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Mother Jones

Of Course Republicans Still Want Trump After All These Indictments

The New York Times and Siena College are out with the latest 2024 polls, and the outlook is as expected. Former president Donald Trump, despite facing mounting criminal charges, is crushing his rivals. He’s in a dead heat against Joe Biden, with 43 percent of registered voters backing each candidate in an increasingly likely rematch. It’s not hard […]

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Trump Loyalists Lay Out Plan for Second Term: Gut Worker Protections

If Donald Trump wins the White House in 2024, loyalists have written a battle plan for how to change labor laws and regulations: make it harder for workers to form unions, make it easier for companies to classify employees as independent contractors, and ban the government from collecting race-based employment data in the name of stopping […]

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Henrietta Lacks’ Family Reaches Settlement With Company Profiting Off Her Stolen Cells

The HPV vaccine. Genetic mapping. The polio vaccine. All of these medical miracles were made possible by Henrietta Lacks, a Virginia woman whose cells were taken without her permission in the early 1950s and used for an enormous range of medical research over the decades that followed. Now more than 70 years later, her family is finally […]

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When White People Became “White People”

How exactly did white people become “white” people? It seems like most white people have no idea about how they came to identify as “white”. That’s a problem. Overlooking this part of our history, I think, means white people can misunderstand ongoing critiques of white identity politics in today’s culture wars. So, I’ve broken it […]

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Mother Jones

When White People Became “White People”

How exactly did white people become “white” people? It seems like most white people have no idea about how they came to identify as “white”. That’s a problem. Overlooking this part of our history, I think, means white people can misunderstand ongoing critiques of white identity politics in today’s culture wars. So, I’ve broken it […]

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Mother Jones

Phoenix Just Had Its Hottest July Ever. So What Now?

This story was originally published by the Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. That Phoenix is hot should come as no surprise. The heat is often the first thing that comes up when someone from out of state asks locals about living in the Valley of the Sun. “How can […]

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Barbie 2 Should Be About the Gender Binary. It Practically Writes Itself.

As a trans guy I feel an affinity to Ken. No body hair? No male genitalia? Parted hair? Fashionable outfits? And the undying belief that women are wonderful? Sign me up! So, I donned my best Beach look (this wasn’t hard: I already own a matching, patterned swim-trunk, button down combo) and showed up ready […]

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White Nationalists Are Big Fans of Elon’s “White Genocide” Tweets

Elon Musk made his most brazen overture to white nationalists yet on Monday, tweeting about the “white genocide” conspiracy theory in South Africa. In response to a video of South Africa’s ​​Economic Freedom Fighters party posted by right-wing influencer and serial plagiarist Benny Johnson, Musk tweeted, “They are openly pushing for genocide of white people […]

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The TikTok Account You Should Be Following is Probably a Library

Let’s face it. It’s bleak out there. Book banning is a whole political stance. It’s scorching hot just about everywhere. And Donald Trump is vowing to run for president—from prison. But one wholesome TikTok trend is reminding me of the light. Against one of the most contentious times for public libraries in recent memory, supporters […]

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Very Annoyed Judge Rejects Trump’s Latest Scheme to Avoid Criminal Charges

A state judge in Georgia has rejected Donald Trump’s bid to throw out a grand jury report and disqualify the Fulton County district attorney from investigating the former president’s efforts to overturn that state’s 2020 election results. The ruling could potentially clear the way for criminal charges in the case. The nine-page order comes from a man […]

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Inside the Republican Plot to Dismantle US Environmental Policy

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. An alliance of rightwing groups has crafted an extensive presidential proposal to bolster the planet-heating oil and gas industry and hamstring the energy transition, it has emerged. Against a backdrop of record-breaking heat and floods this year, the $22 million […]

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“The Era of Global Boiling Has Arrived”: July on Track To Be Earth’s Hottest Month Ever

Wildfires raged in Canada and in 10 countries around the Mediterranean. Heat waves blanketed much of North America, Europe, and Asia. Each day from July 3 to July 6 set records for Earth’s hottest day ever. Now, the World Meteorological Organization and Copernicus, a European Union climate observation agency, have announced that July is “extremely […]

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Trump’s PAC Has Spent $40 Million on Legal Bills This Year

After former president Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he raised more than $250 million in donations by pushing the “Big Lie”—claiming that he had actually won and needed the money to contest the results. Some of the money that came pouring in went to pay down his campaign’s debts, or into the bank accounts of […]

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Federal Judge Blocks Arkansas Law to Criminalize Librarians for Providing “Harmful” Books to Minors

On Saturday, a federal judge in Arkansas temporarily blocked a new law that would have allowed local prosecutors to file felony charges against school and public librarians who loaned out material considered considered “harmful to minors.” The law—which also created a new process to challenge the “appropriateness” of books and force them to be moved […]

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For Some Islanders, Deep Sea Mining Evokes Colonialism

This story was originally published by Hakai Magazine and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The Cook Islands’ main harbor is a small indentation in the island of Rarotonga, which is the most developed of the nation’s 15 islands, yet still the kind of place where you give directions in mango trees and neighbors, […]

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Black Republicans Aren’t Happy With DeSantis About Florida’s New Teaching Guidelines on Slavery

