This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, Justin Bibb was living in a tight, one-bedroom apartment in Cleveland, Ohio. He couldn’t open his windows because his home was an old office building converted to residential units—not exactly conducive to […]

Last month, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested Newark, N.J., Mayor Ras Baraka outside an immigration detention facility, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official said on CNN that there would “likely be more arrests coming.” DHS police came close to delivering on that threat this past week when they invaded the Manhattan […]

Elon Musk is leaving DC not with a bang but a whimper…and, it appears, with some new enemies in the White House. In an interview that aired Sunday on CBS, days after he announced he was departing DOGE, Musk insisted he has never been in lockstep with the Trump administration, despite being President Donald Trump’s […]

This story was originally published by Grist and Street Roots and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On a Thursday morning in Portland’s Old Town neighborhood, two dozen people mill around a warehouse, waiting for the results of a lottery. At 7:45 sharp, a woman sitting in an interior office calls out three […]

Dylan Bringuel remembers the exact moment they got hired by the Holiday Inn Express in Jamestown, New York. It was late August 2022, and Bringuel—who uses they/them pronouns—had recently moved across the country and was struggling to find work.  Bringuel is transgender and was upfront about their gender identity during the job interview. “ I was […]

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just green-lit a new Covid vaccine from Moderna, the company said in a press release Saturday. Now the vaccine will bump up against an administration that is loath to recommend it. The vaccine, called mNEXSPIKE, was approved for adults 65 and older, and people between 12 and 64 years […]

On Friday, the Trump administration released a detailed look at its proposed 2026 budget, including major cuts to federal science agencies that oversee research on everything from cancer to the cosmos. While the broad strokes of Trump’s budget had been released in early May, the new proposal reveals more about what specific programs the president […]

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Nearly two decades ago, scientists made an alarming discovery in upstate New York: Bats, the world’s only flying mammal, were becoming infected with a new, deadly fungal disease that, in some cases, could wipe out an entire colony in a matter of […]

Last week, Max, a trans man in North Carolina in his twenties—and my childhood friend—got top surgery. “I didn’t cry when I saw the results because it just looks like how I feel it should,” Max wrote in an email. He cried later, he said—when he realized he’d been able to “build a body I […]

This story was originally published by Vox.com, and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The Supreme Court handed down an opinion on Thursday that reads like it was written by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, the authors of an influential book arguing that excessive regulation of land use and development has made it too difficult to build […]

During an official Oval Office event marking the end of his time working at the federal government, Elon Musk on Friday emerged with apparent facial swelling and bruising around his right eye. “I wasn’t anywhere near France,” Musk replied when asked about the black eye, an apparent joke about Emmanuel Macron’s marital shove. “I was […]

Trump has been on a spree this week: He’s pardoned or commuted the sentences of a host of people this week, tax fraudsters and TV personalities among them.  So, how do you get one of these pardons? In my new video, I point out that if you’re Black, you should probably know Trump’s “Pardon Czar,” […]

The former Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Xavier Becerra said the Trump administration’s explanations of how fake studies wound up cited in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again (MAHA)” report are “BS.” “We have an obligation to protect the health of the American people, and to be silent […]

The largest Medicaid cuts in US history, which, if signed into law, would sever healthcare for the poorest Americans in order to offset massive tax cuts for the wealthy, have a curious new defense: “Well, we all are going to die.” The line emerged on Friday as Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) attempted to defend the […]

On Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the Trump administration had taken new steps towards “building an America First State Department” by notifying Congress of a “reorganization plan.” The massive overhaul, first proposed in April, will reportedly downsize or eliminate hundreds of bureaus and offices; cut thousands of domestic civil service and foreign […]

To hear people in the anti-abortion movement tell it, the idea that human life, and personhood, begin at fertilization is as old as the Bible. But as abortion historian Mary Ziegler writes in her latest book, Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction, the legal movement for fetal personhood only dates from the 1960s, when […]

On May 16, the Supreme Court handed down a significant order in one of the many swirling cases over the Trump administration’s efforts to seize immigrants and deport them to foreign prisons. In an unsigned opinion, seven of the court’s nine justices reaffirmed that immigrants needed a reasonable amount of time to challenge their deportations. […]

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Toxic pesticide levels have been found in tampons at levels 40 times higher than the legal limit for drinking water. Traces of glyphosate, a pesticide linked to cancer, has been found at very high levels in […]

On January 28, Dr. Troy Jacobs was in Ethiopia getting ready to board a plane from Addis Ababa to Washington, DC, when his phone and computer suddenly stopped working.    Jacobs, a pediatrician and recognized expert in the field of child survival, had been a contractor with the United States Agency for International Development’s maternal and […]

Donald Trump has made false claims about voter fraud central to his political identity and issued a sweeping anti-voting executive order in March. Now he’s weaponizing the Justice Department to advance his voter suppression agenda. On Tuesday, in its first major voting-related lawsuit, the Trump Justice Department sued the state of North Carolina over its […]