One thing we crave after our collective pandemic experience is certainty. If a potentially powerful new variant is out there, we need some answers about it: How fast is its evolution? Will it spread as quickly and widely as Omicron? And will the vaccine be effective against it?In this episode, I talk with Atlantic science writers Katie Wu and Sarah Zhang. They know a lot, and they are very honest about all the things they don’t know.
About 100 million Americans deal with medical debt, late notices, threatening voicemails and credit score declines.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is seeing a dramatic deterioration of infrastructure and displacement of citizens as a result of armed violence, flooding and the world’s largest hunger crisis. In recent months, rampant violence of armed groups has forced more than half a million people to flee their homes, while the United Nations says some 3,000 families also lost their homes after recent intense flooding and mudslides in the eastern part of the country.
On the same day U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Kyiv to announce $1 billion in new U.S. aid to Ukraine, 17 Ukrainians were killed in a Russian missile attack on a Donetsk market. “It’s very painful for me to see all the streets and cities that I spent my childhood in to be completely destroyed by the ongoing war,” says Hanna Perekhoda, Ukrainian historian from the Donetsk region on a speaking tour of the U.S.
The law governing the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief will lapse on Oct. 1.
Families grieving lost children want policymakers to take emergency action.
Republicans are working to persuade Americans that the Biden plan will stifle innovation and lead to price controls.
Here are summaries of the cases and where they stand.
The president leaned into his achievements at a Labor Day event in Philadelphia, but a new poll reflects widespread disapproval.
“It’s a complicated relationship,” she said of the U.S. and China.
The unemployment rate rose from 3.5 percent to 3.8 percent, the highest level since February 2022 though still low by historical standards.
About 3 million children could lose child care after funding expires at the end of next month.
“Our economy is the lowest it’s been.
A military judge at Guantánamo has thrown out the confessions of Saudi man Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri because he had been tortured and waterboarded at secret CIA black sites in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, Romania and Morocco before being sent to Guantánamo. Psychologists James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen, who were paid at least $81 million by the CIA to develop and then implement the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, had waterboarded al-Nashiri at a CIA black site.
The party of Donald Trump is suffering from its “banana republic wing,” lamented Mike Murphy.
The Florida governor argued that there’s “some examples of people that shouldn’t have been prosecuted” following the Capitol riot.
The former Arkansas governor warned of a dark future if legal moves keep Trump out of office.
Mehdi Hasan tried to get the presidential candidate to explain his own words about the former president and his GOP rival. It didn’t go well.
The president tested negative for coronavirus after his wife tested positive, but he’s been instructed to keep masking.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Democracy is under attack around the world; in the United States, the summer brought good news and bad news. The institutions of democracy are still functioning, but not for long if enough Americans continue to support authoritarianism.
Back in the spring, around the end of the COVID-19 public-health emergency, hospitals around the country underwent a change in dress code. The masks that staff had been wearing at work for more than three years vanished, in some places overnight.
On Labor Day, you could drive from Minnesota’s border with Canada all the way to where Louisiana hits the Gulf of Mexico and not encounter a high under 90 degrees. The heat hasn’t broken: Today, nearly a third of Americans are sweltering under heat alerts.Such weather is a fitting end to a devastating season, the kind you run out of superlatives for. This summer, climate extremes suddenly seemed to be everywhere, all at once.
The numbers were climbing on a radiation dosimeter as the minibus carried me deeper into the complex. Biohazard suits are no longer required in most parts of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant, but still, I’d been given a helmet, eyewear, an N95 mask, gloves, two pairs of socks, and rubber boots. At the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, you can never be too safe.
When I first started surfing, as a teenager in Honolulu in 1966, my uncle would clear a way for me through the big, intimidating men on long, heavy surfboards—men who vastly outnumbered women in the fabled waves at Queen’s surf break in Waikiki.Back then, I didn’t see the irony in men dominating a break named for a powerful woman—Queen Lydia Lili‘uokalani, whose cottage had once stood on that very beach.
As the Africa Climate Summit wraps up in Nairobi, we get an update from Kenyan climate justice organizer Eric Njuguna. He says the focus by Western leaders and multinational companies on establishing carbon markets in Africa amounts to a “ticket to pollute” without directly addressing the need to phase out fossil fuels. Njuguna says a key demand from activists is to create access to climate financing without new debt burdens on the continent’s governments.
The Biden administration is expected to send armor-piercing munitions containing depleted uranium to Ukraine as part of the latest military aid package, even though the weapons are radioactive and their use causes contamination that is hazardous to human health. It’s the latest escalation in the war between Ukraine and Russia that nonproliferation activists warn could possibly lead to a nuclear confrontation.
Georgia is intensifying its crackdown against opponents of Cop City, with the state’s Republican attorney general announcing sweeping indictments of 61 people on racketeering charges over protests and other activism related to the $90 million police training facility planned to be built in Atlanta.
Families grieving lost children want policymakers to take emergency action.
Republicans are working to persuade Americans that the Biden plan will stifle innovation and lead to price controls.
Here are summaries of the cases and where they stand.