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has built his political brand on attacking “wokeness” and refusing to back down—his super-PAC is even called Never Back Down—but his support for Florida’s new education standards that include the claim that slavery helped African-Americans develop skills for their “personal benefit” is testing how well those two strategies can co-exist. The […]

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Judge Dismisses Trump’s Defamation Suit Against CNN

Legal challenges to Donald Trump keep piling up, but despite his best efforts, the former president’s attempts to use the legal system to target his enemies keep coming up short. His latest defeat comes from a federal judge in Florida—a Trump appointee no less—who dismissed a defamation lawsuit Trump had filed against CNN for its […]

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Mother Jones

GOP Sen. Tuberville Thinks You’re Complaining Too Much About the Heat

The extraordinary heat stifling the country—and much of the globe—this summer continued to grind on Saturday, with nearly one-third of Americans under some type of heat advisory or warning. But GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville (Ala.), whose previous work experience before being elected in 2020 was as a college football coach, mocked the idea anyone might […]

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Cities Are Grappling With “Forever Chemicals” in Drinking Water

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Just inside the rolled-up door of a pumphouse garage, Cole Benak pulled on a pair of black Nitrile gloves. Outside, morning sunshine warmed the quiet wooded hillside. From the room next door, three massive water pumps whined, pushing thousands […]

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Report: More Than 3 Million People Were Kicked Off of Medicaid in 38 States

The damage from the rollback of a key pandemic-era measure that provided healthcare for low-income Americans continues to unfold. Nearly 4 million people are no longer covered by Medicaid, the Washington Post reports, with many of those dropped for administrative reasons despite still qualifying for coverage. The report is based on a new analysis from […]

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Tesla Can’t Even Do the One Thing It’s Supposed to Be Good At

Elon Musk might not be able to effectively manage Twitter, build a Hyperloop, or fly a rocket into space without exploding. But at least the business that brought him global fame and wealth can deliver on its core promises, right? Wrong. A new Reuters report calls into question Tesla’s ability to do the one thing […]

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The Conservative Freakout Over Barbie Arrives in Brazil

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling has been smashing box-office records left and right. It brought in $162 million during its opening weekend—the biggest debut of the year—and became the best-selling Monday ever for Warner Bros. I just watched the film described in the Atlantic as “a charming blockbuster adventure about the tribulations […]

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Lawmakers Spoke Up For an Indicted Chinese Mogul. Campaign Cash Followed.

The New Federal State of China, a conspiracy theory-promoting group launched in 2020 by Steve Bannon and exiled Chinese mogul Guo Wengui, who the Justice Department has indicted for running a massive fraud scheme, held its gala third-anniversary event in June. Among the mostly Chinese emigres at the event were some notable House Republicans. Fabulist and […]

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The Clean Energy Transition Is “Vulnerable to Abuse by Malicious Actors”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Across the United States, more and more companies are pledging to zero out their greenhouse gas emissions using “voluntary carbon offsets”—credits that represent some amount of climate pollution that’s either prevented or removed from the atmosphere. These credits, bought and sold on […]

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The Colorado Provides Drinking Water to 40 Million People. Do They Know What Utah Does To It Upstream?

From the water, the White River canyon was a scene worthy of Ansel Adams. Swallows darted in and out of mud houses packed on the underside of the soaring sandstone cliffs. A lone elk wandered the hillside, while sheep noshed along the water, tended by a man on a horse striking an iconic Western pose […]

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Voting Rights Are Still Under Assault. Sen. Raphael Warnock Has a New Plan to Protect Them.

Since the 2020 election, GOP-controlled state legislatures have enshrined Donald Trump’s Big Lie by giving partisan actors unprecedented control over how elections are run and how votes are counted. According to the Voting Rights Lab, 29 states have passed 73 new laws impeding the administration of fair elections with efforts that include state legislatures seizing […]

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Another Indictment! Trump Told Aides to Delete Security Footage in Coverup Attempt

Former President Donald Trump told a maintenance worker at his Mar-a-Lago club to “delete security camera footage at the Mar-a-Lago Club to prevent the footage from being provided to a federal grand jury,” a new indictment charges. The new superseding indictment filed Thursday by special counsel Jack Smith in Florida says that on June 27, […]

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Ivermectin May Be Good for Humans After All—Indirectly

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It turns out that eating ivermectin is good for something after all. If you’re a deer, that is. And if the goal is to kill the ticks that are biting you—ticks that carry diseases that threaten humans. The antiparasitic drug, which […]

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How Florida Undermined the “Benefits” of Newly Free Black People

Upon learning that Florida’s new K-12 curriculum standards require teaching middle-schoolers that enslaved people “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” I tweeted, facetiously, “Hey, this slavery thing sounds swell! A great learning experience—with free room and board.” The “personal benefit” provision was one of two stunningly tone-deaf requirements related […]

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The Latest Congressional Hearing on UFOs Was Full of Wild Claims

On Wednesday, a House Oversight subcommittee held a highly anticipated hearing on “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP)—more commonly known to the public as UFOs. Though Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) explained in his opening remarks that “we’re not bringing little green men or flying saucers into the hearing,” the hearing still got pretty…far out. The subcommittee heard […]

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