Today's Liberal News

News Roundup: Grand jury seated in Trump criminal probe; patience with Senate GOP wearing thin

In the news today: A newly seated grand jury begins to hear evidence of criminal behavior inside the Trump Organization. Patience for Republican “negotiations” over infrastructure spending is wearing thin. As Senate Republicans continue efforts to kill a proposed independent probe of the Jan. 6 insurrection, a fallen officer’s mother is asking to meet with the Republicans trying to block the probe from going forward.

Fox News guest blames mass shootings on mass vaccinations, because sure, why not?

So there was another mass shooting in America Wednesday morning, and naturally Fox News and its guests need to find some reason (other than a proliferation of guns ‘n assholes) for the rise of gun violence in this country. Instead of stopping to ask why these events only seem to happen with any regularity in the United States, they have to invent weird theories—and they just invented one of the weirdest.

But first of all, the shooting.

Deferred no more: The struggle for future of undocumented students

This story was originally published at Prism. 

By Brenton Weyi

What happens to a dream deferred? This famous question from Langston Hughes has been the lived reality for undocumented youth nationwide who have received Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA), also known as DREAMers.

But two DACAmented leaders have been working to level the educational playing field for today’s youth: Alejandro Fuentes and Tania Chairez.

Newsmax host uses Pride Month cereal as route to rant about pronouns and ‘woke’ companies

In light of the anti-trans bills state lawmakers are pushing across the country, a lot of queerphobia pales in comparison and isn’t worth the air time. There’s something to be said, too, for simply choosing not to amplify the harm and hate speech uttered by some on the right. One example: On Tuesday night, Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield launched into a queerphobic rant about the LGBTQ community and—get this—cereal, as reported by the New Civil Rights Movement.

Biden sends $200 million to fight the pandemic within the pandemic: Domestic violence

Fifteen months of a global pandemic (and the resulting lockdowns) have created a second public health pandemic: domestic violence. The American Journal of Emergency Medicine along with the United Nations group U.N. Women report horrifying increases in reported incidents of domestic violence—300% in Hubei, China; 25% in Argentina, 30% in Cyprus, 33% in Singapore, and 50% in Brazil. The U.S.

If the Lab-Leak Theory Is Right, What’s Next?

jarun011 / Getty / Katie Martin / The Atlantic
Last summer, Michael Imperiale, a University of Michigan virologist and 10-year member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, published an essay on the need to “rethink” some basic research-safety practices in light of the coronavirus pandemic.

Even TV Is Struggling to Connect

A few unspoken subjects hang over the third season of Netflix’s Master of None, as inescapable as air. One is the sidelining of Aziz Ansari’s character, Dev, for reasons that I can only assume relate to Ansari’s desire to be less conspicuous in recent years. Another is the fact that the series, set in New York City and the vague hinterland of “upstate,” was filmed in the U.K., a feint that provoked a sense of inauthenticity I couldn’t shake.

How Colleges Tell Student-Parents They Don’t Belong

H. Armstrong Roberts / ClassicStock / Getty
Over the past five years, Yoslin Amaya would return home most days in the early-morning hours from her night shift as a janitor to her in-laws’ house in Rockville, Maryland, where she lived in a bedroom with her husband and two sons, Andrew and James. Though she was often exhausted, her long days were not over.

Can Electric Fish Talk Like Obama?

In many, many ways, fish of the species Brienomyrus brachyistius do not speak at all like Barack Obama. For starters, they communicate not through a spoken language but through electrical pulses booped out by specialized organs found near the tail. Their vocabulary is also quite unpresidentially poor, with each individual capable of producing just one electric wave—a unique but monotonous signal.

The West Is Failing Belarus

When the Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko plucked a dissident journalist out of the sky, he proved two things: that his 27-year grip on power is unhindered by international isolation, and that, absent meaningful action by the United States and Europe—whose citizens were among the passengers on the hijacked flight—nothing is going to change.That, at least, is how Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya sees it.

Marcus Smith “Died Like an Animal” When Cops Hogtied Him. Police Have Known for Decades It Can Kill

Despite decades of warnings against the practice, police departments across the country continue to hogtie people during arrests, sometimes with fatal results. On September 8, 2018, Marcus Smith, a 38-year-old homeless Black man in Greensboro, North Carolina, was facing a mental health crisis and asked police officers for help. Instead, eight white officers brutally and fatally hogtied him.