Mother Jones: Posts

Mother Jones

Brewing El Niño Suggests the Worst Heat Is Yet to Come

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Mild El Niño climatic conditions brewing in the Pacific Ocean will strengthen throughout the year, with an outside chance of a record-breaking event that will further turbocharge already sweltering temperatures around the globe, scientists have forecast. Last month saw a “weak” […]

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Mother Jones

Carlos Alcaraz Upsets Novak Djokovic in Dramatic Wimbledon Final

Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic has won 23 Grand Slam tournaments and the past four straight men’s single’s titles at Wimbledon. He hadn’t lost a match on Wimbledon’s center court since 2013—until Sunday, that is, when 20-year-old Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz beat him 6-4 in the fifth set despite having little experience playing on grass. The […]

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Mother Jones

Lagging in Polls, DeSantis Sacks Campaign Staff

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis raised $20 million in the first six weeks of his official campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. He had nearly 100 people on his campaign staff, and yet, he continues to badly trail the front runner, former President Donald Trump. Even in Florida, where DeSantis was reelected in 2022 in a […]

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Mother Jones

Chris Christie Rips Trump for Touting Indictments as a “Great Badge of Honor”

Chris Christie made the rounds on the Sunday morning talk shows this weekend, ramping up attacks on former President Donald Trump as he continues his own latest bid for the GOP presidential nomination. The pugnacious former New Jersey governor seized on comments Trump made Saturday night at the Turning Point USA conference in Florida, where […]

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Mother Jones

Why Deep Sea Mining Is So “Deeply Destructive”

This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Few people know the deep ocean as intimately as Lisa Levin, an ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Not content with doing pure science, Levin, who has participated in more than 40 oceanographic expeditions, co-founded the Deep-Ocean […]

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Mother Jones

Bleak Records Keep Coming: Heat Waves Are Smothering the Planet

The grim records keep tumbling: This June was the warmest month on record. This weekend, Death Valley, California, could tie or set the record for the hottest temperature reliably recorded on Earth. In Canada, record-breaking fires continue to burn. “The extreme weather—an increasingly frequent occurrence in our warming climate—is having a major impact on human health, […]

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Mother Jones

Watch 25-Year-Old Sabrina Ionescu Beat Steph Curry’s 3-Point Record

New York Liberty’s Sabrina Ionescu set WNBA and NBA records Friday during All-Star Weekend’s three-point contest—a feat that basketball legend Steph Curry on Twitter celebrated as “RIDICULOUS!” The 25-year-old point guard landed all but two of 27 possible shots for a total score of 37 out of 40—outscoring Curry’s single-round NBA record of 31 points, and […]

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Mother Jones

RFK Jr. Airs Antisemitic COVID Conspiracies at Flatulent Fundraiser

The conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer, and longshot Democratic presidential nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed at an Upper East Side press event this week that COVID-19 may be a genetically engineered bioweapon that was “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, reports the New York Post. The same press dinner had already gone viral […]

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Mother Jones

Can Tech Stop Animal Poachers in Their Tracks?

This story was originally published by Slate‘s Future Tense partnership and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In August 2021, forest range officer Remya Raghavan caught three people carrying wild boar meat in the Wayanad forest of Kerala, a state in southern India. Possessing wild animal meat is a crime under the country’s 1972 Wildlife […]

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Mother Jones

Why Is It Still So Hard to Get ADHD Medication?

For nearly a year, many people with ADHD and ADD in the United States have struggled to get the medication they’ve been prescribed to manage their condition. Those difficulties stem from a shortage that started with the stimulant Adderall and its generics, then trickled to methylphenidate and lisdexamfetamine, also known as Ritalin and Vyvanse. These […]

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Mother Jones

George Santos Cashed In Big With Followers of Indicted Chinese Billionaire Miles Guo

When George Santos, the indicted but still-in-office Republican congressman from Queens, New York, recently filed the campaign finance report for his reelection effort, there was something unusual about it: Of about 50 total contributors, the document listed about three dozen contributors spread across the country who mostly have Chinese names and who had each maxed […]

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Mother Jones

Far-Right Influencers Don’t Know What To Do About Threads

The rapid ascent of Threads has forced a key question facing any potentially successful social platform: “What’s the far-right going to do with this one?” And with 100 million users joining in just five days—due, in large part, to how the Meta-owned messaging service lets users port their Instagram follows—the issue has come to the fore […]

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Mother Jones

Amazon Got a Perfect Score on Disability Inclusion—From a Group It Helps Fund

On Tuesday, nonprofit organization Disability:IN released its annual “Best Places to Work” Disability Equality Index, which grades how well companies prioritize and accommodate disabled employees. One company that earned a perfect score: Amazon, which has been accused of disability discrimination by state agencies and current and former staff. Disability:IN, formerly the US Business Leadership Network, started more than […]

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Mother Jones

EV Charger Hacking Could Imperil the Security of the Power Grid

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It was co-published with Climate Desk partner Wired. With his electric Kia EV6 running low on power, Sky Malcolm pulled into a bank of fast-chargers near Terre Haute, Indiana, to plug in. As his car powered up, he peeked at nearby chargers. […]

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Mother Jones

The Disastrous Oppenheimer Movie You’ve Never Heard Of

The famed physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, so-called Father of the Atomic Bomb and alleged national security risk, has been portrayed in fictionalized film and TV dramas for more than 75 years, long before director Christopher Nolan placed him at the center of his new biographical thriller. The renditions include actor Sam Waterston’s much-honored depiction […]

