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The Allegations Against One of Soccer’s Richest Clubs Tell the Story of the Sport’s Gilded Age

Ever since its acquisition 15 years ago by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan, a powerful member of the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, Manchester City Football Club has been the Future. City has spent billions of dollars to become one of the world’s biggest soccer clubs, but its greatest innovations have come off the […]

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How a Wayward Teen Lost His Life in the Phoenix Heat

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Caleb Blair entered the Circle K gas station in Phoenix asking for help. “I can’t breathe, I’m hot, I need to sit down. I can’t breathe,” he told the male cashier. He was sweaty, panting heavily, and struggling to stand up straight. […]

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Senate Democrats Are Taking Companies to Task Over Invasive Workplace Surveillance

Whether you call it “tattleware,” “bossware,” or “surveillance capitalism,” Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) has had enough of exploitative workplace monitoring technologies. Late last week, Casey and a handful of other Senate Democrats introduced the Stop Spying Bosses Act, which would help protect workers from intrusive employer surveillance both on and off the clock. The legislation would require “timely and […]

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Relax, New Yorkers. Nobody’s Coming for Your Gas Stove.

On January 9, in an interview with Bloomberg, an agency commissioner at the US Consumer Product Safety Commission floated the idea of regulations, or a potential ban, on new gas stoves—citing the “hidden hazard” of natural gas pollutants. As Mother Jones reported in 2021, this is not a new finding. Gas stoves, and the pollutants […]

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Study: Dirty Air Causes Chess Players to Make Mistakes

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Chess experts make more mistakes when air pollution is high, a study has found. Experts used computer models to analyze the quality of games played and found that with a modest increase in fine particulate matter, the probability that chess […]

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Republicans Have Manufactured a Controversy Over the Chinese Spy Balloon

A US military fighter jet shot down the Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday, but the Biden administration has a different kind of foe that has yet to be neutralized: attacks coming from Republicans trying to score political points over the floating white orb that appeared in America’s skies. The […]

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A New Poll Finds That Democrats Really Don’t Want Biden to Run Again

As President Joe Biden prepares to launch his re-election campaign in the coming months, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll on Sunday showed that Biden must overcome a lack of enthusiasm for his candidacy and a feeling that voters’ financial situation has worsened since he took office. Biden has not officially announced his campaign, though he is […]

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The Billionaire Koch Network Wants to Defeat Trump in 2024

Koch world is over Donald Trump. Americans for Prosperity Action, the group that spends millions on conservative candidates in American elections, backed by the billionaire Charles Koch, announced Sunday that it would take sides in the GOP presidential primary after sitting out the last few cycles—vowing to support a candidate who is not Trump. “The […]

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For One Small Town, “Forever Chemicals” Are a Nightmare That Won’t End

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It’s late October in the northeast corner of Wisconsin. Trees have started to change colors and a colder wind whips across Lake Michigan. Gas station marquees welcome back fall hunters on their annual pilgrimage. Tucked away at a technical college, citizens of […]

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The US Just Shot Down High-Altitude Chinese “Spy Balloon”

The giant white, aerial blob that US officials described as a Chinese spy balloon was seen plummeting towards the Atlantic Ocean near Surfside Beach, South Carolina, on Saturday afternoon, having been shot down by a US military fighter jet. “I ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down on Wednesday, as soon as possible,” President Biden […]

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A Historic Vote Just Reshaped the Democratic Primary. But There Are Battles Ahead.

Bucking decades of political tradition, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) voted for a new line-up of early primary dates in the 2024 presidential cycle. It was a-long awaited move that top Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have championed for years in hopes of making the country’s nominating process more representative of the party’s voters. The […]

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Two EMTs, a Fire Lieutenant, and One More Police Officer Fired in Tyre Nichols Case

Nineteen minutes is basically enough time to watch a sitcom without commercials, cook a frozen pizza in the oven at 400 degrees, or walk one mile at a leisurely pace. But somehow within the first 19 minutes that EMTs Robert Long and JaMichael Sandridge were on the scene after 29-year-old Tyre Nichols was severely beaten […]

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CNN: Supreme Court Justices Routinely Used Personal Email for “Sensitive Transmissions”

One time, I accidentally put a personal medical appointment on the public work calendar. Years ago, I tweeted something (very innocuous) from a brand account, intended for my own followers. The modern workplace requires vigilance (and numerous browsers and devices) to demarcate the strictly professional from the private. For you and me, co-mingling can feel […]

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The $400 Billion Man Running America’s Clean Energy Transition

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Deep in the confines of the hulking, brutalist headquarters of the US Department of Energy, down one of its long, starkly lit corridors, sits a small, unheralded office that is poised to play a pivotal role in America’s shift away […]

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We Don’t Need Black History Month Police Cruisers. We Need Police Reform.

We’re only three days into Black History Month, and people are already cutting up. Within the first two days of February, police departments in both Miami, Florida, and Columbus, Ohio, unveiled their own separate police cruisers commemorating the month, complete with Kente cloth patterns, raised “Black Power” fists, and Martin Luther King Jr. quotes. And, […]

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Shoot Down the Balloon, You Coward! (And Please Also Donate $35 to Republicans.)

