If passed by the House, it would spend more than $300 billion in tax credits over 10 years to boost electric vehicles and renewable energy, among other climate provisions. It would also allow Medicare to negotiate the prices of some drugs, add a 15 percent minimum tax on large companies, and spend $80 billion to expand the Internal Revenue Service.
• China on Saturday announced military drills lasting through August in the Bohai and Yellow Seas—north of Taiwan, bordering North and South Korea—on the heels of last week’s live-fire exercises encircling Taiwan in retaliation for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island democracy. Taiwan’s defense ministry called the drills a “simulated attack” and said Chinese jets crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait. China, which considers Taiwan part of its territory, sanctioned Pelosi and her immediate family on Friday and froze climate talks and other bilateral cooperation with the United States.
• Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb on Friday signed into law a ban on abortions after 10 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for rape, incest, to protect a mother’s life or physical health, and for fetuses diagnosed with lethal anomalies. Only hospitals and hospital-owned outpatient centers may perform abortions under the law, which takes effect Sept. 15. Doctors who perform or fail to report illegal abortions will lose their licenses. Indiana currently allows abortions up to 20 weeks of a pregnancy.
• Israel and the Iran-backed Palestinian Jihad militant group in Gaza declared an Egypt-brokered truce Sunday after three days of fighting. Israel killed a leader of the group Friday and another Saturday in an airstrike on an apartment building in a refugee camp, also killing two other militants and five civilians. Gaza officials said at least 40 people died in strikes including civilians and children, and Israel’s army said Gaza militants fired nearly 1,000 rockets toward Israel.
• Matthew DePerno—Trump-backed GOP nominee for Michigan attorney general—was involved with improperly accessing a vote counting machine to search for evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, Reuters reported Sunday. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office on Friday alleged that several pieces of evidence connect DePerno to the incident and requested a special prosecutor be named to avoid a conflict of interest in the investigation—DePerno is running to unseat Nessel.
• A Texas jury on Friday ordered Infowars’ Alex Jones to pay $45.2 million in punitive damages to the parents of a child killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting, on top of $4.1 million in compensatory damages awarded Thursday. Jones was found liable last year for defaming Sandy Hook victims’ families with his false claims that they were actors and the shooting was a hoax. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack has requested the contents of Jones’ phone revealed during the trial to examine his role in the attack.

Europeans are actually re-opening coal plants as Russia shuts off supplies of natural gas. Increasing the flow of supplies from the Marcellus shale to the Northeast, as well as using the Atlantic coast LNG terminals to ship gas to Europe, will make the energy mix cleaner, not dirtier.” 

https://twitter.com/NRO/status/1555721087345983494

• Can an atheist oppose abortion?  Of course, David argues in Sunday’s French Press, pointing to one who helped broadened David’s own pro-life perspective to include more than abortion. “We might not agree on faith, but we can agree on biology, and biology implicates morality,” David writes. “There is a secular case for life.”

And better late than never. In January the Supreme Court agreed to hear affirmative action cases involving Harvard and North Carolina.