Today's Liberal News

Exiled Russian Environmentalist: Russia’s Uranium Sales to U.S. & Europe Help Putin Fund Ukraine War

We continue our coverage from the U.N. climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, with prominent Russian environmentalist Vladimir Slivyak, co-chair of the Russian environmental organization Ecodefense and winner of the 2021 Right Livelihood Award for defending the environment and mobilizing grassroots opposition to the coal and nuclear industries in Russia.

“Fossil Fuels Fund Dictatorships”: Ukrainian Climate Activist Suspended from COP27 over Russia Protest

Ukrainian climate activist Svitlana Romanko joins us after she was suspended from the U.N. climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, when she accused Russian officials of war crimes and genocide at an event on Wednesday. Romanko is the founder and director of Razom We Stand, an organization demanding a total permanent embargo on Russian oil and gas.

“A Near-Death Experience”: U.K.-Egyptian Activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah Almost Dies on Prison Hunger Strike

The family of imprisoned British Egyptian human rights activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah visited him on Thursday for the first time since he ended his full hunger and water strike, which they say occurred after he collapsed inside his prison shower last week. El-Fattah had intensified his strike on the first day of the U.N. climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh to draw international attention to the country’s human rights violations and protest his seemingly indefinite imprisonment.

Connect, Unite, Act: Mom, I’m a vampire slayer

Connect! Unite! Act! is a weekly series encouraging the creation of face-to-face networks in each congressional district. Groups meet to socialize, support candidates, get out the vote, and engage in other local political actions that help our progressive movement grow and exert maximum influence on the powers that be.

Evangelical leader accuses Justice Samuel Alito of leaking Supreme Court decisions

Rev. Rob Schenck has written a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts informing him that Justice Samuel Alito leaked the outcome of a critical 2014 Supreme Court ruling that gifted corporations with religious rights and allowed them to deny health care to employees. The revelation of Alito’s leak in that case adds weight to the likelihood that he also leaked the draft text of the decision destroying the right to abortion under Roe v. Wade.

Appointment of highly regarded special counsel Jack Smith viewed as sign Trump is in legal jeopardy

Attorney General Merrick Garland on Friday named longtime federal prosecutor Jack Smith special counsel to oversee two Justice Department probes of Donald Trump and determine whether he should be indicted.

Smith will now oversee two ongoing federal investigations into Trump’s involvement in the violent Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and his storage of highly sensitive materials at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.

The Downballot: More Dem wins + overtime races (transcript)

We’re now in the second week of election overtime, and there are still plenty of major races yet to be decided—as well as tons more great news for Democrats to exult over on this week’s episode of The Downballot. On the uncalled-races front, co-hosts David Nir and David Beard dive into a pair of House races in California and several legislatures that could flip from red to blue, including the Pennsylvania House.

Ode to Not Watching the World Cup

I don’t want to overstate this.
I don’t want to say that by watching World Cup 2022,
held in Qatar, on your personal entertainment device,
you’re stepping over the bodies of dead migrant workers,
standing on the heads of incarcerated queer people,
and bankrolling, in a tiny but critical way, the global grift.Because we’re all compromised, right?
We’re all implicated. We all live in webs of capital.
We’re all stuck in the mesh of consequence.

Sam Bankman-Fried Is Going Down Posting

After losing more than $1 billion of his customers’ money, the disgraced crypto titan Sam Bankman-Fried had just one thing to say.“1) What.”That inscrutable message, posted on Twitter last weekend, followed a cataclysmic week for the 30-year-old. FTX, the cryptocurrency-trading site he’d founded and turned into a global behemoth, went insolvent. Bankman-Fried’s personal wealth plummeted from $15 billion to $0 in just one day, and the company filed for bankruptcy.

Whose Midlife Crisis Is It, Anyway?

The television series Fleishman Is in Trouble begins upside down, with the camera soaring over an inverted Manhattan skyline—squat brick buildings in the top half of the frame, hazy blue sky below. It’s an appropriately destabilizing introduction for a show that’s constantly pulling the rug out from underneath us. The series is untrustworthy, in the best kind of way: It withholds and obscures and implies until it doesn’t.

Why We Eat Together

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.For human beings, a meal is never just a meal, and a snack is never just a snack. As the writer and scientist Louise O.

Tár Has an Answer to Art’s Toughest Question

This story contains major spoilers for Tár.As someone who writes about art and artists for a living, I confess that I find no question more exhausting than “Can we separate the art from the artist?” The only good answer is a frustrating one: “It depends.” So I went into Tár, Todd Field’s acclaimed movie starring Cate Blanchett, with some dread.