Alarm is growing over how the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, is changing Twitter after he spent $44 billion to buy the influential social media platform. Musk fired nearly half of Twitter’s workforce in a mass layoff Friday that gutted teams dedicated to human rights, artificial intelligence ethics and combating election misinformation, just days before Tuesday’s midterm election.
Across the United States, local voters will decide critical ballot initiatives related to reproductive freedom, voting rights, marijuana and slavery in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Chris Melody Fields Figueredo of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center says the initiatives like abortion could surprise some people, and says the recent Kansas vote to protect abortion shows reproductive health can transcend party lines.
With Democrats at risk of losing both the House and Senate in Tuesday’s midterms, we speak with Justice Democrats spokesperson Waleed Shahid about the progressives favored to win congressional seats. Texas city councilmember and former labor organizer Greg Casar, Illinois state Representative Delia Ramirez and Pennsylvania community organizer Summer Lee have all been endorsed by Justice Democrats, who are best known for helping catapult members of the Squad to victory in 2018.
The doctors argue in the lawsuit the subpoenas are effectively a “fishing expedition” against abortion providers that violate Indiana law.
The update comes amid anxieties about the administration’s effort to promote the newest vaccination as an upgrade over the original.
Aid Access, a Netherlands nonprofit, is prescribing more abortion medication in the U.S. than ever, in defiance of state laws.
If the measure passes, language will be added to the state’s constitution guaranteeing the right to abortion as well as contraception and other reproductive health services.
Inflation has cooled only slightly and job growth remains strong.
A new POLITICO-Morning Consult poll suggests voters’ views of the economy are baked in.
Housing investment, though, plunged at a 26 percent annual pace, hammered by surging mortgage rates.
According to an NBC News poll released Sunday, 70 percent of registered voters expressed interest in the upcoming election as a “9” or “10” on a 10-point scale.
Documents obtained by The Intercept reveal the Department of Homeland Security is working with private tech companies to fight online speech that undermines support for the U.S. government. We speak to one of the co-authors of The Intercept’s report, investigative journalist Lee Fang, who says the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act signed into law in 2018 by then-President Donald Trump expanded the government’s power to reshape online discourse.
As thousands of asylum seekers continue to arrive on buses in New York, we speak with a man from Venezuela about his journey, and two New Yorkers who have been helping since August to welcome them with dignity and ensure they get the housing, food and other assistance they need. “The system here in New York City is not created for this type of community, which is the migrants that are arriving,” says former asylum seeker, Adama Bah.
Benjamin Netanyahu is set to return as Israel’s prime minister, with Tuesday’s election results showing his Likud Party and far-right allies winning enough seats to form a parliamentary majority. This includes far-right lawmaker Itamar Ben-Gvir, who openly supports the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, vows to crack down on the LGBTQ community and was once convicted of racist incitement against Arabs.
The Ethiopian government and forces in Tigray have reached a truce to end two years of brutal civil war. The new peace deal follows a week of peace talks mediated by the African Union in South Africa. The Ethiopian government wants a unified country and Tigrayans want minoritarian rights upheld, says Adebayo Olukoshi, distinguished research professor at the Wits School of Governance who formerly worked on peace efforts in Tigray with the International IDEA.
Trump “missed the mark on some important areas,” he told Politico.
We haven’t talked much about Pavlivka before (prewar population: 1,000).
Pavlivka is located in a grinding part of the front. Russia has occupied the purple territory on this map since 2014, so you can see the general lack of progress pushing westward since the war began. Most of those red gains have come from the south, up from Mariupol.
When the GOP-packed Supreme Court first overturned Roe v. Wade in June, Republican politicians and operatives developed a standard talking point: By November, the economy will be the overriding issue in the midterms.
After beating that drum for months, sure enough, it crept into conventional wisdom. For the last month, a wide swath of pundits and analysts alike—mostly male—have taken the GOP talking point as gospel.
Democrats across the country have repeatedly—and rightly—argued that abortion is on the ballot in November, but in five states, that statement is true in the most literal way possible.
Voters in California, Michigan, and Vermont will have the chance to amend their state constitutions to affirmatively include the right to an abortion, while Kentucky voters are being asked to amend their constitution to exclude that very same right.
Things are wild over at Twitter following Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media platform. The company is laying off up to half of its workforce, which would amount to around 3,700 people. As layoffs started, former Twitter employees wasted no time filing a class action lawsuit in a San Francisco federal court. Meanwhile, Musk continues to troll and whine all over the platform he is rapidly tanking.
It can definitely be confusing trying to keep up with all the various ways that Donald Trump is in legal trouble. There’s the investigation in Georgia looking into intimidation of state officials and selection of false electors. There’s the investigation in New York that’s focused primarily on the Trump Organization’s tax fraud schemes.
Former president backs off on ill-timed attack on potential presidential rival just before midterms.
Investigators are attempting to determine where gifts sent to Donald Trump that were supposed to go to the National Archives ended up.
Ad claims DeSantis was created by God on eighth day. “What the hell are you talking about? You ever hear of a man named Jesus?” sputtered Michael Steele.
Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia is intensifying his critique of Republican opponent Herschel Walker, saying the celebrity athlete is fundamentally unfit for Capitol Hill.
The final Saturday Night Live before the midterm elections on November 8 couldn’t find much to say about the dire political situation unfolding in races across the country. The shoulder shrug of a cold open suggested that Democrats might do better in the polls if they found wild characters—such as Guy Fieri and Azealia Banks—to run for office and compete with similarly outrageous personalities on the Republican ticket.
I started out as a writer in the early 1990s, before the internet was important. I existed for a long while without a social-media profile, let alone a website to promote my brand. Then—it was about 2009 or so—I was strongly encouraged by my publicist to join the 21st century. I had an opportunity to expose my work to new generations of readers! I thought, Why yes, I would like to do that.
Adrienne Rich, or at least the version of her that people typically remember, was never resigned to the status quo. By the time of her death in 2012, she’d become a feminist leader, an antiwar advocate, and a poet who wrote boldly about politics, human rights, and sexuality. She had vowed to not pay her taxes in protest of the Vietnam War, and she refused a National Medal of Arts, criticizing political leaders.
Political photographs are deceptive things. They are caught in the middle of the action, the spin of a campaign or backstory, and offer subtle nods to larger currents in our country’s history. Often, if you listen carefully to these images, you’ll hear hints of an American tension: the call for more rights and freedom, and the simultaneous, equally loud cry for exclusion based on differences—and for a compromised version of our participatory democracy.
This article was originally published in High Country News.From the top of Pigeon Butte in western Oregon’s William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge, the full width of the Willamette Valley fits into a gaze. Slung between the Coast Range and the Cascades, the valley is checkered with farmland: grass-seed fields, hazelnut orchards, vineyards. In the foreground, however, grassy meadows scattered with wildflowers and occasional oaks trace the land’s contours.