Today's Liberal News

The Deviousness of Texas’s New Abortion Law

Last night, the Supreme Court faced an unprecedented emergency application. Unless the Court acted, abortion would be functionally illegal in Texas.In May, the state had adopted a version of a “heartbeat bill” that went into effect today. So-called heartbeat bills prohibit abortions once a physician can detect fetal cardiac activity, usually around the sixth week of pregnancy, before most people know that they are pregnant.

A Fairy Tale That Hollywood Didn’t Need to Modernize

What would a modern Cinderella look like? The classic fairy tale has been told so many times on film, always following the same basic arc: A charming girl, who is forced into servitude by her mean stepmother and wishes to go to a ball, ultimately gets what she wants with the help of three mice and a magic fairy. Cinderella is the world’s most famous underdog, but she’s also more of a plot vehicle than a deep character.

The Planet Needs Jerome Powell

In recent weeks, the climate movement has become caught in the middle of a fight that seemingly has nothing to do with the environment: Should President Joe Biden renominate Jerome Powell to lead the Federal Reserve?The choice of who should run the country’s central bank has historically not captivated climate advocates—or many Americans, for that matter—yet it has carved the left into two opposing camps, each claiming to fight for a greener economy.

“Blanket Unconstitutional” Texas Abortion Ban Takes Effect in Major Setback for Reproductive Rights

In a major setback for reproductive rights, the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed a Texas law to go into effect that bans abortions after six weeks — before most people even know they are pregnant. Until now, no other six-week ban has ever gone into effect in the United States. The law is seen as a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade and allows private citizens to file civil suits against abortion providers or anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion after six weeks.

“Disaster for Me and My Children”: Afghan Doctor Describes Escape from Kabul After Taliban Takeover

Afghan doctor Wais Aria describes how he fled Afghanistan with his family after the Taliban takeover, packing up his wife and four children and trying for days to leave from the Kabul airport, where he was beaten by the Taliban. They managed to catch a flight out of the country Thursday and arrived in the U.S. on Saturday. “It was a disaster for me and my children,” says Aria, now in Alexandria, Virginia.

Long-Haulers Are Fighting for Their Future

While watching the scientific community grapple with long COVID, I have thought a lot about a scene in The Lord of the Rings. Faced with impending doom, the hobbits Merry and Pippin ask the powerful treelike ents for help. But despite the urgency of the situation, the ents are slow. They meet for hours, and after a lot of deliberation, they announce that they’ve agreed that the hobbits are not orcs. The hobbits, who already knew that, are shocked. They were hoping for more.

Sen. Ron Johnson secretly recorded telling a constituent the truth about the Big Lie

Reporter and activist Laura Windsor has been doing a very good job of getting Republican operatives and elected officials to admit the truth on camera. She has used her The Under Current show to expose how cynical and counterproductive to democracy the GOP is at this point in time. On Tuesday, Windsor released some video of Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin admitting there was no election fraud going on in Wisconsin during the 2020 elections.

Anti-vaxxers shut down Georgia vaccination event

COVID-19 vaccination rates rose in August after dipping down earlier in the summer. But anti-vaxxers remain a danger not just to themselves but to everyone around them. We see the danger to individual anti-vaxxers in one story after another about their miserable deaths. We see the danger to the population as a whole as the pandemic continues to rage because we haven’t reached the vaccination levels that would tamp it down.