As the Kyle Rittenhouse trial comes to a close, two things are becoming clear at once. First, absolutely no one should be surprised if Rittenhouse is acquitted on the most serious charges against him. And second, regardless of the outcome of the trial, the Trumpist right is wrongly creating a folk hero out of Rittenhouse. For millions he’s become a positive symbol, a young man of action who stepped up when the police (allegedly) stepped aside.
President Joe Biden’s virtual summit Monday with Chinese President Xi Jinping follows the two countries’ announcement just days earlier they will work together to confront the climate emergency after Xi did not attend the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow. Tension has been mounting between the two superpowers, especially over Taiwan and Hong Kong, with some speculating that a new Cold War is developing.
Humanitarian and economic conditions are rapidly deteriorating in Afghanistan, where the U.N. estimates that more than half of the population suffers from acute hunger. The country has fallen into an economic crisis after the U.S. and other Western countries cut off direct financial assistance to the government following the Taliban takeover in August. Taliban leaders are also unable to access billions of dollars in Afghan national reserves that are held in banks overseas.
As a wearer of novelty T-shirts and lifelong collector of stuff, I’ve amassed quite a lot of tees over the years. A family road trip to the Ben & Jerry’s factory one summer in the 1990s netted a bright, tie-dyed number, while a recent pandemic acquisition, a forest-green long-sleeved tee, came from Mystic Muffin, a Toronto restaurant famous for its apple cake. I’ve misplaced the former somewhere in storage, but wear the latter all the time in cooler weather.
The agency’s effort to decide which e-cigarettes can stay on the market could force it to confront the menthol question much sooner.
Attempts at price controls have to conform with the parameters of the reconciliation process they’re hoping to use to pass the social spending package on a party-line vote.
The documents released by a congressional committee lay out a timeline for how the Trump White House began to downplay the dangers posed by Covid-19.
The selection ends the administration’s lengthy search for a permanent FDA commissioner.
“The pandemic has been calling the shots for the economy and for inflation,” Janet Yellen said.
It’s tripped up the last two Democratic presidents and could trip up Biden too: How to sell a recovery when most voters aren’t feeling it.
Plummeting stock prices and lack of federal action has soured investors
“This recovery is faster, stronger, fairer and wider than almost anyone could have predicted,” Biden said.
The long-awaited move signals both optimism about the pace of job growth and wariness about price surges that have pushed inflation up to its highest level in decades.
Today marks the 30th anniversary of the Santa Cruz massacre in East Timor, when Indonesian troops armed with U.S. M16s fired on a peaceful memorial procession in the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, killing more than 270 East Timorese. Indonesia had invaded East Timor in 1975 and maintained a brutal occupation until 1999, when East Timorese voted overwhelmingly for independence in a United Nations referendum.
In the news today: Steve Bannon, an apparent key plotter of the January 6 insurrection, was defiant and mocking as he surrendered to federal authorities after his indictment for ignoring a congressional subpoena demanding his testimony. House Republicans, meanwhile, are already vowing retribution against those that would dare indict Bannon in the first place.
An activist and military father who has advocated for deported veterans as co-director of Unified Deported Veterans in Tijuana now gets to return back home himself. Robert Vivar “walked back to San Diego from Tijuana on Veterans Day,” nearly two decades after he was initially deported and had his life upended over a shoplifting offense, The San Diego Union-Tribune reports.
Waiting for him on the U.S.
After much criticism, the vaccine maker is close to an agreement to provide doses at a lower price to the global vaccine equity initiative.
The term “scraping the bottom of the barrel” doesn’t quite do justice to the new crop of MAGA talk show hosts that think Alex Jones is too tame. One of them is Stew Peters. He went from being a failed rapper, to a failed bounty hunter, to now a full-time COVID conspiracy theorist. And yes, being full-blown MAGA, there’s the obligatory police report documenting domestic violence as well.
Lewandowski suggested Trump knew he lost but raised suspicions about the 2020 election to protect his ego, ABC journalist Jonathan Karl writes.
As the battle against whether or not critical race theory should be taught in schools continues nationwide, some Republicans are also targeting the LGBTQ community. After attacking a Florida school board member for escorting a group of elementary school students on a field trip to a local LGBTQ-friendly restaurant, conservatives have taken to attacking LGBTQ books.
Cheney has continued to level criticism at Donald Trump, saying lawmakers who refuse to do so are complicit in his election lies.
We already knew from an October 2020 Associated Press report that the flawed Title 42 public health order that’s used the novel coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to quickly deport asylum-seekers in violation of their rights was implemented under political pressure by the previous administration.
The former White House aide’s podcast mates complained that he had to wear handcuffs while awaiting his court hearing on criminal contempt charges.
“I need us all to be outraged by what happened here today,” the police chief said, decrying the “public health crisis” that is gun violence.
Imagine what it would be like to time-travel from 2019 to now. If you were just strolling down a city street, and not talking to anyone, would you even know that we’re in a pandemic? Sidewalks are no longer deserted, most pedestrians have stopped wearing masks outside, and cardboard signs praising essential workers have been thrown into the recycling bin. But there’s still one big tip-off that things are a little fishy: all those outdoor-dining setups.
A Connecticut judge has found Infowars host Alex Jones liable for damages in lawsuits brought by parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
We speak with Bishop William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign, who was one of the Black pastors who visited the trial of the three white men who hunted down and shot dead Ahmaud Arbery, where last week a defense attorney claimed Black pastors sitting with the Arbery family in the courtroom could be “intimidating” for the jury, which is almost all white.
Among the unprecedented moments for Indigenous participation in the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow were the protests to protect the Amazon rainforest, the largest remaining rainforest on the planet, that activists argue is on the brink of ecological collapse.
The U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, ended Saturday with over 190 nations agreeing to the Glasgow Climate Pact, which calls on governments to return next year in Egypt with stronger plans to curb their emissions and urges wealthy nations to provide more funds to vulnerable countries in the Global South.
“If the 20th century was the story of liberal democracy’s progress toward victory over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse.” For The Atlantic’s December cover story, staff writer Anne Applebaum details the dangerous rise of autocratic power around the world.