President Joe Biden seems to be pretty unhappy about the suspected Chinese spy balloon flying over Montana. His administration signaled this by postponing Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Beijing—less than a day before Blinken was supposed to depart. Donald Trump apparently prefers a different response. “SHOOT DOWN THE BALLOON!” the former commander-in-chief Truthed […]

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The Future of American Environmental Protests May be Unfolding in a Forest Outside Atlanta

The past two weeks have marked a significant escalation in the years-long struggle over the proposed construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center (PSTC), a $90 million project that would be built on nearly 100 acres of city-owned land in an unincorporated section of DeKalb County—Georgia’s fourth largest county that encompasses a sliver of […]

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The Far-Right Bounty Hunter Behind the Explosive Popularity of “Died Suddenly”

Illustration by Shira Inbar On January 5th, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) tweeted about the unexpected passing of Quentin Williams, a Democratic member of the Connecticut House of Representatives. “Terrible news today of Q Williams sudden death,” he wrote. “I’m sending every good thought I have to his family and friends today.” Most of the replies […]

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Before a 6-Year-Old Shot His Teacher, the School District Failed on Threat Assessment

A decade ago, with school shootings on the rise across the country, Virginia passed a law requiring all K-12 districts to adopt a violence-prevention method called threat assessment. The method—which relies on trained teams of administrators, counselors, police officers, and others to evaluate and manage alarming behavior—is designed to help avert tragedies like the one […]

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The IRS Over-Audits Black People. Why Won’t the GOP Say Anything?

At first I figured the Republicans would be all over this. I guess I figured wrong. I’m referring to the bombshell working paper that made headlines earlier this week, in which a team of academic and Treasury Department economists found that the IRS audits Black taxpayers at roughly three to five times the rate of […]

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The Real Reason House Republicans Kicked Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Affairs Committee

House Republicans removed Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from the Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday because she is a Black, Muslim woman. Officially, that’s not the reason. But the facts speak for themselves: The removal is the culmination of years of targeting Omar by Donald Trump, the rightwing media, and Republican lawmakers who attacked her religion, […]

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Columbia Journalism Review’s Big Fail: It Published 24,000 Words on Russiagate and Missed the Point

Misdirection, an essential tool for magicians, is not usually a component of media criticism. But in a lengthy critique of the coverage of the Trump-Russia scandal published this week by the Columbia Journalism Review, veteran investigative reporter Jeff Gerth deflects attention from the core components of Russiagate, mirroring Donald Trump’s own efforts of the past six years […]

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Aim for the Stomach

This piece was published originally by Capital & Main. The writer Upton Sinclair once famously said, upon the reaction to his classic exposé of the slaughterhouse industry, The Jungle, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” He thought he was writing a book exposing the horrendous conditions for workers, and instead ignited […]

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This Deal Could Save the Colorado River—if California Doesn’t Blow It Up

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. After months of tense negotiation, a half-dozen states have reached an agreement to drastically cut their water usage and stabilize the drought-stricken Colorado River—as long as California doesn’t blow up the deal. The plan, which was developed without the input of […]

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“All I Want Is My Baby Brother Back”

Three weeks after his death at the hands of Memphis police, Tyre Nichols is finally being laid to rest. On Wednesday, friends and family gathered to celebrate Nichols’ life at the Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church in Memphis, Tennessee. Several lawmakers and civil rights advocates, including the Reverend Al Sharpton and Vice President Kamala Harris, attended […]

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Oklahoma Jailed Women Who Couldn’t Stop Their Abusers. Will a New Law Help?

In 2015, Kerry King was arrested in Tulsa, Oklahoma, because she failed to stop her abusive boyfriend from beating her and her young daughter. That’s a slight simplification (read more about her case here), but in essence, prosecutors chose to blame the victim. King, then 28, tried to fight her boyfriend off when she discovered […]

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The College Board Just Watered Down its New AP African American History Course

The College Board released the curriculum for its new AP African American Studies course Wednesday, revealing that the group had stripped the course of the topics that prompted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to ban the course. It will no longer contain certain material that DeSantis, who seeks to erase LGBTQ and Black experiences from school […]

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George Santos Relative Says They Never Gave $5,800 Reported by the Campaign: “I’m Dumbfounded”

Last week, Mother Jones reported that more than a dozen top donors to Rep. George Santos’ first congressional campaign did not appear to exist. The donations from people whose names or addresses could not be confirmed totaled more than $30,000. This pattern of questionable contributions, Mother Jones has learned, extends to Santos’ successful campaign last year. […]

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The Website That Wants You to Kill Yourself—and Won’t Die

Most websites aren’t known for having a “kill count.” Kiwi Farms is. Its victims reportedly include Julie Terryberry, who in 2016 took her life after being targeted by users of the site. Two years later, after years of harassment from Kiwi Farms trolls, Chloe Sagal lit herself on fire in a public park. In June […]

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“Polluting Elite” Belch Out Far More Than Their Fair Share of Emissions

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The difference between the carbon emissions of the rich and the poor within a country is now greater than the differences in emissions between countries, data shows. The finding is further evidence of the growing divide between the “polluting elite” of […]

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