U.S. News

...broken neck, broken skull and a severed artery...

The Anti-Defamation League has been a ubiquitous presence in U.S. schools for 40 years, pushing curriculum, direct programming, and teacher training into K-12 schools and increasingly into universities, often over the objections of students, parents and educators.

When the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights notified George Mason University on July 1 that it was opening an antisemitism investigation based on a recent complaint, the university’s president, Gregory Washington, said he was “perplexed.”

Corpus Christi will run out of water if it does not find new water sources outside of the western watershed. That’s according to new research from 3NEWS, interviews with leading experts and scientists, as well as data from the city and state.

In a break with decades of tradition, the Internal Revenue Service says it will allow houses of worship to endorse candidates for political office without losing their tax-exempt status.

On July 4, the broken remnants of a powerful tropical storm spun off the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico so heavy with moisture that it seemed to stagger under its load. Then, colliding with another soggy system sliding north off the Pacific, the storm wobbled and its clouds tipped, waterboarding south central Texas with an extraordinary 20 inches of rain. In the predawn blackness, the Guadalupe River, which drains from the Hill Country, rose by more than 26 vertical feet in just 45 minutes, jumping its banks and hurtling downstream, killing 109 people, including at least 27 children at a summer camp located inside a federally designated floodway.

Even before Grigsby and his team began studying psilocybin, magic mushrooms were on a fast track toward cultural acceptance in Colorado. Denver residents voted to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms in 2019, making the city the nation’s first to ease psilocybin restrictions. A groundswell followed: Oakland and Santa Cruz, California, decriminalized mushrooms, followed by Washington, D.C.; Seattle; Detroit; and several cities in Massachusetts. Oregon voters legalized supervised psilocybin use in 2020. Two years later, Colorado voters approved Proposition 122, a ballot initiative similar to Oregon’s that allows people 21 and older to grow, possess, and share psychedelic substances. (They’re still illegal to sell for personal use.) It also created an eventual pathway for approved healing centers to bring supervised trips to the masses.

Thought recess appointments were fun? Now we have recess rulings!

I flew out of Denver on Monday and was told I didn’t have to take off my shoes.

Jails are notorious for inhumane conditions. Detainees often complain of violence, inedible food, limited programming and subpar healthcare. Lack of sunlight may be an unexpected addition to the list. But sunlight deprivation causes a myriad of serious issues, including high blood pressure, osteoporosis, and an increased risk of diabetes, as well as a host of mental health problems such as depression and sleep disorders.

The warehouse was managed by Devastating Pyrotechnics, which has more than 30 years of experience designing and producing fireworks shows, according to a screenshot of its website before it was taken down.

"I think it probably should be a concern for the government, the declining birth rate," Sarah Brewington told NPR. "There is going to come a time when everyone is retiring and there's not going to be a workforce."

"I think it probably should be a concern for the government, the declining birth rate," Sarah Brewington told NPR. "There is going to come a time when everyone is retiring and there's not going to be a workforce."

Israel’s war in Gaza is chipping away at so much of what we – in the United States but also internationally – had agreed upon as acceptable, from the rules governing our freedom of speech to the very laws of armed conflict. It seems no exaggeration to say that the foundation of the international order of the last 77 years is threatened by this change in the obligations governing our legal and political responsibilities to each other.

A nationwide US network of dozens of far-right, men-only fraternal clubs has what members describe as “literally hundreds” of participants who include past and currently serving military personnel, lawyers, civil servants, and prominent antisemitic influencers, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

On 2 June, at St Mark’s Episcopal church in Washington DC, people packed the sanctuary – elders in denim jackets, seminarians in collars, organizers clutching clipboards. Some had come in from North Carolina; others walked from their homes just a few blocks away. The seats were full, so the crowd lined the aisles and leaned against the red-brick walls beneath stained-glass windows that cast streaks of light across the floor.

The Old Glory Club (OGC) – which has at least 26 chapters in 20 US states and until now has drawn little attention – exemplifies the alarming rise of organized racist political groups in the past few years but especially during the rise of Donald Trump and his return to the White House.

In the aftermath of the Eaton Fire that destroyed over 6,000 homes in Los Angeles’s Altadena area in January, another kind of potential crisis is unfolding. In a town once built by working families and craftsmen, the new face of development doesn’t carry a hammer or a blueprint—it carries a spreadsheet.

