Today's Liberal News

Why People Keep Asking Which Vaccine You Got

The vaccines are here, and with them, the promise of getting back to some sort of normal. Over the coming months, many Americans will be returning to offices or schools, traveling to see family and friends, eating cheeseburgers inside sports bars. But the vaccines’ arrival has also provided a more immediate relief: giving people something to talk about.After a year of awkward conversation, the United States has entered vaccine exuberance.

Robin D.G. Kelley on Derek Chauvin Murder Trial, Reparations in Evanston & Cornel West Tenure Fight

As opening statements begin in Minneapolis for the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin, we speak with UCLA historian and author Robin D.G. Kelley, who says a guilty verdict alone would not represent justice for George Floyd. “The real victory would be to end policing as we know it, to end qualified immunity, to end the conditions that enabled Derek Chauvin to take George Floyd’s life and his colleagues to kind of stand there and watch,” says Kelley.

Capitalism Without Accountability Is at Root of Suez Canal Shipping Crisis, Says Scholar Laleh Khalili

A Suez Canal service firm now says the huge container ship blocking the canal has been refloated and is on the move. The 200,000-ton ship, the Ever Given, got stuck on March 23, blocking one of the world’s most important trade routes, which is used for about 12% of all global trade. The impact of the canal shutdown has raised new questions about global trade practices, including the reliance on massive cargo ships, the conditions of workers on the vessels, and environmental degradation.

This Is What Life Looks Like After Vaccination

Vincent Migeat / Agence VU / Redux
I didn’t feel weepy the first time I hugged my two granddaughters postvaccination. What I felt instead was a softening, a physical relief, a deep sense that things could be normal again, as I sank down to the floor with the 2-year-old and let her nestle into my lap. This relief, I thought, is what a vaccine has given me.

America’s Rural-Jail-Death Problem

This is the second in a five-part series about deaths in American jails. Read the first here.Illustrations by Molly Crabapple In the early-morning hours of January 7, 2019, when it became clear that 30-year-old Christopher Hall might die, no medical staff were on duty at the Boyd County Detention Center.Hall had been booked into the rural eastern-Kentucky jail in the final days of 2018 on a drug-possession charge.

America’s Immigration Amnesia

In the early 2000s, Border Patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas were accustomed to encountering a few hundred children attempting to cross the American border alone each month. Some hoped to sneak into the country unnoticed; others readily presented themselves to officials in order to request asylum. The agents would transport the children, who were exhausted, dehydrated, and sometimes injured, to Border Patrol stations and book them into austere concrete holding cells.