Updated at 12:52 p.m. ET on June 7, 2022.When the Palestinian American journalist and longtime Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh was killed on May 11 while reporting on an Israeli military raid in the city of Jenin, in the occupied West Bank, competing narratives quickly began to take shape.
Criminal justice reporter Keri Blakinger speaks with us about her new memoir, out today, called “Corrections in Ink,” which details her path from aspiring professional figure skater to her two years spent in prison after she was arrested in her final semester of her senior year at Cornell University with six ounces of heroin. Blakinger says her relatively short jail sentence was a lucky case, which she attributes to progressive drug reform as well as her racial privilege.
Police and bikers in Uvalde, Texas, are restricting a growing number of journalists from reporting on the aftermath of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School that left 19 fourth graders and two teachers dead. “None of us can ever recall being treated in such a manner and our job impeded in such a manner,” says Nora Lopez, executive editor of San Antonio Express-News and president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
We speak with Texas Democratic state Senator Roland Gutierrez about how the police botched the response to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, a small town that is part of Gutierrez’s congressional district. The shooting left 19 fourth graders and two teachers dead after the police waited over an hour before anyone confronted the gunman.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson survived a vote of no confidence held by members of his own Conservative Party on Monday. The 211-148 vote came just days after Johnson was booed by conservative royalists when he arrived at a service to honor the queen’s 70-year reign. We speak with Priya Gopal, English professor at the University of Cambridge, who says the vote signals a division within the country’s Conservatives and an opening for progressives.
Since May, there have been more than 700 global cases of monkeypox identified in countries outside West and Central Africa where the virus is endemic.
The CDC is beginning to look at death certificates that indicate more than 100 people who died had long Covid.
The rollout of Covid-19 vaccines to roughly 19 million young children is the last step in making shots available to the entire U.S. population.
One program covers nearly three times as many vaccines today as it did when it was created three decades ago. Despite bipartisan calls for change, Congress has failed to act.
Fêted at the World Economic Forum in 2017, Xi Jinping is now accused of torpedoing the global economy with his disastrous Zero Covid strategy.
Open markets aren’t what they used to be. A more complicated, more regional economic system is reshaping the global order.
Despite high inflation, the U.S. is “moving from the strongest economic recovery in modern history to what can be a period of more stable and resilient growth,” Brian Deese said.
On a month-to-month basis, prices rose 0.3% from March to April, a still-elevated rate but the smallest increase in eight months.
Rates this year could reach their highest levels since before the 2008 Wall Street crash if surging prices continue.
The Biden administration this week canceled almost $6 billion in student loan debt for borrowers who attended the now-defunct network of for-profit schools known as Corinthian Colleges, which defrauded thousands of students before being shut down in 2015. We speak to two activists from the Debt Collective, a group working to end the student loan crisis, about the ongoing fight for full federal student debt cancellation.
Many of Tuesday’s contests will be shaped by political fissures in both major parties and the lingering shadow of former President Trump.
Georgians wonder why they can’t give voters waiting on long lines water, but a super PAC stumping for Herschel Walker can pass out gas vouchers.
A congressional committee’s hearings on the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection are coming up, and the public has been told to expect revelations.
The former Trump official griped that he was strip-searched after he was arrested for defying a subpoena.
The week began after another weekend of mass shootings and with Senate Republicans successfully jerking Senate Democrats around on gun legislation.
Louisiana’s Democratic governor says he’ll call the state’s Republican-dominated Legislature into special session to draw up new congressional districts.
A horrific trend of mass shootings continues across the country, with more shootings reported every day. According to Axios, this weekend alone at least seven occurred, resulting in 11 deaths and injuries to at least 54 others. The gun control debate has now been pushed to center stage in the U.S., but despite the increasing concerns about gun violence, some lawmakers continue to claim guns are not to blame.
Here in the United States, we have a truly unwieldy number of issues to tackle at any given time, especially if you’re not a white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied person. Those people face real issues and barriers, too, of course, but marginalized folks face all of those and then some. Extra sadly but not surprisingly, low-income youth in the nation also face barriers, including access to school lunch.
At some points in the war, it’s been not only possible, but sensible, to doubt reports from either side, especially when they have sounded too rosy. Russia has repeatedly made claims or even shown videos that were absolutely at odds with the reports of those on the ground—that includes happy-happy-joy-joy videos showing smiling people in the areas occupied by Russia going about their day in cities unscarred by weeks of pounding artillery.
Since moving from North Carolina to Massachusetts five years ago, I’ve heard over and over again that I must be so relieved to live somewhere more progressive and accepting—somewhere that isn’t as “backward” as the South.
These statements don’t surprise me anymore, but they do make me sad. There’s no doubt that many Southern states are the home of some of the most extreme anti-abortion, anti-trans, and anti-voter laws in the country.
Boris Johnson lives to fight another day. Britain, meanwhile, lives to endure another day in his shadow, a bit part in the soap opera of his life, watching on as the drama is set on an endless doom loop from comic farce to tragedy.
What can the press do to help stop mass shootings? This question haunts many journalists who struggle through the ritualistic cycle of news coverage that has become all too familiar after a massacre. Publishing photographs showing the grisly sight of slaughtered children is the latest answer from those seeking to move the public and politicians to act.
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. On Mondays, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get Caleb’s writing in your inbox.Perhaps no morpheme has been more crucial to understanding the current cultural moment than meta. I first remember hearing it in high school, an echo across the East River from Brooklyn during the Obama-era hipster boom. On a basic level, meta meant recursive or self-referential—like a warning sign warning you about warning signs or a coffee-table book about coffee tables.
We speak with the chair of the California Reparations Task Force, which is the first in the United States and has just released a landmark report calling for “comprehensive reparations” for Black people harmed by a historical system of state-sanctioned oppression. While the state report is unprecedented, reparations are “first and foremost a federal responsibility,” says attorney Kamilah Moore.