This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The ocean seafloor is one of the last true frontiers of the unexplored and unexploited. Even as the world above it lurches with the changes of global warming and human displacement, the bottom of the ocean has remained a place so […]
The 2023 Oscars are shaping up to be a lot of the same we see every year—legacy directors getting rewarded—and also a little bit of something different. Many of the actresses in discussion for the awards are women of color, though the actor category remains mostly white. With Everything Everywhere All At Once, a genuinely […]
Earlier this month, in his first on-the-record statement rejecting calls to resign after he admitted to lying about huge swaths of his resume, a defiant Rep. George Santos insisted that he would step down only if voters turned against him. “We’ll find out in two years,” Santos said. But Santos may not have to wait […]
Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s decision last month to leave the Democratic Party was, in no small part, an attempt at political self-preservation. The Green Party-candidate-turned-independent-turned-Democrat-turned-indepenent, who has angered Democrats in her home state—and pretty much everywhere—by opposing majority-rule in the Senate, was facing a likely primary challenge from at least one, and possibly several big-name […]
This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Niugtaq—the Yup’ik name for Newtok, Alaska—means “rustling grass” in Yugtun, the local Yup’ik language. That’s the sound you hear when you step off the small commuter plane that lands here daily. In late fall, tall dry tundra grass rustles […]
President Biden has chosen Jeff Zients to replace Ron Klain as his chief of staff when Klain steps down sometime in the coming weeks, people familiar with the decision told the Washington Post and Politico. Zients will help the president manage his work with a divided Congress, while other members of his staff prepare him for a […]
George Santos’ ceaseless lies might further diminish the often dubious reputation of Republicans in Congress, but they are also occasionally very funny. On this week’s Saturday Night Live, Bowen Yang offered a hilarious portrayal of the New York congressman—and provided a persuasive explanation for their lack of physical resemblance. “I know that I look Asian,” […]
Vice President Kamala Harris marked the 50th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case by lamenting that the Supreme Court had overturned the constitutional right to an abortion and announcing a series of Biden administration efforts to ensure access to medication abortion. She spoke in Tallahassee, Florida, to about 1,500 abortion rights supporters at a venue […]
A gunman opened fire Saturday night at a ballroom dance studio in Monterey Park, California, killing at least 10 people and injuring 10 others in the deadliest mass shooting in the United States since the Uvalde Elementary School massacre in May. The five male and five female victims have not been identified. The shooter is still […]
This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The terms atmospheric river and bomb cyclone were not in my vocabulary until recently. During the first two weeks of 2023, however, the San Francisco Bay Area was deluged with a series of storms. I […]
One of the little-noticed moves by President Biden in his first days in office was an executive order that required federal agencies to examine their policies and programs to identify whether and how they perpetuate barriers to equal opportunity. It was a stab at addressing structural inequality in the wake of the national protests over […]
A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with a friend who is a former cop and a MAGA-leaning conservative. We were arguing about politics as usual, when he went on a rant about “President Ron Klain.” White House chiefs of staff generally aren’t household names, so I was impressed with his level of knowledge […]
When he ran for president in 2008, the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) denounced the views of Texas evangelical minister John Hagee as “crazy and unacceptable” and rejected his endorsement for the GOP nomination. But tomorrow, former Vice President Mike Pence, who has presidential aspirations for 2024, will engage in a fireside chat with Hagee […]
This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Animal testing has long been necessary for a drug to gain approval by the US Food and Drug Administration—but it may be on its way out. A new law seeks to replace some lab animal use with […]
On Friday, for the 50th year in a row, tens of thousands of anti-abortion proponents gathered in Washington, DC, to demonstrate their commitment to “protecting the lives of the unborn.” Originally created to protest Roe v. Wade, the 1973 US Supreme Court decision that established the constitutional right to an abortion, the March For Life […]
Donald Trump is not afraid to file a lawsuit, and he certainly no stranger to being sued himself. Once in court, Trump and his attorneys are prodigious filers of complaints, appeals, and protests. In fact, his legal strategy is often “more is better.” But that strategy is suddenly hitting a wall—a federal judge in Florida ruled […]
In the summer of 2011, as Washington deadlocked over the once routine task of raising the nation’s debt ceiling, Kevin McCarthy, then the House GOP whip, decided to mix things up. At a closed-door caucus meeting, the California Republican cut the lights to screen a clip from the heist movie The Town, where Ben Affleck […]
This piece was published originally by Capital & Main. Not only does every good story begin with a question, but the first questions journalists are most likely to ask are often the same, and they start with one of two letters, a “W” and an “H.” But before we get started, let us first tip our hat to […]