In the 2008 best seller Nudge, the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein and the economist Richard H. Thaler marshaled behavioral-science research to show how small tweaks could help us make better choices. An updated version of the book includes a section on what they called “sludge”—tortuous administrative demands, endless wait times, and excessive procedural fuss that impede us in our lives.

Flint, Mich. – A decade after lead contaminated water was found in Flint, Michigan’s water system, the legal battle to replace lead water pipes is finished, a landmark milestone for a city defined by its dangerous water. Today the State of Michigan submitted a progress report to a federal court confirming that, more than eight years after a court-ordered settlement required Flint officials to replace pipes and restore property damaged in the process, nearly 11,000 lead pipes were replaced and more than 28,000 properties were restored. There is no safe level of lead exposure.

Women in Wisconsin will continue to have access to abortion services under a new ruling from the state's highest court that invalidates a 176-year-old state law that had banned abortions in nearly every situation.

As a United States marine, Arturo Flores served in Afghanistan and Iraq, where he worked as a military police officer and trained dogs to find roadside bombs.

so glad we are decimating every federal program for the poor to make room for what really matters: tax breaks for millionaires. Finally the country gets back to its robber baron roots.

Vice President J.D. Vance took heat from critics this week when he downplayed legislation that would result in millions of Americans losing Medicaid coverage as mere "minutiae."

In a welcome sign that sky-high egg prices are coming home to roost, Waffle House is dropping its 50 cent per egg surcharge.

President Trump visited Florida on Tuesday to tour what's been dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz," a controversial migrant detention center in the Everglades that officials say is poised to start filling its bed in a matter of hours.

Fewer meteorologists means less climate change, right?

Another win for freedom to read legislation on the West Coast this week, as Oregon’s state House of Representatives passed Senate Bill 1098 on Monday, a bill that will protect access to books in school libraries. It’s great news: books can no longer be banned solely because they discuss sexuality, religion, or other topics, nor can books be removed because they are written by someone from a protected class. SB 1098 now goes to the governor, who is expected to sign it into law.

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected a request from ExxonMobil to overturn a historic ruling allowing ordinary people and citizen groups to sue industrial polluters, upholding what legal experts say is a crucial mechanism to deter companies from continuously breaking environmental laws.

The Trump administration has, for the first time ever, built a searchable national citizenship data system.

This guy is just fucking delusional.

Blood-sucking ticks that trigger a bizarre allergy to meat in the people they bite are exploding in number and spreading across the US, to the extent that they could cover the entire eastern half of the country and infect millions of people, experts have warned.

Police in southern California arrested a man suspected of posing as a federal immigration officer this week, the latest in a series of such arrests, as masked, plainclothes immigration agents are deployed nationwide to meet the Trump administration’s mass deportation targets.

Senators this week called for a federal investigation into the Trump administration’s killing of hundreds of contracts for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Angus King, a Maine independent, wrote to the agency’s inspector general on Monday asking for an investigation into the administration’s cancellation of the contracts and the consequences for veterans.

The US supreme court has supported Donald Trump’s attempt to limit district judges’ power to block his orders on a nationwide basis, in an emergency appeal related to the birthright citizenship case but with wide implications for the executive branch’s power. The court’s opinion on the constitutionality of whether some American-born children can be deprived of citizenship remains undecided and the fate of the US president’s order to overturn birthright citizenship rights was left unclear.

Influential right-wing groups are calling on President Trump to deport the young progressive who just won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary.

The ongoing political turmoil and bottlenecked federal funding have prompted the widespread development of solar-plus-storage systems across the island that are privately financed via leases, loans, or Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs). Each month, the island sees around 4,000 solar-plus-battery storage systems come online, Rúa-Jovet says. These installations are connected to the grid but can also operate during blackouts.

Don't believe your eyes; believe what the Party tells you to.

In reference to former TV anchor Kari Lake, who, since she can't win an election, has been tapped to run the US Agency for Global Media.

As a public resource, Scientific American has created graphics outlining the vaccines recommended by ACIP [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] as of its final meeting in 2024.

I wouldn't normally do this, but I can't subject anyone to this horrific formatting. Full story:

And the best part? He's headed to confirmation hearings to be on the 3rd Circuit.

After news exploded across social media and beyond that Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist who would become New York’s first Muslim mayor if elected, was on track to win the city’s Democratic primary on Tuesday night, reactions from supporters poured in to offer their well-wishes and thoughts.

Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist who ran a grassroots campaign that inspired younger voters through a relentless focus on making New York City more affordable, was set to win the Democratic primary for mayor Tuesday, toppling former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and nine other candidates in a political earthquake that will reverberate throughout the country.

