Mother Jones
Last week, Justice Juan Merchan pulled off an impressive feat in the New York Supreme Court’s criminal division: He finished empaneling 18 jurors in the first-ever criminal trial of a former president. This was not easy. Donald Trump’s first criminal trial—of the four he faces in the coming months—concerns 34 counts of falsifying business records, […]
Mother JonesThe first criminal trial of a former US president is underway, with Donald Trump facing 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to hush-money payments allegedly made in 2016 to cover up an affair he had with adult film star Stormy Daniels. Here’s the latest—the key updates and absurd moments—from the historic trial. “The people call […]
Mother JonesHelen Cruz has been a resident of Grants Pass, Oregon, for roughly four decades, but for the last five of those years, she’s had no home in which to live. She’s not alone. Her small mountain town with a population of 39,189 provides no public homeless shelters. She is among up to 600 people experiencing […]
Mother JonesJust weeks after the Supreme Court ended the Constitutional right to an abortion in the summer of 2022, Mylissa Farmer arrived at a hospital in Joplin, Missouri after her water broke at about 18 weeks pregnant. The doctors agreed that the fetus had no chance of survival and that she needed to end her pregnancy […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When US homeowners buy subsidized flood insurance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, they make a commitment to build back better after flood disasters, even if it costs them. FEMA’s notorious 50 percent rule stipulates that if a home in a flood zone […]
Mother JonesMonday marks the Supreme Court’s final week of oral arguments until October 2024, and the justices have saved some of their most consequential matters for last. On the court’s schedule are cases regarding former President Donald Trump’s immunity, abortion rights, and the criminalization of homelessness. Here’s a preview of what will be on the docket. […]
Mother JonesFor decades, unionizing in the American South was like cutting a five-acre field with nail clippers: time-consuming, grueling, and largely ineffective—though not technically impossible. But on Friday, hourly workers at Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, defied the long-standing barriers by voting overwhelmingly to join the United Auto Workers union (UAW). Late that night, the National […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Grist as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, Native News Online, and APTN. It is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When around 70,000 Indigenous Maasai were expelled from their lands in northern Tanzania in 2022, it […]
Mother JonesOn Saturday, the US House of Representatives voted to pass a $95 billion foreign aid package to assist Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan, as well as a TikTok ban requiring the popular app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest from the platform within up to a year or face a nationwide prohibition in the United States. The […]
Mother JonesWhen Braven Glenn, a 17-year-old boy, was killed in a car wreck, the early details made little sense to his mother, Blossom Old Bull. Officials told her police chased Glenn for speeding, and he ended up in a head-on collision with a train. It took days for Old Bull to learn that the officer […]
Mother JonesJoshua Rubin, a Brooklyn software developer and founder of the pro-immigrant grassroots group Witness at the Border, spent his 72nd birthday in Eagle Pass, Texas. He gathered with another half a dozen volunteers at the border town across from Mexico’s Piedras Negras for a two-week vigil “to, according to the organization, “stand up against [Governor] Greg […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It is the jewel of the Adriatic. Its shimmering waters feed a rare colony of Dalmatian pelicans, the world’s largest freshwater birds, sustain the endangered Albanian water frog, and host loggerhead turtles on its encircling dunes. The Nartë lagoon […]
Mother JonesNew Hampshire could soon beat Florida—known for its anti-vaccine Surgeon General—when it comes to loosening vaccine requirements. A first-in-the-nation bill that’s already passed New Hampshire’s state House, sponsored only by Republican legislators, would end the requirement for parents enrolling kids in childcare to provide documentation of polio and measles vaccination. New Hampshire would be the […]
Mother JonesWith Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson struggling to hold onto the gavel in the face of eternal rebellion from some of his party’s most intransigent far-right members, Politico thought it would be a good idea to call up former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to ask him about the situation. And […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. With private investors poised to profit from water scarcity in the west, US senator Elizabeth Warren and representative Ro Khanna are pursuing a bill to prohibit the trading of water as a commodity. The lawmakers will introduce the bill on Thursday afternoon, the […]
