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Federal agents use tear gas against residents and local police in Chicago

Federal agents use tear gas against residents and local police in Chicago

Chicago Sun-Times reports: Federal agents deployed tear gas on the Far Southeast Side — sickening protesters and more than a dozen cops — despite a deputy Chicago police chief having told them his officers didn’t have gas masks and offering to clear a path so the agents could safely leave a chaotic scene, according to law enforcement sources. Angry residents had poured into the street to confront federal immigration agents near 105th Street and Avenue N in the East Side…

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More women than ever want to leave Trump’s America

More women than ever want to leave Trump’s America

The New Republic reports: A growing percentage of young women no longer see a future in the United States. Roughly 40 percent of women between the ages of 15 and 44 said that they would permanently move abroad if they were able to, according to a 2025 Gallup Poll. That included 45 percent of single women, and 41 percent of married women. It’s a stark difference from how young women felt when they were asked the same question a decade…

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How the shutdown of USAID has already killed hundreds of thousands of people

How the shutdown of USAID has already killed hundreds of thousands of people

  Atul Gawande writes: It was January, my final week in the outgoing Administration. In a few days, Donald Trump would be inaugurated as President. I had come to the United States Agency for International Development in early 2022, leaving my surgery practice and public-health research in Boston to lead the agency’s global-health efforts. Now I’d be returning to my previous life. I spent my last days at U.S.A.I.D. in meetings with our civil- and foreign-service leaders, thanking them. Their…

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Incompetent or a liar. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, implausibly pleads ignorance

Incompetent or a liar. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, implausibly pleads ignorance

The New York Times reports: Kevin D. Roberts is the president of the Heritage Foundation, a powerful think tank at the center of conservative politics. He makes more than $800,000 a year. He manages a budget of $100 million. He has a doctorate in history. Now, he is trying to escape a gaffe that could derail his career. So he is asking allies to believe something at odds with his sophisticated credentials: He erred out of ignorance, because he does…

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Stewart Rhodes might wish otherwise, but there seems to be little appetite for the Oath Keepers in 2025

Stewart Rhodes might wish otherwise, but there seems to be little appetite for the Oath Keepers in 2025

Wired reports: Stewart Rhodes announced last week that he is relaunching the Oath Keepers, his anti-government militia which virtually disappeared after dozens of its members—including Rhodes—were arrested for their roles in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Rhodes, speaking to the Gateway Pundit this week, says that he sees the relaunched group as playing a role in combating what he labeled an “insurrection by the left” on the streets of US cities. “Right now, under federal statutes, president Trump…

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What is time? Rather than something that ‘flows,’ a philosopher suggests time is a psychological projection

What is time? Rather than something that ‘flows,’ a philosopher suggests time is a psychological projection

Time isn’t an illusion, unlike optical illusions that trick your eyes. There’s nothing to ‘trick’ because it has no physical basis. BSIP/UIG Via Getty Image By Adrian Bardon, Wake Forest University “Time flies,” “time waits for no one,” “as time goes on”: The way we speak about time tends to strongly imply that the passage of time is some sort of real process that happens out there in the world. We inhabit the present moment and move through time, even…

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The resurgence of the politics of inequality

The resurgence of the politics of inequality

David Wallace-Wells writes: Last week’s elections have hardened quickly into today’s broad strategic wisdom: American politics is now, above all, about affordability, sometimes also called “cost of living.” The terms imply a new political landscape, defined by challenges emerging in the aftermath of the pandemic emergency — inflation and interest rates, housing costs and grocery costs and energy costs — which politicians have been slow to acknowledge and policy slow to address. But there is another way of looking at…

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Where a de facto policy of climate-change acceleration is leading us

Where a de facto policy of climate-change acceleration is leading us

Vann R. Newkirk II writes: Earlier this year, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, a graveyard was spared by the fire that sent thousands of Los Angeles residents fleeing into the coal-black night. Here, in Mountain View Cemetery, lie the bones of Octavia Butler, the famed science-fiction writer who spent her life in Pasadena and Altadena, both of which had burned. Trinkets offered by fans often decorate Butler’s unassuming grave. A footstone is inscribed with a quotation from…

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Wikipedia operates in good faith — unlike its critics

Wikipedia operates in good faith — unlike its critics

Renée DiResta writes: Late last month, Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, an AI-generated encyclopedia with 855,279 articles, no human editors, and no way for users to request improvements beyond a suggestion box addressed to its eponymous chatbot author. The tech entrepreneur is eager, he has said, to “purge out the propaganda” that he argues afflicts Wikipedia, the venerable user-generated reference source. But some Grokipedia articles are near replicas of Wikipedia entries. Other articles in the new source seem conspicuously sanitized: The…

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Epstein claimed he gave Russians insight into Trump

Epstein claimed he gave Russians insight into Trump

Politico reports: Nearly a month before President Donald Trump met Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in 2018, Jeffrey Epstein attempted to pass a message to Russia’s top diplomat: If you want to understand Trump, talk to me. “I think you might suggest to putin that lavrov can get insight on talking to me,” Epstein wrote in a June 24, 2018, email to Thorbjorn Jagland, a former prime minister of Norway who was leading the Council of Europe at the…

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The carefully considered deliberations of the Sandwich Guy’s jury

The carefully considered deliberations of the Sandwich Guy’s jury

Ashley Parker writes: The jurors in the case of The United States of America v. The Sandwich Guy (as Sean Charles Dunn is better known) sized one another up before the final group had even been selected, asking, “Did you attend the ‘No Kings’ march?” “It’s like, You’re damn right I went,” one juror told me, referring to the anti-Trump protests throughout the country last month, including in Washington, D.C. (The juror, who spoke with me several days after she…

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How Trump has exploited pardons and clemency to reward his allies and supporters

How Trump has exploited pardons and clemency to reward his allies and supporters

By Jeremy Kohler This story was originally published by ProPublica The beneficiaries of President Donald Trump’s mercy in his second term have mostly been people with access to the president or his inner circle. Those who have followed the rules set out by the Department of Justice, meanwhile, are still waiting. Trump has granted clemency to allies, donors and culture-war figures — as well as felons who, like him, were convicted of financial wrongdoing. On Friday, he granted pardons to…

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The BBC must not be cowed by Trump’s threats

The BBC must not be cowed by Trump’s threats

Alan Rusbridger writes: There’s one way the BBC could retrieve some dignity from the smoking rubble of the past week. It should send Donald Trump a four-word reply to his blustering threat to sue the corporation in Florida for $1bn in damages: “See you in court.” There’s barely a notable news organisation in the US that Trump hasn’t yet sued. ABC News and CBS News have demonstrated the resolve of a jellyfish in stumping up millions to settle lawsuits that…

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Ezra Levin: What now after Senate Democrats surrender on the shutdown vote?

Ezra Levin: What now after Senate Democrats surrender on the shutdown vote?

  Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, summarizes Sunday’s shocking vote to re-open the government, without the Democrats winning anything tangible with perfect clarity: “there is something deeply broken within the Democrat system.” After a stellar performance at the polling booths on November 4th, eight Senate Democrats made the decision to abandon their party’s core shutdown demands and squander their winning momentum. In response, Indivisible is launching its largest primary program ever in 2026, with more details to follow. Keep up…

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