The weekend was stuffed with new Republican excuses for why a FBI search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort that found multiple secret, top secret, and confidential government security documents was either of no major significance or another instance of investigators being mean to Trump, but none of the excuses square with what we already know.
The Republican reactions to Trump, ahem, being caught with highly classified nuclear weapons-related documents after asserting to federal agents he didn’t have them continues, and as the facts worsen for Trump his pro-attempted-coup Republican allies are sliding towards the obvious endpoint. If a Republican leader commits a crime against the government, well then maybe that thing shouldn’t even be a crime at all!
Rand Paul has been homing in on that one.
The Republican Party is now obsessively inventing excuses for why the man who attempted to overthrow the government rather than abide his election loss is allowed to make off with whatever classified nuclear weapons documents he wants to, after the coup’s failure, but we’ve been learning much more about the actual circumstances of the FBI search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club with each passing day.
Russia continues to flood forces into the Kherson area in response to Ukraine’s repeated declarations that it is just this close from launching its long-expected counter-offensive to retake its land. The whole situation continues to have the feel of a trap as Ukraine systematically eliminates ammunition depots and supply routes into the region.
Another big BOOM on Nova Kakhovka, Kherson region, now. The detonation of ammunition is reported #Kherson #Ukraine pic.
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.
If documents seized at Mar-a-Lago include material about nuclear weapons, as has been reported, “I don’t know what the defense” could be, Conway noted.
Some of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, are trying to profit from their participation in the deadly insurrection.
The former president also slammed the FBI as “corrupt” for confiscating the material. Some of it was marked as classified and top secret, according to a warrant.
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.