Today's Liberal News

Bayer/Monsanto Wins Roundup Case as Supreme Court Blocks Suit over Link Between Herbicide & Cancer

The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 to restrict thousands of lawsuits claiming Bayer, the parent company of Monsanto, had a duty to warn consumers about potential cancer risks from its popular weed killer Roundup. The case before the Supreme Court began in St. Louis, Missouri, where a resident named John Durnell, who had used Roundup for decades and was later diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, sued Monsanto under Missouri state law for not putting a warning label on its product.

Supreme Court Strips Protections for Haitian & Syrian Immigrants in “Racially Inflected” Decision

Thousands of Haitians and Syrians living in the United States are newly at risk of deportation after the Supreme Court ruled to allow the Trump administration to strip them of “temporary protected status,” or TPS. The program, designed for foreign citizens of countries the U.S. government believes are too unstable or dangerous to be returned to, often due to natural disasters or war, has been a major target of attack by the Trump administration and its anti-immigrant agenda.

Venezuela Earthquakes: U.S. Sanctions Impede Rescue Efforts as Death Toll Soars

The death toll from twin earthquakes that hit Venezuela Wednesday night is expected to reach into the thousands as rescuers continue to search for bodies trapped in the rubble. Hospitals are rapidly reaching a breaking point, and thousands of survivors have been left homeless. Reporter Andreína Chávez’s building was one of the countless residences in Venezuela’s capital Caracas and its surrounding region that were damaged by the massive quakes.

Dark Matter

No one knows what it is.
No one you’d count on
knowing has a clue, which is true
mystery, not obfuscation,
a question contending
with the topsoil of time.
Desire’s what’s the matter
with our lives, a sea parting
to reveal another sea.
Its command renews,
swells and beckons:
You’d be a fool not to love                                     
until the last second.

The Overlooked Reason Europe Doesn’t Have AC

This summer, the transatlantic culture war has fixated on an unlikely flash point: air-conditioning.
Last weekend, I arrived in Paris at the beginning of the heat wave, or canicule, that has stifled the country and much of Europe. Temperatures in France have soared to record-breaking highs, reaching nearly 112 degrees Fahrenheit in certain parts of the country.

The Democracies Can Still Triumph

There is such a thing as too much history. Although this may be a strange reflection for a historian who has just finished a world history in a time of European and Middle Eastern war, the fetishistic obsession with curated versions of nations and empires in the past can blind one to the present and what really matters: how people and their families today wish to live. Yet history is a deathless arsenal of stories and facts that teaches us how humans lived and also sometimes how we should live.

The ‘Two Ships’ Theory of American History

Are Americans one people, or many? Our national motto, “e pluribus unum,” seems to offer the definitive answer to the question: We are many, but one. Even on the verge of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln insisted in his first inaugural address that Americans were united by “the mystic chords of memory” stretching back to Revolutionary battlefields and Patriot graves.

Instagram Plus Is a New Low

A couple of years ago, an old flame of mine had the nerve to start dating a new woman. He had posted a photo with her on Instagram; they were wrapped around each other, smiling, with a cheeky caption that I took to be some sort of lovers’ inside joke. I clicked on her username. She had a public Instagram account, so I was free to peruse her photos until I reached her high-school graduation, or until I made myself cry, whichever came first. I noticed she’d posted an Instagram story that day.