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Mother Jones

Despite Record-Breaking Temps, Phoenix Heat Tsar Says Hottest City in the US Has a Livable Future

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The heat expert leading efforts to make America’s hottest city more bearable insists that Phoenix could eventually eradicate heat deaths—despite July’s record-breaking death toll. As many as 300 people may have died during the hottest ever month on record as the temperature in […]

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Report: Georgia Prosecutors Have Texts Directly Connecting Trump to Voting Breach

As Fulton County DA Fani Willis prepares to present the findings of the investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the election this week, CNN reports on text messages directly connecting the former president’s lawyers to a January 2021 voting systems breach. From CNN: Investigators in the Georgia criminal probe have long suspected the breach […]

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Ron DeSantis Did Not Have a Good Weekend

I did not attend the Iowa State Fair this weekend. But even a thousand miles away from pig pens and Republican presidential candidates, I could feel the utter humiliation of a certain Florida man. That’s the big takeaway from the fairgrounds where Ron DeSantis was repeatedly heckled with pro-Trump chants as he attempted to play the […]

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Indonesia to World: Stop Dumping Your Plastic on Us

This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In 2019, at a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, delegates from 187 countries approved the first-ever global rules on cross-border shipments of plastic waste. No longer could countries export contaminated, mixed, or unrecyclable plastics without the recipient country’s informed consent. It was […]

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Local Police Stage a Bizarre Raid in the Offices of a Kansas Paper

Local law enforcement in Marion, Kansas, seized cell phones, computers, and other material from the office of the Marion County Record, its reporters, and the home of its publisher, according to reporting from the Kansas Reflector, a nonprofit newsroom. Eric Meyer, the Record’s publisher and owner, said the raid came after an anonymous source leaked […]

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I Deeply Regret Ever Wishing a Millennial Would Run for President

With the 80-year-old current president and the oft-indicted former president and GOP hopeful most likely to face him in the general election a mere three years younger, it’s easy to pine for a more youthful option. Gen X would do. A millennial might be better. Unfortunately, the only choice is this guy. Vivek raps to Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” (he told […]

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Death Toll in Maui Wildfire Rises to 80

The death toll from the Maui wildfire near Lahaina has risen to 80, county officials announced late Friday. Authorities are still searching for missing people and have indicated that the number of fatalities is expected to rise in the coming days. That means the Hawaii fire could soon become the deadliest wildfire in the United […]

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Debunking Florida’s Argument That Slavery Could Benefit the Enslaved, in 120 Seconds

In my latest video, I tackle the controversy surrounding Florida’s teaching standards. These new guidelines, approved last month, sparked an avalanche of criticism by suggesting that enslaved Americans “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Although Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis tried to distance himself from the new rules, saying, […]

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Extreme Heat Is Creating New Opportunities for Insurers

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. People buy insurance to protect against unlikely but devastating events, big catastrophes that drive households and businesses to financial ruin and bankruptcy. That makes insurance most people’s first line of defense against climate disasters, which now destroy tens of billions of dollars […]

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Mother Jones

How Colonialism Contributed to the Maui Wildfires

Fires have been raging across Hawaii’s Maui Island since Tuesday night. It is already the second deadliest wildfire in United States history, with 270 structures and 2,000 acres burned, 55 people dead, and 11,000 people without power. More than 11,000 people were evacuated on Wednesday, says Hawaii Department of Transportation director Ed Sniffen. The population of Maui […]

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Clarence Thomas’ 38 Vacations: The Other Billionaires Who Have Treated the Supreme Court Justice to Luxury Travel

This piece was originally published by ProPublica. During his three decades on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas has enjoyed steady access to a lifestyle most Americans can only imagine. A cadre of industry titans and ultrawealthy executives have treated him to far-flung vacations aboard their yachts, ushered him into the premium suites at sporting events […]

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Mother Jones

Biden’s Pseudo-Declaration of Emergency Frustrates Climate Activists

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Joe Biden has said that he has “practically” declared a national emergency on the climate crisis, despite not actually taking that step, vexing climate campaigners. “I’ve already done that,” Biden said when asked if he intends to declare a climate emergency in […]

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Mother Jones

At Least 36 Dead in Maui Fires as Toll Rises: “We Barely Made It Out.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. At least 36 people have died and 30 have been injured in wildfires that have ravaged the historic town of Lahaina in Hawaii, local authorities have said. Officials warned that the death toll in could rise, with the fires still burning […]

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Mother Jones

How Police Work the Media When Civilians Die in Custody

The initial narratives pushed by law enforcement after so-called “officer-involved shootings” or fatal beatings, particularly of Black men, have been found wrong many times over. In January, the Memphis police officers who beat 29-year-old Tyre Nichols to death claimed he’d been combative and reached for one of their guns. Video footage debunked both claims. In 2020, […]

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Mother Jones

“Betsy DeVos Was a Disaster. I Think Erika Donalds Could Be Worse.”

