Morning Wire - Friday Afternoon Update | 12.23.22

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

Developing stories you need to know just in time for your drive home. Get the facts first on Morning Wire.   Use Promo Code 'WIRE' for 10% off your Will: https://www.epicwill.com/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This show is brought to you by Epicwill. If you can skip this ad, it means you've already found the roughly five minutes it takes to secure your children's future with Epicwill. We'll have you? Go to Epicwill.com and use promo code Wire to save 10% on Epicwill's complete will package. Again, that's Epicwill.com. Use promo code Wire. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley. It's Friday, December 23rd, and this is your Morning Wire afternoon update. The life expectancy of the average U.S. citizen has reached a 25-year low due to COVID and drug overdoses, the CDC announced Thursday.

The average life expectancy fell for the second year in a row from 77 years to 76.4 in 2021. The drop was attributed predominantly to COVID and synthetic drug overdoses. The three leading causes of death were heart disease, cancer, and COVID. Spain's lower House of Parliament passed a sweeping LGBT law Thursday, that allows people over age 16 to change their legally registered gender without, quote, medical supervision. Under the law drawn up by the center-left coalition government, minors aged 12 or 13 will need a judge's authorization to make the change, while those between 14 and 16 will have to be accompanied by their parents or legal guardians.

And the law also bans so-called conversion therapies related to sexual preference or gender identity. It establishes fines and punishments for attacks on LGBT people, and overturns a ban that previously prevented lesbian couples from registering their children under both parents' names. Just in time for Christmas, New York legislators returned to the state capital Thursday to give themselves a nice holiday gift, a pay raise that would make them the nation's best paid state lawmakers. Members of the State Assembly and Senate voted to raise their base salaries by 29% up to 142,000 per year. The bill does, however, restrict the amount New York legislators can make from other jobs. Before Thursday's vote, Republican State Senator George Braylo said he thinks that they should prioritize other things.

The whole idea of giving a 30% raise to legislators just unconscionable. Right now, skyrocketing prices for everything are what people are concerned about. And this is just not only is it bad timing, but it's too much and certainly not something I believe the average person in New York would support. After a 6.4 magnitude earthquake caused damages and deaths in Northern California on Tuesday, a series of aftershocks have continued to impact the region, including a 3.3 magnitude earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area. The 6.4 magnitude earthquake Tuesday left two people dead, a dozen injured, and thousands of people without power.

Uganda's government says it's received more than 5,000 doses of Ebola vaccines for a clinical trial to assess their protection against the Sudanese. strain of the virus that caused an outbreak with over 50 deaths. The country's health minister said on Thursday that a global expert consultation will be held on January 12th to determine when the trials should start. That's a day after the World Health Organization is expected to declare the Uganda outbreak over if no new cases are reported. A new report commissioned by the Marine Corps suggested that the Corps dropped the use of Sir and Ma'am in boot camp in order to be more gender-inclusive. The 738-page report completed by the University of Pittsburgh also notes that the Army, Navy, and Coast Guard have already de-emphasized gender and now use last names or ranks of their seniors to address them.

The senior leadership of the Marine Corps will now consider the proposal. The Phoenix Suns have a new owner, billionaire mortgage lender Matt Ishbia. Isbia purchased the majority stake for $4 billion, the highest purchase price in the league's history. He bought the shares from Robert Sarver, who announced who would sell the franchise after an NBA investigation into allegations of misogyny and racism, resulted in Sarver being fined $10 million and given a one-year suspension. Those are your drive-home updates this afternoon. To learn more about these stories, go to Dailywire.com. And for more in-depth discussion of the biggest stories of the day, listen to the latest full episode of Morning Wire every morning.