Former President Donald Trump has given many denials to writer E. Jean Carroll’s allegation that he cornered her and raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. He’s called Carroll’s story “all fiction,” “a con job,” and “a big fat hoax.” “I know nothing about this woman,” Trump insisted in 2019, when Carroll first […]
Florida’s ongoing war against so-called “wokeism” has reached a new low. On Wednesday, 28 presidents of Florida’s state and community colleges announced that they would seek to eliminate policies and academic programs that are viewed as forcing a “belief in critical race theory” or subjects related to intersectionality. “Our institutions will not fund or support any institutional […]
Alec Baldwin will be charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter in the shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on a Santa Fe movie set, New Mexico prosecutors announced Thursday. Armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed will also be charged. Baldwin fatally shot Hutchins with a Colt .45-caliber firearm while preparing to film a scene for the movie Rust in October […]
Soon after Elon Musk purchased Twitter in late October, the tech mogul reinstated Donald Trump’s account, which the company had shut down permanently after Trump used Twitter to help instigate the January 6 insurrection. The twice-impeached ex-president hasn’t tweeted again yet, instead sticking to posting on his own far less influential and financially shaky Truth […]
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The forest carbon offsets approved by the world’s leading provider and used by Disney, Shell, Gucci and other big corporations are largely worthless and could make global heating worse, according to a new investigation. The research into Verra, the world’s leading carbon standard for the […]
There is something odd about the relationship between GOP fabulist George Santos and Andrew Intrater, a sophisticated and wealthy New York financier, Republican donor, and cousin to sanctioned Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. Intrater was one of Santos’ top political donors. At Santos’ behest, he invested hundreds of thousands of dollars with a firm where Santos […]
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is mulling a return to Twitter and Facebook for the former tweeter-in-chief. Such a move might help his stalled political operation, but it could also seriously undermine his most prominent current business endeavor, the social media platform Truth Social. Shares in Digital World Acquisition Corp.—a company that’s supposed to one day merge […]
Three Amazon warehouses exposed workers to safety issues that put them at risk for “lower back injuries and other musculoskeletal disorders,” the Occupational Safety and Health Administration announced today. Amazon faces a proposed penalty of $60,260—or roughly 0.000013 percent of its reported $469,822,000,000 2021 revenue. Safety inspections at warehouses in Deltona, Florida; Waukegan, Illinois; and New […]
When Kara Sternquist was arrested and jailed in MDC Brooklyn—a scandal-plagued federal detention center—she already had what a prosecutor described as “unique medical challenges.” After receiving surgery to address a spinal compression prior to her arrest, Sternquist was left with “very limited sensation in the bottom half of her body” and used devices like canes to […]
Two years and two days after the invasion of the US Capitol by pro-Trump insurrectionists, much of the world appeared to be astonished as an angry mob stormed Brazil’s seat of power, calling for a military intervention and attacking the congressional building, the presidential offices, and the Supreme Court. David Nemer, a Brazil-born assistant professor at […]
Two years after Sen. Kyrsten Sinema voted against raising the minimum wage with an exaggerated thumbs-down, the Arizona Independent once again reduced political debate to an infuriatingly twee hand gesture. This time, she initiated a high-five with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) over their shared refusal to reform Senate rules. At a World Economic Forum event […]
Michael Cohen, the longtime fixer for Donald Trump, met with New York City prosecutors on Tuesday afternoon, signaling that those prosecutors may be gearing up for more criminal cases related to the former president. Cohen spent just over a year in prison after pleading guilty to tax fraud, campaign finance, and perjury charges stemming from […]
Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter is written by David twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories about politics and media; his unvarnished take on the events of the day; film, book, television, podcast, and music recommendations; interactive audience features; and more. Subscribing costs just $5 a […]
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The oil giant Exxon privately “predicted global warming correctly and skilfully” only to then spend decades publicly rubbishing such science in order to protect its core business, new research has found. A trove of internal documents and research papers has previously established […]
This story was originally published by Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In 2015, a delegation from the Smithsonian Institution travelled to Mozambique to inform the Makua people of a singular and long-overdue discovery. Two hundred and twenty-one years after it sank in treacherous waters off Cape Town, claiming the lives of 212 enslaved people, the […]
It started innocuously enough. A week after the election, I got an email the National Republican Congressional Committee. Having just taken back the House, the GOP’s campaign arm was very excited to offer me an “exclusive” chance to pay $35 for a “House Majority Membership Card.” But I had to act fast. “If you do […]
