During the Nazi era, roughly 300,000 additional Jewish refugees could have gained entry to the U.S. without exceeding the nation’s existing quotas. Read more .
On the night of the 1951 Oscar ceremony, José Ferrer wasn’t even in Los Angeles. A stage actor through and through, he was in New York, rehearsing his latest play with Gloria Swanson. So when Helen Hayes announced that he had won Best Actor for his... read more .
Refocusing a debate on President Donald Trump's moves in the Middle East in the midst of the Senate impeachment trial, the Democratic-controlled House on Thursday approved measures reasserting congressional authority over war powers. Read more .
As the International Criminal Court moved forward this week with its investigation into alleged war crimes committed against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, the White House's new so-called "peace" plan includes a largely unreported... read more .
The Trump administration has finally lifted the curtains on the final act of its Middle East diplomacy by revealing the long-awaited, ahem, "peace plan" in a surrealistic White House celebration. Read more.
On January 21, New Jersey became the ninth state in the nation to ban the gay panic defense, a strategy that the governor said is “rooted in homophobia.” W. Carsten Andresen, a criminal justice scholar, has been building a database of murder cases that use the... read mor e.
The collapse of the Libyan state has had region-wide repercussions, with flows of people and weapons destabilizing other countries throughout North Africa.” This statement came from the Soufan Group’s recent... read more .
A powerful magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck in the sea south of Cuba on Tuesday, triggering a tsunami warning for Cuba, Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the... read more .
A group of French cities and advocacy groups said Tuesday they had filed a lawsuit against oil giant Total, claiming it was not doing enough to limit carbon emissions and prevent climate change. Read more.
For a century, the Iowa caucuses—those precinct-level paradigms of democracy, where supporters of candidates stand up to be counted—have been the opening bell of the presidential election season. While our presidential elections now seem like... read more.
China extended long-distance travel curbs Sunday as the death toll from the new coronavirus rose to 56 with more than 2,000 people infected globally as foreign consulates and multinationals planned limited evacuations of personnel and citizens from... read more .
This week, prosecutors in Brazil filed a criminal complaint against Glenn Greenwald, an internationally lauded journalist best known for publishing leaked documents detailing the NSA’s mass surveillance. Greenwald’s prosecution is an attempt to use computer crime law to silence an investigative reporter... read more .
After seven weeks of a record-breaking strike that shuttered the Paris rail network and brought chaos to the French capital, Paris’s restaurant owners are still counting the cost. Read more .
A day after he said the president's behavior "puts even President Nixon to shame," Rep. Jerrold Nadler on Friday accused President Donald Trump of being a "dictator" for his wanton violations and disregard for his oath of office. Read more .
January 27th marks the 10th anniversary of the death of the great historian and activist Howard Zinn. Zinn did not merely record history, he made it: as a professor at Spelman College in the 1950s and early 1960s, where he was ultimately fired for his outspoken support of students in the Civil Rights Movement, and specifically the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); as a critic of the U.S. war in Vietnam, and author of the first book calling for an immediate U.S. withdrawal; and as author of arguably the most... read more .
Over the years, Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald has made more than a few enemies. What some of his fans and supporters see as a crusade for truth and justice can strike others—including those who become the targets of his journalistic crusades—as needlessly hostile and potentially biased. But there is one enemy that has... read more .
Julian Assange has been moved out of solitary confinement in a prison medical wing to an area with other inmates, according to WikiLeaks. The move was described by his supporters as a 'dramatic climbdown', affecting his treatment at... read more.
President Trump’s January 3, 2020, decision to order a drone assassination of Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani in Iraq has backfired in spectacular fashion. Less than two months ago, the streets of nearly every major city in Iran were choked with more than 200,000 anti-regime protestors. They chanted slogans against recent increases in... read more .
With the Environmental Protection Agency’s own data showing that nearly half of our rivers and streams and a third of our wetlands are in “poor biological condition,” and with millions of... read more .
Waving national flags and banners denouncing U.S. President Donald Trump, tens of thousands of Iraqis marched peacefully through Baghdad on Friday to demand the... read more .