Mother JonesA high-speed police chase. A 17-year-old Crow boy, dead. The police report? Nowhere to be found. The entire police department? Vanished. The excruciating question that still remains: What happened to Braven Glenn? The hunt for answers is at the heart of our searing new short film After the Crash, by reporter Samantha Michaels and filmmaker […]
Mother JonesThe challenge to secure jurors for Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan bumbled further on Thursday morning after two jurors were excused—one after prosecutors questioned their truthfulness and another, an oncology nurse, who expressed concerns that the media had effectively outed her. The latter dismissal follows several media reports that featured biographical information about selected jurors. Fox […]
Mother JonesThis article was produced by The Bittman Project and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. which supports independent journalists as they forward fresh narratives about inequality. It is co-published here with permission. EHRP’s high-quality journalism is co-published with mainstream media outlets, to help readers understand and address systemic hardship. Cooking and food shopping are very different in America […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It was a relatively cool spring day in Phoenix, Arizona, as a tree-planting crew dug large holes in one of the desert city’s hottest and least shaded neighborhoods. Still, it was sweaty backbreaking work as they carefully positioned, watered and staked a […]
Mother JonesCruising south down a two-lane highway in Montana, Braven Glenn looked out onto the open road, the evening sky chilly and dark. It was November 24, 2020—half a year into the pandemic and three months after his 17th birthday. He was a good student, on his way to pick up his girlfriend, a basketball player […]
Mother JonesNew York City Police gathered in force outside of Columbia University on Wednesday, after students convened in the pre-dawn hours to erect dozens of camping tents on a campus lawn. The demonstration backing Palestine was launched hours before president Minouche Shafik began testifying at a Congressional hearing addressing allegations of anti-semitism on campus in the […]
Mother JonesIn November, ahead of President Joe Biden’s meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) issued a press release casting himself as a fierce opponent of China. It declared, “Since being elected to the U.S. Senate, Senator Scott has introduced dozens of bills to punish Communist China for its increased military aggression, continued […]
Mother JonesLast week, in a bid to clarify his historically nebulous stance on abortion, Donald Trump said that if reelected, he intends to leave abortion rights “to the states,” seemingly contradicting his prior stance in favor of a 16-week national ban. But Mary Ziegler, a law professor at UC Davis and leading abortion historian, thinks that […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. One of the biggest battles over Colorado River water is being staged in one of the west’s smallest rural enclaves. Tucked into the bends of the lower Colorado River, Cibola, Arizona, is a community of about 200 people. Maybe 300, […]
Mother JonesConservative Supreme Court justices on Tuesday questioned the Justice Department’s use of a 2002 statute against obstructing an official proceeding to prosecute a number of people involved in the January 6 attack on Congress. In pressing Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar on how broadly the DOJ can apply the law, several justices offered similar hypotheticals. “Would […]
Mother JonesState legislative bodies have always played a leading role in determining outcomes for fundamental but humdrum issues like state budgets, insurance regulations, road safety laws, and civil services. But the last few years have demonstrated their overriding importance in matters related to personal freedom and social wellbeing. One issue where this has played out powerfully […]
Mother JonesState legislative bodies have always played a leading role in determining outcomes for fundamental but humdrum issues like state budgets, insurance regulations, road safety laws, and civil services. But the last few years have demonstrated their overriding importance in matters related to personal freedom and social well-being. One issue where this has played out powerfully […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Blake Dollier spoke excitedly as he watched the construction crews pulverize concrete along a quarter-mile stretch of US Highway 52 where it passes through West Lafayette, Indiana. Soon, the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT), where Dollier works as the public […]
Mother JonesThe justice system finally caught up with Individual-1—a.k.a. Donald J. Trump. On the opening day of Trump’s historic trial for his porn star/hush-money caper—no former president has ever been on trial for criminal charges—New York Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan had to clear up a few pending legal issues before moving to the arduous task […]
Mother JonesSo, here we are. The first day of the first criminal trial of a former US president. Can it get more extraordinary than that? “He keeps setting new Guinness Records in terms of unprecedented history,” Mother Jones’ own David Corn explained in a new video outside a Manhattan courtroom where Donald Trump’s trial kicked off this […]