Hello Friday folks. It has been a tense week. There has been some good news, but unfortunately, what has been broken is very hard to piece back together again. That includes the Supreme Court, our infrastructure, and the environment. Raise a glass to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor as she is doing God’s work on a court packed with zealots.
Democrats are not necessarily pro-abortion: they are pro-choice and believe that abortion should be safe and legal. President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill supports that by including provisions that could help reduce unwanted pregnancies by expanding health care coverage for poor women and demand for abortions by expanding the social safety net to lower the cost of raising children.
There are few greater pleasures in life than watching GEO Group continue to lose in court. The private prison profiteer had sought to greatly reduce, and even throw out, the millions of dollars a federal jury had awarded to detained immigrants that the company had forced to work for as little as $1 a day (and sometimes nothing at all).
But the U.S.
Kellogg workers began striking outside of production plants in four cities (Battle Creek, Michigan.; Omaha, Nebraska; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; and Memphis, Tennessee) back in early October. About 1,400 employees initially walked out of work after Kellogg and the union that represents them—The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM)—didn’t reach an agreement regarding a new work contract.
In Rolling Stone, Andy Kroll reports that the pledges the nation’s top law firms took—you know, those promises to stop funding Republican lawmakers who allied themselves on Jan. 6 with a seditious attempt to topple government?—have by and large met the same fate as pledges from other powerful companies and interest groups.
“I liked Bibi. … But I also like loyalty. … Bibi could have stayed quiet. He has made a terrible mistake,” Trump said, according to an Israeli author’s account in Axios.
The president called the move by Kellogg’s “an existential attack on the union and its members.
After weeks of waiting, the Supreme Court this morning finally allowed abortion providers’ challenge against Texas’s functional ban on abortion, S.B. 8, to go forward. But the win for abortion providers is not the sweeping victory that seemed likely when the Court heard oral argument on S.B. 8 in November—and even if legal abortions resume in Texas, any reprieve probably won’t last for long, because of another major abortion case, Dobbs v.
Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.Earlier this week I curated some nuanced commentary on abortion and solicited your thoughts on the same subject. What follows includes perspectives from several different sides of the debate. I hope each one informs your thinking, even if only about how some other people think.We begin with a personal reflection.Cheryl was 16 when New York State passed a statute legalizing abortion and 19 when Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973.
Robert Scott Palmer was arrested 12 days after he was identified in a HuffPost story and pleaded guilty in October.
Georgia Republican David Perdue is furthering his embrace of debunked claims that Georgia’s 2020 presidential election was wrongly decided as he runs for governor.
Publicist Trevian Kutti tried to intimidate a Georgia election worker into making false claims of voter fraud, Reuters reported.
As Joe Biden convened his virtual Summit for Democracy this week, he warned that democratic erosion represents “the defining challenge of our time.” He isn’t wrong. Democracy is under siege, and this year has been marked by contested elections, coups, and autocratic brazenness. This was the fifth consecutive year in which the number of countries moving in the direction of authoritarianism outpaced those moving toward democracy.
Steven Spielberg has been making films that feel like musicals for his entire career. No, the fearsome shark of Jaws and dinosaurs of Jurassic Park didn’t belt out a tune, and heroes like Indiana Jones and Tintin weren’t dancing through their set pieces, but they might as well have been. Spielberg is an expert at the careful choreography of camera blocking; his gift for legibly communicating complicated sequences of movement on a massive scale is second to none.
House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney dismissed pharmaceutical industry arguments that the drug price controls the Democrats are pursuing would limit efforts to develop new cures and therapeutics.
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.
We speak with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney on his new film, “The Forever Prisoner,” which follows the story of Guantánamo prisoner Abu Zubaydah, who was the first so-called high-value prisoner subjected to the CIA’s torture program and has been indefinitely imprisoned since 2006 without charge. Nearly two decades after the start of the U.S.
Filipina journalist Maria Ressa and Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov accepted the Nobel Peace Prize Friday for their “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression.” “There are so many more journalists persecuted in the shadows with neither exposure nor support, and governments are doubling down with impunity,” said Ressa in her acceptance speech at Friday’s Nobel ceremony, which we play in full.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could soon face charges in the United States after a U.K. court ruled Friday in favor of the U.S. government’s appeal to extradite him. U.K. Judge Timothy Holroyde said he was satisfied with a pledge from the United States that Assange would not be held in a so-called ADX maximum-security prison in Colorado, despite a U.K.
The companies said a third dose appears to provide a similar number of antibodies as a two-dose series against the original virus and other variants.
Despite promises to distribute shots based on need alone, U.S. negotiations with Myanmar and Taiwan have fanned fears that the administration is mixing politics and public health.
The ruling came in response to a lawsuit from several contractors and seven states.
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.
Aggressive action to deliver pandemic relief was the right call — and withdrawing support now would only hurt American workers.
Animal rights activist Wayne Hsiung has been convicted on felony charges of burglary and larceny for removing a sick baby goat from a goat meat farm in North Carolina in 2018. Hsiung is the co-founder of the animal rights organization Direct Action Everywhere. He was given a suspended sentence and 24 months probation.
By April 1968, Charles de Gaulle was bored. “None of this amuses me anymore,” the French president told his aide-de-camp, Admiral François Flohic. “There is no longer anything difficult or heroic to do.
In the news today: The economic news continues to be surprisingly bright, considering that we’re still knee-deep in a worldwide pandemic.