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A public option, but for banking. That’s what Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are proposing in a new bill unveiled on Friday.

would foster the creation of public banks across the country by providing them a pathway to getting started, establishing an infrastructure for liquidity and credit facilities for them via the Federal Reserve, and setting up federal guidelines for them to be regulated.

at some point it’s just hitting a wall where it doesn’t carry them along and they’re looking for options,” said Tlaib, who represents Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, the third-poorest congressional district in the country. “So I’m putting this on the table as an option.”

There are two core strains of denialism apparent in mainstream America today: that the election was a fraud and that Covid doesn't exist.

What ties these lies together:President Donald Trump won't admit defeat in the election or missteps on Covid, creating a bedrock of inaccuracyThe democratization of information on the internet enables everyone to publish their thoughts, even if they're totally made upAs the country gets more tribal in its politics, people find satisfaction in blaming villains, regardless of facts.

Either Trump is spinning an alternate reality for followers who agree with him or he is just channeling and amplifying what he hears from them. Regardless, in his four years in office, he has totally normalized bad information.

Four and a half years after the landmark Brexit referendum, the United Kingdom is scheduled to leave the European Union at 11 p.m. London time on New Year's Eve. With the clock running down, the two sides are still trying to negotiate a new free trade agreement to avert major disruptions at borders and more economic damage as the coronavirus surges again in the cold winter months.

The U.K. is leaving the EU while trying to maintain tariff-free and quota-free access to the massive European market of nearly 450 million consumers. Given that, the two sides are still divided over key issues.

For instance, how much access will European fleets continue to have to British fishing grounds?

Fast-food restaurants have a problem: Customers are returning but workers aren’t.And, increasingly, neither are their dining rooms.

broke? Or do I want to be broke working 40 hours a week and working my life away?’”

That’s 1,734,000 openings vs. an estimated 1,475,000 unemployed people, the Fed data shows.

The movement has three distinctive strains. First, the people over 50 who have been hanging around conservative circles for decades but who have recently been radicalized by the current left.

The second strain is made up of mid-career politicians and operatives who are learning to adapt to the age of populist rage:

people like Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard), J. D. Vance (Yale Law), and Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale).

the debate over whether great-power competition or transnational threats pose the greater danger to the United States is a false one. Look back at strategic assessments from ten years ago on China and Russia, on the one hand, and those on pandemics and climate change, on the other, and it is clear that Washington is experiencing near-worst-case scenarios on both. Great-power rivalry has not yet sparked a hot war but appears to be on the brink of sparking a cold one. Meanwhile, the worst pandemic in a century is not yet over, and the climate crisis is only accelerating. 

What COVID-19 has made powerfully clear is that this is an age of transnational threats and great-power competition—one in which the two phenomena exacerbate each other.

By the same token, ramping up competition with China without a plan to rally the world to deal with transnational threats (which can themselves fuel rivalry between great powers) would only guarantee future disasters. 

as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

He is the mayor of Pavlopil, a village in eastern Ukraine. When Vladimir Putin started grabbing Ukrainian territory in February 2014, Mr Shapkin knew his village was in danger.

On one side were pro-Russian separatists, armed by the Kremlin. On the other were loyalist forces. If they fought over Pavlopil, villagers would surely die.

He suggested that the separatists enter in the morning, unarmed and on foot, to buy food and cigarettes. The Ukrainian army could do the same each afternoon. That way, they would not bump into each other and start shooting.

Ms. Grulkowski had just heard about a years-in-the-making effort to designate her corner of central Montana a national heritage area, celebrating its role in the story of the American West. A small pot of federal matching money was there for the taking, to help draw more visitors and preserve underfunded local tourist attractions.

She collected addresses from a list of voters and spent $1,300 sending a packet denouncing the proposed heritage area to 1,498 farmers and ranchers. She told them the designation would forbid landowners to build sheds, drill wells or use fertilizers and pesticides. It would alter water rights, give tourists access to private property, create a new taxation district and prohibit new septic systems and burials on private land, she said.

From the vantage point of informed democratic decision making, it’s a haunting tale about how a sustained political campaign can succeed despite — or perhaps as a result of — being divorced from reality.

The states that are most deeply integrated into the existing fossil-fuel economy, either as producers or as consumers, tend also to be the places that are most resistant to, and separated from, the major demographic, cultural, and economic changes remaking 21st-century American life.

