Donald Trump’s return to power and a Republican-controlled Congress are set to mark a new era in US political history, one steeped in rule-breaking, authoritarian tendencies, and an overwhelming hostility to long-established civic institutions. And, according to the president-elect, a herculean portion of this agenda will kick into gear immediately after he is inaugurated, with […]

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Even before President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House on Monday, California got ahead of things. Anticipating more of the federal meddling they’d seen in the past, like when Trump’s first administration tried to block the state’s vehicle emissions standards, lawmakers met […]

President-elect Donald Trump may be famously inconsistent on abortion rights, but his picks to run federal departments and agencies haven’t been. They have defended anti-abortion laws in court, spread disinformation about the procedure, and openly celebrated the Dobbs decision. Some nominees you’ve likely heard of because their troubling reputations preceded them; others are lesser-known. Abortion […]

On Friday night, just days before his inauguration, President-elect Donald Trump took to X to celebrate…the launch of his new meme coin. “It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for,” he wrote, “WINNING!” It’s a move that, at least on paper, seemed to inflate Trump’s personal wealth by billions ahead of ushering in the most […]

On Monday, January 6, my grandmother celebrated her one-hundredth birthday. It was quite a milestone for a woman who during the Covid pandemic asked me, “What’s the big deal with getting vaccinated, we all did it in the ’30s to combat typhoid?” My family came over from across the United States—as close as Las Vegas […]

President Donald Trump ran his 2024 campaign on a promise to enact mass deportation, and to do so immediately. The Wall Street Journal reports that four people familiar with the plan say the incoming administration is preparing for a large-scale immigration raid to begin in Chicago on Tuesday, and last a week. The New York […]

It’s been two decades since the Battle of Fallujah, the bloodiest battle of the global war on terror, during the Iraq War—a disaster we now know was based on a lie. At the time, however, in the aftermath of 9/11, the battlefield was filled with troops who believed they were serving and defending their country […]

On January 8, after multiple wildfires erupted in Los Angeles, a father who was an amputee, and his son, who had cerebral palsy—both wheelchair users—died while waiting for assistance to leave their home. Two days later, on January 10, a woman described as bedridden also died from smoke inhalation and thermal injuries. They were three […]

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When Deb Haaland was chosen as the secretary of the Interior by President Joe Biden in 2021, she was the first Native American ever to serve in a US Cabinet. It was a seminal moment for tribal […]

When the longtime state representative serving her district in north-central New Mexico retired in early 2020, science educator Anita Gonzales wondered who would replace him. Then she asked herself, “Why not me?”  Although she’d occasionally visited the state Capitol in Santa Fe to lobby for issues that mattered to STEM students and teachers, Gonzales didn’t […]

On Friday, the Senate voted to advance a bill that would significantly increase the number of undocumented immigrants subject to mandatory detention and give right-wing judges more power. Most notably, it has done so with help from Democrats who now fear being tagged as weak on immigration enforcement. The Laken Riley Act is named after […]

This morning President Joe Biden announced that he is commuting the sentences of nearly 2,500 people serving longer prison terms for convictions related to crack cocaine. In doing so, Biden made history and set the record for the most total individual commutations by a president in history at over 4,000. “Today’s clemency action provides relief […]

The Supreme Court on Friday allowed a ban on TikTok to take effect. Last year, President Joe Biden signed a law that would ban the platform unless its Chinese parent-company, ByteDance, sold it. In handing down its ruling, the court rebuffed an effort by the platform, some of its users, numerous free-speech advocates, and President-elect […]

In the early days of the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, President Joe Biden took some time to congratulate himself on a job well done. For weeks, his administration had been pursuing a “bear hug” of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: heaping billions in aid on the US ally and insulating it from international […]

Government employees who report possible malfeasance are almost certain to be targeted by the second Trump administration. Mark Zaid is a lawyer likely to represent some of them; over the past two decades, he has provided legal counsel to a long list of federal employees and intelligence officers, including whistleblowers. His most high-profile whistleblower case, […]

During his campaign, incoming president Donald Trump did everything possible to muddy his record on abortion and reproductive healthcare. He flip-flopped on whether he supported outlawing abortion and declined to answer questions on birth control and medication abortion. He bragged about appointing the three Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade but also assured […]

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. As firefighters are battling multiple huge blazes tearing through Los Angeles, California’s prisons have deployed more than 1,000 incarcerated people to battle on the frontlines. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) said that, as of Wednesday morning, 1,116 […]

At a Senate committee hearing on Wednesday, Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, acknowledged climate change is “real” and that greenhouse gasses are making the planet hotter—but stopped short of saying the agency must regulate them. About 90 minutes into the hearing before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public […]

In the week since wildfires began spreading through Los Angeles County, rent prices have skyrocketed as the thousands who have lost their homes try to find new places to live. “We’ve seen businesses and landlords that use increased demand during emergencies to jack up the price,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a January […]

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. set out in late 2021 to hawk a conspiracy theory-drenched book attacking Anthony Fauci for his work to limit the spread of infectious diseases, he ran into a problem. Mainstream TV networks weren’t interested, due to Kennedy’s penchant for spreading falsehoods about childhood vaccinations, Covid, and other topics. “Nobody would […]