Mother Jones
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been disqualified from the Georgia case against Donald Trump. The ruling, issued Thursday morning by a panel of the state’s appellate court, deals what could be a fatal blow to the one remaining bid to hold the incoming president criminally liable for trying to steal the 2020 election. […]
Mother JonesOn December 19, 2014, then-President Barack Obama signed the Achieving a Better Life Experience Act into law, establishing tax-exempt savings accounts of up to $100,000 for qualified disability expenses—including education, housing, transportation, health, and basic living expenses—for people whose disabilities began before age 26, without counting against the $2,000 Social Security Insurance asset limit. In […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. There’s a Keurig machine in some 40 million households in the US. Single-serve coffee brewing systems—which allow consumers to make just one cup of coffee at a time by feeding a pod into a slot and pressing a button—have soared in popularity since […]
Mother JonesAt 8 a.m., the August air of California’s Central Valley already feels like an open door to a sauna. As we sign in at the gatehouse, Fateen Jackson nods approvingly at my red T-shirt. “Don’t wear green,” he told me several days ago, “and don’t wear blue.” A green-uniformed guard, belt bristling with a […]
Mother JonesIn 2007, I visited San Quentin to see a transformational program for prisoners that was created by my friend, Jacques Verduin. The program was called Guiding Rage Into Power—known as GRIP. The men who participated had all been violent criminals, some had murdered, many had been gang members. They were “lifers.” And they had all […]
Mother JonesFor a brief moment in November, the TheoBros, a network of militant Christian nationalist influencers, made news when Trump nominated one of their allies, former Fox News commentator Pete Hegseth, to lead the Department of Defense. Hegseth attends a church that is affiliated with the TheoBro movement, and he has cited TheoBro patriarch Doug Wilson, […]
Mother JonesLet’s just get it out of the way upfront: Donald Trump is assembling a government of billionaires, the likes of which the United States has never seen. The president-elect has tapped five reported billionaires for cabinet posts: North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum for interior secretary, hedge funder Scott Bessent for treasury secretary, Cantor Fitzgerald chief […]
Mother JonesIt’s an open question how well American democracy will withstand a second Trump presidency. Donald Trump has repeatedly promised to weaponize the government to prosecute his perceived political enemies, making politicization of the Justice Department worry Number One. The fact that he’s put forward an FBI director, Kash Patel, who has already drawn up a […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Back in early August, I reported on the arrest of two climate activists outside the New York headquarters of Citibank, one of the world’s largest fossil fuel financiers and target of a campaign known as Summer of Heat. John Mark Rozendaal, a […]
Mother JonesFour years ago, after thousands of people were incited by losing presidential candidate Donald Trump to storm the US Capitol and try to prevent Joe Biden from taking office, the FBI began one of its largest criminal investigations ever. Those efforts remain ongoing but may soon largely be undone by Trump, using the clemency powers […]
Mother Jones“You have to read this book,” my new psychologist informed me. As a teenager, I was raped by a hostel employee. For years after, I spent every waking moment trying to avoid the gruesome memories—which instead haunted me at night. I wanted nothing more than to share my story, certain that I’d feel immediate relief. […]
Mother JonesThe state of Utah has come up with its share of boondoggles over the years, but one of the more enduring is the Uinta Basin Railway. The proposed 88-mile rail line would link the oil fields of the remote Uinta Basin region of eastern Utah to national rail lines so that up to 350,000 barrels […]
Mother JonesOn the morning of November 18, New York City police reported that a man fatally stabbed three people in a seemingly random spree in Midtown Manhattan. The victims included a construction worker in Chelsea, a man fishing along the East River, and a woman sitting on a bench near the United Nations headquarters. A cab […]
Mother JonesThe next ranking member of the House Oversight Committee will reportedly be nine-term Democrat Gerry Connolly of Virginia. Connolly, 74, beat out his competitor, 35-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), 131-84 at a closed-door meeting on Tuesday, the Associated Press reports. The current Oversight ranking member, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), is vacating the post to replace […]
Mother JonesDani Izzie, a wheelchair user with quadriplegia, tried to take public transit, as she usually does, when visiting Miami in 2022. Heading to catch a bus, Izzie came to the end of a street without curb cuts—meaning she couldn’t safely cross it to the bus stop. She tried to get an accessible taxi; none were […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In Southern California, December wildfires are somewhat uncommon, but not completely out of the norm. And this year, extremely dry conditions and strong Santa Ana winds created the perfect recipe for dangerous late-year fires. On the night of December 9, […]
