It seems obvious now, in hindsight, that people expected too much from comedy in the first two decades of the new millennium—that it could make us better, make us healthier, undermine despots, change minds, enable progress, even save the republic. Those were enticing ideas, but Jon Stewart never seemed to fall for them. His job was making a comedy show, as he essentially told Tucker Carlson during a 2004 appearance on CNN’s Crossfire.
After the FBI raided the home of the wrong Trump supporter, online sleuths successfully identified the duo in about 30 minutes.
Four years ago, when President Donald Trump announced that he would take the United States out of the Paris Agreement, the world’s largest companies leapt into action.Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, personally beseeched Trump to remain in the pact. Bob Iger, Disney’s chief executive, resigned from a White House advisory council in protest. Goldman Sachs’s CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, sent his first-ever tweet just to denounce the exit. Within days, hundreds of U.S.
The Delta variant’s arrival this summer delivered a blow to the nation’s entire coronavirus arsenal, but its impact on the champion of last year’s vaccine race—Pfizer—has been particularly humbling. Compared with Moderna’s competing shot, Pfizer’s vaccine seems to induce half the amount of virus-fighting antibodies, and is associated with nearly twice as many breakthrough infections, according to two recent studies.
If those promising preliminary results hold, the new drug could help fill a significant gap in the world’s Covid-19 arsenal.
Friends and relatives of the late radical attorney Michael Ratner respond to the recent controversy over Yale University professor Samuel Moyn’s claim that Ratner “prioritized making the war on terror humane” by using the courts to challenge the military’s holding of prisoners at Guantánamo. Ratner’s longtime colleagues blast Moyn for failing to recognize how the late attorney had dedicated his life to fighting war and U.S. imperialism.
We look at the life and legacy of the late Michael Ratner, the trailblazing human rights lawyer and former president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, with three people who knew him well: Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights; Vince Warren, the organization’s executive director; and Lizzy Ratner, Ratner’s niece and a senior editor at The Nation magazine.
Despite the feverish negotiations and the stakes involved, more than half of Americans are not closely watching the debate in Congress, according to the poll.
Officials said the number of unvaccinated workers in the city is small enough that it shouldn’t cause big disruptions.
The sheer breadth of qualifying medical conditions and occupations, plus the lack of any proof requirements, means just about anyone who got the Pfizer vaccine can now seek out a booster.
Key aspects of the economy are doing better than before the pandemic, which supporters say shows how government spending can help.
With the deadline looming, the White House is starting to ramp up pressure on Republicans.
The central bank said it’s making progress toward its goals of averaging 2 percent inflation over time and reaching maximum employment.
Biden laid blame for the sluggish growth of U.S. jobs on the “impact of the Delta variant” of the coronavirus.
Central bank chief seeks to avoid market turmoil as president weighs tapping him for a second term.
The center-left Social Democratic Party in Germany has narrowly claimed victory in an election that marks an end to the 16-year era of Angela Merkel’s conservative chancellorship. We look at what this means for Europe and the world with Yanis Varoufakis, a member of the Greek Parliament and the former finance minister of Greece.
Progressives in the House of Representatives say they will oppose the $1 trillion infrastructure bill, after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she would seek a vote on the measure separately from the Build Back Better Act, the $3.5 trillion bill that expands the social safety net and combats the climate crisis.
The Democrats, you may have heard, are in disarray. President Joe Biden’s approval ratings have sunk to new lows, and his expansive economic agenda is stalled on Capitol Hill. Opposition from progressives forced House leaders to scrap a planned vote Thursday on the president’s lone bipartisan success in the Senate, a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. That failure, and the ensuing finger-pointing, threatens to drive the party’s warring wings even further apart.
In the news today: A federal shutdown was avoided as Congress agreed to keep the government funded until December, but the debt ceiling fight still looms. Meanwhile, it’s Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema versus Democrats (and global weather patterns), yet again. The House Select Committee on the January 6 insurrection blasted out nearly a dozen new subpoenas focused on how Trump’s mob of violent deplorables assembled.
Though a self-imposed deadline was missed, Democrats still have time to figure out how to get President Joe Biden’s agenda through Congress.
Congress is close to passing the historic and popular Build Back Better Act, but two Senate Democrats are standing in the way: Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin.
Manchin has at least been specific about some of his concerns, and represents a deep-red state where the politics are more difficult. But Sinema has been infuriatingly vague, and represents a state that voted for Joe Biden and is trending blue. She really has no excuse.
At this point in facing the novel coronavirus pandemic, it sometimes feels like nothing enrages parents like mask-wearing requirements for students. Given that classrooms are generally inside, most students are too young to get vaccinated, and teachers may be immunocompromised or otherwise unable to get vaccinated themselves, it makes perfect sense that if you want your child or teenager to attend in-person school, they need to mask up.
“It’s pretty sad if you ask me,” Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii said when asked about the West Virginia senator’s outline of a $1.5 trillion reconciliation bill.
The Biden administration has announced a new policy that is set to provide government-funded legal help to vulnerable asylum-seeking children in a number of U.S. cities, BuzzFeed News reports. This is a significant initiative: Unlike in criminal court, people in immigration court aren’t guaranteed an attorney. This includes most unaccompanied children, who have had to appear in court alone.
Two mothers with children at the same Chicago Public Schools site have died of COVID-19 after 11 of 17 of the classrooms at Jensen Elementary School were in quarantine due to reported cases of the virus, according to the Chicago Teachers Union.
“Both mothers had children sent home from quarantined Jensen classrooms,” the union wrote on its website Tuesday. “One mother complained bitterly on social media that she was never contacted by a contact tracer.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of our coverage of The Atlantic Festival. Learn more and watch festival sessions here. Despite the whirlwind in Washington this week, Marco Rubio isn’t worried—at least for his own party. As of now, Democrats have reached a deal to stave off a government shutdown until December, but they still need to prevent another crisis: a first-ever default on the national debt.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of our coverage of The Atlantic Festival. Learn more and watch festival sessions here.Hillary Clinton can draw a straight line from her duels with conservative media and Republican politicians in the 1990s to the January 6 insurrection—and she fears worse is coming. “There’s always been a kind of paranoid streak in American politics,” the former secretary of state told Atlantic staff writer Jennifer Senior.
A GOP donor said Corey Lewandowski harassed her at a recent charity event in Las Vegas.
A judge issued default judgments — a rarity in the legal world — against Jones and Infowars after the conspiracy theorist failed to produce discovery records.
The process is central to the billing fix that Congress passed last year and that the administration has since been charged with implementing.