As fall dips into winter in the Northern Hemisphere, the coronavirus has served up the holiday gift that no one, absolutely no one, asked for: a new variant of concern, dubbed Omicron by the World Health Organization on Friday.Omicron, also known as B.1.1.529, was first detected in Botswana and South Africa earlier this month, and very little is known about it so far. But the variant is moving fast.
In the end, President Joe Biden did what many close to him expected: He took a longer-than-anticipated amount of time to arrive at a reasonable, moderate decision that thrilled few but carried limited risk.
The Commerce secretary said in an interview that the Biden administration sees trading partners in Asia as part of the solution.
Aggressive action to deliver pandemic relief was the right call — and withdrawing support now would only hurt American workers.
The president needs people to overcome a new set of fears and direct their purchases into the areas of the service economy hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic.
“The pandemic has been calling the shots for the economy and for inflation,” Janet Yellen said.
We speak with Mansoor Adayfi, a former Guantánamo Bay detainee who was held at the military prison for 14 years without charge, an ordeal he details in his new memoir, “Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo.” Adayfi was 18 when he left his home in Yemen to do research in Afghanistan, where he was kidnapped by Afghan warlords, then sold to the CIA after the 9/11 attacks.
Democracy Now! first aired on nine community radio stations on February 19, 1996, on the eve of the New Hampshire presidential primary. In the 25 years since that initial broadcast, the program has greatly expanded, airing today on more than 1,500 television and radio stations around the globe and reaching millions of people online.
As Democrats in Congress struggle to pass the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better Act, there is large bipartisan consensus in the U.S. Congress to spend over $7 trillion over the next 10 years in military spending. The United States spends more each year on defense than China, Russia, India, the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, and Australia combined.
The survivor of a serial rapist who received probation joins us to speak out after a New York judge sparked international outrage when he ruled it is inappropriate to jail the man who attacked her. Christopher Belter pleaded guilty to raping and sexually assaulting her along with three other teenage girls age 15 and 16, but he will avoid serving time in prison, and instead receive 8 years of probation.
Update on Nov. 24: Jurors on Wednesday afternoon returned guilty verdicts against all three of the white men charged with killing 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery in February 2020. Travis McMichael fired the fatal shots and was convicted on all counts, including the charge of malice murder. His father Gregory McMichael, a former police officer, and neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan were convicted of felony murder and other charges.
The Oscar-winning actor said it was “a path that I’m choosing not to take at this moment.
Welcome back to our impromptu and sporadically scheduled pandemic guide to anime. If you’ve missed any of our earlier entries, you can find them all here:
(Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)
That housekeeping out of the way, we’ll quickly get to it. We spent the last two go-rounds looking at animated horror of the ghosts, zombies, and monsters variety. If you aren’t into that, rejoice: we’re done.
This article contains spoilers through the seventh episode of Succession Season 3.Given how this season of Succession has gone so far, the Roy siblings should have reason to celebrate. They held on to control of the family’s company, Waystar Royco, after a Hail Mary negotiation. They helped choose the Republicans’ next presidential nominee from the comfort of their father’s hotel suite.
GOP Rep. Ronny Jackson insisted that the highly transmissible variant is just a trick to “push” midterm mail-in ballots.
The Detroit Academy of Arts & Sciences (DAAS) choir is a reason to be happy this holiday season. Angela Kee is their fearless leader and, under her direction, the choir has performed at tourist conventions, opened Pistons and Lions games, and even sang at the White House for President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama—and 80% of the students at DAAS live at or below the poverty level.
Cohen doesn’t believe Trump will run in 2024, even though he keeps saying “I’m thinking about it.” That’s to “keep the grift going,” he added.
Welcome back to the weekly Nuts & Bolts Guide to small campaigns. A few months ago, I wrote a Nuts & Bolts diary about the lack of solid representation in local offices, particularly law enforcement. Sheriff’s offices and District attorneys are overwhelmingly older white men, and organizations like Reflective Democracy have pointed this problem out repeatedly. In a large number of cases, these positions are held by elected officials.
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said this type of behavior “has to be called out.
David Pepper, the former Ohio Democratic Party chairman, has had a front-row seat to one of the major fronts in the American right’s insurgent war on democracy: Namely, the nation’s statehouses, where the gradual Republican takeover in the past decade has resulted in a barrage of antidemocratic laws, not to mention the empowerment of incipient far-right extremist ideology.
People often define America as a melting pot. But as the country brings together multiple cultures, many often cross the line between cultural appreciation and appropriation.
WHO’s regional director for Africa called on countries to follow science and international health regulations.
“What happened on Jan. 6, senator?” Fauci said, responding to Republican lawmakers’ latest attack against him.
NIAID Director Anthony Fauci said cases of the Omicron variant have not been detected yet in the U.S., but that “inevitably, it will be here.
African Union officials have complained about the lack of vaccines since the U.S., U.K. and EU pre-purchased the bulk of available supplies at the end of 2020.
Anthony Fauci said claims he lied about certain research funding in the Wuhan lab smacked of contempt for science.
Francis Collins said there are many unknowns at this point.
Illustrations by Miki LoweChildhood is a fruitful source of inspiration for artists, but some return to it more than others. The poet Marie Howe is one of them. She grew up in a large Catholic family, the oldest of nine siblings and one of 100 first cousins; she said in 2017 that family is “where everything happens.” If the image that comes to mind is a hectic and happy, Cheaper by the Dozen–type household, you should read her poems: The vignettes she paints can be dark.
In David Mamet’s film State and Main, a Hollywood big shot tries to shortchange a set hand by offering him an “associate producer” credit on a movie. A screenwriter overhears the exchange and asks, “What’s an ‘associate producer credit’?” The big shot answers: “It’s what you give your secretary instead of a raise.
A World Health Organization panel named the variant “omicron” and classified it as a highly transmissible virus of concern, the same category of the delta variant.