Mother Jones
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Deep underneath the sodden soils and the berms of snow that now coat California, fuels for fire are waiting to sprout. Grasses and other quick-growing vegetation, spurred by the downpours that saturated the state at the start of the year, […]
Mother JonesIn the fall of 2020, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton faced a mutiny. Seven high-ranking staffers suspected that the state’s chief law-enforcement officer was using the powers of his office to benefit an Austin real-estate developer named Nate Paul, who had given generously to the Republican’s re-election campaign. The staffers put their concerns in writing, […]
Mother JonesToday, I think we’ve seen the entire 2024 Republican presidential primary writ small. Let’s start with specifics and then go broad. This morning, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley announced she is running for president. She did so at a relatively normal rally with a pre-Trumpian tone, a reminder that once a “BYAH” could sink a campaign. And it was so […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A train carrying hazardous materials heading from Pennsylvania to Illinois derailed in early February, causing a major fire and alarm over a possible imminent explosion. The situation has local people worried, despite reassurances from officials, and has highlighted how vulnerable many […]
Mother JonesThe Department of Justice has elected not to press charges against Rep. Matt Gaetz after a years-long sex-trafficking probe, according to a CNN source familiar with the subject. In late 2020, during the Trump administration, investigators set out to determine whether or not the Florida Republican had violated federal law, examining what the Washington Post described as […]
Mother JonesIn her first public appearance since officially announcing her presidential run, Nikki Haley kept it safe: The former South Carolina governor touted her Indian American identity, declared that America is not racist, and noted that the left’s focus on race is a form of pathetic self-loathing. And, as expected, she declined to mention her former boss […]
Mother JonesAfter more than three decades in office, Sen. Dianne Feinstein announced Tuesday that she will not be running for reelection in 2024. The 89-year-old senator from California, the longest-serving woman in Senate history, said in a press release that she would “accomplish as much for California as [she] can through the end of next year” […]
Mother JonesOn Tuesday, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley announced she was running for president, the way most people do—with a three-minute-long soft-focus announcement video that begins with a few notes from a piano over an aerial shot of the water tower in her hometown. Haley, who served as US ambassador to the United Nations during […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The flames and deadly black smoke that billowed high over a small town on the Ohio and Pennsylvania border Monday were an acute reminder of a type of commonly used plastic with a particularly troublesome environmental and health record. […]
Mother JonesJennifer Crane pulled a fifty-pound tote off the conveyor belt, boxed it up at her station, and pushed it back on the belt to be labeled and shipped. Mindful of her quota—70 packages an hour for up to 11 hours—she grabbed a twenty-pound box and felt pain shoot up her arm. Amazon’s medical team told […]
Mother JonesThis morning, the driver of a U-Haul in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, hit and injured eight people, apparently intentionally, in a stunning example of the use of a motor vehicle to inflict harm. Two people are in critical condition, according to authorities. Video from the scene shows the U-Haul careening onto a sidewalk, nearly hitting a […]
Mother JonesA bunch of the “Make America Great Again” crew watched the Super Bowl on Sunday—and apparently did not approve of what unfolded on their television screens. I’ll let you guess what they took issue with. The complaints started rolling in as Broadway legend and star of “Abbott Elementary,” Sheryl Lee Ralph, performed a rendition of […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In my mid-20s, I undertook the quintessentially Australian rite of passage of moving to London for a few years. Months into my first English winter, I started having dreams about the Australian wilderness. The images were so vivid and […]
Mother JonesIn East Palestine, Ohio residents are unsure of whether or not it’s safe to return to their homes after a train derailment in the area forced officials to do a “controlled release” of vinyl chloride, a “colorless compound that is a human carcinogen and can be deadly if inhaled” into the air to avert an explosion. […]
Mother JonesLate on Saturday evening, the College Board responded to Gov. Ron DeSantis’s wave of attacks on education in Florida accusing the state’s Department of Education of criticizing the Advanced Placement African American studies course, and its use in the state of Florida, as a vehicle for the governors’ far-right politics. The College Board said that it welcomes […]