House Republicans are eager to investigate the mishandling of classified documents—some classified documents, anyway. On Sunday, James Comer, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, appeared on CNN and released a letter demanding visitor logs for Joe Biden’s Wilmington home, where classified material from Biden’s time as vice president was recently discovered. “Without a list of […]
A federal bankruptcy judge slapped exiled Chinese mogul Guo Wengui with new restrictions this week after finding that Guo had defied an earlier order to stop a harassment campaign by his fans aimed at lawyers for his creditors. Guo, an ally and patron of Steve Bannon, fled China in 2014 ahead of corruption charges. In the United States, […]
This story was originally published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In November 2016, virologist David Evans traveled to Geneva for a meeting of a World Health Organization committee on smallpox research. The deadly virus had been declared eradicated 36 years earlier; the only known live samples of smallpox were in the […]
This story was originally published by Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Down at the bottom of the Earth during this southern summer, a delicate dance is under way each day, as captains of cruise ships struggle to keep their vessels out of one another’s sight and so preserve the icy continent’s image of […]
On January 3, Los Angeles police officers killed 31-year-old Keenan Anderson, a Washington, DC, high school English teacher, who was visiting family. He went into cardiac arrest after being repeatedly tased by police responding to a traffic accident, according to body camera footage and his family’s account. Newly released body camera footage shows LAPD officers […]
Before a 6-year-old intentionally shot his teacher in Newport News, Virginia, last Friday, school officials learned that the boy may have had a gun in his possession but failed to find it, the school system’s superintendent said late this week. According to reports from a local TV station and the Associated Press, superintendent George Parker said during […]
A New York judge has imposed a $1.6 million fine—the maximum allowed by law—on two of Donald Trump’s companies for their role in a criminal tax fraud scheme. Last month, a jury convicted both companies following a trial that featured testimony from Trump’s longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg. Weisselberg admitted that he and other executives had […]
More than eight months after workers at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island voted to unionize, the National Labor Relations Board has certified the election results, bringing the fledgling union one step closer to entering contract negotiations. Amazon workers won their 2022 union election by a margin of 523 votes, according to an NLRB filing. […]
This story was originally published by Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Single-use items such as plastic cutlery, plates, and trays are to be banned in England in a bid to reduce pollution, the government has confirmed. Figures suggest that every year England uses about 1.1 billion single-use plates and 4.25 billion pieces of such cutlery, […]
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Thursday that he is appointing a special counsel to investigate how classified documents wound up in President Joe Biden’s post-vice-presidency office and in Biden’s Delaware home. At a press conference, Garland said he had appointed Robert K. Hur, a former federal prosecutor who served as the US attorney for Maryland […]
President Joe Biden acknowledged on Thursday that a second batch of classified documents from the Obama administration had been found, this time in his garage in Wilmington, Delaware. Earlier this week, the White House acknowledged that Biden’s attorneys found a batch of classified documents in the closet of a think tank in Washington, DC, that […]
First, they were incandescent lightbulbs. Then, low-flow showerheads. Now, in their seemingly neverending quest to remove“wokeness” from their appliances, Republicans have set their sights on waging a war on behalf of gas stoves. The brewing battle comes amid reports that the US Consumer Product Safety Commission that it is considering a ban on the beloved kitchen […]
This past weekend, George Santos, the Republican fabulist from New York, was sworn in as a member of the House of Representatives, even as serious questions remained about his personal and political finances, particularly the source of the millions of dollars in income he claimed on financial disclosure forms and of the $705,000 he loaned […]
In 2008, Bruno Simões was working as a clerk at a store called The Salt in Niterói, a city that neighbors Rio de Janeiro. One day, a 20-year-old George Santos walked in. Simões watched as Santos picked out several pieces of clothing and shoes. His total added up to $1,313—”a lot of money at the […]
As I was watching the new Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney’s 2017 novel, Conversations With Friends, I kept waiting for something to happen that was never going to happen. The show follows two young women in Dublin, Frances and Bobbi, who become romantically entangled with an older married couple. As the series progressed, I was […]
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Danone, the French yogurt and bottled water company, is being taken to court by three environmental groups who accuse it of failing to sufficiently reduce its plastic footprint. The company behind Evian and Volvic mineral water was failing in its duties […]
