On January 3, a group of more than 300 competitors departed from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to begin the 43rd annual Dakar Rally: a 14-day, 4,751-mile off-roading adventure held entirely in Saudi Arabia once again. The race used to be held in Africa, until 2008, when unrest in Mauritania forced organizers to move to South America, where it was hosted until last year.
Last week, at his home in Sunnyvale, California, a man named Michael T. Jones died of cancer, at age 60. This past weekend the local San Jose Mercury-News ran an appreciation of him and summary of his career, which you can read here. He is mourned by the many friends he made over the decades, of course most of all by his wife, June, with whom he recently celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary.
I appreciate where he’s coming from, but I want to stay creative and giddy about sex.
As the wealth of U.S. billionaires soars by over a trillion dollars during the pandemic, Oxfam is warning COVID-19 could lead to the biggest increase in global inequality on record. A new Oxfam report finds it could take more than a decade for poor people to recover from the health and economic crisis, and urges governments to take immediate action.
President Joe Biden has placed immigration at the center of his ambitious agenda, signing several executive orders reversing Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and promising a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. But Biden is not only navigating the destructive legacy of his immediate predecessor, but also that of the Obama administration when he was Vice President, which oversaw three million deportations.
President Joe Biden has signed an executive order repealing the Trump administration’s ban on transgender people serving in the U.S. military and ordered the Pentagon to review the files of troops who were forced out because of the ban and to immediately halt discharges of transgender troops now serving.
I had put a little aside every month for various projects and vehicle upgrades, and it’s all gone.
Parenting advice on youth sports, racism, and toxic neighbor friends.
The debt poses no imminent danger to U.S. finances, economists say, so the more pressing concern should be jump-starting the economy.
You can, in fact, call for “unity” and pursue policies that Republicans don’t like.
Warm weather, low taxes, and a mayor ready to nurse their grievances about Bay Area liberalism.
He can’t possibly expect the GOP to go along with this—but that might be a good thing.
How four years of sneers about snowflakes, “safe spaces,” and soy boys changed my views on parenting.
The government said that 5.1 million Americans are continuing to receive state jobless benefits, down from 5.2 million in the previous week.
Trump’s presidency may be best remembered for its cataclysmic end. But his four years as president also changed real American policy in lasting ways, just more quietly. We asked POLITICO’s best-in-class policy reporters to recap some of the ways Trump changed the country while in office, for better or worse.
At the same time, the unemployment rate stayed at 6.7%, the first time it hasn’t fallen since April.
The share of wealth controlled by the top 1 percent sits at levels not seen since the 1920s. Biden’s hopes for changing it rests on Senate control.
A government shutdown was averted after the president approved the Covid relief package and annual spending bill.
After President Joe Biden issued an executive order on his first day in office canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, pressure is growing from Indigenous leaders and environmental groups for the new administration to do the same with the Dakota Access pipeline, the controversial project that sparked the historic Standing Rock uprising in 2016.
Britain will soon pass the grimmest of milestones: 100,000 people dead from COVID-19. This appalling tally is higher than anywhere else in Europe, and almost twice that of Germany, the biggest country on the continent. Depending on how it is measured, Britain is now the second-worst-hit nation on Earth relative to its size.There is simply no escaping the reality that the country has suffered a catastrophic failure of governance.
The GOP leader cited comments from two Democratic senators who reiterated their support for the Senate rule as a reason to move forward.
Night Owls is a themed open thread appearing at Daily Kos seven days a week.
Kate Aronoff at The New Republic writes—Right to Work on a Hot Planet. Labor and climate campaigners quite literally share a common enemy. The name often ends in Koch:
The Protecting the Right to Organize Act—which passed out of the House last February, and which Biden has voiced support for—would preempt the core of statewide right-to-work measures.
Politico brings us the sad tale of Donald Trump’s White House staffers and hangers-on now trying to find new jobs after supporting an effort to overthrow the nation’s democracy to reinstall their favorite crook. Apparently it isn’t going well.
In a big surprise, Republican Sen. Rob Portman announced Monday that he would not seek a third term next year in Ohio. Portman, who is 65, had not shown any obvious interest in retirement, and he had a large $4.6 million war chest at the end of September of 2020.
In October of 2019, former elected county assessor for Maricopa County Paul Petersen was charged by Utah’s attorney general with 11 felonies. Those felonies included “human smuggling, sale of a child and communications fraud.
The doctor’s excuses are too little, too late, Keilar said of the COVID-19 misinformation that flowed from the White House under Birx’s watch.
President Joe Biden will sign an executive order strengthening Buy American policies on Monday. While such provisions, which encourage federal agencies to buy U.S.-made products, already exist, they’re filled with loopholes and haven’t always been followed.
“Existing Buy American rules establish a domestic content threshold—the amount of a product that must be made in the U.S.