These fossil-fuel-reliant states are nearly all among those moving most aggressively to restrict voting, abortion, and LGBTQ rights; to ban books; and to censor what teachers and college professors can say about race, gender, and sexual orientation

Most of them have larger populations of white voters who identify as Christian and rely heavily on blue-collar work in the powerhouse industries of the 20th century: production of energy and other natural resources, manufacturing, and agriculture. Republicans dominate their electoral landscape, both in state and federal offices.

In the coming days or weeks, he may be kicked out of office by his own MPs. More likely, he will cling on in 10 Downing Street under the permanent threat of eviction. Either way, he no longer controls the fate of his own premiership.

Downing Street indulged in routine late-night booze-ups while the rest of the country was under strict lockdown. The prime minister’s disingenuous attempts to wriggle out of being blamed did him no good—indeed, they served only to reveal his and his wife’s own carousing.

Double standards at the top tend to corrupt the whole of public life. More important, it raises two other of Mr Johnson’s attributes that plague post-Brexit Britain.

The call to action urged people to start posting at noon Pacific time, attach their favorite graphics, and like and retweet other Buttar supporters’ contributions.

Confronted with campaigns to make certain ideas seem more widespread than they really are, many researchers and media commentators have taken to using labels such as “misinformation” and “disinformation.” But those terms have fallen victim to scope creep. They imply that a narrative or claim has deviated from a stable or canonical truth; whether Pelosi should go is simply a matter of opinion.

In fact, we have a very old word for persuasive communication with an agenda: propaganda.

The announcement was presented — in official news reports, on social media — as a major victory for Chinese women. The government was set to overhaul its law governing women’s rights for the first time in decades, to refine the definition of sexual harassment, affirm prohibitions on workplace discrimination and ban forms of emotional abuse.

The proposed revisions are the latest in a series of conflicting messages by the Chinese government about the country’s growing feminist movement. On paper, the changes, which China’s legislature reviewed for the first time last month, would seem to be a triumph for activists who have long worked to push gender equality into the Chinese mainstream.

At the same time, the authorities, ever leery of grass-roots organizing, have detained outspoken feminist activists and sought to control the country’s fledgling #MeToo movement. Sexual harassment lawsuits — already rare — have been dismissed.

The atrocities that Russian troops have committed in Ukraine raise two questions about Russians at home: Do they know their military is doing these things? And if they do, are they OK with it? The answers are almost certainly “Yes” and “They’re working on it.”

Ostensibly, the Putin regime has done its best to starve Russians of truthful information. Independent news outlets have been closed outright or blocked on the internet. Those still active cannot be reached without a virtual private network

is this information blockade really effective?

The GOP made its Faustian bargain years ago. Early in Trump’s presidency there was a transmutation; his brutal style of politics, his lies and conspiracy theories, and his corruption, which were once tolerated, became celebrated.

The effect is to sow distrust in our legal institutions. That’s the point. Delegitimize them. Shatter confidence in institutions and sources of authority that can hold liars and lawbreakers accountable. Manipulate people into doubting what is true. As James Poniewozik of The New York Times has put it, if Trump and his allies succeed in convincing his supporters that there is no truth, then they will be left to conclude that “you should just follow your gut & your tribe.” You can get away with a lot if you can make up your own facts. Donald Trump has gotten away with a lot, at least until now.

It never came, because most Republicans—some cynical, some too afraid to speak out, some cultlike in their devotion to Trump—decided early on to reject any evidence that would discomfort them, that would call into question their partisan loyalties, that would cause them to have serious second thoughts. Most of all, they decided to reject any evidence showing that their opponents were right about Trump and they were wrong. They decided that the awful things Trump has done can’t be true because they don’t want them to be true. This is their political a priori.

Cocaine production is at global highs. Seizures of amphetamine and methamphetamine have exploded. The multiyear pandemic deepened personal burdens and fomented an increase in use.

In the United States alone, overdose deaths, fueled by opioids and deadly synthetic fentanyl, topped 100,000 in both 2021 and 2022 — or double what it was in 2015.

Across the Atlantic in Europe, tiny Portugal appeared to harbor an answer. In 2001, it threw out years of punishment-driven policies in favor of harm reduction by decriminalizing consumption of all drugs for personal use, including the purchase and possession of 10-day supplies.

Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same

Why wouldn’t you choose a girl? That such a statement should be so casually uttered by an old cowboy like Ericsson—or by anyone, for that matter—is monumental. For nearly as long as civilization has existed, patriarchy—enforced through the rights of the firstborn son—has been the organizing principle, with few exceptions

“You have to be concerned about the future of all women,” Roberta Steinbacher, a nun-turned-social-psychologist, said in a 1984 People profile of Ericsson. “There’s no question that there exists a universal preference for sons.”