Mother JonesAh, the Super Bowl is upon us. Like most American news organizations, we are obligated to offer some predictions today, and the time of the game, for easy web traffic. The game is on at 6:30 p.m. eastern time. I think the Philadelphia Eagles linebackers will try to target Kansas City Chief’s go-to tight end […]
Mother JonesRescuers in Turkey and Syria continued to pull survivors from fallen buildings on Saturday, as the death toll from a 7.8 magnitude earthquake reached 25,000. The quake last Monday and its aftershocks led thousands of buildings to collapse in the region, injuring tens of thousands of people and leaving millions homeless during below-freezing temperatures. Turkish […]
Mother JonesMonterrious Harris, 22, was sitting in his car outside his cousin’s apartment in Memphis on January 4 when eight men in black hooded sweatshirts and ski masks allegedly approached the vehicle and ordered him out. “I will shoot you!” one of the men said, according to Harris. “I will shoot you!” Harris put his car […]
Mother JonesOutside a Family Dollar store in Gulfport, Mississippi, a stream of cars enter a parking lot. It is early February, a Saturday, but no one is here to shop. Katrina Mateen, 41, stands with her back toward the store’s entrance, where a cluster of teddy bears, fake flowers, and tea candles sit in the sun. […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Proponents of a “moonshot” idea to deal with global heating have been handed a new, very literal, interpretation by researchers who have proposed firing plumes of moon dust from a gun into space in order to deflect the sun’s rays […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Hakai Magazine and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Clear blue sky above a forested island surrounded by glittering sea. Wild. Uninhabited. Protected. It appears as if we’re approaching paradise. We cut the boat’s engine and nose into a rocky beach. Crowned with Douglas fir, Garry oak, and […]
Mother JonesA lawyer for Hunter Biden has threatened to sue Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese mogul closely linked to Steve Bannon, over Guo’s role in disseminating material reputedly copied from Biden’s laptop. In a letter sent Thursday, high-powered attorney Abbe Lowell demanded that Guo preserve any evidence that might be relevant to such a suit. Lowell—who Biden […]
Mother JonesPresident Biden is still riding the high from his State of the Union zinger on protecting Medicare and Social Security. He even gave a whole speech about it yesterday in Tampa. Sensing that Americans don’t like the notion of being denied the retirement benefits they’ve paid into their entire lives, Republicans are trying to argue […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. While 2022 inflicted hardship upon many people around the world due to soaring inflation, climate-driven disasters, and war, the year was lucrative on an unprecedented scale for the fossil-fuel industry, with the five largest western oil and gas companies alone […]
Mother JonesIt was shocking news: Charles McGonigal, a former counterintelligence chief for the FBI, was arrested for his alleged role in two separate schemes. In one, he purportedly accepted $225,000 from an Albanian-American businessman, while he was still in the FBI, and did favors for that businessman and Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama. In the other, […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In September 2022, two months before PhD student Megan Kerr was scheduled to board a military plane bound for the Antarctic ice sheet, she found herself in a conference room on Oregon State University’s campus, waiting to ask a question that […]
Mother JonesEditor’s note: This short piece accompanied “Forever Home” in the March/April 2023 print edition of Mother Jones. This spring, the US Supreme Court will hear a case that could decide the future of the Indian Child Welfare Act, the 1978 landmark law that strengthened tribes’ rights to keep Native children out of the foster care […]
Mother Jones“Can you tell the court a little bit about what she was like as a baby?” It was December 2018, and Robyn Bradshaw sat on the witness stand in the Hennepin County Juvenile Justice Center in Minneapolis, fighting for custody of her granddaughter. The night before, Bradshaw had attended a support ceremony with other members […]
Mother JonesHouse Republicans spent much of their first big oversight committee hearing Wednesday attacking Twitter for denying American voters the chance to look at Hunter Biden’s penis. The lawmakers’ pro-dick-pic position was probably inadvertent. But that is where they landed. The hearing failed to produce any evidence to support the central allegation advanced by committee chair, Rep. Jim […]
Mother JonesBetween 2019 and 2022, Jair Bolsonaro governed a country with a population of almost 215 million people, but since losing Brazil’s presidential election to the Worker’s Party’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in late October, Bolsonaro’s real-life universe has shrunk considerably. It is now confined to Kissimmee, Florida, in one of two houses owned by José […]