African travellers flying on international airlines to and from the continent say they are fed up with receiving poor service from flight attendants and ground staff, and tired of being transported in older carriers. Read more .
On the morning of Sept. 11 last year, about two dozen family members of those killed in the terror attacks filed into the White House to visit with President Donald Trump. It was a choreographed, somewhat stiff encounter, in which each family walked to the center of the Blue Room to share a moment of conversation with... read more .
In a tweet thanking Dalhi Myers for her endorsement, Sanders wrote, "Together, we will defeat the most dangerous president in modern history." Read more .
The US is currently enjoying another stock market boom which, if history is any guide, also stands to end in a bust. In the meantime, the boom is having a politically toxic effect by lending support to Donald Trump and obscuring the case for reversing the neoliberal economic paradigm. Read more .
Famous for Madonna's cone bras, blue and white stripy T-shirts, saintly models and corsets, "L’Enfant terrible" of French fashion Jean Paul Gaultier is retiring from the catwalk. His final haute couture show, which marked 50 years of his career, took place this week in Paris... read more .
The Republican-controlled U.S. Senate voted early on Wednesday on party lines to approve the rules for President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, rejecting Democratic efforts to obtain evidence and ensure witnesses are heard. Read more .
January 12 marked the 10th anniversary of a devastating earthquake in Haiti. But its aftershocks can still be felt today, in the mass protests against corruption and cutbacks. Read more .
It was the big one that many climate campaigners had been waiting for. For years, one of the targets for campaigners leading the fossil fuel divestment campaign has been the asset management company BlackRock. Read more .
The FBI’s aggressive efforts against Martin Luther King Jr. remain a huge stain on the Bureau, and exemplary of the dirty work it carried out during the long 1960s. Less known, but of no less consequence... read more .
One of the most important global conservation events of the past year was something that didn’t happen. For the first time since 2002, Iceland – one of just three countries that still allow... read more .
Swarms made up of millions of locusts descended on several regions in Kenya in late December, devouring crops and grazing pastures. Farmers are afraid the invasion will destroy their livelihoods and government efforts to spray the area with insecticides have done... read mor e.
If the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation since 1968, it would be close to $12 an hour today, more than 65 percent higher than the national minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. While this would make a huge difference in the lives of... read more .
Hillary Clinton criticized the campaign of her former Democratic presidential rival Bernie Sanders in a new documentary in which she says he was an ineffective U.S. senator who accomplished little because “nobody liked him.” Read more .
In his first Friday sermon delivery since 2012, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has defended the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) amid a growing backlash after it mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian passenger... read more .
The legend can be dated to 1552: Francisco López de Gómara was the first person to say that the Spaniards conquered Mexico because the conquistadors had been seen as gods by the indigenous people. López de Gómara had never been to Mexico, but he was chaplain and secretary to the retired Hernando Cortés, who had led the conquistadors. Read more .
FBI agents on Thursday arrested a former Canadian Armed Forces reservist and two other men who are linked to a violent white supremacist group and who were believed to be heading to a... read more .
Dozens of Amazon indigenous leaders have gathered in the heart of the threatened rainforest to form an alliance against Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's environmental policy and his threats to throw their homelands open to mining concerns. Read more .
Calling the Trump administration's attempt to gut the federal Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program "unlawful" and well as "cruel," 15 state attorneys general as well as the city of New York filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Agriculture Department over its new requirements for the program, a month after... read more .
As the US Senate formally opened the impeachment trial on whether to remove Donald Trump from office, a nonpartisan congressional watchdog on Thursday dealt the Republican president a blow by concluding that the White House violated the law by withholding security aid approved for Ukraine by US lawmakers. Read more .
Greece will elect its first woman president on January 22 after leading opposition parties on Thursday approved the government's nomination of top judge Ekaterini Sakellaropoulou. Read more .
On the heels of new research showing that the world's oceans are rapidly warming, scientists revealed Wednesday that a huge patch of hot water in the northeast Pacific Ocean dubbed "the blob" was to blame for killing about one million seabirds. Read more .
