TruthOut

One thing I was grateful for during the pandemic was masks — and not just for safety reasons. I’m on Medicare for disability, which unfortunately doesn’t cover dental care. At 60 years old, I’ve lost many of my teeth. It was nice hiding behind a mask for a while. But I was grateful for another reason, too: for once, Congress actually expanded the social safety net. With stimulus payments and extra...

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Indiana’s Medical Licensing Board ruled late Thursday that Dr. Caitlin Bernard, who performed an abortion last year for a 10-year-old rape victim who traveled from Ohio to Indiana to obtain the procedure, violated patient privacy when she spoke to a reporter about the patient. The case became a national lightning rod in the debate over abortion access after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v.

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Defying a last-minute appeal by former President Donald Trump, the Texas House voted overwhelmingly Saturday to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton, suspending him from office over allegations of misconduct that included bribery and abuse of office. The vote to adopt the 20 articles of impeachment was 121-23. The stunning vote came two days after an investigative committee unveiled the articles...

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Progressive economists and advocates warned that the tentative debt ceiling agreement reached Saturday by the White House and Republican leaders would needlessly gash nutrition aid, rental assistance, education programs, and more — all while making it easier for the wealthy to avoid taxes. The deal, which now must win the support of both chambers of Congress, reportedly includes two years of caps...

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to kick off his long-anticipated presidential announcement on Wednesday evening backed by a super PAC flush with tens of millions of dollars from the Republican’s old state-level PAC. Never Back Down, a pro-DeSantis super PAC, told the New York Times that more than $80 million of its $200 million budget would be transferred from DeSantis’ old state-level PAC.

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PayPal has upheld its ban on Palestinians living in the occupied territories. While Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are prohibited from using the service, Israeli settlers are allowed to use the digital payment platform. The company’s decision comes days after eleven Democratic House members called on PayPal to expand its services to Palestinians. The letter was delivered at the company’s...

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Days after a group of Chinese citizens sued Florida’s government over its new law restricting Chinese citizens from purchasing property in the state, U.S. Rep. Al Green this week warned of a “proliferation” of such bans and unveiled federal legislation to prohibit them. The proposal would affirm that federal law, such as the Fair Housing Act, takes precedence over state bans restricting who can...

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When the clerk at VJ’s Food Mart confronted Corey Stingley, the 16-year-old handed over his backpack. Inside were six hidden bottles of Smirnoff Ice, worth $12, and the clerk began pulling them out one by one. Stingley watched, then pivoted and quickly moved toward the door, empty-handed. But there would be no escape for the unarmed teen in the light blue hoodie. Three customers...

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We look at the largely forgotten 1937 Memorial Day Massacre, when police in Chicago shot at and gassed a peaceful gathering of striking steelworkers and their supporters, killing 10 people, most of them shot in the back. It was a time like today, when unions were growing stronger. The workers were on strike against Republic Steel, and the police attacked them with weapons supplied by the company.

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Negotiators from around the world will convene in Paris next week to continue working on a legally binding global treaty to address the plastics crisis. In this second of five rounds of talks, there will be much to discuss, including basic agenda items like the rules governing the negotiations. But for many who will be attending, one issue seems to have risen to the top of the priority list: toxic...

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Newly announced GOP presidential candidate and Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill into state law on Thursday that protects private companies that orchestrate spaceflights from liability lawsuits if a crew member gets injured or dies as a result of an accident. The legislation became law exactly one day after DeSantis announced his 2024 presidential campaign in a Twitter Spaces event...

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State abortion bans in Tennessee and beyond, which constrain women’s health care, have put family planning clinics at risk of losing their federal funding. The conflict involves the Title X family planning program, which provides services to low-income people, including minors. As of 2021, more than 3,200 clinics used federal grants to supply free or low-cost contraception...

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There’s a lot of Trump legal news these days, what with the E. Jean Carroll verdict, the Manhattan hush money indictment, the news that Fulton County, Georgia, D.A. Fani Willis has put local authorities on notice to anticipate “something” coming in August, and a cascade of reporting on special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case...

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Two employees at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate moved boxes full of papers the day before the Department of Justice (DOJ) executed a subpoena last year to retrieve classified documents from the property, a new report indicates. Trump and his aides also carried out a “dress rehearsal” for moving the documents from his storage locker to elsewhere in the estate...

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In the summer of 2020, at the onset of a deadly pandemic, George Floyd’s murder propelled unprecedented numbers of people across the globe to take to the streets. From Australia to India, from Johannesburg to Saskatoon, demands reverberated to defund police and invest in safer communities. While people flooded the streets in anger and grief, these crowds also represented the success of decades of...

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While I was studying United States history as a junior in high school, my teacher (who had repeatedly shared with students that her favorite president was Thomas Jefferson) described Sally Hemings as his mistress. Hemings, an African American woman who was enslaved by Jefferson, did not have the legal right to refuse unwanted sexual advances due to her legal status. In other words, in the eyes of...

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After more than a decade, Seattle’s experiment with addressing police violence through federal intervention is winding down. In 2010, 35 community organizations wrote a letter to the Department of Justice (DOJ), asking the agency to “promptly investigate whether the Seattle Police Department has engaged in a pattern or practice of violations of civil rights by unnecessary and excessive force...

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Sen. Bernie Sanders said late Thursday that cuts to aid programs for vulnerable people should be “off the table” entirely as Republican negotiators and the Biden White House reportedly closed in on a deal that would raise the debt ceiling in exchange for a two-year cap on non-military discretionary spending. Sanders (I-Vt.), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee...

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In recent weeks, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who has feuded with Joe Biden pretty much from the start of the president’s administration, has begun publicly campaigning against the $400 billion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) — a piece of legislation crammed with environmental investments and thus a critical piece of Biden’s efforts to reduce global warming. Despite the fact that Manchin himself...

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The Supreme Court issued a ruling on Thursday that severely curtails the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to regulate water pollution in the latest of the far right justices’ crusade against environmental regulations. In a 5-4 decision, with the three liberal justices and Brett Kavanaugh disagreeing, the Court ruled that the EPA’s jurisdiction over protecting the “waters of the...

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