Mother JonesOn Monday, President-elect Donald Trump said that he would consider pardoning Eric Adams if the New York City mayor is convicted on charges related to accepting bribes and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. “I think that he was treated pretty unfairly,” Trump told reporters from his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago. Despite admitting to not knowing “the […]
Mother JonesAfter being released from prison in October, Steve Bannon seemingly did everything in his power to get Donald Trump back in the White House. Now he appears interested in helping the president-elect remain in the Oval Office—even beyond what is constitutionally allowed. At an event hosted by the New York Young Republican Club on Sunday, […]
Mother JonesIn his litany of complaints about the federal government, Elon Musk has reserved special ire for the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates SpaceX, one of his companies. With Donald Trump on the way back into the White House, FAA head Michael Whitaker announced on Thursday that he’ll step down in January, despite having years left […]
Mother JonesAmid the frenzied coverage of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson‘s assassination and the public’s troubling reaction to it were references to various polls, including one conducted in 2016 by the Kaiser Family Foundation, whose results suggested that Americans were content with their private health plans. Similar stats had crept into the debate over Medicare for All—a […]
Mother JonesTwo weeks after the election, I met Dianela Rosario in Huntington Park, California—an almost entirely Latino city that swung hard to the right this year. A 51-year-old Dominican American shopkeeper, Rosario told me that before this year she had never voted for a Republican presidential candidate. But, in 2024, inflation and the prices of groceries […]
Mother JonesABC News will pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit that president-elect Donald Trump brought against the network, centered on incorrect comments that anchor George Stephanopoulos made about the civil lawsuit against Trump brought by writer E. Jean Carroll. The details of the settlement are concerning for anyone who cares about press freedom in […]
Mother JonesDevin Nunes, the ex-California congressman and current head of Trump’s struggling social media platform, Truth Social, is getting his prize for being the next president’s long-serving yes-man. On Saturday, Trump announced that he would appoint Nunes as chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, a group of up to 16 private citizens who get high-level […]
Mother JonesAnnoyed with time changes in the fall and spring? So is President-elect Donald Trump. On Friday, Trump posted on Truth Social that the “Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time” because it is “inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.” Ending daylight saving time would also not be that original—two […]
Mother JonesEvery summer, 50 of the nation’s best and brightest teenage girls gather in Mobile, Alabama, to embark on two of the most intense weeks of their lives. Everybody wants the same thing: to walk away with a $40,000 college scholarship and the title of Distinguished Young Woman of America. Reporter Shima Oliaee competed for Nevada […]
Mother JonesOn Wednesday, the nonprofit organization Disability Rights Florida sued the Florida Department of Children and Families, claiming that the state agency failed to collect data and compile comprehensive annual reports on the people it’s involuntarily committing. Florida’s Baker Act, which first passed in 1971, has required specific data—including the length of commitments and the diagnoses […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In the landscape of international finance for fossil fuels, some of the most important players are obscure government bodies known as “export credit agencies.” These agencies provide funding to companies seeking to build large and risky infrastructure projects, often in developing countries. […]
Mother JonesThis story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Shortly after he was reelected last month, Donald Trump announced an economic gambit that was aggressive even by his standards. He vowed that, on the first day of his second term, he would slap 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, […]
Mother JonesIn an interview this week, Eric Trump promised that his father will build a “very large wall” between the incoming first family’s private business interests and any government business. Then, apparently without a hint of irony or shame, he took the stage at a crypto conference—which he attended as a representative of the crypto company […]
Mother JonesIn the lead-up to Donald Trump’s second inauguration, professional conspiracy peddlers are hard at work finding ways to gin up panic and paranoia—even if their preferred candidate is about to take office. The fear mongering is ginning up skepticism about the next pandemic—and any vaccine that could fight it. Some have suggested that the Deep […]