On Tuesday, Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter (R-GA) introduced the Fair Tax Act, a House bill that proposes to abolish the IRS and replace the progressive federal income tax with a national consumption tax. “Instead of adding 87,000 new agents to weaponize the IRS against small business owners and middle America,” Carter said in his […]
Until today, Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) had kept the story of her traumatic, pre-Roe pregnancy private. But during a congressional debate on abortion policy, she opened up about being forced to carry a dead baby to term—and warned lawmakers of the deadly consequences of a federal abortion ban. Wilson said that she became pregnant, intentionally, […]
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. From the ring-tailed lemur to the aye-aye, a nocturnal primate, more than 20 million years of unique evolutionary history could be wiped from the planet if nothing is done to stop Madagascar’s threatened mammals going extinct, according to a new study. […]
On Sunday, in Brazil’s version of the January 6 insurrection, thousands of supporters of defeated former President Jair Bolsonaro staged a coordinated assault against the country’s democratic institutions and three branches of government. On the grounds of Brasília’s Three Powers square, insurrectionists stormed and trashed the Supreme Court, the Palácio do Planalto, and Congress buildings, as […]
This October marked five years since the #MeToo movement began. At the time, we reflected on the ways we’d been treated at school, at the office, at home. We named abusers. And upon this most recent anniversary, I’ve been thinking specifically about what the movement has meant for those who “grew up” during this period. […]
A Manhattan judge has sentenced longtime Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg to five months in jail for his role in helping the former president’s businesses evade taxes for much of the last decade. Following the sentencing on Tuesday afternoon, Weisselberg, 75, was taken into custody and transported to New York City’s Rikers Island jail […]
The internet is in rare agreement: C-SPAN, the famously staid public affairs network, had a banger week. Measured in television ratings, that’s indisputable; Americans were apparently riveted by Kevin McCarthy’s marathon humiliation, and who could blame them? But the attendant praise for a C-SPAN gone wild—the direct result of the chaos the network’s cameras were […]
This piece was published originally by Capital & Main. All good stories start with a question. So here are five questions for journalists to consider as the record-breaking accumulation of greenhouse gases continues into the opening days of 2023. Climate change, of course, can’t be divided into parts. The answers to these questions, however you devise them, may […]
As the Republican nominee in 2016, Donald Trump repeatedly promised that he, like every other Oval Office contender in recent memory, would release his tax returns. As we now know, he likely had no intention of doing so. In fact, Trump has fought tooth and nail to keep his tax records hidden—from prosecutors, Congress, and […]
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. “If you encounter a cougar, never approach or offer it food. You are not a Disney princess.” “Most grandma/reindeer collisions are entirely preventable. Please give wildlife plenty of space.” “Please be responsible with hot takes this Thanksgiving if your turkey […]
A shocking act of gun violence took place on Friday at an elementary school in Newport News, Virginia, where a 6-year-old boy used a gun he’d brought to school to shoot his teacher during class. The act was “intentional,” according to local authorities, who have not yet disclosed a possible motive. The teacher, 25-year-old Abigail […]
RIO DE JANEIRO – On January 1, 2023, a photograph of newly inaugurated Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, walking up the access ramp to Palácio do Planalto, the presidential offices building in Brasilia, accompanied by a diverse group of people representing Brazil’s society—including a Black woman, an indigenous leader, a 10-year-old boy— appeared on […]
The US Consumer Product Safety Commission is considering a ban on gas stoves, citing mounting research linking the appliance to a host of health problems including children’s asthma. In addition to a potential ban on new gas stoves, Bloomberg reports the agency is looking into setting industry-wide standards on stove emissions. One of the agency’s […]
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The US Environmental Protection Agency has proposed new standards for how much of the nation’s fuel supply should come from renewable sources. The proposal, released last month, calls for an increase in the mandatory requirements set forth by the federal Renewable […]
Steve Bannon and others involved in the January 6, 2021 attack on Congress lauded supporters of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro as they stormed government buildings in their capital on Sunday. The cheerleading showed that far-right supporters of Donald Trump’s Big Lie are not merely unrepentant but eager to continue exporting their opposition to democratic norms. […]
In scenes reminiscent of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by supporters of former president Donald Trump, crowds of supporters who appear to back former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro stormed that country’s major government buildings, including the presidential offices, legislative building, and supreme court, on Sunday. While the situation continues to develop, images […]
Fueled by anger over the federal law enforcement investigation of former president Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of confidential documents and the trials and subsequent imprisonment of some January 6 participants, Republicans plan to institute a new select committee to investigate the investigators. While probing the FBI’s role in the Mar-a-Lago raid last year was a staple of the GOP’s talking […]
