Today's Liberal News

Tyre Nichols and the End of Police Reform

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In January 2023, I traveled to Memphis to report on the killing of Tyre Nichols, an unarmed Black man beaten to death by a group of Memphis police officers.

Just Don’t Call Her Unqualified

Donald Trump has been widely ridiculed for staffing his administration with unqualified partisan hacks recruited from Fox News. This is not quite fair. Yesterday, Trump named Jeanine Pirro as the new interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. Pirro is a partisan hack recruited from Fox News, but she’s a qualified one.
Millions of Americans know Pirro as a prolific conservative-television pundit, most recently as a member of Fox News’s afternoon talk show, The Five.

The Real Trump Family Business Is Crypto

Early Monday morning, the leader of the free world had a message to convey. Not about the economic turmoil from tariffs, any one of the skirmishes playing out abroad, or a surprise shake-up in his White House staff. Instead, President Donald Trump turned to Truth Social to post about something called the “$TRUMP GALA DINNER,” with a link to gettrumpmemes.com.

What It Costs to Get the Life You Want

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
The wives in Mavis Gallant’s stories aren’t happy. In “The Flowers of Spring,” from 1950, a woman named Estelle visits her paralyzed husband, Malcolm, at the hospital. She feels sorry for him but also resentful and trapped, and she wonders whether the wives of other disabled men also feel “despair and discontent.

The Pope’s Most Revealing Choice So Far

In the span of his infant papacy, Robert Prevost hasn’t had time to make many decisions besides what to say from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, what to wear when he said it, and what name to take as pope. This last choice is the most instructive. As the novelist Laurence Sterne once wrote, names exert “a strange kind of magick bias” on their subjects.

“We Are Not Living. We Are Enduring.” Gaza Mother on Struggle for Food, Safety Under Israeli Blockade

Ahead of the Mother’s Day holiday in the Untied States, we speak to Duha Latif, a mother of two children in Gaza, about life for mothers living under Israeli occupation and assault. Democracy Now! last spoke to Latif over a year ago, when she was attempting to evacuate Rafah with her family. She now resides in a tent in Khan Younis and struggles to feed her family as Israel’s blockade has created widespread famine throughout the Gaza Strip. “We are not living. We are enduring,” says Latif.

Priest Sexual Abuse Survivors Demand Accountability from New Pope: “Open Up Those Archives”

Survivors of sexual abuse by Catholic priests are calling for Pope Leo XIV to institute a zero-tolerance policy and for the church to investigate his handling of prior sexual abuse allegations. “He needs to be transparent. He needs to be honest,” says Peter Isely, a survivor of sexual assault by a Catholic priest and a co-founder of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. “Wait and see,” says James V. Grimaldi, executive editor of National Catholic Reporter.

Leo XIV: First U.S.-Born Pope Criticized Trump/Vance on Deportations, Lack of Compassion for Immigrants

The first U.S.-born pope has taken the name Pope Leo XIV. Chicago-born Cardinal Robert Prevost is also a naturalized citizen of Peru, where he served the church for two decades. He greeted 1.4 billion Roman Catholics and the world Thursday with a message of peace and has posted statements online in support of migrant rights and criticized the Trump administration. In the first part of our discussion, we go to Rome for an update from James V.