Today's Liberal News

Ukraine update: Experts keep waiting for Russia to show competence, but it still isn’t happening

With the ubiquity of smartphones, the on-the-ground details of Russia’s war against Ukraine have been more closely documented than any war. The footage is omnipresent, even allowing independent observers to make detailed catalogs of destroyed equipment. The movement of Russian troops is being tracked by satellite, as well as by pinging electronic devices they have stolen and taken with them. We can hear individual conversations between Russian soldiers and their families.

Ukraine update: The heavy weapons spigot has finally opened for Ukraine

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy: 

“I like new questions,” he said. “It’s not interesting to answer the questions you already heard.” He is frustrated, for instance, by repeated requests for his wish list of weapons systems. “When some leaders ask me what weapons I need, I need a moment to calm myself, because I already told them the week before. It’s Groundhog Day. I feel like Bill Murray.

Without federal voting protections, many look to states as the ‘laboratories of democracy’

by Frances Nguyen

This article was originally published at Prism

The night before the Jan. 6 insurrection in the U.S. Capitol, Virginia state Sen. Jennifer McClellan came across an envelope tucked inside her father’s Bible. Inside was a receipt for $2.12: the poll tax her father paid in 1948 to vote in Tennessee, a financial barrier meant to exclude Black voters in the decades after Reconstruction.

Biden administration expands Ukrainian TPS eligibility to thousands more people

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it is changing the cutoff date for Ukrainian Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a welcomed decision that stands to greatly increase the number of immigrants eligible for relief.

The Biden administration initially announced that Ukrainian immigrants who are already in the U.S. as of March 1 would be eligible to apply. But this week, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced a new eligibility date of April 11.

The End of Airplane Masking Feels Momentous

Updated at 6:50 p.m. ET on April 20, 2022If you commuted to work today on a bus, train, or metro system, you probably saw more mouths and noses than usual. On Monday, a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a CDC rule that mandated masks on all U.S. transportation networks, including in airports and on planes.

The Northman Is an Unsentimental Portrait of a Hero

The magic of Robert Eggers’s breakout first film, The Witch, a horror fable about a Puritan family besieged by supernatural forces, lay in its authenticity. Not from the close attention to period detail, though that was itself impressive, but from the earnestness of its tone, which presented every supernatural element as matter-of-factly as the grim realities of corn farming in 17th-century New England.

The Simple Anti-COVID Measures We’re Not Taking

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Soon after, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekSay you received $1 billion to spend on improving the world. How would you spend it? Why?Email your thoughts to conor@theatlantic.com. I’ll publish a selection of correspondence in an upcoming newsletter.

Let the Fantastic Beasts Movies Die

This article contains spoilers for Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. The final showdown in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore is supposed to be epic. Albus Dumbledore, the mighty wizard played by Jude Law, comes face-to-face with his former lover turned nemesis, Gellert Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen), breaking the pact they’d made as young men never to fight each other.

Should Couples Merge Their Finances?

When Americans marry, their finances usually do too: The majority of married couples put all their income into shared accounts.In the 1970s and ’80s, not doing that was sometimes considered a bad omen for a relationship. But that’s no longer the case today.

Melissa Lucio Faces Texas Execution Despite Innocence Claims & Bipartisan Calls to Save Her Life

Calls are growing for Texas to stop the approaching execution of Melissa Lucio, who says she was wrongfully convicted of killing her toddler Mariah in 2007. We speak to one of Lucio’s attorneys, Vanessa Potkin of the Innocence Project, who says Lucio was coerced into making a false confession within hours of her daughter’s death and deserves a new trial based on new evidence and misleading expert testimony.

U.S. Welcomes Ukrainians at Border, Uses Title 42 as “Political Tool” to Block Other Asylum Seekers

The U.S. has hit a record number of apprehensions at the border shared with Mexico, arresting over 1 million asylum seekers in the past six months alone. We speak with immigration attorney Erika Pinheiro about the Biden administration’s unequal treatment of different nationalities, as refugees from countries like Haiti, Cuba and Cameroon face harsh restrictions on asylum, but Ukrainian refugees seem to be receiving special treatment and even exemption from Title 42.

Cameroonians Win Temporary Protected Status After Outcry Over “Double Standard” for Ukrainians

In a win for immigrant rights, the Biden administration has granted temporary protected status, or TPS, to Cameroonians living in the United States. The move allows around 40,000 Cameroonians to become eligible for the relief, which would protect them from deportation back to a politically unstable state and grant them permission to work in the U.S. for at least 18 months ​​amid escalating violence in Cameroon between government forces and armed rebels.

Abortion Bans Pass in GOP-Led Florida, Kentucky, Oklahoma & Tennessee as SCOTUS Set to Overturn Roe

Republican-led states are enacting a wave of new abortion restrictions, including Tennessee, Florida, Kentucky and Oklahoma just last week. Reproductive rights are under attack as the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, says Caroline Kitchener, who covers reproductive rights for The Washington Post. We also speak with Kitchener about Lizelle Herrera, the Texas woman arrested for disclosing an attempted abortion with her doctors.