Updated at 5:29 p.m. on August 31, 2023Earlier this week, mission control commanded the International Space Station to turn its cameras toward the Gulf of Mexico. Giant white clouds, gleaming against the blue of the planet’s oceans and the blackness of space beyond, indicated the arrival of Hurricane Idalia, hovering menacingly off the coast of Florida.
About 3 million children could lose child care after funding expires at the end of next month.
This week Texas will join the 20 or so other states that have passed laws restricting access to medical therapies and procedures for transgender children. The new law is a triumph for Governor Greg Abbott, who has tried a couple of different strategies to restrict gender transitions, first threatening to investigate parents and caregivers for child abuse and now, in the latest bill, threatening doctors with prosecution.
A major New York Times investigation reveals how the United States’ aquifers are becoming severely depleted due to overuse in part from huge industrial farms and sprawling cities. The Times reports that Kansas corn yields are plummeting due to a lack of water, there is not enough water to support the construction of new homes in parts of Phoenix, Arizona, and rivers across the country are drying up as aquifers are being drained far faster than they are refilling.
As Hurricane Idalia left a wake of destruction Wednesday, President Joe Biden said, “I don’t think anybody can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore.” Climate activist and scientist Peter Kalmus calls for Biden to declare a climate emergency in order to unleash the government’s ability to transition away from fossil fuels. “The public just doesn’t understand, in my opinion, what a deep emergency we are in,” says Kalmus.
Military leaders in Gabon seized power on Wednesday shortly after reigning President Ali Bongo had been named the winner of last week’s contested election. Bongo and his family have led the country for close to 60 years, during which they have been accused of enriching themselves at the expense of the country.
Republicans are working to persuade Americans that the Biden plan will stifle innovation and lead to price controls.
Here are summaries of the cases and where they stand.
While the IRA requires CMS to select the drugs on which Medicare spends the most, experts said calculating annual expenditures is not a cut-and-dried process.
Makers of the drugs have 30 days to agree to participate.
“Our economy is the lowest it’s been.
The Biden administration has hit hard the president’s economic policy, known as “Bidenomics,” amid falling inflation, steady job growth and diminished talk of a forthcoming recession.
The president made a big bet on owning the economy. His team says give it time.
The Florida governor has made a name for himself with the fights he’s picked.
The Texas senator was derided on social media for his latest performative outrage.
Fabian Nelson’s primary runoff victory comes on the heels of a historic wave of restrictions passed by GOP-controlled legislatures targeting the rights of trans people.
The former Trump advisor will not be allowed to claim executive privilege by former president Donald Trump at his contempt of Congress trial, which starts next week.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Former President Donald Trump continues to smash through boundaries without losing support. Below, I explain why Trump’s chances of winning the 2024 Republican nomination now seem stronger than ever. But first, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
The end will come for the cult of MAGA.
Matt and Mercedes Schlapp lashed out at the website after it reported Matt Schlapp is facing two more allegations he made unwanted advances.
To borrow a phrase from the man himself, Rudy Giuliani had a theory, but not a lot of evidence.The lack of evidence—or more specifically, the failure to hand it over—caught up with him today, when a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that Giuliani was liable for defaming Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, a mother and daughter who served as election workers in Fulton County, Georgia.
Last December, Moby-Dick made one of my students gasp. It wasn’t the first time this had happened (weird book), but nothing about the text itself produced the response. For the final project in my English class for high-school seniors, where we spend a semester reading Moby-Dick, I assigned a pretty standard eight-to-10-page research paper. One student, interested in finance, saw a connection between the plot and the 2008 financial crisis.
Around the time of the 2016 election, YouTube became known as a home to the rising alt-right and to massively popular conspiracy theorists. The Google-owned site had more than 1 billion users and was playing host to charismatic personalities who had developed intimate relationships with their audiences, potentially making it a powerful vector for political influence. At the time, Alex Jones’s channel, Infowars, had more than 2 million subscribers.
We go with Democracy Now! correspondent Juan Carlos Dávila to the Dominican Republic, where many Haitian migrants and their descendants work on sugar plantations under conditions amounting to forced labor and live in heavily underresourced communities known as bateyes. Many bateyes do not have electricity or running water.
We continue our discussion with Congressmember Greg Casar of Texas about U.S. policy in Latin America by looking at one of its long-term effects: migration to the U.S. As people flee instability in their home countries brought about by U.S. trade and military policy, U.S. border authorities have implemented increasingly dangerous measures to stop migrants from traveling safely, including a deadly floating barrier of circular saw blades in the Rio Grande.
We speak to Congressmember Greg Casar of Texas, who has just returned from a congressional trip to meet with newly left-leaning governments in Brazil, Colombia and Chile ahead of the 50th anniversary of the U.S.-backed Chilean coup, which overthrew democratically elected President Salvador Allende and installed a 17-year military dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet.
The Biden administration has taken a major step to rein in price gouging for prescription drugs in the United States. Medicare will now be able to negotiate prices on 10 of the most expensive drugs used to treat diabetes, cancer, heart disease and more. That list is set to expand over the years. In what’s seen as a blow to Big Pharma, the White House says the move, a part of the Inflation Reduction Act, will benefit more than 9 million people in the U.S.
Families grieving lost children want policymakers to take emergency action.
Many steps remain before older adults see the benefit of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ upcoming talks with drugmakers.
