Joshua Rhoades was standing near an abandoned farmhouse in rural Illinois on a windy night in early March, fiddling with his camera, when he noticed what he called “a faint, eerie, ethereal glow” above him. A pillar of light had illuminated the darkness, stretching from the horizon—a hint of sun, but it was nearly 8 p.m.
Days of extreme rainfall have swamped large areas of Australia, especially in the state of New South Wales. Hundreds of people have been rescued, tens of thousands have been evacuated, and at least two deaths have been reported so far. As the weather system begins to move away, recovery efforts are now starting in some of the dozens of communities that were declared disaster zones. Collected below are images of the widespread damage caused by this once-in-a-generation flooding event.
“We’ve only had one Asian American host co-host this show. Does that mean one of us should be leaving because there’s not enough representation?” she asked.
GlaxoSmithKline said an outside law firm it hired had substantiated claims against the former Operation Warp Speed leader.
As the United States struggles to make sense of two new mass shootings — in Atlanta, Georgia, and Boulder, Colorado — we look at one country that fought to change its culture of gun violence and succeeded. In April of 1996, a gunman opened fire on tourists in Port Arthur, Tasmania, killing 35 people and wounding 23 more. Just 12 days after the grisly attack and the public outcry it sparked, Australia announced new gun control measures.
The massacre in a Boulder grocery store came just after a Colorado judge ruled in favor of the National Rifle Association’s challenge to the city’s ban on assault weapons, which was passed in 2018 after this type of weapon was used in the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida. Despite increasingly regular mass shootings, the NRA has pushed for expanded gun rights since the 1970s and insisted that more guns, not fewer, would prevent gun deaths.
Following Monday’s massacre in Boulder, Colorado, we speak with Colorado state Representative Tom Sullivan, who entered politics after his son Alex was killed in the 2012 Aurora movie theater shooting. He explains how the state’s painful history of mass shootings, going back to Columbine High School in 1999, shows even in places most affected by gun violence, it can be difficult to make lasting and effective change.
Margaret Licata has watched her husband’s dementia progress gradually over the past two decades—and now, during the pandemic, all at once.Joe Licata, 79, has frontotemporal dementia with aphasia, which means that he cannot speak or understand language. He began showing symptoms in his late 50s, when Margaret noticed a personality change: Joe would shrug off her attempts at conversation and seemed interested only in watching television.
“Whatever they think happened is probably pretty far from what really did,” the director Michael Ratner recently said in an interview about his new four-part YouTube documentary, Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil, whose first two installments are now out. The “they” he refers to is the general public, and the “what” is the July 2018 incident that landed the now-28-year-old singer Demi Lovato in intensive care.
Americans are experiencing a crime wave unlike anything we’ve seen this century. After decades of decline, shootings have surged in the past few years. In 2020, gun deaths reached their highest point in U.S. history in the midst of a pandemic. In 2021, although researchers can’t yet say anything definite about overall crime, shooting incidents appear to be on the rise in many places.
Parenting advice on tough discussions, travel frustrations, and needy mothers.
Some of the nation’s most popular governors have been knocked off their pedestals.
It’s trying to offer something Amazon and Spotify can’t.
As the president once put it: Come on!
They’re considering restoring a tax deduction that once benefited the upper-middle class and rich. Bad idea.
The full tranche of vaccine Johnson & Johnson committed in February to delivering may not be ready to ship until the third week of April.
Central bank officials now expect the unemployment rate to drop to 4.5 percent by the end of 2021.
Janet Yellen said the greater risk was not strengthening the economy as it recovers from the impact of the pandemic.
He is best known for his work on a Stockton pilot project that provided $500 a month to a small group of low-income residents.
Another massive injection of federal cash could ignite the economy like never before. It also could drive up inflation and burst market bubbles, creating new headaches in an otherwise positive outlook.
Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses why he chooses to use the term “refugee” in his books, and speaks about his own experience as a refugee. His new novel tells the story of a man who arrives in France as a refugee from Vietnam, and explores the main character’s questioning of ideology and different visions of liberation.
Twitter users lambaste John Kennedy over his weird comments less than 24 hours after a mass shooting.
In the immediate aftermath of yet another mass shooting, lawmakers allied with the (now-bankrupt but still grifting) National Rifle Association wasted no time in repeating old defenses for why Americans must tolerate regular mass murders and nothing, absolutely nothing, ought to be done about it.
We called huge numbers of workers essential but didn’t raise their pay or respect their safety in the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s only now that most “essential” workers outside of health care are starting to get vaccinated. But that process is finally happening in more states, after just a few prioritized those workers in the early phases of the vaccine rollout.
Meatpacking workers are a key case.
It initially looked like Marjorie Taylor Greene was winning the race for “dumbest freshman Republican” in a runaway. But in the space of a few hours yesterday, the other QAnon congresswoman, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, found a way to close the gap.
Shortly after the horrific mass shooting in Boulder, Boebert took to both her official and personal Twitter feeds to offer up the usual thoughts and prayers—er, tots and pears.
After being waitlisted, Southern California resident Sebastian Araujo’s mom immediately snatched up a COVID-19 vaccine appointment as soon as a slot had opened up. But Araujo said in a viral Twitter thread that got the attention of local and national outlets that his mom, Graciela, who is undocumented, was rejected at the drug store chain where she had been scheduled to get her shot.
One of my first memories of experiencing racism firsthand is from my childhood. I remember sitting in a middle school class with a substitute going down a list of names to take attendance. As she read through the list of names she paused and said she wasn’t even going to bother reading this name because it wasn’t in English. I immediately knew it was me. “The letters Q and A do not go together in English,” I was told.
“First class” is about to become a misnomer.
“I have not eaten since. I’m going to do a juice cleanse today.
Every week, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get The Weekly Planet, our guide to living through climate change, in your inbox.The think tank Carbon180 is, as far as I know, the only American nonprofit dedicated to studying the removal of carbon-dioxide pollution from the atmosphere. It is not a very large organization.