Today's Liberal News

Historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Policing in U.S. Was Built on Racism & Should Be Put on Trial

A Minnesota jury’s conviction of former police officer Derek Chauvin on three counts for murdering George Floyd does not go far enough in dismantling police brutality and state-sanctioned violence, says historian and author Khalil Gibran Muhammad. “We know that while the prosecution was performing in such a way to make the case that Derek Chauvin was a rogue actor, the truth is that policing should have been on trial in that case,” Muhammad says.

News Roundup: D.C. statehood; Biden rebuilds climate relationships; Facebook’s role in violence

In the news today: The House passes a bill to grant statehood to Washington, D.C.; Biden attempts to repair international relationships at climate summit; and an internal Facebook report again confirms the company’s central role in spreading election disinformation, far-right hoaxes, and violence long before the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Here’s some of what you may have missed:

• House passes bill on statehood for Washington, D.C.

Ted Cruz’s latest straight-faced dishonesty: ‘You didn’t see us try to pack the court’

Ted Cruz has been accused of a lot of things: being the Zodiac Killer; being from Canada; being a churlish Sea Monkey that grew out of control in a secret Area 51 lab before escaping into the forest with a family-size bag of Bugles and a sixer of Zima; being the son of a key JFK assassination conspiracist; spending the past four years hiding in Donald Trump’s Underoos like a colicky baby wallaby; having the personality of a clammy loaf of reduced-salt Wonder Bre

This Week in Statehouse Action: Sweet Leaf edition

Happy Earth Day to those who observe!

And who doesn’t observe? Extraterrestrials, maybe?

But don’t they want us to fix our own planet so we don’t go off and dirty up theirs?

Anyway, this missive missed 4/20 by just a couple of days, but that’s also a holiday worth celebrating.

Regardless of whether you do or plan to partake of marijuana, its increasing legality is a very good thing.

We’re rapidly approaching the time to stop catering to ‘vaccine holdouts’

The millions of Trump voters who have thus far refused to be vaccinated against COVID-19 want us to know that we’re going about it all wrong if we want them to get the shot.

They’re tired of being “bullied,” they say. Besides, as one says, they haven’t gotten sick (yet) despite being “out and about” the entire pandemic. There’s just too much information out there to trust anyone, another says.

Podcast: When Can I Take Off My Mask?

The coronavirus pandemic has led businesses and governments to perform “hygiene theater,” which can give a false sense of security. But how do we thread the needle between being too cautious and too cavalier? Derek Thompson joins James Hamblin and Maeve Higgins to help us understand. Listen to their conversation on the podcast Social Distance:Subscribe to Social Distance to receive new episodes as soon as they’re published.

Show Your Immune System Some Love

If the immune system ran its own version of The Bachelor, antibodies would, hands down, get this season’s final rose.These Y-shaped molecules have acquired some star-caliber celebrity in the past year, due in no small part to COVID-19. For months, their potentially protective powers have made headlines around the globe; we test for them with abandon, and anxiously await the results.

The New Swing Voters

The last election’s most unexpected twist is framing one of the most urgent questions confronting both parties today: What explains Donald Trump’s improved performance among Latino voters?The president who began his first national campaign by calling Mexicans “rapists,” drug smugglers, and criminals; who labored to build a wall across the U.S.

Meet the Texas Doctor Developing a “People’s Vaccine” to Help Inoculate Billions Around the World

We look at the state of the pandemic and vaccine rollout in the United States and around the world with Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Hotez is part of a team at Baylor University that is working with a private Indian company to develop a low-cost COVID-19 vaccine. The task of developing a simple vaccine is “daunting,” Dr.

American Police Are Inadequately Trained

In response to the high rate at which American police kill civilians, many on the left have taken up the call for defunding the police, or abolishing the police entirely. But some policing experts are instead emphasizing a different approach that they say could reduce police killings: training officers better, longer, and on different subjects.