At the heart of history’s most successful eradication campaign is a mystery. The smallpox vaccine—now also being deployed against monkeypox—contains a live virus that confers immunity against multiple poxviruses. But it is not smallpox or a weakened version thereof. Nor is it monkeypox. Nor is it cowpox, as suggested by the vaccine’s famous origin story involving pus taken from an infected milkmaid to immunize an 8-year-old boy.
In a closely watched speech, the Fed chair foreshadowed further interest rate increases and warned that rates might need to stay high for some time to kill price spikes.
Moderna said it’s not seeking to have the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine removed from the market, nor is it seeking an injunction preventing future sales.
Millions of pregnant people in the United States have now lost access to abortion in their state since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Anti-abortion “trigger laws” have gone into effect in numerous states across the country, including Texas, where it became a felony to perform an abortion starting Thursday, punishable by up to life in prison. We speak to Dr.
One year after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban takeover of the government, the country is in a humanitarian crisis that includes widespread hunger and poverty. Meanwhile, the U.S. refuses to release $7 billion in foreign assets that belong to Afghanistan’s central bank.
Six months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war has reached a stalemate. We speak with Anatol Lieven, senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, who says a possible path to a general ceasefire can begin with securing the safety of the region around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
The federal government’s challenge represents one of its most aggressive actions to preserve abortion rights.
The report by House Democrats examining the pandemic says Trump officials sought vaccine approvals to sway voters before the 2020 election.
It’s the latest hiccup the administration is facing amid broad criticism over its monkeypox response, its messaging to LGBTQ communities about the virus’s risks and its failure to supply enough vaccines to immunize those most susceptible to contracting it.
As the U.S. central banks raises interest rates, the rest of the world is feeling the squeeze.
The Republican Senate candidate sneakily updated his website after accusing his Democratic opponent of “lying about my views on abortion.
Google will confirm that certain places provide abortions through regularly calling them directly and collaborating with “authoritative” data sources.
President Joe Biden appealed to Democrats and Republicans alike to vote in November to protect a slate of civil liberties.
Everyone’s heard it and plenty of us have said it: Democrats need stronger messaging. Team Blue doesn’t often talk the same talk as those across the aisle and under that burning dumpster next to the manure pile. And while that’s not a bad thing—Republican rhetoric has led to appalling acts of violence, terrorism, and a whole-ass insurrection, after all—a bit of a stronger tone is sometimes warranted.
This is one of those times.
Yesterday was Independence Day in Ukraine, which Russia appears to have celebrated mostly in the same way it has celebrated every day for months: with a reported 98 towns shelled, missiles falling in Ukrainian cities (including at least 65 civilian casualties at a train station in Chaplyne, 100 miles from the front), and with many, many failed attempts to capture Ukrainian towns and villages.
On Wednesday, President Joe Biden announced his plan to relieve some of the student debt causing a trillion-dollar economic crisis for tens of millions of Americans—mostly the young, women, and people of color. The plan calls for canceling up to $10,000 in debt for student borrowers who make less than $125,000 a year and $20,000 in relief for Pell Grant recipients with similar incomes.
It’s been more than three years since former Attorney General William Barr issued his infamous “summary” of the report created by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
The arrests this week of five Florida militiamen who called themselves the “B Squad” for their violent actions on Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol serve as a helpful reminder that the Justice Department is still in the process of bringing the insurrectionists who attacked American democracy that day—now over 860 and counting—to justice.
Donald Trump squawked about scammed students in his attack on college loan forgiveness after paying $25 million to settle Trump University lawsuits.
Twitter users mocked the former baseball pitcher, whose video game company defaulted on a $75 million loan from the state of Rhode Island in 2012.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Earlier this month, we published Caitlin Dickerson’s 18-month investigation into the Trump administration’s family-separation policy, the result of more than 150 interviews and a review of thousands of pages of government records, some of which were obtained after a multiyear lawsuit.
America’s first-ever reformulated COVID-19 vaccines are coming, very ahead of schedule, and in some ways, the timing couldn’t be better. Pfizer’s version of the shot, which combines the original recipe with ingredients targeting the Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5, may be available to people 12 and older as early as the week after Labor Day; Moderna’s adult-only brew seems to be on a similar track. The schedule slates the shots to debut at a time when BA.
When Massimo Scanziani’s daughter was young, he’d often see her eyes twitching beneath her eyelids while she was sleeping. These rapid eye movements (or REMs) are so obvious, Scanziani told me, that he can hardly believe that they were described just seven decades ago. In 1953, Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman identified a special phase of sleep when neurons were abuzz and eyes were shut but flitting about.
Few things are more satisfying for a certain type of college-football fan than a Notre Dame loss, and all the better if it’s an upset. So last September, when the Fighting Irish were in danger of losing to the University of Toledo Rockets, 16.5-point underdogs, I knew I had to watch. First I flipped over to NBC, where Notre Dame’s home games are generally aired. No luck. Even before I could Google it, my Twitter feed reminded me of the problem: I had been Peacocked.
We speak with one of the reporters who this week exposed the secretive Chicago industrial mogul who has quietly given $1.6 billion to the architect of the right-wing takeover of the courts — the largest known political advocacy donation in U.S. history. The donor is Barre Seid, who donated all of his shares in his electronics company, Tripp Lite, to the nonprofit group run by Leonard Leo, who helped select former President Trump’s conservative Supreme Court nominees.
Oklahoma plans to execute a person a month for the next two years, starting today. We get an update from Connie Johnson, former state senator and murder victim family member with the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, and speak with world-renowned anti-death-penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean. “Our death penalty is broken. It always was from the beginning,” Prejean tells Democracy Now! “I recognize that this is torture and an abuse of human rights.
“Freedom Dreams: Black Women and the Student Debt Crisis,” a new short documentary from The Intercept, profiles Black women educators and activists struggling under the weight of tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of dollars in student loan debt. It is directed by Astra Taylor and Erick Stoll, narrated by former Ohio state Senator Nina Turner, and was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
In a much-anticipated move, President Biden has signed an executive order Wednesday for student debt relief that could help more than 40 million borrowers by canceling up to $20,000 of their federal loans. Many advocates for canceling student debt say Biden’s plan doesn’t go far enough, while Republicans decry the plan as “student debt socialism.
The newly effective laws make good on conservative promises to swiftly prohibit abortion in as many states as possible.
The Federal Reserve chair needs to convince markets he means business when he addresses the landmark conference of economists on Friday.