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Mother Jones

Donald Trump Really Trying to Pretend He Couldn’t Care Less About Michael Cohen

Former president Donald Trump faced off with his onetime fixer Michael Cohen in court on Monday, and for the most part, Cohen delivered a persuasive indictment. Even though the two men have had an openly antagonistic relationship for years, Trump appeared to be very performatively ignoring his former attorney, as Cohen methodically testified about Trump’s […]

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Mother Jones

Trump Wants to Deport Pro-Palestine Protesters—and GOP Lawmakers Are Filing Bills to Make It Happen

At a rally in Wildwood, New Jersey on Saturday, former President Donald Trump made many questionable comments. He called Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg “Fat Alvin.” He claimed migrant children “don’t speak English.” And he said that, if he’s re-elected, he will deport pro-Palestinian, antiwar protesters. “When I’m president, we will not allow our colleges to […]

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Mother Jones

Trump Wants to Deport Pro-Palestine Protesters—and GOP Lawmakers Are Filing Bills to Make It Happen

At a rally in Wildwood, New Jersey on Saturday, former president Donald Trump made many questionable comments. He called Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg “Fat Alvin.” He claimed migrant children “don’t speak English.” And he said that, if he’s re-elected, he will deport pro-Palestinian, anti-war protesters. “When I’m president, we will not allow our colleges to […]

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Mother Jones

Climate Scientists Ponder: “Do I Really Want to Bring a Child Into This World?”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. “I had the hormonal urges,” said Camille Parmesan, a professor and leading climate scientist based in France. “Oh my gosh, it was very strong. But it was: ‘Do I really want to bring a child into this world that we’re […]

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Lost in the Crowd: The Hidden Biases of Medical Fundraising

More than 100 million Americans have medical debt, with half owing more than $2,000; disabled people are twice as likely to have it than those without disabilities. Annually, around half a million Americans are pushed into bankruptcy by health care costs. That’s understandably made medical fundraising through websites like GoFundMe appealing, with Americans seeking a combined $10 […]

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Tribal Leaders Ban Gov. Kristi Noem from Twenty Percent of South Dakota

Governor Kristi Noem has had a tough stretch…of her own making. Ahead of the publication of her new book last week, No Going Back, the South Dakota Republican has been on a clean-up tour after it emerged that she included an anecdote about killing her own puppy and another that falsely boasted of meeting North […]

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UN Officials Describe “Absolutely Catastrophic” Conditions in Gaza

Humanitarian officials are warning of increasingly dire conditions in Rafah as the Israeli army orders tens of thousands of civilians to evacuate the city in advance of further operations in the city. The situation is “absolutely catastrophic,” UNICEF spokesperson Tess Ingram told ABC’s Martha Raddatz on “This Week” Sunday. Approximately 300,000 people have fled Rafah […]

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Hammerheads Sharks Are Back in the Caribbean: “I Could Not Believe It”

This story was originally published by Hakai and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Hammerhead sharks—fish with pronounced oblong heads and bodies as long as small cars—are unmistakable. Seeing one of these critically endangered animals is a thrill, but seeing nearly a dozen plying the water side by side is worth writing home about. This was […]

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Israel Orders New Rafah Evacuations

Israel on Saturday ordered hundreds of thousands in Rafah to evacuate immediately as Israeli military forces prepared to expand further into Gaza’s southernmost city amid a devastating humanitarian crisis. The warning, which arrived in the form of dropped leaflets, came despite a rare threat from President Biden this week that he would withhold certain weapons […]

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Melania Trump Says Hell No to Barron Serving as a GOP Delegate

Barron Trump’s political debut has been shelved—for now—after his mother, Melania Trump, effectively rebuffed an invitation for her 18-year-old son to serve as a delegate at the GOP convention this summer. “While Barron is honored to have been chosen as a delegate by the Florida Republican Party, he regretfully declines to participate due to prior […]

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The Founder of Mother’s Day Mostly Cared About Her Own Mother

It seems like such a simple idea: a day to honor the women who bring life into the world. But how do we square the ideal of celebrating and supporting mothers with the reality of how lawmakers and courts have acted to undermine maternal health and rights in the post-Dobbs era? Or make sense of […]

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Why RFK Jr.’s Brain Worm and Other Parasites Deserve Your Respect

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When Chelsea Wood was a child, she would often collect Periwinkle snails on the shores of Long Island. “I used to pluck them off the rocks and put them in buckets and keep them as pets and then re-release them,” Wood said. […]

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Mother Jones

Steve Bannon Still Isn’t in Prison, but He’s a Little Closer

Steve Bannon’s odds of going to prison ticked up on Friday when DC’s Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an appeal of his 2022 conviction for contempt of Congress. But more than 18 months after a federal district court judge sentenced the former Donald Trump adviser to four months behind bars for blowing off subpoenas from […]

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Mother Jones

Virginia Board Votes to Rename Schools Back to Honoring Confederate Military Leaders

After the 2020 police killing of George Floyd, dozens of schools bearing names that honored Confederate figures renamed themselves. The move came against a flood of similar efforts aimed at addressing the nation’s stark racial disparities—at least on paper. But nearly four years to the day of Floyd’s death, a Virginia school board appears to […]

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Mother Jones

Modern-Day Lessons From Hiroshima

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. For four decades, I’ve had a recurring nightmare in […]

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Mother Jones

The Emperor Had Very Few Clothes

At the hush-money trial of former president Donald Trump in Manhattan, Stormy Daniels’ story is, in a sense, a proxy battle for the actual debate about bookkeeping: If you believe Daniels’s accounting of the affair she alleges they had, then you must find Trump—who denies any such encounter—unbelievable. If you don’t believe Daniels, then it […]

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Mother Jones

Moms for Liberty Accuses Schools of Antisemitism. The Irony is Rich.

