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Category: Politics

Dobbs turned abortion into a huge liability for Republicans

Dobbs turned abortion into a huge liability for Republicans

FiveThirtyEight reports: When Theresa M. started attending a support group for breast cancer survivors, she didn’t expect political issues like abortion to be a part of the conversation. But since last summer, when her home state of Florida — freed from the requirements of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court — began imposing new abortion restrictions, younger women who were newly diagnosed with breast cancer started to voice concerns. “They worry if you find out you’re pregnant, you might…

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The government must say what it knows about Covid’s origins

The government must say what it knows about Covid’s origins

Zeynep Tufekci writes: Three researchers at a laboratory in Wuhan, China, who had fallen ill in November 2019 had been experimenting with SARS-like coronaviruses under inadequate biosafety conditions, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing current and former U.S. officials. The Journal had reported in 2021 that some researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had sought hospital care that November, around the time that evidence suggests Covid first began to spread among people. It was not publicly known,…

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Ex-FBI analyst who, like Trump, kept classified documents in her bathroom, receives nearly four-year prison sentence

Ex-FBI analyst who, like Trump, kept classified documents in her bathroom, receives nearly four-year prison sentence

The Kansas City Star reports: A former FBI intelligence analyst from Dodge City, Kansas, who kept hundreds of classified documents at her home, including in her bathroom, was sentenced to nearly four years in prison by a federal judge in Kansas City on Wednesday for violating the same part of the Espionage Act that former President Donald Trump is accused of breaking. The sentencing for willful retention of national defense information was the first since a federal grand jury indicted…

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Inside Moms for Liberty’s close relationship with the Proud Boys

Inside Moms for Liberty’s close relationship with the Proud Boys

Vice News reports: Alexandra Caballero was already well-known in Miami’s far-right scene as an organizer of anti-mask protests at school board meetings when, in August 2021, she joined the city’s chapter of the extremist “parental rights” group known as Moms for Liberty. For six months, Caballero told VICE News that she was happy to be a member of the group. Founded in 2020, Moms for Liberty portrays itself as a wholesome, grassroots movement that is focused on protecting students. However,…

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Justice Alito doth protest too much

Justice Alito doth protest too much

The New York Times reports: Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. took the unusual step late Tuesday of responding to questions about his travel with a billionaire who frequently has cases before the Supreme Court hours before an article detailing their ties had even been published. In an extraordinary salvo in a favored forum, Justice Alito defended himself in a pre-emptive article in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal before the news organization ProPublica posted its account of a…

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There is no shared American value system

There is no shared American value system

Dahlia Lithwick and Michael Podhorzer write: In another least-surprising surprise of our times, last week Donald Trump expressed his intent, if elected to a second term as president, to utilize his Justice Department to destroy his political opponent. The New York Times reported that Trump had promised, in a speech after his arraignment, to “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire…

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Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russia slowly makes progress

Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russia slowly makes progress

Michael Weiss and James Rushton report: Ukraine might be a victim of its own success. Last year, Kyiv launched a surprise operation to recapture territory in Kharkiv Oblast from Russian forces, liberating territory roughly the size of Denmark in the space of five days. That campaign, a closely guarded secret, was unforeseen by just about everyone — especially the Russians. But it set high expectations for Ukraine’s long anticipated spring counteroffensive. That spring has finally arrived, and Ukraine has gone…

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Pentagon says Ukraine accounting error revealed last month is much bigger than previously stated

Pentagon says Ukraine accounting error revealed last month is much bigger than previously stated

CNN reports: The Pentagon announced Tuesday that the accounting error revealed last month was significantly more than previously stated and aid provided to Ukraine was overvalued by $6.2 billion rather than $3 billion. The accounting error includes fiscal years 2022 and 2023 and occurred because “in a significant number of cases,” when the US transferred weaponry, military officials counted the value of replacing the weapon instead of the value of the actual weapon, deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh explained…

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The movement that sees Trump as an instrument of God leading a spiritual war

