After the first week of fighting in Ukraine, viewers may have tuned in to this week’s Saturday Night Live with some curiosity and fear about how the show would tackle the biggest news story in the world. The series had gone the quiet and respectful route last week by having the Ukrainian Chorus Dumka of New York replace the usual episode-opening antics.
The sick poet peels
fruit, watching the city wake
from the hotel glass.Street signs say ONLY
ONLY STOP—the tree buds don’t,
the garbage bags don’t.The taxi driver
mentions Kerouac to soothe
your grief in his car.A shadow glimmers
on the sidewalk. A bird turns
its head east & west.The waitress brings bread,
a whole sourdough loaf, says,
Darling. Sorry. Here.The green truck wakes you.
Before you slit the curtain,
you don’t predict green.
As the Omicron surge recedes, millions of the country’s thrice-vaccinated find themselves wondering if now, finally, is their moment to enjoy life and stop worrying as much about COVID.Yet more than a thousand Americans are still dying every day. Millions of immunocompromised people remain vulnerable, even if they’ve gotten their shots, and children under the age of 5 still can’t get vaccinated at all.
In the spring of 2020, a group of astronomers told the world a dramatic story: They had discovered a black hole just 1,000 light-years away from Earth, closer to us than any they’d found before. They’d detected it in a constellation called Telescopium, nestled alongside two stars that, on a clear night in the Southern Hemisphere, are visible to the naked eye.
The White House on Thursday called the GOP attempt to terminate the pandemic emergency declaration “a reckless and costly mistake.
The majority opinion pointed to “the importance of ensuring that States have a fair opportunity to defend their laws in federal court.
The new ask raises questions about when the White House will have to come back to Congress for more.
The strategy represents a major milestone for the president after a first year consumed by the pandemic.
The Fed is already expected to begin a campaign of interest rate increases next month in a bid to remove its support for economic growth amid a blistering job market and rapidly rising prices.
“America’s job machine is going stronger than ever,” Biden said at the White House.
The burst of jobs came despite a wave of Omicron inflections that sickened millions of workers, kept many consumers at home and left businesses from restaurants to manufacturers short-staffed.
Congress needs to create a new safety net for such lenders — not let regulators squeeze them out of business.
Inside the White House, there is still optimism: “President Biden was elected to a four-year term, not a one-year term.
We speak with Ukrainian American journalist Lev Golinkin about the rise of the far right in Ukraine. Golinkin says Russian bombing of the sacred Jewish site of Babi Yar disproves Putin’s claims that the invasion is about “denazification,” and attacks on cities in eastern Ukraine show he does not care about Russian-speaking Ukrainians either.
As the Russian military escalates its invasion in Ukraine, Russian police are cracking down on antiwar protesters at home, arresting more than 8,000 over the past eight days. Meanwhile, Russia’s lower house of parliament has passed a new law to criminalize the distribution of what the state considers to be “false news” about military operations, and remaining independent news outlets in the country are shutting down under pressure from the authorities.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russia of “nuclear terror” after Russian forces shelled and subsequently set on fire the largest nuclear power plant in Europe on Friday morning. The fire at the Zaporizhzhia plant burned for hours but reportedly did not spread to any of the plant’s six reactors before the Russians ultimately seized the site. Ukraine heavily relies on nuclear power, with 15 active nuclear power reactors across the country.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned that if a Third World War were to take place, it would be a nuclear war. His comments come just days after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert and after Russian nuclear submarines set sail for tests in waters near Norway. Meanwhile, voters in Belarus have approved a referendum opening the door for Russia to station nuclear weapons in Belarusian territory, and Russia has called on the U.S.
A federal judge shoots down twisted legal arguments by John Eastman battling to hold back his documents from the Jan. 6 House select committee.
Still, “you know, he was a friend of mine,” Trump preened. “I got along great with him,” he said on speaker phone to golf pro pal John Daly.
Before the invasion, I posted a 7-day weather outlook for Ukraine and wrote, “Those are above-freezing temperatures, meaning that grounds are already thawing out, creating a soft mushy mess that would bog down any Russian incursion deep into Ukraine.” It wasn’t a particularly novel observation.
This article, written by TNR deputy editor Jason Linkins, first appeared on newrepublic.com and in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter. Sign up here.
President Joe Biden’s response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has thus far been a model in how to play a difficult hand well.
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A professor in Qatar was the first to spot the propaganda accounts praising Putin and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This week saw two winning union votes with big margins and special significance. Workers who’d been organizing at a Manhattan REI store voted to unionize by an 88 to 14 margin. REI has 170 stores, and as we watch Starbucks stores unionizing—with three out of four that have voted so far having voted yes, the most recent one by a big margin—you have to wonder what supposedly progressive retail or food service chain is next.
Connect! Unite! Act! is a weekly series that seeks to create face-to-face networks in each congressional district. Groups meet regularly to socialize, get out the vote, support candidates, and engage in other local political actions that help our progressive movement grow and exert influence on the powers that be.
Experts have warned that a no-fly zone would amount to a U.S. declaration of war against nuclear-armed Russia.
Trump is largely alone in his sustained praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin as “smart,” an assessment he reiterated last week during speeches to donors.
In the past 30 years, two Westerns have won Best Picture at the Academy Awards and both redefined that most American of genres. When Clint Eastwood’s brutally revisionist Unforgiven won in 1993, it marked a turning point for films that had long idealized frontier violence. The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men then won in 2008, defining modern Westerns beyond the typical 19th-century setting.
What seemed like an eternity ended at 13. I decided that was the appropriate age to swap my fat pigtails out for a fantastic, fluffy ’fro. In lieu of a debutante cotillion or other social ritual, the coming-out of my hair would mark my transition from girl to teenager. An afro, my afro, would also serve as a talisman of acceptance—indisputable evidence that, no matter my light-skinned flesh nor the thousand shades of blond in my thick hair, I was Black.
Last month, as Delta Flight 1580 made its way from Utah to Oregon, Michael Demarre approached one of the plane’s emergency-exit doors. He removed the door’s plastic covering, a federal report of the events alleges, and tugged at the handle that would release its hatch. A nearby flight attendant, realizing what he was doing, stopped him. Fellow passengers spent the rest of the flight watching him to ensure that he remained in his seat.