Moms for Liberty, the most prominent group in the rightwing movement against “woke” public schools, is well known for its crusades against LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum and anti-racism initiatives in classrooms. Since 2021, the group, which counts 130,000 members, across 48 states, has claimed—at school board meetings, conferences, and on social media—that left-wing teachers are turning students […]

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Mother Jones

How Paul Manafort Tried To Make Money With a Project Supposedly Tied to the Chinese Regime

In March, the politerati were atwitter over what appeared major news: Longtime political operator, lobbyist, wheeler-dealer, and (pardoned) felon Paul Manafort was in talks to join Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. This seemed an odd move, given all of Manafort’s schemings over the years. A more recent Manafort business venture—unknown to the public—raises further questions […]

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Vermont Could Be the First State to Bill Oil Firms for Climate Damage

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Vermont is poised to pass a groundbreaking measure forcing major polluting companies to help pay for damages caused by the climate crisis, in a move being closely watched by other states including New York and California. Modeled after the EPA’s […]

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Mother Jones

The UK’s New Study on Gender Affirming Care Misses the Mark in So Many Ways

Last month, the UK’s four-year-long review of medical interventions for transgender youth was published. The Cass Review, named after Hilary Cass, a retired pediatrician appointed by the National Health Service to lead the effort, found that “there is not a reliable evidence base” for gender-affirming medicine. As a result, the report concludes, trans minors should generally not […]

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How My Campus Avoided a Horrible Protest Showdown

How—in a world that increasingly feels like it’s under unmanageable stress—can we maintain the sense of community, and the actual communities, that we need to both help alleviate and survive those stresses? It’s a question that our country has been asking at least since January 6, with no great answer. How, to give just one […]

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Dobbs Has Created a Health Care Apocalypse

Dr. Leilah Zahedi-Spung spent four years in medical school, four years in an OB-GYN residency, and three years in a maternal-fetal medicine fellowship learning how to care for high-risk pregnant patients. In her decade-plus of medical training, she learned that in some cases, the only rational and responsible option for medical intervention is an emergency […]

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Mother Jones

Dobbs Has Created a Healthcare Apocalypse

Dr. Leilah Zahedi-Spung spent four years in medical school, four years in an OB-GYN residency, and three years in a maternal-fetal medicine fellowship learning how to care for high-risk pregnant patients. In her decade-plus of medical training, she learned that in some cases, the only rational and responsible option for medical intervention is an emergency […]

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Mother Jones

More Than a Million Adults Have Legal Guardians. Seven States Won’t Let Them Vote.

Last month, the Department of Justice released new guidance reaffirming disabled people’s right to vote, and the ways that their voting rights are protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act. “For too long,” the release from the department’s Civil Rights Division says, “many people with disabilities have been excluded from this core aspect of citizenship” […]

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Mother Jones

The Future of Natural History Is Here—and It’s Open-Source

It’s 1963. You’re an African spiny mouse in Egypt. You mostly eat dates, but you’re known to consume the dried flesh of local mummies; your species was here long before they were. In another 60 years, it’ll be discovered that your fur hides regenerative, bony scales called osteoderms—an incredible adaptation long thought exclusive to armadillos […]

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Mother Jones

The Future of Natural History Is Here—and It’s Open-Source

It’s 1963. You’re an African spiny mouse in Egypt. You mostly eat dates, but you’re known to consume the dried flesh of local mummies; your species was here long before they were. In another 60 years, it’ll be discovered that your fur hides regenerative, bony scales called osteoderms—an incredible adaptation long thought exclusive to armadillos […]

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Mother Jones

An Epic Battle Over 1 Mile of Land in Wisconsin Is Tearing Environmentalists Apart

Judge William M. Conley watched as the Cardinal-Hickory Creek Transmission Line inched toward the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife Refuge—a 240,000-acre bird sanctuary through which the fully funded power project lacked the permits to pass. By January 2022, he’d seen enough. It “amounts to little more than an orchestrated trainwreck,” Conley, an Obama-appointed federal judge […]

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Mother Jones

A Nurse on the Scene Inside Rafah’s Last Maternity Hospital

At the last maternity and neonatal hospital in Rafah, the devastation has already arrived. “There is no safe place in Gaza from a healthcare perspective—and beyond,” Bridget Rochios, a certified nurse-midwife from California volunteering at Al-Helal Al-Emirati Maternity Hospital told me. As Israel prepares a ground invasion of Rafah, Rochios—who is working with the Canadian healthcare […]

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Mother Jones

Report: Trump Promised to Scrap Climate Laws if US Oil Bosses Donated $1 Billion

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Donald Trump dangled a brazen “deal” in front of some of the top US oil bosses last month, proposing that they give him $1 billion for his White House re-election campaign and vowing that once back in office he would instantly tear up Joe […]

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Republican-Led States Across the Country Are Copying Texas’ Radical Anti-Immigration Law

On April 30, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma signed HB 4156, enabling state law enforcement to arrest undocumented immigrants. The measure was, in many ways, radical. For more than a century, immigration enforcement has been almost exclusively the domain of the federal government. But, across the country, Republicans on the state level are attempting to undo […]

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