Today's Liberal News

Walmart takes the CDC’s gift to employers, cuts paid leave time for workers with COVID-19

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) confusing, widely panned (and widely mocked) shift from 10 days of quarantine after a positive COVID-19 test to five days for asymptomatic cases was seen by many as a gift to employers eager to keep workers on the job no matter what—an interpretation quickly confirmed by CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, who said the shift was intended to “keep the critical functions of society open and operating.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz puzzlingly sets his sights on overturning vaccine mandates for kids … in D.C.

On Wednesday, Sen. Ted Cruz’s office emailed a press release indicating that the Texas Republican would propose a bill to overturn the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for schoolchildren—not in his adopted home state, but in the nation’s capital. A particularly ironic quote at the beginning of the press release shows Cruz misconstruing what it means to listen to science when it comes to public health.

You Can’t Simply Decide to Be a Different Person

When I was a kid, my dad did something on family vacations that perplexes me to this day: He ran. Every day, at least four or five miles, rising before the sun and before anyone else was awake. He wasn’t training for anything. He wasn’t trying to lose weight. There was no specific goal, no endpoint, no particular reason he couldn’t take the week off while in the greater Disney World metropolitan area, which, in July, is hotter than the surface of the sun.

Your Starkly Different Perspectives on Omicron

Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.As the Omicron stage of the pandemic wears on, many of you are anxious, frustrated, and incredulous or even despairing as to how others are behaving––but you’re not of like mind. Some of you believe that the response to the new variant is overwrought, while others think that it is underwhelming.

The ‘Meta-emptiness’ of Emily in Paris

When the first season of Netflix’s Emily in Paris debuted in October 2020, it was met with both delight and ridicule: delight at its escapism into sunny France and from away the election and pandemic, but also ridicule at Lily Collins’s bubbly American abroad blithely Instagramming her croissants by the Seine. (“The whole city looks like Ratatouille!”)These reactions are not mutually exclusive though, as Emily in Paris’s many conflicted fans can attest.

The Books 20 Years in the Making

In 1999, Gayl Jones published a book that reads the way jazz sounds. Her fourth novel, Mosquito, is an ambitious, experimental riff that blends historical and philosophical beats and finds connections between U.S.-Mexico border tensions and the Underground Railroad. Mosquito displayed the wide-ranging talents of a writer heralded by Toni Morrison and fresh off a National Book Award nomination. It was also the last novel Jones would publish for more than two decades.

Sudan Protests Demand End to Military Rule: “No Negotiation, No Partnership, No Legitimacy”

We get an update from Sudan, where at least three pro-democracy protesters were killed by security forces on Thursday, bringing the death toll to at least 60 since the military coup on October 25. Thursday’s protest came four days following Abdalla Hamdok’s resignation as Sudan’s prime minister, after he was deposed in the October coup and then shortly restored to power by the military in November.

WHO Says Omicron Variant Is Not “Mild” as ER Doctor Describes New COVID Wave Overwhelming Hospitals

We look at the skyrocketing number of COVID infections. Coronavirus cases hit record highs this week, with global cases climbing 70% from last week to 9.5 million and the U.S. reporting a single-day record of 1 million new cases on Monday. In the U.S., the extraordinary volume of cases is filling up emergency rooms nationwide and exhausting healthcare workers, says emergency room physician Dr. Craig Spencer, who has been treating coronavirus patients since the pandemic began.

Hospitals Are in Serious Trouble

When a health-care system crumbles, this is what it looks like. Much of what’s wrong happens invisibly. At first, there’s just a lot of waiting. Emergency rooms get so full that “you’ll wait hours and hours, and you may not be able to get surgery when you need it,” Megan Ranney, an emergency physician in Rhode Island, told me. When patients are seen, they might not get the tests they need, because technicians or necessary chemicals are in short supply.

News Roundup: One year from the Jan. 6 insurrection, Republican extremism has only grown

In the news today: The anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection, a day when Donald Trump, his allies, a majority of Republican lawmakers, and a violent mob attempted to nullify the results of a United States election rather than abide an election loss.

Here’s some of what you may have missed:

• ‘He lost’: Biden delivers stinging rebuke of Trump, GOP on one-year anniversary of Capitol siege

• In the year since Jan.

Caribbean Matters: COVID-19 surges as a coup anniversary tarnishes Three Kings Day

While Jan. 6 is now known as the date of the failed coup attempt in the United States, throughout the Caribbean, in both Spanish- and French-speaking nations, it is the feast of the Epiphany, also known as Three Kings Day, Dia de los Reyes, or Le Jour des Rois. Here in the U.S., communities of the Caribbean diaspora celebrate, too. For example, Epiphany kicks off the beginning of Carnival in New Orleans, which ends on Mardi Gras, when folks will be eating king cake.

Capitol rioter accused of stealing sign arrested for deadly drunk driving accident while out on bond

Emily Hernandez is a 22-year-old Missouri woman who has been out on bond while she awaits a trial and resolution for her part in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. Hernandez has been charged with five misdemeanors, “including knowingly entering a restricted building without authority, demonstrating in the Capitol, stealing, and knowingly engaging in disorderly conduct in a restricted building with intent to impede the government.

‘Remain in jeopardy’: Markey, Warren call for probe into immigration abuses at Plymouth jail

The Plymouth County, Massachusetts, sheriff’s office announced last fall that it would be ending its agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This is a major step forward: The 287(g) program, which allows local law enforcement to act as federal immigration agents, is a discriminatory and flawed policy that the Justice Department said has resulted in racial profiling.