Print In his sweeping conceptual history of anti-Jewish thought, the historian David Nirenberg has suggested that “Judaism” has long served as a “category, a set of ideas and attributes with which non-Jews can make sense of and criticize their world.” It was through the category of... read more .
The January 8th death of one of the icons of the Iranian Revolution, former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani,—along with a contentious political transition in the United States between administrations with starkly different stances on Iran—poses significant challenges to the 39-year old state. Read more .
Leo Tolstoy wrote that happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. So too with failed democracies. There is no one route to the dissolution of the open society, but the patterns are familiar, whether in ancient Athens, the Roman Republic or the collapse of the democracies in Italy and the Weimar Republic in Germany that led to fascism. The ills that beset Germany and Italy in the 1930s are sadly familiar to us—an ineffectual political system, a retreat by huge sectors of the population into a world where... read more .
The Australian government committed A$50 million ($34.58 million) to an emergency wildlife recovery program on Monday, calling the bushfires crisis engulfing the country “an ecological disaster” that... read more .
Northern Ireland's government reopened for the first time in three years on Saturday after rival parties rallied around a new power-sharing deal aimed at helping the province face the challenges of Brexit. Read more .
For the corporate press, it would appear that the only "coup" is that perpetrated by Maduro in insisting on serving out his elected mandate. Read more .
Taiwan’s incumbent President Tsai Ing-wen declared victory over her closest challenger, Han Kuo-yu, in Saturday’s election, earning her a second-term as the region's first female leader. Read more .
On December 20, 2019, criminal justice advocates celebrated the news that President Trump signed the Fair Chance Act into law. Tucked into a massive defense spending bill, the law is a federal version of “ban the box,” prohibiting the government and its... read more .
Backed by Virginia’s first Democratic-controlled legislature in over 20 years, Governor Ralph Northam vowed this week to push through new gun-control laws, angering gun-rights advocates who plan to... read more .
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) stands to gain from former U.S. housing secretary Julián Castro’s endorsement as Castro had most donors in common with Warren compared to other Democratic candidates. Read more .
Forty men still remain detained at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp 18 years after it opened on January 11, 2002. Only seven of them face charges, including five prisoners accused of involvement in... read more .
On January 3, US President Donald Trump announced triumphantly the killing of Iran's General Qassem Soleimani. Having assassinated the equivalent of a member of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Trump claimed... read more .
A few years ago, Adalberto Martín began to see some troubling changes at work. As a veteran member of the room service staff at Marriott’s W Hotel in downtown San Francisco, he was an expert in delivering carefully assembled trays of food and drink to hungry guests. Read more .
Oman's Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said, one of the Middle East's longest-serving rulers who maintained the country's neutrality in a volatile region, died on Friday. Read more .
The Boeing Company has released hundreds of internal messages that raise serious questions about its development of simulators and the 737 MAX that was... read more .
The British press has succeeded in its apparent project of hounding Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, out of Britain. The part it perhaps didn’t bargain for, however, is the loss of Prince Harry — a much loved royal and a key part of the... read more .
The State Department on Friday made clear that the American military will not abide by the requests of the Iraqi government to leave the country and instead will stay indefinitely. Read more .
Marianne Williamson, the self-help guru who warned of the “dark psychic force” unleashed by Republican President Donald Trump, suspended her quixotic outsider campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination on Friday. Read more .
If the state of Texas had its way, the state would be in the process of taking over the Houston Independent School District. But a judge temporarily blocked the takeover on Jan. 8, with the issue now set to be decided at a trial in June. Read more .
The new decade has opened with a sobering and scary climate change reality. The state of New South Wales is in a designated state of emergency because of fires. At least 25 people have died as a result of those fires. Thousands of people have been displaced. Wildfires have destroyed more than 12 million acres of land across the Australian continent—an area almost seven times the size of the 2018 California... read more .
President Donald Trump brought the United States to the brink of war with Iran by ordering the assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the second most powerful figure in Iran. After Soleimani and four others were killed in a U.S. drone strike at Baghdad International Airport Friday, Trump, offering no evidence, alleged that Soleimani was orchestrating imminent attacks on American personnel. Read more .
