Today's Liberal News

Trump’s War on Children: DOGE Guts Head Start, Child Abuse Programs, Healthcare & More

Cuts by the Trump administration are putting children at risk, according to a new report by ProPublica. The administration has cut funds and manpower for child abuse investigations, enforcement of child support payments, child care and more. On top of that, Head Start preschools, which offer free child care to low-income parents, are being severely gutted. Democracy Now! speaks with ProPublica reporter Eli Hager on his investigation into Trump’s “War on Children.

Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa Remembers Pope Francis for Progressive Views & Embracing the Global South

Thousands of mourners are lining up at the Vatican, where Pope Francis’s body is lying in state in St. Peter’s Basilica. His funeral will be on Saturday. In May of 2024, Pope Francis gathered 30 Nobel Peace laureates to the Vatican in a roundtable including our guest, Maria Ressa, who was awarded the prize for defending the free press in the Philippines. “He changed the church by changing the people,” says Ressa.

What Porn Did to American Culture

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The world we live in has been molded by the porn we watch—and you don’t have to look too hard to find it. Instagram models hawk their OnlyFans subscriptions, sex workers post “Day in My Life” vlogs, and the market for erotic romance novels is a gold mine.

AI Executives Promise Cancer Cures. Here’s the Reality

To hear Silicon Valley tell it, the end of disease is well on its way. Not because of oncology research or some solution to America’s ongoing doctor shortage, but because of (what else?) advances in generative AI.
Demis Hassabis, a Nobel laureate for his AI research and the CEO of Google DeepMind, said on Sunday that he hopes that AI will be able to solve important scientific problems and help “cure all disease” within five to 10 years.

The Last True Private Realm

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
If you were judged on the basis of your darkest dreams, what could you be found guilty of? Moral debasement? Murderous intent? Desperate, cringey behavior? Thankfully, no one can spy on the sordid or embarrassing acts that may transpire in other people’s sleep. But two recently published books connect dream behavior to real-world implications.

How the Trump Administration Flipped on Kilmar Abrego Garcia

At each stage in the political and legal fight over Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s wrongful deportation, the Trump administration has pushed back harder and dug in deeper.
The administration first called Abrego Garcia’s deportation an “administrative error,” then a “clerical error.” The words trivialized the decision to send a man to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador without legal proceedings and in direct violation of a judge’s protective order.

Ben-Gvir Can’t Bring Himself to Pretend

On Wednesday night, as the guest at a banquet in New Haven, Connecticut, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir made light of his waistline—a rare joke from a man whose utterances are more often vile than funny. Even so, he managed to blend the two. He said that when he assumed office in 2022, he took steps to make the food served to Palestinian inmates in Israeli prisons less abundant and less palatable.

“Musk Is Scamming the City of Memphis”: Meet Two Brothers Fighting Colossus, Musk’s xAI Data Center

We speak with two brothers who are fighting Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI over its massive data center in Memphis, Tennessee, used to run its chatbot Grok. The facility is next to historically Black neighborhoods and is powered by 35 pollution-spewing methane gas turbines the company is using without legal permits. Musk says he wants to continue expanding the project.