Updated at 7:30 p.m. ET on December 22, 2021Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.This week there’s new information in a long-running debate.For more than a decade I’ve opposed U.S. drone-war policies. Calling drone strikes “surgical” was Orwellian propaganda, I argued. I later urged a drone-strike moratorium due to repeated massacres of innocents, among other reasons.
The pill, called Paxlovid, will provide the U.S. with another tool to help fight the virus as the more infectious Omicron variant surges.
Much of 2021 has been filled with a dull sense of déjà vu as the coronavirus pandemic has continued to shrink social worlds and batter morale. Many of the books our writers and editors were drawn to investigated failure, grief, apocalypse—resonant themes at a time of constant rupture and regression. Others helped jolt readers out of routines, and stretched the imagination.
I try to avoid despair when writing about climate change. Having covered the topic for five years, I’ve learned that a game of telephone shapes what eventually enters circulation. Case in point: Last week, scientists presented satellite data showing that a floating piece of ice off the coast of Antarctica was beginning to splinter. That is concerning and surprising, but not catastrophic.
A group of 11 Haitian asylum seekers is suing the Biden administration, accusing the U.S. government of physical abuse, racial discrimination and other rights violations when they were forced to shelter under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas. The class-action lawsuit comes after images of Border Patrol agents whipping Haitian asylum seekers from horseback went viral in September, drawing outrage from rights groups. The plaintiffs in the case are also demanding the U.S.
President Biden has announced a plan to begin distributing 500 million at-home COVID tests starting in January in response to the latest surge in cases, linked to the highly transmissible Omicron variant of the coronavirus. His plan also includes the establishment of new federal testing sites and the deployment of military medical personnel to help overwhelmed hospitals around the country. Dr.
U.S. air power has been central in the country’s wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, with officials promising that drones and other sophisticated weapons allow the U.S. military to carry out precision airstrikes that spare civilians caught in war zones. But a groundbreaking investigation by The New York Times reveals the U.S.
Just as soon as they press Save on their out-of-office responses this week, many Americans will catch what, statistically speaking, Americans usually catch during the cold winter months. No, hopefully not COVID-19. I’m talking about baby fever!The holidays are the high season for baby-making, which is why so many people are born between August and October, or about nine months from the week when everyone stops working and starts drinking hot alcohols.
More than 60,000 patients are hospitalized with Covid-19, according to the CDC, and the numbers are climbing with the highly contagious Omicron strain surging.
The White House has urged vaccinations and booster shots to combat the new variant.
Former President Donald Trump confirmed he had gotten a booster during a live show with Bill O’Reilly in Dallas on Sunday.
A standard 50-microgram boost raised antibody levels about 37-fold higher than pre-boost levels 29 days after the shot was administered.
The U.S. was behind other countries in charting the spread of disease in the pandemic’s disastrous early months. It’s still behind as new variants threaten to disrupt the winter.
Nearly the entire increase came from the burst of federal spending as the government mobilized to contain the spread of the virus.
The Fed plans to cease its bond buys entirely by March, rather than its earlier target of June to give itself room to begin raising interest rates as early as the second quarter of next year.
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.
Longtime immigrant rights leader Jean Montrevil has been granted three years of protection from deportation as part of a settlement for the First Amendment lawsuit Montrevil filed against the U.S. government that argued federal immigration officials targeted him for deportation due to his activism. Montrevil was abruptly deported to Haiti in 2018 but was allowed under the Biden administration to return home to New York in October to reunite with his family.
In the news today: The omicron variant of COVID-19 is looking to be bad news for the unvaccinated—but potentially catastrophic for overworked hospitals. Rethink travel plans, wear masks, and make sure you’ve gotten your booster if it’s time for you to get one.
Fresh off his losses in court over harassing the parents of murdered school children, Alex Jones is now suing the Jan. 6 Committee in hopes of stopping investigators from reviewing records that they say are key to understanding precisely who was involved—and how—in Donald Trump’s scheme to overturn the 2020 election results.
Unsurprisingly, Jones indicated in his lawsuit filed at the U.S.
Leaked audio that was reportedly made on Dec. 16 during a private lunch in New York City reveals that Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is running for a seat in the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania as a Republican, has some, uh, thoughts on trans rights he apparently didn’t feel he could share on his syndicated talk show, The Dr. Oz Show. Oz reportedly defended J.K.
In a shocking and disturbing incident, a teacher at a Washington, D.C., elementary school made third-graders pretend to die in gas chambers and shoot their classmates in disturbing reenactments of the Holocaust, according to The Washington Post. While the teacher has not been identified, an email to the students’ parents from Watkins Elementary School’s principal notes that they were placed on leave last week.
Here’s a suggestion for assignment editors at the large national media outlets who have provided us with an endless stream of stories about Trump voters in rural diners over the past half-decade: Try instead reporting on what it’s become like for non-Trump voters in these rural red areas where the politics of menace and thuggery have taken over—sort of an inverted version of the cliché; the rural Biden voter who can barely show his face at the local café.
“The guy should be fired on the spot,” the infectious disease expert said, though he accurately predicted that Watters would not be held accountable.
The senator’s dislike of the child tax credit helped tank the entire Build Back Better Act.
“These companies and personalities are making money by peddling lies… that can kill their own customers and their own supporters,” he said.
The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) said the Build Back Better Act would provide benefits to coal miners in West Virginia.
The Pennsylvania lawmaker is the first sitting member of Congress the committee has summoned.
It was bad enough that the Omicron variant shattered hopes of a normal holiday season, or at least what passes for normal in year two of the pandemic. Now it feels like we’re fated to live with COVID-19 in perpetuity, forever worried that when one variant fades, another will quickly take its place, that we’ll never, once and for all, throw out our face masks.Anthony Fauci is more upbeat.