After spending days and days giving away the store to secure his new position, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has promised lots of major action starting Monday—and one of the first items on his agenda is gutting the Office of Congressional Ethics. As the epidemic of Congressional stock ownership shows—ethics has never been Congress’ forte. But as one of the […]
This story was originally published by Hakai Magazine and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The constant thrum of ship engines and other human noises can be a real nuisance for many sea creatures, disrupting their feeding, navigation, and communication. Now a new study shows that ship noise can also kill the mood for amorous crabs. To […]
On Saturday, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries made history as the first Black lawmaker to lead a congressional party, making a splash with his first official speech as House Minority leader in the wee hours of the morning. “As John Lewis would sometimes remind us on this floor, we may have come over on different ships but […]
It’s finally over. After days of negotiations and 14 failed ballots—the most since 1860—Republican Kevin McCarthy was officially elected speaker of the House early Saturday morning. In exchange for the necessary votes to get him elected, the congressman had to beg, barter, and plead with a group of hardline Republicans who held out for a […]
It was late. Everyone was fried. And apparently, some Republicans had finally had enough. On Friday night, toward the end of the 14th (and penultimate) vote to elect Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as House Speaker, McCarthy found himself walking over to Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican who has been one of most outspoken conservative holdouts […]
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. About one in eight cases of asthma in children in the United States is due to the pollution given off by cooking on gas stoves, new research has found, amid moves by Joe Biden’s administration to consider the regulation, or even […]
12:29 a.m. ET: The House finally voted confirm Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House. It’s been a wild ride. As midnight approached on the fourth day of House speaker voting, things were buzzing on C-SPAN. The freely accessible channel trained its briefly liberated cameras on Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as he appealed to holdout Rep. Matt […]
House Republicans are celebrating the anniversary of the January 6 attack by making it clear that they are not, in actual practice, against it. Would-be House Speaker Kevin McCarthy spent Friday morning and preceding days hurling concessions at some of the same far-right members of Congress who helped Donald Trump incite the riot and tried […]
The 25-year-old documentarian Andrew Callaghan has been pissing off reporters lately. In his new HBO documentary, This Place Rules, Callaghan chronicles the events leading up to January 6, 2021, via dozens of man-on-the-street interviews with outlandish people of all stripes—from MAGA protesters to QAnon believers to self-proclaimed antifa members. In most scenes, Callaghan wears an […]
On Thursday, President Joe Biden announced new and stricter border enforcement measures that include the expansion of a Trump-era policy to summarily expel migrants and further restrict asylum seekers’ ability to seek protection at the border. In order to “increase security at the border and reduce the number of individuals crossing unlawfully between ports of […]
The work of photographer Nate Gowdy should be familiar to regular Mother Jones readers, especially those who’ve followed our January 6 reporting. His black-and-white photos captured the chaos as protesters marched from the “Stop the Steal” rally to the explosive swarming of the US Capitol. Gowdy’s new book, Insurrection, is among the first photo books […]
On the first day of the new Congress, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) delivered one of the nominating speeches for Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who was seeking the House speakership. Jordan bemoaned a “government that has been weaponized” against the American people and called for greater accountability. The next day, during a second round of failed […]
The video was exceptionally violent even for a pro-Trump meme. With his face superimposed over that of Colin Firth from the 2014 movie Kingsman: The Secret Service, Donald Trump strides through the “Church of Fake News” and plunges a spear into the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). He holds Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) hostage while blasting away […]
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The world’s first vaccine for honeybees has been approved for use by the US government, raising hopes of a new weapon against diseases that routinely ravage colonies that are relied upon for food pollination. The US Department of Agriculture has […]
Two years after the January 6 disaster, evidence continues building that numerous extremists went to Washington that day armed with guns, tactical gear, and other weapons. The mass attack on Congress incited by Donald Trump was grisly and devastating: The Capitol Building was damaged and desecrated, scores of law enforcement agents were assaulted, a QAnon […]
Yesterday afternoon, it hit me. As I watched C-SPAN yesterday, waiting for Republicans to get their shit together, I noticed something surprising: a lack of coffee cups in the hands of our nation’s elected representatives. I usually have an iced coffee glued to my palm, like most who hail from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. How could Rep. […]