Iran's civil aviation chief denied Friday that a missile downed a Ukrainian airliner which crashed killing all 176 on board, dismissing Western claims of a catastrophic mistake by Tehran's air defences. Read more .
Yes, our infrastructure stinks, our schools are failing, this country’s a nightmare of inequality, and there’s a self-promoting madman in the White House, so isn’t it time to take pride in the rare institutional victories America has had in this century? Arguably, none has been more striking than the triumphal success of the American war system. Read more .
Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Syria on Tuesday and met with officials including President Bashar Assad, Syrian state media and a Kremlin spokesman reported. Read more .
Paper documents are still priceless records of the past, even in a digital world. Primary sources stored in local archives throughout Latin America, for example, describe a centuries-old multiethnic society grappling with... read more .
Puerto Rico's governor declared a state of emergency on Tuesday after a powerful 6.4 magnitude earthquake killed at least one person in the south of the island and caused widespread damage. Read more.
A few months ago a group of NASA exoplanet astronomers, who are in the business of discovering planets around other stars, called me into a secret meeting to tell me about a planet that had captured their interest. Because my expertise lies in modeling the climate of... read more .
The holidays have passed and nationwide protests and transport strikes in France are still ongoing, but patisserie windows throughout the country are stacked with shiny, golden brown galettes des rois, or king cakes, a sure sign that the festivities are not quite over. Read more .
On February 4, 2002, a Predator drone circled over Afghanistan’s Paktia province, near the city of Khost. Below was al-Qaeda’s founder Osama bin Laden—or at least someone in the CIA thought so—and he was marked for death. As Secretary of... read more .
In Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, an area with a poverty rate of 13.8 percent, about 1,000 families received letters in August warning that unless their arrears were paid in full, they could be taken to Dependency Court for negligence. “The result may be your child being removed from your home and placed in foster care,” threatened the... read more .
Iraq's parliament voted in an extraordinary session Sunday to expel all American troops from the country and file a United Nations complaint against the U.S. for violating Iraq's sovereignty with its... read more .
In the early hours of January 3, a US air raid killed General Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' (IRGC) Quds Force, as well as Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a commander of... read more .
A chain-reaction crash involving a tour bus, three tractor-trailers and a passenger car killed five people and injured about 60 others on the Pennsylvania Turnpike early on Sunday, state police said. Read more .
A Kuwaiti makeup artist was accused of racism after she posted a video and a picture of herself painted in dark makeup, in what critics condemned as blackface. Read more .
As is always the way with Western colonialists, Trump administration figures such as secretary of state Mike Pompeo gave it out on Friday that the people of Iran are dying for the United States to invade and occupy them, and are just tickled pick that the... read more .
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has allegedly amassed US$100 billion in purportedly charitable assets since 1997 without ever giving any money away – a possible breach of federal tax laws. Read more .
A French court on Tuesday rejected a lawsuit brought by star chef Marc Veyrat seeking to force the prestigious Michelin restaurant guide to hand over its reasons for stripping his restaurant of a third star just a year after he won it. Read more .
Reproductive rights advocates on Thursday seized on an amicus brief signed by more than 200 members of Congress, including two conservative Democrats, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to... read more .
Pop diva Mariah Carey has had a long list of hits over the years, but her classic holiday song has helped her make history as the first artist to top the Billboard charts in four separate decades. Read more.
Microscopic pieces of plastic have been discovered in the most remote locations, from the depths of the ocean to Arctic ice. Another place that plastic is appearing is inside our bodies. Read more .
“You will be muzzled,” the lawyer for Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) warns her at the end of “Bombshell,” (directed by Jay Roach) as the former Fox News anchor signs a $20 million settlement in a sexual harassment suit against her former boss, Roger Ailes. She might just as easily have been talking about the... read more .
Civil rights advocates on Tuesday praised a federal judge in North Carolina who struck down the state's new voter ID law, saying in her ruling that there was likely "discriminatory intent" behind state... read more .