Sign up for Derek’s newsletter here.The flood of Omicron news can be overwhelming. The endless data, anecdotes, and studies are hard enough to synthesize. But what makes the information even harder to parse is that so much evidence (i.e., what people are seeing) is intertwined with opinion (i.e., what people are hoping and fearing).
Even before the arrival of Omicron, the winter months were going to be tough for parts of the United States. While COVID transmission rates in the South caught fire over the summer, the Northeast and Great Plains states were largely spared thanks to cyclical factors and high vaccination rates. But weather and the patterns of human life were bound to shift the disease burden northward for the holidays—and that was just with Delta.
James, a progressive whose investigation of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) pushed him out of office, is running for reelection as attorney general.
Eligible teens will be able to get the shot once they are at least six months past their second dose.
Attorney General Letitia James wants the former president to sit for a deposition related to the Trump Organization.
An explosive new investigation details how the European Union has created a shadow immigration system that captures migrants arriving from Africa before they reach Europe and sends them to brutal militia-run detention centers in Libya. “This is a climate migration story,” says Ian Urbina, investigative journalist and director of The Outlaw Ocean Project, who authored the report for The New Yorker magazine.
As calls grow for Biden to extend the moratorium on student debt, we speak with the Debt Collective’s Astra Taylor and feature her new film for The Intercept, “Your Debt Is Someone Else’s Asset,” animated by artist Molly Crabapple. The $15 trillion in U.S. household debt is “a form of wealth transfer” from the poor to the rich, Taylor says. “People are in debt by design.
President Biden may soon approve the largest military spending bill since World War II, which ramps up spending to counter China and Russia. Separately, the Senate voted down a bipartisan bid by Senators Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul and Mike Lee to halt $650 million in U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia amid the devastating ongoing war in Yemen.
Enrollment is up 20 percent in Texas and 9 percent in Florida compared to this time last year.
“If I’m wrong, so be it, bro,” Carlson’s guest said after he’d told Fox News viewers that the St. Louis baseball booster was “clearly a law enforcement officer.
The ruling came in response to a lawsuit from several contractors and seven states.
“A pandemic is not the time to be cutting access to doctors for patients on Medicare,” Kim Schrier, (D-Wash.) who introduced the bill along with Steven Horsford (D-Nev.), said in a statement.
Justices are expected to decide whether to scrap the half-century-old decision underpinning abortion rights and let states chose if they want to ban the procedure early in pregnancy.
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.
Aggressive action to deliver pandemic relief was the right call — and withdrawing support now would only hurt American workers.
At least fifteen lives have been saved, so far, after the nation’s first supervised illegal drug injection sites opened in New York City about a week ago. The facilities provide clean needles and the opioid reversal medication Naloxone, as well as medical care and drug dependency treatment options. This comes as U.S. overdose deaths topped 100,000 during the first year of the pandemic.
The Fox News conspiracy theorist suggested coronavirus “feminizes” people.
In the news today: The select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol subpoenaed phone records for more than 100 people, even as key potential witnesses are refusing to talk. Elsewhere in government, Republicans continue their quest to make the United States a worse place, holding up important legislation and forcing Congress into some really stupid contortions to get the basics done.
Ever since Steve Bannon boasted to journalist Sarah Posner—just before being hired as Donald Trump’s campaign manager—that his publication at the time, Breitbart News, was “the platform for the alt-right,” it’s been self-evident what direction his right-wing populist politics were heading: straight towards white nationalism and neofascism.
President Biden’s new hard infrastructure bill—passed with a level of bipartisan support in both houses of Congress that’s almost unheard of these days for a spending package—is quite a major accomplishment. (What, you thought I was going to make a joke involving Biden’s prior use of an off-color exuberance?) One important measure of its success is the degree to which it increases racial equity.
Is Tucker Carlson literally on Vladimir Putin’s payroll? He has to be, right? As the free world attempts to stand up to this ex-KGB thug who brazenly attacked our country and poisons political adversaries nearly as often as Tucky-son poisons minds, Fox’s resident trust fund bloviator is giving literal aid and comfort to the enemy.
You might say this foppish fish stick fuckwit is a modern-day Tokyo Rose—only slightly more transparent.
Several Democrats joined Republicans in a symbolic rebuke of the Biden administration’s vaccine or testing mandate for businesses.
Imagine testing positive for COVID-19, then deliberately not telling anyone for a week that you tested positive while continuing to go about your normal routine, knowingly putting others at risk. Then imagine being so cowardly and venal that rather than admitting to that test, you instead decided to blame the grieving families of dead U.S. soldiers for exposing you because you were too afraid of the political consequences that would follow if you had told the truth to begin with.
Trump’s former chief of staff claims he can’t discuss items covered by executive privilege, refusing to cooperate with the investigation of the insurrection.
The conservative pundit deleted the tweet following backlash.
As families around the country prepare to send out Christmas cards with letters and photos commemorating the year gone by, many elected officials do the same. Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky tweeted one such family picture on Saturday, featuring himself and his clan armed to the teeth on a leather love seat, a merry tree glittering in the backdrop. Massie’s photo drew some ire.
A lot is still unknown around Omicron, but a worrying trend has become clear: This variant sure is spreading fast. In South Africa, the U.K., and Denmark—countries with the best variant surveillance and high immunity against COVID—Omicron cases are growing exponentially. The variant has outcompeted the already highly transmissible Delta in South Africa and may soon do the same elsewhere. According to preliminary estimates, every person with Omicron is infecting 3–3.
And there it is, the first trickle of data to confirm it. In the eyes of vaccinated immune systems, Omicron looks like a big old weirdo—but also, a kind of familiar one. That’s the verdict served up by several preliminary studies and press releases out this week, describing how well antibodies, isolated from the blood of vaccinated people, recognize and sequester the new variant in a lab.