Yesterday was Independence Day in Ukraine, which Russia appears to have celebrated mostly in the same way it has celebrated every day for months: with a reported 98 towns shelled, missiles falling in Ukrainian cities (including at least 65 civilian casualties at a train station in Chaplyne, 100 miles from the front), and with many, many failed attempts to capture Ukrainian towns and villages.
On Wednesday, President Joe Biden announced his plan to relieve some of the student debt causing a trillion-dollar economic crisis for tens of millions of Americans—mostly the young, women, and people of color. The plan calls for canceling up to $10,000 in debt for student borrowers who make less than $125,000 a year and $20,000 in relief for Pell Grant recipients with similar incomes.
It’s been more than three years since former Attorney General William Barr issued his infamous “summary” of the report created by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
The arrests this week of five Florida militiamen who called themselves the “B Squad” for their violent actions on Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol serve as a helpful reminder that the Justice Department is still in the process of bringing the insurrectionists who attacked American democracy that day—now over 860 and counting—to justice.
Donald Trump squawked about scammed students in his attack on college loan forgiveness after paying $25 million to settle Trump University lawsuits.
Twitter users mocked the former baseball pitcher, whose video game company defaulted on a $75 million loan from the state of Rhode Island in 2012.
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.Earlier this month, we published Caitlin Dickerson’s 18-month investigation into the Trump administration’s family-separation policy, the result of more than 150 interviews and a review of thousands of pages of government records, some of which were obtained after a multiyear lawsuit.
America’s first-ever reformulated COVID-19 vaccines are coming, very ahead of schedule, and in some ways, the timing couldn’t be better. Pfizer’s version of the shot, which combines the original recipe with ingredients targeting the Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5, may be available to people 12 and older as early as the week after Labor Day; Moderna’s adult-only brew seems to be on a similar track. The schedule slates the shots to debut at a time when BA.
When Massimo Scanziani’s daughter was young, he’d often see her eyes twitching beneath her eyelids while she was sleeping. These rapid eye movements (or REMs) are so obvious, Scanziani told me, that he can hardly believe that they were described just seven decades ago. In 1953, Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman identified a special phase of sleep when neurons were abuzz and eyes were shut but flitting about.
Few things are more satisfying for a certain type of college-football fan than a Notre Dame loss, and all the better if it’s an upset. So last September, when the Fighting Irish were in danger of losing to the University of Toledo Rockets, 16.5-point underdogs, I knew I had to watch. First I flipped over to NBC, where Notre Dame’s home games are generally aired. No luck. Even before I could Google it, my Twitter feed reminded me of the problem: I had been Peacocked.
We speak with one of the reporters who this week exposed the secretive Chicago industrial mogul who has quietly given $1.6 billion to the architect of the right-wing takeover of the courts — the largest known political advocacy donation in U.S. history. The donor is Barre Seid, who donated all of his shares in his electronics company, Tripp Lite, to the nonprofit group run by Leonard Leo, who helped select former President Trump’s conservative Supreme Court nominees.
Oklahoma plans to execute a person a month for the next two years, starting today. We get an update from Connie Johnson, former state senator and murder victim family member with the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, and speak with world-renowned anti-death-penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean. “Our death penalty is broken. It always was from the beginning,” Prejean tells Democracy Now! “I recognize that this is torture and an abuse of human rights.
“Freedom Dreams: Black Women and the Student Debt Crisis,” a new short documentary from The Intercept, profiles Black women educators and activists struggling under the weight of tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of dollars in student loan debt. It is directed by Astra Taylor and Erick Stoll, narrated by former Ohio state Senator Nina Turner, and was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
In a much-anticipated move, President Biden has signed an executive order Wednesday for student debt relief that could help more than 40 million borrowers by canceling up to $20,000 of their federal loans. Many advocates for canceling student debt say Biden’s plan doesn’t go far enough, while Republicans decry the plan as “student debt socialism.
The newly effective laws make good on conservative promises to swiftly prohibit abortion in as many states as possible.
The Federal Reserve chair needs to convince markets he means business when he addresses the landmark conference of economists on Friday.
He said in a statement that he would leave his government post in December to “pursue the next chapter of my career.
As the U.S. central banks raises interest rates, the rest of the world is feeling the squeeze.
Primaries in New York’s redrawn congressional districts have led to heated battles within the Democratic Party that could have national implications. In the newly created 10th Congressional District, Dan Goldman, a conservative Democrat and heir to a multimillion-dollar Levi Strauss fortune, is running against a diverse field of candidates that includes Mondaire Jones, Yuh-Line Niou, Carlina Rivera and Elizabeth Holtzman.
We speak to the Pakistani British historian and writer Tariq Ali about new anti-terrorism charges brought against former Prime Minister Imran Khan after he spoke out against the country’s police and a judge who presided over the arrest of one of his aides. His rivals have pressed for severe charges against Khan to keep him out of the next elections as his popularity grows across the country, says Ali.
Mexican authorities arrested former Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam on Friday for his failure to conduct a thorough investigation into the disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in 2014. This came a day after a truth commission formed by current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the students’ disappearance was a “crime of the state.
A man was recently sentenced to prison for sending death threats to the top scientist and telling him he hoped he’d get a bullet in his “satanic elf skull.
Democrats in tough races aren’t praising Biden for acting on one of his campaign promises.
Laws that depended on the fall of Roe v. Wade are now in place in Idaho, Tennessee and Texas, which already had strict abortion restrictions.
It’s a big deal: An announcement from President Joe Biden forgiving $10,000 in student loan debt—$20,000 for Pell Grant recipients—puts a dent in the latest crisis of capitalism, but it’s the provision that freezes loan interest so that it can’t keep growing even as borrowers make their monthly payments that may do the most for ex-students suffering from predatory loan structures. As Sen.
Conventional wisdom says the party that holds the White House is fated to suffer midterm losses. It’s tough to come out ahead when the election is framed as a referendum on the sitting president, in a political system that guarantees no president can get his agenda through Congress unscathed.
President Joe Biden finally announced his student debt relief plan on Wednesday, and it exceeds the expectations of recent reports on his thinking. Biden will cancel up to $10,000 in debt for all student borrowers with incomes under $125,000 ($250,000 for married couples). That number had been widely reported. But in addition, Biden is cancelling up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients at the same income levels.
Aug. 24 is Ukrainian Independence Day. It also marks six months since Russian dictator Vladimir Putin began an illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. And now it marks the biggest U.S. military aid package since the war began.
President Joe Biden has made note of this occasion both by congratulating the Ukrainian people on their continued independence and by announcing a package of military aid designed to see that Ukraine stays a free and independent nation.
Republicans didn’t even wait for President Joe Biden to announce up to $20,000 in student debt relief before they started screeching about how terrible it would be for people who don’t have student debt and people who already paid off their student debt. The screeching has been going on for as long as debt cancellation has been discussed, but it reached a fever pitch as Biden’s announcement approached.
The Fox News host said “I didn’t have to take out loans” and called debt relief for people who did “disgusting.