On a hot afternoon in June, some 700 seated attendees of the annual summit of the conservative parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty bowed their heads in prayer. The Moms had waited in a security line that spanned two floors of the Philadelphia Marriott to get here, and even during this somber moment, the giddiness […]

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State Pension Fund Is Helping a Middle Eastern Firm Export Arizona’s Precious Groundwater

This article is a collaboration between Mother Jones and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit investigative newsroom. Also listen to Reveal’s accompanying podcast, “The Great Arizona Water Grab.” As rural Arizonans face the prospect of wells running dry, foreign firms are sucking up vast amounts of the state’s groundwater to grow hay for Saudi Arabia and other […]

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Mother Jones

In Another Sign of Florida’s Democratic Decay, DeSantis Suspends an Elected Prosecutor

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took a break from his ailing presidential campaign on Wednesday to suspend Monique Worrell, an Orlando-based elected prosecutor. The move was unsurprising: Since winning the state’s top job in 2019, he has sought to make political hay by booting multiple Democrats from office, in contravention of the voters who put them […]

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Mother Jones

LIV and Let Die

Imagine a well-manicured golf course nestled in a valley formed by rolling green, tree-filled mountains. Men of a similar profile, but different ages, dot it: mostly white, often stocky, almost all wearing caps, polos, khaki shorts, and sunglasses—either Oakleys or Costa fishing specs—as they mill from hole to hole. There are women too; fewer of […]

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The US Nuked Nagasaki 78 Years Ago Today. “Oppenheimer” Barely Mentions It.

Seventy-eight years ago today, on August 9, 1945, the US military detonated a powerful atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Nagasaki, ultimately killing as many as 90,000 people, nearly all civilians. Yet Nagasaki today might as well be called the “forgotten A-bomb city.” Every August, media and public attention focuses overwhelmingly on Hiroshima, site […]

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How One Museum Is Nurturing Japans’ Most Beloved Insect

This story was originally published by Atlas Obscura and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. At the third meeting of the Moriyama City Firefly Forest Museum’s eight-week Firefly Course, a conservation training program for adults, egg collection begins. Each female Genji firefly, Nipponoluciola cruciata, can lay up to 500 of the caviar-like orbs, carefully depositing them across the mossy banks […]

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Mother Jones

Boy Problems

Mark wanted to improve. The pandemic had sent him into an emotional tailspin. Covid coincided with his first heartbreak and an illness that left him bedridden. Even before calls to stay home, Mark rarely left his parents’ house in their small central European town: He spent most days playing video games and watching anime. The […]

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Direct Democracy—and Abortion Rights—Win in Ohio

A Republican-driven effort to make it harder to amend the Ohio constitution failed in a special election on Tuesday. The defeated measure, known as Issue 1, would have effectively torpedoed the state’s direct democracy process, raising the vote threshold required to amend the state constitution from a simple majority to 60 percent, and requiring the […]

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Mother Jones

Biden Just Made Land Around the Grand Canyon a National Monument—Blocking New Uranium Mining There

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden formally designated nearly 1 million acres of public land surrounding the Grand Canyon as a national monument, an action that permanently bans new uranium mining in the area. Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni—Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument, as it’s called, means “where Indigenous peoples roam” in the Havasupai […]

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Low-Income Puerto Ricans to Get $450 Million for Rooftop Solar

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The Department of Energy announced last week that it will provide nearly half a billion dollars to install rooftop solar and battery back-up systems on the homes of some of Puerto Rico’s most vulnerable residents. The funding could cover the […]

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Mother Jones

Low-Income Puerto Ricans to Get $450 Million for Rooftop Solar

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The Department of Energy announced last week that it will provide nearly half a billion dollars to install rooftop solar and battery back-up systems on the homes of some of Puerto Rico’s most vulnerable residents. The funding could cover the […]

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Mother Jones

One Politician Stopped California’s Fossil Fuels Divestment—Again

This piece was published originally by Capital & Main. Environmental groups, faculty associations and others seeking to slow climate change are pushing California to cut its investments in fossil fuels. Divestment supporters point to the state’s massive economy — the largest in the country — as evidence that divesting here could help kick off a nationwide trend by […]

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Ron DeSantis Defends Florida’s New Guidelines Suggesting Slavery Benefited Black People

In a Sunday interview with NBC News, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis stood by a new provision in the state’s education guidelines that implied freed African-Americans benefitted from chattel slavery, claiming it would teach students that enslaved people “eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.” “That means they developed skills in […]

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Mother Jones

The GOP’s Stealth Plan to End Direct Democracy in Ohio

In February 1912, former President Teddy Roosevelt traveled to Columbus, Ohio, to endorse an effort to amend the state’s constitution through citizen-led ballot initiatives. “I believe in the initiative and the referendum, which should be used not to destroy representative government, but to correct it whenever it becomes misrepresentative,” Roosevelt said. “In actual practice it […]

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Mother Jones

She’s a Prophet. She’s a Theocrat. She’s the Most Powerful Lobbyist You’ve Never Heard Of.

Every Monday, Abby Abildness leads her “Penn’s Sacred Challenge Tour,” a guided walk through the Pennsylvania Capitol in Harrisburg. On the day I join, a group of stylish and well-behaved Christian homeschoolers trail her through marbled hallways, beneath mosaic ceilings, and past stained-glass windows, dissecting the early-20th century art for hidden meanings, like a Christian […]

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Mother Jones

Is the Collapse of a Critical Atlantic Current Really Imminent?

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. So much on this planet depends on a simple matter of density. In the Atlantic Ocean, a conveyor belt of warm water heads north from the tropics, reaching the Arctic and chilling. That makes it denser, so it sinks and […]

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