This time last year, health officials were advising Americans to stay home for the holidays. The CDC cautioned against travel; Anthony Fauci announced that he would be spending Christmas apart from his children for the first time in 30 years. But that grim advice was accompanied by hope for a normal 2021 holiday season: Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine was authorized for emergency use in adults on December 11, 2020, with Moderna’s following close behind.
In Chile, voters this weekend will determine a close runoff election between far-right candidate José Antonio Kast and leftist Gabriel Boric, a former student leader. If Boric, who holds a narrow lead, wins the race, he would become Chile’s youngest and most progressive president in years.
The United States is continuing talks with Iran over its nuclear program after President Trump withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015. With a new Iranian administration after April’s controversial election, many worry that if talks fail, tensions between the two countries could turn into military escalation fueled by pressure from Israel.
The U.S. House voted to recommend the Department of Justice charge former President Trump’s former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows with criminal contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack. The vote came after the committee released a series of text messages from Republican lawmakers and Fox News hosts to Meadows on January 6 that begged him to convince Trump to tell his followers to leave the Capitol.
The data is coming in, but it’s not perfect. Here’s what to keep in mind.
“We’re very firmly in the corner of equity,” he said.
New York’s mayor said business owners in the city would prefer a mandate over shutdowns.
Costs for key goods and services soared 0.8 percent for the month and 6.8 percent for the year, the highest since 1982, the Labor Department reported Friday.
The middle class is facing serious economic hardship with little of the workplace flexibility now afforded to the well-off. Here’s how employers — and government — can help.
Powell’s comment came after the Fed already announced earlier this month that it would slow the pace at which it buys U.S. government debt and mortgage-backed securities.
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.
In the news today: Significant public movement in the investigation and prosecution of the Jan. 6 insurrection. The House select committee investigating the coup has now released numerous text messages and documents that make a mockery of Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows’ claims of executive privilege—and show just how furiously Trump’s allies were working to create pretexts for voiding the election—including using the military, if necessary.
The texts released by the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 show that the White House, Republicans in Congress, and Donald Trump Jr. were all terrified about the insurgents breaching the Capitol. Some were terrified for how it would cost them politically. Some for how the insurgents might harm them physically.
by Sakshi Udavant
This story was originally published by Prism.
One evening last year after two months of being stuck inside due to shelter-in-place orders, Chital Mehta, an Indian mother living in Delaware, took her two young kids on a walk and broke down in the middle of the road.
“The lockdown deeply affected my sanity,” she said. “I struggled to engage my children inside our small apartment.
Liberian families in the U.S. won a huge victory in late 2019, following the passage of a pathway to legalization as part of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. The provision, championed by Liberians and their advocates, allows thousands of Liberians with temporary protections to apply for permanent relief. It was a historic win for many families who have been living in limbo.
The single most important prayer in Judaism is the Shema. At least that’s what most of us believe—although, since we’re talking about Jews, you know there’s gotta be at least some debate. One section commands Jews to remember God’s words, teach them to their children, and to place them “on the doorposts of thy house.
“I have to say that their silence is deafening,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said of those who texted Trump’s chief of staff during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
The total is about equal to the population of Atlanta and St. Louis combined.
FDIC Chair Jelena McWilliams, a Trump appointee and ex-bank executive, is blocking a review of bank merger regulations.
The ruling includes a 14-day stay, giving the former president time to appeal before the documents are released.
A confirmation vote in January would give the agency a permanent political leader for the first time during the Biden presidency.
The White House press secretary called the actions of Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade “disappointing and, unfortunately, not surprising.
“Today was great!” my 7-year-old exclaimed recently when I came home from work. By cosmic standards, her day wasn’t that special. She went to the playground, where she finally mastered the monkey bars. She visited the history museum—or at least its gift shop. She got “really big” nachos. She went to the kids’ art studio. Two years ago, visiting a museum and a nacho joint was so common, it wouldn’t even have registered.
Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr. arrived late to the Jan. 6 attack because he had car trouble. He threatened House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
If 5-year-olds could read academic research reports, they might be alarmed by what they’d find in a recent one from the Stanford Center on Longevity.It opened with a bit of promising news: “In the United States, demographers predict that as many as half of today’s 5-year-olds can expect to live to the age of 100.” But that was followed, several pages down, by a haunting prediction: “Over the course of 100-year lives, we can expect to work 60 years or more.
Gavin Newsom wants to believe that what’s good for Texas is good for California. Shortly after the conservative majority on the Supreme Court allowed a narrow challenge to Texas’s anti-abortion law to go forward while the law remains in force, the Golden State governor vowed that he would pursue passage of gun restrictions modeled on the Texas law’s unusual structure.
Updated at 6:52 p.m. ET on December 14, 2021.Last week, at a small funeral home in Northwest Washington, D.C., I attended the funeral of a teacher I knew from my time working in Prince George’s County schools eight years ago, Yvonne Brown.Ms. Brown loved literature. She wrote and self-published a novel. She started her school’s poetry club. She loved the magic of words. She loved her students.
Killer T cells, as their name might imply, are not known for their mercy. When these immunological assassins happen upon a cell that’s been hijacked by a virus, their first instinct is to butcher. The killer T punches holes in the compromised cell and pumps in toxins to destroy it from the inside out. The cell shrinks and collapses; its perforated surface erupts in bubbles and boils, which slough away until little is left but fragmentary mush.
As unionizing efforts have taken the U.S. by storm, we look at the history of the U.S. labor movement and how unions have acted as a bulwark against corporate power. Worker organizing at Starbucks, Kellogg’s and Amazon shows that unions help enforce health and safety measures and protect workers who speak out.