Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died in June 1989, just months after issuing a fatwa ordering the murder of Salman Rushdie and all others involved in the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses. Fatwas cannot be rescinded posthumously, which is why ever since then, this fatwa has hung in the air like a putrid smell, inhaled deeply for inspiration by devout followers of Khomeini and his successors. On Friday, a man stabbed Rushdie in upstate New York.
You might assume a poem titled “August” would have something nice to say about the dog days of summer. But Helen Hunt Jackson, who wrote it under her pen name, “H. H.,” doesn’t seem too thrilled. All “sweet sounds” have ceased, leaving only the dull hum of insects. (Perhaps the crowds have gone on vacation?) Flowers still bloom, but she sees past this display of bounty; soon enough, they’ll shrivel. “Pathetic,” she writes.
Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or “rad trad”) Catholics. On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.
Some studies suggest long Covid could affect as much as 30 percent of people who are infected.
The disease has gained a foothold among men who have sex with men, and experts warn that time is running out to stop the virus from spreading in the U.S. population more broadly.
When the activist and writer Ellen Willis published “Toward a Feminist Sexual Revolution” in 1982, the preposition in her title underscored an uncomfortable truth: The sexual revolution had come and (mostly) gone and left women largely unsatisfied. On the one hand, the ’60s and ’70s had ushered in real, tangible gains. Contraception and abortion had been legalized; the stigmas surrounding casual and extramarital sex had lessened.
“Frustrating” was one word a young progressive activist named Annie Wu Henry used to describe today’s Democratic establishment.In her mind, Wu told me in an interview, Democrats were falling short in terms of addressing the country’s affordability crisis, eliminating student debt, protecting the rights of immigrants and LGBTQ Americans, and ensuring access to abortion.
The HHS secretary faces renewed White House criticism over his ability to manage a public health crisis
It’s not illegal to get an abortion off the Gulf coast or in a van in Colorado, critics and lawyers seem to agree. But other challenges remain.
Democrats are widely expected to lose control of one or both chambers in November, and members are aware that today’s vote on the Inflation Reduction Act may be their last chance for some time to enact major reforms to the U.S. health system.
The agency has lifted guidance that led to quarantining of students exposed to, but not infected with, the coronavirus.
The Biden administration is amid negotiations with several companies to bottle millions of new monkeypox shots. But officials say it could take months for those doses to be ready.
The Inflation Reduction Act, passed by the House of Representatives today, is about to become the first comprehensive climate legislation in U.S. history. Compared with Congress’s desultory approach to the issue in the past, the numbers are striking: The legislation will spend roughly $374 billion on decarbonization and climate resilience over the next 10 years, getting us two-thirds of the way to America’s Paris Agreement goals.
As the U.S. central banks raises interest rates, the rest of the world is feeling the squeeze.
Suddenly, overnight, real progress has been teed up for the White House.
Republicans are poised to cast aside all the economic technicalities and bash Democratic candidates up and down the midterm ballot over an economy that is already deeply unpopular with voters in both parties.
We speak to Walden Bello, the longtime Filipino activist and former vice-presidential candidate. He was arrested Monday on “cyber libel” charges, which he says was just a tactic by the new administration to suppress his vocal criticism of them. The arrest took place just weeks after the inauguration of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the former U.S.-backed dictator. Bello says people are “worried that this is a foretaste of things to come.
A jury in California has convicted a former worker at Twitter of spying for Saudi Arabia by providing the kingdom private information about Saudi dissidents. The spying effort led to the arrest, torture and jailing of Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, who ran an anonymous satirical Twitter account. His sister, Areej al-Sadhan, and the lawyer for the family, Jim Walden, are calling on the Biden administration to push for his release.
One year after the Taliban seized power again in Afghanistan, we look at the new government’s crackdown on women’s rights while millions of Afghans go hungry. We speak to journalist Matthieu Aikins, who visited the capital Kabul for the first time since the U.S. evacuation one year ago. He writes the country is being “kept on humanitarian life support” in his recent article for The New York Times Magazine.
As cities nationwide crack down on unhoused populations and soaring rents force people out of their homes, the Los Angeles City Council faced major protests this week when it voted to ban encampments for unhoused people near schools and daycares. The vote expanded an anti-homeless ordinance to include nearly a quarter of the city.
Club members, staff and hundreds of guests at wedding receptions, fundraisers and parties could have had access to top secret information.
After officials contacted Trump team about the documents, people were seen on camera moving boxes in and out of storage, sources told The New York Times.
Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley is wildly claiming IRS agents armed with AR-15s are preparing to show up at Americans’ doors to audit their taxes.
My oh my. It’s been less than a week since federal agents raided Donald Trump’s Florida beachhouse in search of classified documents that Trump stole from the White House, but Republicans have come up with a truly dizzying number of excuses and smokescreens trying to cover up his wrongdoing—often several each day. Honestly, it’s been somewhat hard to keep track of them all, especially as many contradict one another, but we’re here to help.
On Saturday, Democratic House Reps. Adam Schiff and Carolyn Maloney, as heads of the House Intelligence and Oversight committees, sent a letter to the Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, asking him to “review potential damage to national security stemming from former President Donald Trump’s storage of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
In the days since the FBI executed a search warrant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, Trump, and his GOP lackeys have trotted out excuse after excuse to explain away the trove of material seized from a storage room at his golf club: A politically motivated witch hunt! The evidence was planted by the FBI! There was nothing important there! Obama did it too! (He didn’t.
On vacation still, but checking in to provide an update on the on-the-ground tactical situation in Ukraine. I’ll start at Izyum, and work my way around the front in clockwise direction.
Izyum direction: No one is officially calling it yet, but it’s increasingly clear that Ukraine has retaken Dovhen’ke as Russia’s Izyum holdings recede.
by Lajward Zahra
This article was originally published at Prism
It’s 106 degrees Fahrenheit, the kind of heat that makes the air here in El Paso, Texas, feel like sandpaper. Sitting in the shade at one of Sun Metro Bus’ 3,437 bus spots across El Paso doesn’t make the heat much more bearable, but it at least provides respite from the glaring sun.
“It’s the Boeberts, if you know who the Boeberts are,” one neighbor reported in a 911 call. “I need a sheriff out here.
Salman Rushdie was stabbed repeatedly yesterday at the Chautauqua Institution, in western New York. He is on a ventilator. He has wounds to his neck, stomach, and liver; severed nerves in one of his arms; and, according to his literary agent, Andrew Wylie, will probably lose an eye. This singular symbol of daring artistic ambition has become, suddenly, a flesh-and-blood person in grave suffering.