In the news today: The House committee probing the Jan. 6 insurrection wants to hear from yet another House Republican who was in contact with Donald Trump that day: Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, whose pleas to Trump for assistance during the violence were rebuffed. The new year is bringing at least some good news, as new government rules take effect curtailing surprise medical bills.
When Fox News demonstrates more journalistic scruples than the BBC, you know we’re in trouble.
Famed constitutional scholar Alan Dershowitz, who thinks the Constitution gives Donald Trump the power to do anything he wants so long as he’s earnestly attempting to steal elections, appeared on BBC News Wednesday after Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty on five counts of sex trafficking.
Amid the increasing number of COVID-19 cases across the U.S. due to the omicron variant, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced some recent changes to coronavirus guidelines on Dec. 27. While one would assume the recommendations would be stricter given the surge in cases, the announcement came as a shock to many because the CDC instead shortened the recommended isolation and quarantine period for people with COVID-19.
A 14-year-old aspiring engineer who came to America from Chile after fearing for her safety was killed two days before Christmas in a tragic police shooting. Valentina Orellana-Peralta wasn’t a suspect when officers were called to a Burlington department store to investigate an assault with a deadly weapon in progress around 11:45 AM Thursday in the North Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles, police said in a news release.
When winter cold sweeps through parts of the United States, the desire for warmer weather has always sent Americans to places like the Caribbean. Even during this pandemic, U.S. tourists long to go somewhere, no matter the possible risks to their health or to the health of the people who call their holiday destinations home.
Though many tourists arrive by air, pleasure cruising to the Caribbean has a long history.
The four-week average, which smooths out week-to-week volatility, fell to just above 199,000, the lowest level since October 1969.
Noam Chomsky decries what he calls the torture of imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. He also critiques the Biden administration’s reckless foreign policy. “The trajectory is not optimistic,” Chomsky says. “The worst case is the increasing provocative actions towards China. That’s very dangerous.
Noam Chomsky warns the Republican Party is “marching” the world to destruction by ignoring the climate emergency while embracing proto-fascism at home. Chomsky talks about the January 6 insurrection, how neoliberalism is a form of class warfare and how President Biden’s climate plans fall short of what is needed.
Today, a special broadcast: an hour with Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author, who just turned 93 years old. Chomsky spoke to Democracy Now! prior to the discovery of the Omicron coronavirus variant, but he predicted new variants would emerge.
There is a dome, post-Soviet and colorful, wired with the kind of technological doodads you might see in a Bond villain’s lair— revolving modernist chairs, disembodied voices rising out of metal speakers issuing orders for the day. A giant ball bounces ominously in the background. People disappear from time to time, but nobody leaves. Everyone seems to be constantly being watched.
The results mark the first evidence of the effectiveness of such a vaccine boost while Omicron is circulating.
When a routine echocardiogram revealed a large mass next to my heart, the radiologist thought it might be a hiatal hernia—a portion of my stomach poking up through my diaphragm to press against the sac containing my heart.“Chug this can of Diet Dr. Pepper and then hop up on the table for another echocardiogram before the soda bubbles in your stomach all pop.”So I did.
“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his new podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.The end of the year isn’t just the holiday season; it’s also charity season. Estimates of charitable giving indicate that at least 20 percent of all gifts are made in December, when our holiday love for humankind conveniently converges with the end of the tax year.
Life sentences in Louisiana used to come with the opportunity of early release for good behavior. When the rules changed, these people were left behind in Angola and forgotten for decades.
From Lara Trump to Josh Hawley, here are some of our most-read stories of the year.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tally represents a grim new milestone in the coronavirus pandemic.
The new warning is based on preliminary studies by the National Institutes of Health’s Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics initiative.
The agency said the disparity was due to the rate with which the highly transmissible Omicron spread.
“It’s on the table,” he added. “But that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. I doubt if we’re going to see something like that in the reasonably foreseeable future.
The results, which covered Nov. 1 through Dec. 24, were fueled by purchases of clothing and jewelry.
Nearly the entire increase came from the burst of federal spending as the government mobilized to contain the spread of the virus.
The Fed plans to cease its bond buys entirely by March, rather than its earlier target of June to give itself room to begin raising interest rates as early as the second quarter of next year.
Costs for key goods and services soared 0.8 percent for the month and 6.8 percent for the year, the highest since 1982, the Labor Department reported Friday.
The middle class is facing serious economic hardship with little of the workplace flexibility now afforded to the well-off. Here’s how employers — and government — can help.
Mumia Abu-Jamal remembers South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who died on Sunday at the age of 90. Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for fighting to end apartheid in South Africa. In 2007, Tutu visited Mumia when he was still on death row. “His spirit reflected a giant,” says Abu-Jamal. “He struggled for change with his prophetic voice, his sweet humor, his deep love and his boundless sense of compassion.
World-renowned author, activist and professor Angela Davis talks about navigating the pandemic and an inadequate two-party political system during a time of racial uprising in the United States. She also talks about imprisoned journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Biden presidential campaign and the protests that erupted from the police killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
In the news today: Former Sen. Harry Reid, a giant of progressive politics, died last night at age 82. The nation’s COVID-19 pandemic has now reached yet another all-time high, with a 7-day average now topping a quarter-million new cases per day. And the mass shooter responsible for five deaths in Denver has been identified as a white supremacist who repeatedly advocated for political violence on social media—and wrote a “book” that reveled in such violence.
What could be possibly more American than a group of cranky a-holes fighting for their God-given right to spread deadly diseases at fast-food restaurants? That’s peak 2021, folks; MAGA mites always save the best for last.
As much as I’d like to dump most Burger King food into Boston Harbor (still a far better choice, I’d argue, than eating it), I don’t think this protest will have the historic impact these anti-vaxxers hope it will.
Pressure from corporate donors, public relations firms, and anti-union consultants has chilled research by labor studies academics.
By Jo Constantz, for Capital & Main
Throttled by both strong-arm tactics from anti-union interests and a chronic lack of support from universities, the field of labor studies has dwindled in the U.S. in recent years.
Ghislaine Maxwell, the wealthy socialite believed to be Jeffrey Epstein’s right-hand woman, was found guilty on Wednesday of five out of six counts at a federal court in New York. The jury reached its verdict after six days of deliberations that spanned around 40 hours.