Editorial voices from across the country

Editorial voices from newspapers around the United States as compiled by the Associated Press:
Almost 10 years after Alexander Litvinenko died in London, an official inquiry by Britain concluded last week that Russian President Vladimir Putin “probably” ordered Russian agents to kill him. The report deserves the attention of world leaders.
The agents met Litvinenko, a turncoat Russian spy who was once a close ally of Putin, in a posh London hotel and spiked his tea with polonium-210. The radioactive substance caused his agonizing death three weeks later.
Theresa May, the British home secretary, who oversees domestic security, told Parliament that the assassination was “a blatant and unacceptable breach of the most fundamental tenets of international law and civilized behavior.” Employing the British penchant for understatement, she added: “We have to accept that this doesn’t come as a surprise…”
Vice President Joe Biden took his “moonshot” cancer initiative to the heady reaches of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week, bringing a brace of powerful weapons to the fight: decades of government service, a national bully pulpit, and searing personal experience with the disease that killed almost 600,000 Americans in 2015. In fact, by many accounts, the death of his 46-year-old son Beau, from brain cancer last year, prompted Biden to put aside his political goals to wage this battle.
At Davos, Biden announced he already met with three pharmaceutical companies and the head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and that the drug executives said they are “open to a different way of doing business” in order to ensure that promising new therapies get to patients quickly.
Certainly, with this high-profile start, there’s reason for optimism. But daunting barriers remain. More than 40 years after President Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act of 1971, billions of dollars have been devoted to research. While there have been some tantalizing success stories since then, cancer is a complex foe: Researchers acknowledge that they still don’t fully understand metastasis, and many tumors ultimately become resistant to the drugs used to treat them.
The term “moonshot,” which stems from the Kennedy Administration’s push for a space program that was robust enough to put U.S. astronauts on the moon, might seem like a political cliché. At this moment, it’s actually just what is needed.
Over the past month, the name Steven Avery has dominated headlines throughout the state and nation. He was convicted of raping a woman, then through DNA evidence 18 years later was set free, became a poster boy for injustice and filed a $36 million lawsuit against the agencies that put him behind bars.
But his freedom was short-lived.
Two years later, he was back behind bars, this time in connection with the murder of Teresa Halbach, a 25-year-old freelance photographer who worked for Autotrader magazine.
Through the Netflix documentary “Making a Murderer” released Dec. 18, directors Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos analyze the case and present a film questioning whether authorities set up Avery after he sued them.
It’s a film so convincing, hundreds of thousands of people signed an online petition demanding Avery’s freedom. But the filmmakers left many details out.
The Netflix series brushes over important details about Halbach’s death. When questioned about leaving some evidence out, Ricciardi said: “It would be impossible for us to include all the evidence that was presented in the trial … that’s called a trial. What we made was a documentary.”
In that case, viewers should beware of jumping to conclusions based on a documentary which, as Ricciardi pointed out, is different than a trial.