TruthOut

An estimated 109,680 people died of a drug overdose in 2022. Police and policy makers at all levels of government spent billions of dollars over the past decade attempting to contain this crisis, but 2022 saw the highest death toll on record, with fatalities exceeding 100,000 for the second year in a row. Social stigma and police push drug use out of view. Every death is a human being and their...

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Fracking companies used more than 282 million pounds of hazardous chemicals from 2014 to 2021 with no federal oversight, according to a new study. The study, published in Environmental Pollution, is the first to examine the “Halliburton Loophole,” which exempts fracking from federal regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The provision, passed by Congress as part of the Energy Policy Act of...

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In March 2022, the Idaho House of Representatives, like legislatures in 13 other states, voted to criminalize providing gender-affirming medical care to transgender youth. When asked about the bill’s threat to the lives of trans youth, Republican State Rep. Julianne Young replied, “I see this conversation as an extension of the pro-life argument.… We’re not talking about the life of the child...

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This spring the Biden administration declared April as National Care Workers Recognition Month, releasing the largest slate of executive actions for care work in history, including directives to support family caregivers and enhance job quality for long-term care workers. These include initiatives to ensure that funding for long-term care goes directly to worker wages, to establish the first-ever...

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The Republican-controlled Louisiana state House of Representatives has passed a bill banning physicians from providing gender-affirming care for transgender youth in the state, which, if signed into law, would make Louisiana the 17th state in the country to enact such a ban through state law. According to an Associated Press analysis, two other states have also enacted administrative regulations...

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As the public deals with the consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn 50 years of precedent protecting abortion rights across the country, trust in the Supreme Court has hit an all-time low, new polling by Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago finds. The latest installment of the General Social Survey, which NORC has conducted since...

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On Thursday, far right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) announced that she would soon be filing articles of impeachment against President Joe Biden. Greene, a loyalist to former President Donald Trump who voted against his impeachment in early 2021, claimed in her announcement that Biden has refused to enforce the U.S.’s immigration laws — despite the fact that Biden has not only continued...

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As Republicans threaten to tank the entire U.S. economy in order to force through massive cuts to federal programs and climate initiatives, supposedly to reduce the national debt, a new report finds that one of the GOP’s parallel efforts to make permanent a deluge of massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy would undo all of the “savings” from their debt limit package and pile trillions...

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While gleefully tossing Sharpies into a crowd at an evangelical school on Wednesday, far right Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a series of anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ bills, including one horrifying bill that allows the state to temporarily take trans children away from their families if they’re receiving or are planning to receive gender-affirming care. S.B. 254, which passed the Florida legislature...

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Two New York lawmakers have introduced legislation that would block local charities from funding illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. State assembly member Zohran Mamdani (Queens) and State Senator Jabari Brisport’s (Brooklyn) Not on our dime!: Ending New York funding of Israeli settler violence Act would amend New York’s not-for-profit corporation law and establish a civil penalty for...

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On Tuesday, Republican lawmakers in Nebraska’s unicameral legislature successfully advanced a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth in the state, attaching an amendment that would also implement a 12-week abortion ban. Debate over the bill was contentious, and its passage came despite loud protestations from hundreds of demonstrators who gathered in the state capitol to...

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David and Adair Keller started their married life together in 1977 at Camp Lejeune, a military training base on the Atlantic Coast in Jacksonville, North Carolina. David was a Marine Corps field artillery officer then, and they lived together on the base for about six months. But that sojourn had an outsize impact on their lives. Forty years later, in January 2018, Adair was diagnosed with acute...

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Book bans are spreading like wildfire through the U.S., with right-wing forces aggressively targeting fiction books that have protagonists of color or LGBTQ characters, as well as nonfiction analyses of racism and other forms of oppression. Just this week, Penguin Random House — the largest publisher in the U.S. — filed a federal lawsuit to block book bans being imposed in Florida public schools...

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Calls are growing for the Justice Department to investigate Donald Trump’s attorney and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for allegedly plotting to sell presidential pardons during the Trump administration, after his former employee Noelle Dunphy filed a $10 million lawsuit against Giuliani accusing him of sexual assault and other misconduct. The complaint alleges Giuliani “asked Ms.

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Adouble standard in our tax code for government retirement subsidies gives preferential treatment to those who need it least — wealthy corporate executives. Ordinary employees with access to 401(k) plans face strict limits on the amounts they can set aside, tax-free, for their golden years. Most senior executives of large corporations, on the other hand, have unlimited tax-deferred compensation...

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“Whenever there is grief, there is unity, and in unity, there is strength, and we feel it,” says Jalal Abukhater. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” host Kelly Hayes talks with Abukhater, a Palestinian writer living in Jerusalem, and Palestinian activists Jeanine Hourani and Lea Kayali, about the 75th anniversary of the Nakba, resistance in the face of Israeli aggression and how hope sustains...

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“Ductile” is not a word you come across very often. It means flexible, and it’s written in the federal register as a result of the Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act of 1968, which required the Department of Transportation (DOT) to develop and enforce minimum safety regulations for the transportation of gases by pipeline. Those regulations became effective in 1970. For more than half a century there’...

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For his first time as chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has reintroduced legislation to establish universal health care across the U.S., the only wealthy country that doesn’t guarantee health care coverage to all its citizens. The Medicare for All Act would provide health care for all, including visits to providers of primary...

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PEN America, an organization that seeks to protect free expression, and book publisher Penguin Random House are suing a Florida school district over its banning of several book titles, alleging the district did so for political rather than practical purposes. The lawsuit also lists the authors of the books that have been banned in the Escambia County School District as co-litigants...

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With the United States just two weeks away from a possible default on its debt for the first time ever, President Joe Biden has cut short a trip to Asia to continue negotiations with congressional leaders in Washington over lifting the federal government’s debt ceiling. Republicans are seeking major budget cuts, as well as new work requirements for recipients of Medicaid and the Supplemental...

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