A new subvariant of SARS-CoV-2 is rapidly taking over in the U.S.—the most transmissible that has ever been detected. It’s called XBB.1.5, in reference to its status as a hybrid of two prior strains of Omicron, BA.2.10.1 and BA.2.75. It’s also called “Kraken.”Not by everyone, though. The nickname Kraken was ginned up by an informal group of scientists on Twitter and has caught on at some—but only some—major news outlets.
Ronna McDaniel saw her earnings jump in 2020 after initially making $123,000 when Trump picked her in 2017. She is now seeking a fourth two-year term.
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.After declining to renew the contract of an adjunct professor, the president of Hamline University issued a statement that underscores the need to defend academic freedom in American universities.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
When I moved from small-town Oregon to Paris’s 11th arrondissement last summer, the city seemed like a poem in gray: cobblestones, seven-story buildings, the steely waters of the Seine. But soon I started noticing the green woven in with the gray. Some of it was almost hidden, tucked inside the city’s large blocks, behind the apartment buildings lining the streets.
During a 2016 tea party meeting, Mark Green told an audience that he didn’t want public school students in Tennessee to learn about the Islamic faith.
This past summer, I marked a personal milestone: 40 years since moving to Israel.The summer of 1982 was one of the lowest points in Israeli history. All of the ambivalence over Israel that would divide the Jewish people in the coming decades began to coalesce then, when Israel was fighting a war in Lebanon that large parts of the Israeli public regarded as unnecessary and deceitful.I had joined an Israel that was, for the first time, bitterly divided over the perception of threat.
In California, at least 19 people have died as storms continue to batter the region, leading to widespread flooding, mudslides and power outages. The National Weather Service says large portions of Central California have received over half their annual normal precipitation in just the past two weeks — and more rain is coming. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says 34 million Californians are under a flood watch.
We speak with journalist Lynzy Billing, whose investigation for ProPublica details how CIA-backed death squads, known as Zero Units, have yet to be held accountable for killing hundreds of civilians during the U.S. War in Afghanistan. The Afghan units, which were routinely accompanied by U.S. soldiers, became feared throughout rural Afghanistan for their brutal night raids, often descending upon villagers from helicopters and carrying out summary executions before disappearing.
We go to Kabul to speak with Jan Egeland of the Norwegian Refugee Council about the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, where at least five people died Wednesday in a suicide bombing near the Foreign Ministry. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack. Meanwhile, pressure is growing on the ruling Taliban to reverse bans on women attending university or working with nongovernmental organizations.
The Biden administration is forwarding lists of senior facilities with zero people vaccinated to state regulators for review and possible penalties.
Fed officials are signaling that they’re determined to keep their vise-like grip on the economy through the end of 2023.
HHS has frustrated some doctors by requiring them to send patients test results before they have a chance to explain them.
People close to Yellen said she had considered leaving for family reasons and because the Treasury job is highly political — and would become more so with Republicans in control of the House.
Even with last month’s further easing of inflation, the Federal Reserve plans to keep raising interest rates.
We speak with civil rights leader Ben Jealous about his new memoir, “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free,” which examines his long career as an activist and organizer, and growing up the son of a white father and a Black mother. He discusses the lessons he drew from his mother, Ann Todd Jealous, and his grandmother, Mamie Todd, about the racism they experienced in their lifetimes.
As ceremonies mark the 100th anniversary of when a white mob attacked and burned down the Black town of Rosewood, Florida, we look at the largely untold story of how a racist mob murdered at least six Black residents and forced the rest of the town to flee. Many eyewitnesses said the true death toll was far higher.
“The GOP is now the Santos party,” the MSNBC anchor said in a stinging commentary on the disgraced New York congressman.
“Here I am introducing my lifetime friends to this guy and asking them for money. I wish I hadn’t,” one staffer said, according to Talking Points Memo.
The representative reportedly shared her plans to run for Senate in 2024 during a closed-door meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus on Wednesday.
Republicans have seized on the news, including former President Donald Trump.
The assault weapons ban comes less than a year after a deadly shooting massacre at a Fourth of July parade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park.
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.Staff writer and Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Anne Applebaum is uniquely qualified to plumb the American influence on Brazil’s “January 6 moment,” the insurrection on Sunday by supporters of the country’s far-right former president, Jair Bolsonaro.
Republicans condemned violence against anti-abortion groups and reaffirmed protections for infants born after botched abortions. Neither measure is likely to move in the Senate.
In the two-plus years that COVID vaccines have been available in America, the basic recipe has changed just once. The virus, meanwhile, has belched out five variants concerning enough to earn their own Greek-letter names, followed by a menagerie of weirdly monikered Omicron subvariants, each seeming to spread faster than the last. Vaccines, which take months to reformulate, just can’t keep up with a virus that seems to reinvent itself by the week.
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekLast week, Spiegel International reported on a country where carnivores can already legally dine on meat that is produced from the stem cells of animals.
Imagine a fairy-tale city—on the coast, perhaps, with sailboats bobbing in the breeze. This is Ursula K. Le Guin’s Omelas, a fictional utopia where “the air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire.”But Omelas holds a horrifying secret: Its continued existence relies on a single malnourished, unloved child being kept in a cellar, alone and uncomforted, in filth and fear.
We speak with one of the 7,000 nurses on strike now in New York City at two hospital systems that account for more than a quarter of all hospital beds in the city, and a journalist who has documented how hospital CEOs are boosting their own pay by millions of dollars while slashing charity care. The strike began Monday after nurses failed to reach a new contract agreement with Mount Sinai Hospital and Montefiore Medical Center, with higher wages and better staffing among their main demands.
We go to Peru for an update after Peruvian authorities declared an overnight curfew in parts of southern Peru as mass protests continue following the ouster and arrest of leftist former President Pedro Castillo.
The emerging strategy could further limit the Biden administration’s already limited policy.
New or expanded health care clinics are starting to bring more people into small towns after the fall of Roe v. Wade.