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Mother Jones

Choose Your Fighter: Elon Musk vs. Mark Zuckerberg

One of the dumber news stories of the past few weeks has been the talk of a fight—presumably live, televised, and in a cage—between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. I don’t blame you if you’ve scrolled past any mention of this story. It is one of the best examples of the devolution of American culture […]

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Mother Jones

A Thunderous Fart Wrecked an RFK Jr. Event

In the three months since announcing his bid to become the next president of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has largely stayed in his lane of conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine nonsense. But we have also seen some stranger moments, including a video of a shirtless Kennedy working out in jeans and a belt […]

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Mother Jones

The FDA Just Approved the First-Ever Over-the-Counter Birth Control Pill in the United States

The FDA just made the Pill a heck of a lot easier for Americans to access. On Thursday, the agency approved Opill, a progestin-only birth control pill, for over-the-counter use, making a daily oral contraceptive available without a prescription for the first time in the United States. The decision removes a significant barrier—the need to […]

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Mother Jones

Are You There, God? It’s Me, Shannon Hale.

In April, bestselling children’s book author Shannon Hale published book number 10 in her acclaimed Princess in Black series. For those who don’t have an elementary schooler in their lives and therefore may not be as familiar with the series as I am, here’s the gist: Prim Princess Magnolia lives in a charming castle doing […]

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Mother Jones

Amazon Drivers Protest Brutal Conditions—Including Extreme Heat

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Heat waves can delay flights and melt airplane tarmac, but Amazon won’t let them hinder Prime deliveries. Extreme heat and unsafe working conditions under the merchant giant have now spurred drivers to unionize. In Southern California, 84 delivery drivers joined the International Brotherhood of […]

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Mother Jones

It’s Not Just Trump. Right-Wing Defendants Keep Saying the DOJ Framed Them, Too.

Back in April, when Manhattan prosecutors charged Donald Trump with falsifying business records, the MAGA faithful who protested outside the courthouse included some with legal issues of their own. Followers of the exiled Chinese mogul Guo Wengui, who had been arrested a few weeks earlier on fraud charges, were there. Fabulist Congressman George Santos (R-N.Y.)—who at […]

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Mother Jones

America Isn’t All Bad. This Image Proves It.

Almost exactly a year ago, when NASA released the first photos from the James Webb Space Telescope, President Biden declared in a speech, “These images are going to remind the world that America can do big things, and then remind the American people, especially our children, that there’s nothing beyond our capacity.” I agree with […]

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Mother Jones

DOJ Says No Immunity: Another E. Jean Carroll Lawsuit Against Trump Can Go Forward

On Tuesday, the Department of Justice reversed itself and said it would not oppose a lawsuit filed in federal court by writer E. Jean Carroll against former President Donald Trump for defamation. The trial is set to begin in January 2024. The lawsuit accuses Trump of defaming Carroll when the former president called her a […]

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Mother Jones

How the Affirmative Action Ban Affects Environmental Justice Policies

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A landmark decision by the Supreme Court to end the use of race-based affirmative action in college admissions could impede federal efforts to reduce the nation’s persistent economic, environmental, and health disparities, one of President Joe Biden’s top political […]

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Mother Jones

Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville Isn’t Convinced That White Nationalists Are Racist

In a heated interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Sen. Tommy Tuberville claimed that it’s just “some people’s opinion” that white nationalists hold racist beliefs. On Monday night, when Collins pressed the Alabama Republican on his previous comments about white nationalists serving in the US military, Tuberville doubled down, saying they have every right to serve…as long as they’re […]

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Mother Jones

Top Democratic-Run Firms Won’t Discuss Their Work for No Labels

Is No Labels becoming radioactive within the Democratic establishment? Two prominent, Washington, DC-based consulting firms that are run by Democrats and that have done significant work in recent years for the self-professed centrist outfit will now not discuss their relationship with the group or say whether they are still on the No Labels payroll. No […]

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Mother Jones

Top Democratic-Run Firms Won’t Discuss Their Work for No Labels

Is No Labels becoming radioactive within the Democratic establishment? Two prominent Washington, DC-based consulting firms that are run by Democrats and have done significant work in recent years for the self-professed centrist outfit will now not discuss their relationship with the group or say whether they are still on the No Labels payroll. No Labels […]

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Mother Jones

More Nations Are Growing Wary of Deep Sea Mining

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The list of countries calling for a pause on deep-sea mining continued to grow this week ahead of a key moment that mining companies hope will launch the fledgling industry, and its opponents hope could clip its wings, perhaps for good. Ireland and […]

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Mother Jones

A Nebraska Mom Helped Her Daughter Get an Abortion. They Are Both Facing Prison Time.

A Nebraskan mother accused of giving her 17-year-old daughter abortion pills and helping her bury the remains of the fetus pleaded guilty on Friday to violating a 2010 state law that makes it a crime to provide an abortion after 20 weeks of gestation. Jessica Burgess, 42, now faces up to two years in prison—as does […]

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Mother Jones

A Teen Died in a Sawmill Accident as Republicans Push to Roll Back Child Labor Laws

A Wisconsin 16-year-old died this month from injuries sustained from an “industrial accident” while working on a sawmill, in a startling reminder of the rise of child labor in dangerous occupations throughout the country. Officials announced today they are investigating. A cause of death has not been released. Department of Labor statistics show a steady uptick in child […]

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