This story was originally published at Prism.
President Joe Biden delivered his first State of the Union address on March 1 to bipartisan support and applause, but advocates across some of the country’s most pressing issues, including immigration, reproductive rights, and police reform, were left disappointed. Prism spoke to advocates of some of the key issues Biden addressed during his speech and asked for their reactions.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is being asked to investigate the illegal misuse of a toxic chemical at a Florida immigration detention facility that already has a history of human rights abuses. More than two dozen groups are urging the agency to probe Florida’s Glades County Detention Center (GCDC), expressing worry the facility is miusing the chemicals at up to 50 times the permitted concentration.
Travelers to China are often surprised by the efficiency of the Great Firewall. For a westerner dropping in, it can be a shock to find that Twitter is blocked. And Facebook is blocked. And even Google searches are blocked.
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Every Friday, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Earlier this week I asked for your thoughts about the war in Ukraine. Every single correspondent was sympathetic to Ukraine, not Russia.
After Yang begins with a dance. The opening credits of Kogonada’s new science-fiction film are an invigorating introduction: a montage of the movie’s entire cast executing a synchronized musical number in groups of four, as part of a virtual competition. The dance moves are rigid, though still delivered with flashes of improvisation, and the entire joyous sequence is the kind more movies could stand to indulge.
Six years into the Trump era in American politics, many of his critics still believe they can find a silver bullet to end it. On Wednesday, the House committee on January 6 filed a brief in a federal court in California that, depending on your interpretation, was either an attempt to compel documents from a reluctant witness or an omen of Donald Trump’s imminent imprisonment.
The moon is a wonderland of craters—thousands of them, carved by asteroids hitting the surface over billions of years. Space rocks are still at it, and every year the bombardment scoops out dozens of craters big enough for moon-orbiting spacecraft to notice. Today, because of human beings and their little space things, Earth’s celestial companion got one more dent.This morning, a piece of space junk smacked right into the far side of the moon.
The way a place looks, sounds, feels, and smells is a crucial part of how we experience and remember it. So it can be a challenge to make somewhere feel real with words alone. To bring the South to life in her most recent book, Imani Perry turned to travelogues, a genre with long roots in the region. The books she revisited “are artistic and philosophical explorations” as well as geographic ones, she writes. And in her memoir, The Yellow House, Sarah M.
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.
The strategy represents a major milestone for the president after a first year consumed by the pandemic.
Over the last several days, as many as 520,000 people have fled Ukraine, according to the United Nations.
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 acclaimed Filipino scholar and activist Walden Bello on the Global South’s response to the unfolding crisis in Ukraine. Bello says there’s hesitation from many world leaders to take an active role in the crisis, arguing that there is a lack of explicit national interests and a general suspicion the U.S. provoked the invasion to take advantage of the subsequent backlash against Russia.
It’s among the first pieces of legislation to copy the controversial Texas law that has effectively outlawed abortion for most pregnant people in the state.
We are now seeing large-scale devastation in civilian neighborhoods and population centers as Vladimir Putin’s forces, still struggling to maintain supply lines and now suffering significant damage both from command incompetence and Ukrainian defenses, have turned to artillery attacks and firing cluster bombs at civilian targets.
Generalissimo Sean Hannity, the high commander for war strategy at Fox News, has an idea that will end the war! Erm, sorry—I meant “world.” Those two words sound so similar.
Anyone with any sense of history knows that the last thing President Joe Biden can do is send the U.S. military into Ukraine while Russia conducts its war of aggression. Nor can NATO—which includes three nuclear powers—get involved.
Viktoriya, a U.S. citizen originally from Ukraine, tells CNN that she’s agonizing over what she can do to help loved ones who are also in the immigration process but have now had to flee their homes following brutal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s invasion. “Right now, they are in different places, which makes us scared,” she said in the report. “They don’t know what to do.
While most of our focus here in the U.S. has been on events in Ukraine and on President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, key figures in the Caribbean were gathered for the 33rd session of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), held in Belize on March 1-2. No matter how far away from Europe, events taking place there will have a global impact, and the Caribbean is no exception.
That does not mean that Ukraine was a primary focus of the gathering.
Republican Rep. Van Taylor shocked Texas politicos Wednesday by announcing that he was ending his re-election campaign because of an affair the married congressman had with a woman who had fled her ISIS terrorist husband years ago, a move that came hours after he was forced into a primary runoff against former Collin County Judge Keith Self. Taylor said he would be taking his name off the runoff ballot, which will automatically make Self the GOP nominee.
Immigrant rights groups applauded the temporary designation while calling out a racist double standard on which immigrants the U.S. swiftly gives such status to.
Without a quorum, the Senate committee couldn’t hold a vote on the restrictive legislation.
GOP state Rep. Danny Bentley talked about Jewish women’s sex lives and said falsely that an abortion pill was created during the Holocaust.
Guilfoyle was in the Oval Office for the former president’s final attempt to persuade Mike Pence to overturn the election for him, according to the subpoena.
The White House on Thursday called the GOP attempt to terminate the pandemic emergency declaration “a reckless and costly mistake.