The coronavirus is flying through the Greek alphabet. On Friday, the World Health Organization designated Omicron a “variant of concern”—spooking stock markets and triggering a new round of international travel bans. Today, President Joe Biden echoed the WHO’s language, calling Omicron a “cause for concern,” but warned Americans not to panic.Little is known about the variant so far, my colleague Katherine J. Wu says.
The crackpot Republican won’t apologize for joking that Omar had a backpack full of explosives.
The bearded man, who was based in the LA area, had eluded online sleuths who have successfully identified dozens of rioters.
Since Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted under claims of self-defense for fatally shooting two people and wounding a third during racial justice protests last year in Kenosha, Wisconsin, another case in the city is drawing new national attention. Human rights advocates are calling for charges to be dropped in the case of Chrystul Kizer, who faces homicide and other charges for killing her white sex trafficker in 2018 after he drugged her and tried to rape her when she was just 17-years-old.
After a Georgia jury reached a verdict of “guilty” in the closely watched trial of three white men who chased and fatally shot 25-year-old unarmed Black man Ahmaud Arbery, many activists and racial justice advocates following the case have expressed some relief in hearing the conviction.
We go to Cape Town, South Africa, to speak with a leading health justice advocate about how scientists in the country have identified a new Omicron coronavirus variant, and the World Health Organization warns it could be more transmissible than previous variants. Against the advice of the WHO, several countries have closed their borders to foreign travelers.
Amid all the attention paid to the legal drama surrounding both Mississippi’s and Texas’s contested abortion laws, one striking detail seems to have escaped much notice: Neither state makes an exception for rape or incest. This is a major departure, a sign of how extreme America’s abortion politics have become. For decades, exceptions to abortion bans for rape and incest were a rare source of consensus.
Parents know that winter is the season of sickness. Your kid will have approximately infinite colds. You, too, will have approximately infinite colds. Last winter, COVID precautions kept sickness at bay. But this year, school is in session, day-care colds are spreading fast, and the only cohort of people in America not yet eligible for COVID vaccination is our youngest children.
Conservatives in America have, in recent months, used the idea of freedom to argue against wearing masks, oppose vaccine mandates, and justify storming the Capitol. They routinely refer to themselves as “freedom-loving Americans.” Freedom, as a cause, today belongs almost entirely to the right.This was not always the case. In the early 1960s, civil-rights activists invoked freedom as the purpose of their struggle. Martin Luther King Jr.
Back in 2020, I might’ve imagined the end of the pandemic being something like that gum commercial: everyone together, vaccinated, picking the same time to come safely and communally out of lockdown and get back to the way things were before, so grateful to be alive we practically leapt into one another’s arms as soon as we got the chance. That is not, of course, the way things have gone in 2021.
As fall dips into winter in the Northern Hemisphere, the coronavirus has served up the holiday gift that no one, absolutely no one, asked for: a new variant of concern, dubbed Omicron by the World Health Organization on Friday.Omicron, also known as B.1.1.529, was first detected in Botswana and South Africa earlier this month, and very little is known about it so far. But the variant is moving fast.
In the end, President Joe Biden did what many close to him expected: He took a longer-than-anticipated amount of time to arrive at a reasonable, moderate decision that thrilled few but carried limited risk.
The Commerce secretary said in an interview that the Biden administration sees trading partners in Asia as part of the solution.
Aggressive action to deliver pandemic relief was the right call — and withdrawing support now would only hurt American workers.
The president needs people to overcome a new set of fears and direct their purchases into the areas of the service economy hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic.
“The pandemic has been calling the shots for the economy and for inflation,” Janet Yellen said.
We speak with Mansoor Adayfi, a former Guantánamo Bay detainee who was held at the military prison for 14 years without charge, an ordeal he details in his new memoir, “Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo.” Adayfi was 18 when he left his home in Yemen to do research in Afghanistan, where he was kidnapped by Afghan warlords, then sold to the CIA after the 9/11 attacks.
Democracy Now! first aired on nine community radio stations on February 19, 1996, on the eve of the New Hampshire presidential primary. In the 25 years since that initial broadcast, the program has greatly expanded, airing today on more than 1,500 television and radio stations around the globe and reaching millions of people online.
As Democrats in Congress struggle to pass the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better Act, there is large bipartisan consensus in the U.S. Congress to spend over $7 trillion over the next 10 years in military spending. The United States spends more each year on defense than China, Russia, India, the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, and Australia combined.
The survivor of a serial rapist who received probation joins us to speak out after a New York judge sparked international outrage when he ruled it is inappropriate to jail the man who attacked her. Christopher Belter pleaded guilty to raping and sexually assaulting her along with three other teenage girls age 15 and 16, but he will avoid serving time in prison, and instead receive 8 years of probation.
Update on Nov. 24: Jurors on Wednesday afternoon returned guilty verdicts against all three of the white men charged with killing 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery in February 2020. Travis McMichael fired the fatal shots and was convicted on all counts, including the charge of malice murder. His father Gregory McMichael, a former police officer, and neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan were convicted of felony murder and other charges.
The Oscar-winning actor said it was “a path that I’m choosing not to take at this moment.
Welcome back to our impromptu and sporadically scheduled pandemic guide to anime. If you’ve missed any of our earlier entries, you can find them all here:
(Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)
That housekeeping out of the way, we’ll quickly get to it. We spent the last two go-rounds looking at animated horror of the ghosts, zombies, and monsters variety. If you aren’t into that, rejoice: we’re done.
This article contains spoilers through the seventh episode of Succession Season 3.Given how this season of Succession has gone so far, the Roy siblings should have reason to celebrate. They held on to control of the family’s company, Waystar Royco, after a Hail Mary negotiation. They helped choose the Republicans’ next presidential nominee from the comfort of their father’s hotel suite.
GOP Rep. Ronny Jackson insisted that the highly transmissible variant is just a trick to “push” midterm mail-in ballots.
The Detroit Academy of Arts & Sciences (DAAS) choir is a reason to be happy this holiday season. Angela Kee is their fearless leader and, under her direction, the choir has performed at tourist conventions, opened Pistons and Lions games, and even sang at the White House for President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama—and 80% of the students at DAAS live at or below the poverty level.
Cohen doesn’t believe Trump will run in 2024, even though he keeps saying “I’m thinking about it.” That’s to “keep the grift going,” he added.
Welcome back to the weekly Nuts & Bolts Guide to small campaigns. A few months ago, I wrote a Nuts & Bolts diary about the lack of solid representation in local offices, particularly law enforcement. Sheriff’s offices and District attorneys are overwhelmingly older white men, and organizations like Reflective Democracy have pointed this problem out repeatedly. In a large number of cases, these positions are held by elected officials.
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said this type of behavior “has to be called out.
David Pepper, the former Ohio Democratic Party chairman, has had a front-row seat to one of the major fronts in the American right’s insurgent war on democracy: Namely, the nation’s statehouses, where the gradual Republican takeover in the past decade has resulted in a barrage of antidemocratic laws, not to mention the empowerment of incipient far-right extremist ideology.