The spiral of lies disseminated by newly elected Republican Rep. George Santos of New York has made him a political and social pariah and object of relentless scrutiny. Since the New York Times’ December exposé revealed the newcomer essentially manufactured his resumé and biography, the 34-year-old Long Island congressman has become the gift that keeps on giving […]
President Joe Biden on Friday, the two-year anniversary of the January 6th attack on the US Capitol, will award Presidential Citizens Medals to twelve individuals, including law enforcement officials who suffered injuries from the violence and election officials who faced pressure to overturn the election. Among the recipients will also be Fulton County, Georgia election […]
Two years after President Donald Trump incited a mob to storm the US Capitol and halt the certification of the Electoral College results, the January 6 insurrection is still a live wire in American politics. Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes was convicted of seditious conspiracy last month for his role in the riot. Advocates of […]
In 2021, on San Francisco’s wettest October day on record, an “atmospheric river” dumped a stunning 4.02 inches of rain downtown, causing highways and neighborhoods in the area to flood. Cars were stranded in standing water. And the city’s sewers, which carry both stormwater and sewage, overflowed in the low-lying Marina neighborhood. Officials estimated that […]
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Europe’s record-breaking warm winter weather has closed ski slopes and forced resorts to open summer trails or shut altogether, as grass and mud replace seasonal snow from Chamonix in France to Innsbruck in Austria. Eight countries across the continent have recorded their […]
In the last decade or so, a growing number of cities have turned to rain gardens. These shallow, plant-filled ditches can help reduce flooding during storms, which are predicted to get heavier in many parts of the country as the climate changes. Often, rain gardens are part of multi-million-dollar urban development projects. But they can also […]
Forget Dylan in ’65. Get ready for the USPS in ’26. Last month, the USPS laid out its plan for increasing the proportion of electric vehicles from the 10 percent it initially promised: By 2028, 45,000 of the 60,000 new purpose-build mail trucks will be electric, as will 21,000 of the 46,000 additional “commercial off-the-shelf” […]
On January 11, 2021, five days after Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol, CNN published an article titled “Experts Warn That Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ Will Outlast His Presidency.” It quoted Timothy Snyder, a historian who wrote the 2017 bestseller On Tyranny. “The idea that Mr. Biden didn’t win the election is a big lie,” Snyder […]
As Kevin McCarthy’s humiliating campaign to clinch the House speakership enters its second day, Donald Trump is calling on GOP lawmakers to unite and back the California Republican in an effort to prevent a “giant and embarrassing defeat.” McCarthy would do a “good job,” perhaps even a “great one,” the former president continued, striking a strangely milquetoast […]
If billionaire Don Foss were still alive, he’d have a big problem on his hands. On Wednesday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a joint lawsuit against Credit Acceptance Corporation (CAC), the Michigan-based “predatory” lender that Foss—who died last year at the age of 78—founded back in the […]
The first item listed on this week’s House legislative schedule, following the historically chaotic selection of a House Speaker and seating of members—including the scandal-plagued and apparently unpopular freshman George Santos (R-N.Y.)—is consideration of the ill-named Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act. This Republican bill is ill-named because what it actually does is protect […]
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It has only been a decade since climate activists launched campaigns to get financial institutions and money managers to see that dollars pumped into the fossil fuel industry were a risk to both the planet and investor portfolios. […]
The 118th Congress opened on Tuesday with dramatic questions. Would Kevin McCarthy suffer a historic, first-in-a-century defeat? If such a humiliating event were to happen—and it did—then how many rounds of voting would it take for a House speaker to finally emerge from the ashes of this political fire. But personally, the most suspenseful moments so […]
The 118th Congress opened on Tuesday, a historically staid, even boring event that descended into chaos after Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) failed to lock down the votes to become House speaker. The California Republican’s inability to secure the speakership in the first round of voting is a colossal embarrassment for a man who has been […]
Manhattan’s new Amtrak hub occupies the ground floor of an old Post Office sorting facility across 8th Avenue from Penn Station, and compared to the claustrophobic, sewage-strewn warren next door, Moynihan Train Hall feels like a revelation. Natural light floods through the elegant glass ceiling; at night, you can look up and see the lights […]
The last time I got in a fight was about four years ago in San Francisco. The incident involved me, my bike, and a car. And when I say fight, I mean a stranger shoved me to the ground and I ran away—the bike under me as I hurried like a child riding a stick that’s supposed […]
When I asked Rachel Sweet, a political operative from flyover country, what motivated her to pursue a career of fighting for reproductive rights, she couldn’t pinpoint a specific moment or life experience. She grew up in a politically engaged family that often talked about liberal values. She interned at Planned Parenthood in early adulthood and […]