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 […]

Donald Trump set off another social media eruption on Tuesday when he posted on his money-losing Truth Social site, “What Valdimir Putin doesn’t realize is that if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD. He’s playing with fire!” Here apparently was evidence […]

Elon Musk’s announcement on Wednesday that his “scheduled time” working for President Donald Trump is ending was instantly met with a mix of celebration and schadenfreude. And for once, the delight is likely to include both critics of the president and Trump-world. This is not surprising. Musk’s personality, by all accounts deeply unlikeable, had been […]

In March, the Trump administration’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) sent concerned letters to 20 of the nation’s top law firms. The problem? Big Law diversity and equity programs were likely illegal, said the administration, because DEI discriminated against male and white candidates. At first, such an attack could seem silly—the policy memo equivalent of […]

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. China is the world’s largest single greenhouse gas emitter, spewing more than double the amount of heat-trapping chemicals as the next biggest climate polluter, the United States. For decades, China’s emissions soared ever higher as its economy grew, burning extraordinary volumes of coal, […]

One might have thought that last November, when Missourians voted to enshrine “reproductive freedom,” including abortion, in the state constitution, that would be the end of the conversation. In overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, the US Supreme Court professed that the question of whether abortion should be legal was now up to states. And […]

Many people were shocked to read allegations last year by Donald Trump’s nephew, Fred Trump III, about his uncle: Fred, whose son William has intellectual and developmental disabilities, reported that the elder Trump said during his first presidential term that people like William should “just die.” That is shocking—but it’s not surprising. The comment falls […]

This story was originally published on the author’s substack, Field Notes From Alexander C. Kaufman, to which you can subscribe here. Five years after President Donald Trump signaled his support for extracting metals from the moon, his new administration is seeking to satisfy the United States’ hunger for critical minerals by encouraging mining under the polar ice caps, amid warzones, and at […]

A record 45 million Americans were expected to travel this Memorial Day weekend, long considered the unofficial kickoff to summer. And most of them were hitting the road. Sarah Kendzior is no stranger to the family road trip. Her family, in fact, has visited 38 states—and counting. These trips were born out of a love […]