Mitch McConnell isn’t known for his joyousness, but the dour Senate Republican leader was able to find delight even in the bleak aftermath of the January 6 insurrection: This, at long last, was the end of Donald Trump.“I feel exhilarated by the fact that this fellow finally, totally discredited himself,” McConnell told the New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin late that night, according to Martin’s forthcoming book with Alex Burns, This Will Not Pass.
Sometimes, it feels like everyone on the internet thinks they’ve been shadowbanned. Republican politicians have been accusing Twitter of shadowbanning—that is, quietly suppressing their activity on the site—since at least 2018, when for a brief period, the service stopped autofilling the usernames of Representatives Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, and Matt Gaetz, as well as other prominent Republicans, in its search bar.
The steady spending suggested the economy could keep expanding this year even though the Federal Reserve plans to raise rates aggressively to fight the inflation surge.
The Biden administration has pledged billions in military aid to Ukraine since Russia invaded in late February, and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said this week that the U.S. goal was “to see Russia weakened.” Author and analyst Anatol Lieven, senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, warns that unless there is a commitment to finding a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it could become a U.S.
The Biden administration participated in a prisoner swap with Russia this week, freeing a Russian pilot who was jailed in Connecticut on drug charges in return for a Marine veteran imprisoned in Russia since 2019. Meanwhile, the fate of jailed basketball player Brittney Griner remains unclear.
Harvard University released a 134-page report this week that detailed the school’s extensive ties to slavery and pledged $100 million for a fund for scholars to continue to research the topic. The report documents dozens of prominent people associated with Harvard who enslaved people, including four Harvard presidents. Harvard commissioned the study in 2019 as part of a wave of schools reckoning with their pasts and the ongoing legacy of racial discrimination.
The Omicron BA.2 subvariant now accounts for most cases in the country, with the number of BA.2.12.1 subvariant cases on the rise particularly in the Northeast.
The former White House coronavirus response coordinator made her most critical remarks yet ahead of the release of a new book.
The world health community is at odds over how to handle the next phase of the pandemic battle.
The war in Ukraine will “severely” set back the global recovery from Covid-19, according to the IMF.
The Fed’s campaign to raise interest rates — designed to reduce spending and curb inflation — will slow growth, which will have consequences for American workers.
Prices have been driven up by bottlenecked supply chains, robust consumer demand and disruptions to global food and energy markets worsened by Russia’s war against Ukraine.
The Biden administration recently extended a Covid-related pause on repayments.
White House officials deny any sense of panic over the economy or their midterm chances.
We speak with human rights and environmental lawyer Steven Donziger, who was released Monday from nearly 1,000 days of house arrest as part of a years-long legal ordeal that began after he successfully sued Chevron on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadorian Amazonian Indigenous people.
Boeing “probably should not have taken” the “very unique set of risks” that came with the deal, admitted David Calhoun.
Under oath, the former president claimed he was afraid of being struck with “very dangerous” airborne fruit.
Russia continued making slow, grinding progress on Wednesday, taking five settlements, repulsed on six other approaches, and pushing into some of the larger towns. Ukrainian resistance is stiff.
🇷🇺 have taken control of Zarichne and has continued to advance in Yampil’.
“I’m not getting in the car.”
This is what former Vice President Mike Pence said on Jan. 6, 2021 to Tim Giebels, the lead special agent tasked to protect him.
Thousands of rioters, many of them armed with weapons makeshift and otherwise, were laying siege to the U.S. Capitol while clamoring to hang him, the second person in line for the presidency of the United States. This conversation reportedly happened just before 2:30 PM.
In a sea of tanks, armored personal carriers (APC), infantry fighting vehicles (IFV), armored fighting vehicles (AFV), Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) Vehicles, it can be easy to overlook the vehicles that are most often responsible for getting soldiers where they need to be on the battlefield—Infantry Mobility Vehicles. Also known as Jeeps.
Well, not actually Jeeps.
Your day probably hasn’t been weird enough, so let’s fix that right now with a quote from an ex-President of These United States.
“I wanted to have people be ready because we were put on alert that they were going to do fruit,” said Donald J. Trump, previously in charge of this nation’s nuclear arsenal.
Nearly two years after former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights found that Minneapolis police officers are more likely to use neck restraints and chemical irritants on Black people and more likely to cite, use force against, and arrest Black people during traffic stops. The human rights departments announced the saddening but not shocking findings on Wednesday after a nearly two-year investigation.
The request comes a month after the drug company signaled its two-dose regimen generated immune protection in the youngest children comparable to young adults.
The former president said “you can be killed” by projectile fruit.
A petition by 3 American Samoans calls on the court to overturn the 100-year-old Insular Cases that deemed people in newly acquired territories as “uncivilized.
An independent autopsy confirmed what the Latino father’s family had declared: Police in Alameda, California, killed him, not meth. No officers were charged.
Conservatives on Twitter have greeted Elon Musk as a liberator. The mega-billionaire is in the process of purchasing the social-media platform and reorienting it toward what he calls “free speech.” The conservative columnist Ben Shapiro celebrated the news of the new free-speech era by insisting that Musk engage in politically motivated mass firings of Twitter workers based on their perceived political leanings.
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Every Friday, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekElon Musk bought Twitter. Anticipating that the deal will go through, many are advising him on how to improve the platform, with a focus on the tension between free speech and content moderation.
If you tried to imagine the perfect gym teacher, you’d probably come up with someone a lot like Hampton Liu. He’s a gentle, friendly guy who spends most of his time trying to figure out how to make the basics of exercise more approachable, and he talks frequently about how he never wants anyone to feel shame for their ability or skill level.
In an ill-fated attempt to hype myself up for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, I went on YouTube to look at an inflatable blue gorilla—a stage prop for the hip-hop act Brockhampton, who had announced that Coachella would be the group’s last booking ever. The festival unfolds in two identical three-day lineups over consecutive weekends; I was attending the second weekend, and I wanted a taste of how the first one had gone.