Hey there, I hope you got every present you wanted, that all your friends and family are well, and that you have a warm cup of something laced with pumpkin pie spice close at hand. Because this may be the gloomiest, soot-stained story to come down your chimney this holiday season.
UPDATE: Monday, Jan 2, 2023 · 5:54:08 PM +00:00
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Barbara Morrill
In case you missed it, a related post from Mark Sumner:
Ukraine update: 10 moments from a war that already contains a million unforgettable moments
Over 10 months, the Russo-Ukraine War has killed over 200,000 on both sides and leveled entire cities to the ground, with consequences reaching far beyond Ukraine’s border.
Incoming House Majority Leader Steve Scalise sent a letter Friday to the Republican conference outlining the agenda for the first few weeks of the session of the Republicans’ tiny new majority. That is, if they can actually get a speaker elected, because they can’t do any business at all until that’s accomplished.
Everyone who knew Ken Balcomb—the great whale scientist who died this week at age 82 after a long struggle with cancer—has stories to tell about him, often many of them. My favorite is one that he liked to tell sometimes, but that other people I know witnessed on several different occasions.
The transcript is part of a mass database of evidence released by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
After an investigation into the inhumane conditions at the facility, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Florida activists demand that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) cancel its contract with the Baker County Sheriff’s Office.
This article was originally published at Prism.
In November, a group of incarcerated women at Baker County Detention Center in Macclenny, Florida, filed a Prison Rape Elimination Act complaint with the ACLU of Florida.
The Jan. 6 House select committee released a text message exchange between Hicks and another White House staffer on the day of the U.S. Capitol riot.
The former Trump adviser told his aide he would “surround the Capitol in total silence” after Biden’s inauguration, according to the House panel investigation.
We continue our Democracy Now! special broadcast with Democracy Now! co-host Juan González, who recently gave three “farewell” speeches in his hometown of New York before he moved to Chicago. González is an award-winning journalist and investigative reporter who spent 29 years as a columnist for the New York Daily News.
In a Democracy Now! special broadcast, we spend the hour with our own Juan González, who recently gave three “farewell” speeches in his hometown of New York before he moved to Chicago. González is an award-winning journalist and investigative reporter who spent 29 years as a columnist for the New York Daily News.
In the United States, sports can dominate kids’ whole lives. Weekends are filled with games, tournaments, and travel. For the most talented, participation in club teams can lead to state teams, followed by national ones. Then, with the pursuit of college sport scholarships, and eventually playing in the NCAA, a teenager’s entire identity can become intertwined with athletic success.
This article was originally published in Hakai Magazine.Planet Earth used to be something like a cross between a deep freeze and a car crusher. During vast stretches of the planet’s history, oceans from pole to pole were covered with a blanket of ice a kilometer or so thick. Scientists call this “snowball Earth.”Some early animals managed to endure this frigid era from roughly 720 million to 580 million years ago, but they had their work cut out for them.
Many Democrats fumed last month when Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona left the party and changed her affiliation to independent. But her decision has at least one good consequence: It makes Congress more representative of America.After all, “independent” is––per years of Gallup data––typically the country’s most popular party affiliation, with more Americans identifying that way than as Democrats or Republicans.
If one thing unites all Americans, it’s the conviction that paying taxes is a pain. Even those like myself who don’t mind contributing their fair share to keep seniors off the street hate having to fill out all of the paperwork, especially if our taxes are complicated. The Tax Foundation estimates that filling out tax forms eats up 6.5 billion hours of work a year, for an economic cost of something like $313 billion.
Reviews by outside experts and internal officials found serious flaws in the nation’s food-inspection programs after four infant hospitalizations and two deaths were linked to infant formula. But the FDA is still processing the recommendations.
An Arizona court has ruled that abortion doctors cannot be prosecuted under a pre-statehood law that criminalizes nearly all abortions yet was barred from being enforced for decades.
Now some states are making pandemic rules permitting booze-to-go and delivery permanent.
The panels began investigating Aduhelm’s approval and pricing in June 2021, just weeks after it won the FDA’s backing despite questions about the drug’s clinical benefit to patients.
Only now, in this moment in Hollywood, would an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s award-winning novel White Noise by the indie darling Noah Baumbach be funded like a blockbuster. After all, the film isn’t going to make any real money—even though it’s been playing in a few theaters for more than a month, it had its wide release yesterday on Netflix. But for years, the streamer has financed many a master filmmaker’s risky passion project.
Even with last month’s further easing of inflation, the Federal Reserve plans to keep raising interest rates.
We look at a remarkable film that follows how acclaimed playwright Liza Jessie Peterson gave a mesmerizing performance of her one-person play “The Peculiar Patriot” at the Louisiana State Penitentiary known as Angola, before authorities stopped it halfway through.
In 2022, more jails in the United States became death traps, as people faced inhumane conditions in overcrowded facilities amid a lack of mental healthcare, housing and backlash against bail reform. Most of those who died were incarcerated pretrial, and activists say this number is heavily underreported. From New York City to Houston, Texas, jail deaths have reached their highest levels in decades.
In a remarkable development, New York Democrats look likely to defeat Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul’s nomination of Hector LaSalle to be the state’s next chief judge, after progressives raised concern about his conservative judicial record and anti-abortion, anti-labor and anti-bail reform positions.
Brazil has begun three days of national mourning to mark the death of the global soccer icon Pelé at the age of 82. Born Edson Arantes do Nascimento, Pelé was a poor Afro-Brazilian who led the Brazilian national soccer team to its first World Cup title in 1958 at just 17 years old, and ultimately two more times in later years — more than any other player in history.
“The whole persona that he created, the ability to deceive us, is so troubling,” one voter told CNN.
Incoming House Majority Leader Steve Scalise sent a letter Friday to the Republican conference outlining the agenda for the first few weeks of the session of the Republicans’ tiny new majority. That is, if they can actually get a speaker elected, because they can’t do any business at all until that’s accomplished.
When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the U.S. Congress, there were moments in his speech that generated spontaneous applause and standing ovations. But there was at least one moment that Zelenskyy likely expected to get a much bigger response from his American audience.
It’s easy to think of Zelenskyy back in Kyiv, planning this trip with his small circle of advisers, wondering just what he might say in order to best serve the needs of Ukraine.
Millions—perhaps billions—of social media users routinely post images of themselves online without thinking too much about it, most simply trusting in the fact that since so many others have done exactly the same thing, then it must be “okay.
Recently, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works convened for a hearing titled “Examining the Impact of Plastic Use and Identifying Solutions for Reducing Plastic Waste.” The final hearing for the committee of the 117th Congress began with Sen. Jeff Merkley discussing the plastic problem, ranging from how plastic does not break down to the ways it has infiltrated seemingly everything through that process.
Because Donald Trump has a finite number of dead ex-wives and just a handful of golf courses on which to bury them, he has to continually come up with creative ways to lower his tax burden. He almost certainly outsources this thankless task to his team of accountants, because fully 80% of his mental energy is devoted to guessing which Pokémon will show up in today’s Happy Meal.