The movement that sees Trump as an instrument of God leading a spiritual war

Stephanie McCrummen writes: Convergence. Spiritual warfare. Demonic strongholds. These were the kinds of terms that Tami [Barthen] tossed off easily, and knew could make the movement seem loopy to outsiders. But they were part of a vocabulary that added up to a whole way of seeing the world, one traceable not so much to ancient times but rather to 1971. That was when an evangelical missionary named C. Peter Wagner returned to California after spending more than a decade in…

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How Leonard Leo, architect of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, helped DeSantis flip the state Supreme Court

How Leonard Leo, architect of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, helped DeSantis flip the state Supreme Court

The Washington Post reports: For decades, the ambitions of Florida’s Republican governors were stymied by the liberal-leaning state Supreme Court. That is, until Ron DeSantis was elected. The court let him erase a congressional district with a large Black population. It opened the door to a law making it easier to impose the death penalty. Now, it’s poised to rule on the governor’s plan to outlaw most abortions in the third-most-populous state. The hard-right turn was by design. DeSantis seized…

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Team Trump suspects his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, is a ‘rat’

Team Trump suspects his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, is a ‘rat’

Rolling Stone reports: Earlier this year, Donald Trump sent some of his lawyers and political advisers on a “small fact-finding mission,” as a person with knowledge of the matter describes it to Rolling Stone. The former president wanted to know, according to that source and another person close to Trump: “What is Mark doing?” Trump was referring to his former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Justice Department investigators and Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office had been keen on…

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U.S. is rejecting asylum seekers at much higher rates under new Biden policy

U.S. is rejecting asylum seekers at much higher rates under new Biden policy

The Los Angeles Times reports: A new Biden administration policy has dramatically lowered the percentage of migrants at the southern border who enter the United States and are allowed to apply for asylum, according to numbers revealed in court documents obtained by The Times. Without these new limits to asylum, border crossings could overwhelm local towns and resources, a Department of Homeland Security official warned a federal court in a filing this month. The new asylum policy is the centerpiece…

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Legal experts say the charges against Hunter Biden are rarely brought

Legal experts say the charges against Hunter Biden are rarely brought

NBC News reports: The charges brought against President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden are rarely prosecuted, legal experts say. Under a plea deal reached with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware — an office headed by Donald Trump appointee David Weiss — Hunter Biden will plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges of failing to pay taxes, which he later reimbursed. Biden also faces a felony gun charge — possession of a firearm by a person who is…

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FBI resisted opening probe into Trump’s role in January 6 for more than a year

FBI resisted opening probe into Trump’s role in January 6 for more than a year

The Washington Post reports: On Jan. 13, 2022, the department indicted Rhodes and 10 other Oath Keepers on charges of seditious conspiracy. It did not quiet the criticism, but instead put a spotlight on signs the Justice Department was not, in comparison with the House committee, working as actively to investigate Trump’s role in the attempted coup. Politico had reported that week that the House committee had demanded and received documents from several states about fake electors as well as…

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Well-funded Christian group behind U.S. effort to roll back LGBTQ+ rights

Well-funded Christian group behind U.S. effort to roll back LGBTQ+ rights

The Guardian reports: With the US besieged by a rightwing culture war campaign that aims to strip away rights from LGBTQ+ people and others, blame tends to be focused on Republican politicians and conservative media figures. But lurking behind efforts to roll back abortion rights, to demonize trans people, and to peel back the protections afforded to gay and queer Americans is a shadowy, well-funded rightwing legal organization, experts say. Since it was formed in 1994, Alliance Defending Freedom has…

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As the nation celebrates Juneteenth, it’s time to get rid of these three myths about slavery

As the nation celebrates Juneteenth, it’s time to get rid of these three myths about slavery

John Blake writes: Temple “Tempie” Cummins stoically stares at the camera with her arms folded in her lap, sitting stiffly in a chair in her dusty, barren backyard with her weather-beaten wooden shack behind her. Her dark, creased face reflects years of poverty and worry. The faded black and white image of Cummins from 1937 was snapped by a historian who stopped by her home in Jasper, Texas, to ask her about her childhood during slavery. Cummins, who did not…

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