It is Friday times. The week has been filled with highlights and lowlights, and all of those lights concern an attack on our centuries-old experiment in the concept of representative democracy. The Jan. 6 committee hearings this week saw former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ top aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, testify about how fully onboard everybody was with disrupting our country’s democratic processes.
Perched on high ground across the river from the larger city of Severodonetsk, the town of Lysychansk has played a critical role over the last two months of the battle in eastern Ukraine. When Russian forces pressed into Severodonetsk in May, they seemed to think taking the city would be a cakewalk.
Here’s just a sliver of what the Supreme Court did in the past two weeks of decisions. It doesn’t even count the atrocities it rolled out earlier in the session, including all of the destructive shadow docket decisions that were made without hearings, without any transparency, and often even without the Court’s extremists signing their names.
In one term, the extremist Supreme Court: -overturns Roe v.
Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony was an arguable watershed moment for the Jan. 6 committee’s probe into the coup that investigators say former President Donald Trump nearly pulled off last year.
The Supreme Court, filled with truly mediocre-minded wannabe conservative Christian clerics, has spent this last session of the court taking away reproductive rights, everybody’s Miranda rights, the separation of church and state in the classroom, and the ability of our government to regulate greenhouse gases that have driven anthropogenic climate change.
The bar was hosting a drag show Thursday when about 10 people showed up to yell about “pedophiles” and harass bar operators and patrons.
Trump knew what to expect and threw fuel on the fire, charged Alex Holder, who said the former president is in “cloud cuckoo land” on the 2020 election.
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.It’s been a week full of ghastly revelations and depressing events, so let’s step away from the stress of politics and think about music heading into this holiday weekend.But first, here are three great stories from The Atlantic.
We encounter Bran, the narrator of Nell Zink’s new novel, Avalon, just as she leaves a party where something pivotal and distressing has happened to her. We know that it is pivotal because we immediately cut back in time to Bran’s childhood, and much of the novel becomes an inexorable march toward that fateful night. We also have some warning that the account we are about to hear is a fragile memory: “I have trouble recounting my childhood in chronological order.
The Atlantic’s executive editor, Adrienne LaFrance, discusses a post-Roe America with two contributing writers. The legal historian Mary Ziegler and the constitutional-law scholar David French answer questions about what happens now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned.
The maskless man a few rows back was coughing his head off. I had just boarded the train from D.C. to New York City a couple of weeks ago and, along with several other passengers, was craning my neck to get a look at what was going on. This was not the reedy dregs of some lingering cold. This was a deep, constant, full-bodied cough. Think garbage disposal with a fork caught inside.No one said anything to the man (at least to my knowledge).
In June 1984, at New York’s Quadrasonic Sound studios, Leonard Cohen laid down a song he’d spent years writing. “Hallelujah” would eventually join the pantheon of contemporary popular music; at the time, though, the Canadian singer-songwriter may as well have dropped it off the end of a pier.
As activists across the U.S. are mobilizing to defend reproductive rights, we speak to the Dutch physician Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, who has dedicated her life to circumventing anti-abortion laws, including providing abortions on ships in international waters and sending abortions pills around the world. She also discusses navigating censorship on social media platforms, telemedicine, the future of contraception and more.
We go to San Antonio, where 53 migrants seeking refuge in the U.S. died earlier this week after being confined to a sweltering tractor-trailer. Human rights advocates blamed the tragedy on restrictive immigration policies like the Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as MPP or the “Remain in Mexico” program.
In a blow to climate activism, the Supreme Court on Thursday severely limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to place emission caps on power plants. In the case, West Virginia v. EPA, several states led by West Virginia and fossil fuel companies fought against the regulations imposed by the Obama administration under the Clean Air Act.
The company is currently challenging a Mississippi law that effectively banned telehealth abortions by making patients see doctors in person.
Legislators were long unable to impose major regulations on abortion. Now, the power to decide when — and whether — abortion should be legal is squarely in their hands.
Health experts warn that this potential migration could be devastating for patients, leaving them without access to birth control, prenatal care and other reproductive health services.
Cities say demand for vaccines is still outstripping supply.
The advisory committee signaled a preference for the strain composition to target the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants.
Fears have mounted that the central bank might trigger a recession sometime in the next year with its aggressive rate action.
Things are so dire that central bank policymakers might hike rates by three-quarters of a percentage point, a move not taken in almost 30 years.
America’s rampant inflation is imposing severe pressures on families, forcing them to pay much more for food, gas and rent.
Former aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson, revealed Tuesday to the House January 6 committee that Meadows and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani both sought pardons after the insurrection. Meanwhile, in a video deposition with Trump’s former national security adviser Mike Flynn, who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, Flynn repeatedly refused to answer questions from committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney.
The Illinois Republican also found it telling that a number of Trump’s close allies had requested presidential pardons after the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The budget will make all low-income adults eligible for the state’s Medicaid program by 2024 regardless of their immigration status.
The Supreme Court continued to dismantle the very foundations of civil rights and government with a new ruling today claiming that government agencies cannot pass regulations touching on “major questions” if Congress has not written a law authorizing those specific regulations. What counts as a “major question?” Whatever six archconservative Supreme Court justices handpicked for their hostility toward regulations declare to be one, that’s what.
Donald Trump is like an old Chucky doll you threw in a dumpster years ago while packing for a move across the country—and then one day, out of nowhere, he shows up in the seat behind you during your morning bus commute.
Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said he thinks Trump and his allies are “very concerned and very nervous right now.
The state attorney general’s office stated that gender confirmation treatments are not “deeply rooted in our history or traditions,” and therefore should be banned.