It is Friday. The news has been a mixture of foreign policy hawks versus the American public’s desire not to be hawks, and anti-mask GOP officials versus the American public’s desire for this pandemic to be brought under control. Here is some of what you might have missed.
Zach Everson has long tracked the lobbyists, Republicans and foreign government reps who have spent big at the hotel to wrangle favors from the former president.
Republican Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama is in the news again. No, it’s not because she’s signed another bill attacking people’s right to choose what they do with their bodies; and no, it’s not because she just signed a bill to make it harder for people in her state to vote. It’s because one of her state attorneys—and former deputy general counsel in the Office of Governor—has been arrested on a child solicitation charge.
In recent years, Rudy Giuliani’s corruptions and the cynical mediocrity of his Trump cabal have led to more and more public humiliations, culminating in his election fraud, kraken team, and dripping hair-dye antics. The onetime prosecutor is so unhinged both politically and aesthetically it is sometimes hard to remember how dangerous a position of power and persuasion he continues to have … to some degree.
As the delta variant continues to spread across the country, unvaccinated individuals are facing the worst of it. Many of those who once organized against pandemic safety measures like wearing masks and getting vaccinated are now battling the virus in hospitals. In one incident, a Texas man who helped organize protests against COVID-19 restrictions is fighting for his life after being hospitalized for almost a month, the San Angelo Standard-Times reported.
Nearly 70 legislators led by anti-war stalwart Barbara Lee and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are calling on the Biden administration to raise the refugee cap for the 2022 fiscal year, citing “vulnerable Afghans who are in grave danger following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.” President Joe Biden has previously pledged to raise the cap to 125,000 in the next full fiscal year. Currently its 62,500. Legislators are calling on him to raise it to at least 200,000.
In 2010, Elder said he was also against mandating that insurance companies cover people with preexisting conditions.
That testing glitch really ruined my O-week.
Imagine how the scene at the Kabul airport looked to the suicide bomber in the last seconds before he committed his act of murder yesterday: thousands of men, women, and children queuing and jostling in desperate escape from the coming Taliban regime. These were not randomly selected men, women, and children either. These were people with technical skills: medicine, computers, electrical engineering. These were people who spoke foreign languages.
A judge ruled Friday that Florida school districts may impose mask mandates.
Nearly every day, the family of five set out to the airport from their home in Kabul only to be met by other desperate Afghans and large crowds.
Central bank chief seeks to avoid market turmoil as president weighs tapping him for a second term.
The 83-year-old said in a new interview that he is struggling to decide when he should step down from the Supreme Court.
It was after Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced that she would pursue a COVID-19 vaccination mandate for all city employees that the local Fraternal Order of Police president, John Catanzara, finally understood what it was like to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.“We’re in America, G-ddamn it. We don’t want to be forced to do anything. Period,” Catanzara said, as transcribed by the Chicago Sun-Times.
Zac Eash had originally planned to be home for two weeks when he became a father. But his daughter was born in early March 2020, and, well, you know. “We both got to spend a lot of time with her the first four months of her life,” Eash, a middle-school teacher living in Ames, Iowa, who finished out the school year remotely, told me.When in-person classes resumed late last summer, Eash was acutely aware of how much less time he had with his wife and baby daughter, and he missed it.
Updated at 4:15 p.m. ET on August 27, 2021.In 2006, astronomers gathered in Prague to consider a very basic question: How many planets are in our solar system? Was it nine, or was it actually eight, or perhaps as many as 12? By the end of the conference, after several polite debates and “lots of heated hallway discussions,” the verdict was in. Under the new rules of planethood, the solar system had eight planets, and Pluto wasn’t one of them.
Patrick Zachmann / Magnum
This week, kids and teachers across the United States went back to school, after a year and a half of remote learning and Zoom fatigue. This school year is likely to be a mess—again—and among all of the pandemic considerations, teachers are also contending with keeping students engaged in and out of the classroom.
The conservative talk radio host Larry Elder is now the Republican front-runner challenging Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom in a special election that could also shape national politics. California voters cast ballots on September 14 on whether to recall Newsom, after a right-wing campaign to unseat the governor garnered enough signatures to trigger the vote.
As thousands of people in Afghanistan attempt to flee the country before the United States’ withdrawal on August 31, we look at how the Trump administration made it much harder for Afghans who worked with the U.S. to apply and receive what is known as a special immigrant visa, or SIV.
We speak with Haroun Rahimi, assistant professor of law at the American University of Afghanistan, about the Islamic State affiliate that claimed responsibility for this week’s devastating suicide bombings at Kabul airport, which killed more than 110 people, including 13 U.S. troops. Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K, is a puritanical group that is “critical of all other sects of Islam,” says Rahimi.
We go to Kabul, Afghanistan, for an update as the death toll from twin suicide bomb attack outside the airport has topped 110 people, including 13 U.S. troops. The suicide bombers struck near the crowded gates of the airport where thousands of Afghans had gathered in an attempt to flee the country before the withdrawal of U.S. troops on August 31.
Parenting advice on new activists, nail polish, and wedding woes.
Prospects for Medicare expansion are further complicated by a price tag that could exceed $350 billion over a decade and surpass the cost of other health priorities under discussion.
He spends his meager income on his motorcycle and cigarettes.
We’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on unnecessary takeout and groceries.
A well-meaning rule is working completely backward.
And I would rather they find out after I’m gone.
The executive order comes after the governor, who is recovering from his own case of Covid, touted the vaccine as the reason for his “brief & mild” infection.