When asked how much she pays for childcare, Leah Freeman chuckles and says she isn’t sure. “It’s like C$93 (about $67) every two weeks or something. I barely see it leaving my bank account,” she said.

On Monday afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican appointees — with no reasoning — issued an order allowing the Trump administration to provide no notice to people it is deporting to a country with which the person has no connection and where the person could face great danger.

The US supreme court cleared the way on Monday for Donald Trump’s administration to resume deporting migrants to countries other than their own without offering them a chance to show harms they could face, handing him another victory in his aggressive pursuit of mass deportations.

Intimidation certainly seems to be going swimmingly.

On the plus side, Sept. 1 implementation is out the window -- you can't regulate that fast. I'm not sure what the endgame is here, but even a blind squirrel, usw.

The Trump administration has terminated 639 employees at Voice of America and its parent organization in the latest round of sweeping cuts that have reduced the international broadcasting service to a fraction of its former size.

Just before the 2019 holiday season, musician Isaac Zones got an email, forwarded from a friend. It asked, “Do you and your neighbors want to save money on your energy bills, reduce carbon emissions and survive the next power outage?”

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. has approved the world's only twice-a-year shot to prevent HIV, maker Gilead Sciences announced Wednesday. It's the first step in an anticipated global rollout that could protect millions – although it's unclear how many in the U.S. and abroad will get access to the powerful new option.

If FEMA is "phased out” as President Trump plans, states that don't have other resources to draw on will be scrambling to fill gaps. Given the massive costs involved in repairing or replacing infrastructure, states will be highly likely to continue to rebuild exactly what's been knocked down, according to Gaughan, rather than investing in structures built to withstand future climate effects—like roads on higher ground, or more substantial culverts, or new communities away from floodplains.

San Francisco-based Wildtype will be the first company to launch cultivated seafood in the US after securing an FDA ‘no questions’ letter regarding the safety of its cell cultured salmon.

There's not really an excerpt I can paste that covers the full extent of the grift, so I'll let it be an exercise for the reader just how bad this is.

Donald Trump has launched a mobile phone service and $499 gold smartphone, the latest monetization of his presidency by a family business empire now run by his sons.

Doctors at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals nationwide could refuse to treat unmarried veterans and Democrats under new hospital guidelines imposed following an executive order by Donald Trump.

Not going to provide an excerpt here, as this is a developing story.

For years, the Los Angeles County jail has been known as the United States’ largest mental health institution.

As super-contagious measles continues to spread and nears a six-year U.S. record, cases in its original epicenter of West Texas may be subsiding as hesitant residents become more concerned and willing to vaccinate, while North Dakota is a new focus with the highest rate of any state.

The “No Kings Day” nationwide rallies against Donald Trump/for democracy on Saturday turned out millions of people.

Two law enforcement officials told CNN the suspect is 57-year-old Vance Boelter. Officials found a “manifesto” identifying “many lawmakers and other officials” in his vehicle, police said. A law enforcement official told CNN Boelter works for a security company.

Local news stations identified the victims as state senator John Hoffman and state representative Melissa Hortman. Both are members of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party. There is little information on the suspect at this time.

Kennedy named microbiologist Robert Malone to the reconstituted advisory committee. Malone contributed to research that eventually would pave the way for the development of mRNA vaccines. He claims—falsely, experts say—to be the creator of the RNA technology at the heart of prominent COVID-19 vaccines. During the pandemic he became a leading voice against that technology, a star on right-wing media platforms who spread false claims alleging, for one example, that mRNA COVID vaccine maker Moderna had admitted that its vaccines can insert DNA into genomes and cause cancer. According to Factcheck.org, the claim led to social media posts saying the shots could cause “turbo cancer.”

On a glimmering May morning, Tom Briggs pilots a 45ft aluminium barge through the waters of Casco Bay for one of the final days of the annual kelp harvest. Motoring past Clapboard Island, he points to a floating wooden platform where mussels have been seeded alongside ribbons of edible seaweed.

In a bid to confront mounting food insecurity, the City of Chicago announced last year that it was exploring the creation of a municipally-owned grocery store, an unprecedented move for a major American city. The proposal was a response to the persistent exodus of private grocers from the city’s South and West Sides, where decades of disinvestment have left entire neighborhoods with few reliable options for fresh, affordable food.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Well, that's fucking ominous.