Why Biden commuted 37 federal death row sentences. And, a push to understand long COVID

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🎧 Biden released a statement this morning saying he condemns the people convicted of murder on federal death row and grieves the victims of the crimes, NPR’s Deepa Shivaram tells Up First. He explained his decision to commute the sentences was guided by his conscience, his experience as a public defender, and his time as a senator, vice president and president. The possibility of the incoming administration resuming federal executions that he halted in 2021 played a part in the consideration to commute the sentences, according to Biden’s statement.

🎧 Patient advocacy groups say there’s too much focus on understanding why people get sick and not enough focus on relieving people’s suffering, says Sarah Boden with NPR-KFF Health News collaboration. In the U.S., there are an estimated 17 million adults with long COVID. Many are unable to work or care for their families. The NIH says there's real urgency to discover treatments for the disease's long-term effects, but scientists first need a solid understanding of the underlying biology.

🎧 NPR’s Lauren Frayer recently visited several of those sites. She saw the Byzantine fortifications of a walled old city destroyed by an Israeli airstrike. “These are some of the iconic sites you see on postcards of Lebanon,” she says. In mid-November, the United Nations added 34 sites in Lebanon to its list of protected cultural properties hoping to prevent damage to them. But it did not help with all of them. The World Bank estimates the cost of damage and economic losses from the war in Lebanon to be about $8.5 billion. Rebuilding cannot begin in a lot of areas until Israeli troops fully withdraw.