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This story is part of the Life After Roe package, appearing this week, that looks at the surprising resilience of the abortion access movement in the Dobbs era—and at how hardliners are doubling down on their efforts to ban abortion nationwide. The young woman was on her way out of her chemistry class on a warm spring day at Texas Tech when she noticed Kristan Hawkins’ tent. A blue tarp displayed an unsettling image of two disembodied hands cupping a baby’s head, with the theme of Hawkins’ ca

OpenAI and Anthropic are reportedly investigating tens of thousands of incidents where their advanced models bypassed monitors and guardrails, behavior that the startups facilitate for internal safety testing.  According to a Saturday Axios report, sources said that most of the results of these tests are not public and are not known to have caused tangible harm.  In recent weeks, OpenAI has disclosed six instances of “unexpected or concerning behavior” where its models—without pe

On Sunday afternoon, Ireland is set to play a soccer match against Israel amid widespread public calls and protests in the country to boycott the game due to Israel’s violent conduct in Gaza, which a UN report found to be a genocide.  The match will take place at Nagyerdei Stadium in Debrecen, Hungary, an alternative venue for Israel’s “home” match as Union of European Football Associations, the international governing football body in Europe, has not permitted games in Israel since Octo

This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In a modern five-story building in the center of Hamburg, Germany, technicians are preparing to install several new “racks”—gray metal casings that hold computing hardware—alongside the scores that already line the narrow, dimly lit corridors of the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ), one of the world’s largest repositories for climate simulation data

Joe Lonsdale, a cofounder of weapons-tech company Palantir, shared some of his thoughts on America’s AI-assisted warfare at a Reuters-hosted event late last week—and one statement stands out as being particularly alarming. The US strike on a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, in February was tragic, he acknowledged—but, he argued, “It’s very easy to judge things from the outside.” “It could be the case that somebody made 99 really good choices and then one bad choice

A new report by the American Federation of Government Workers has documented a staggering level of staff attrition at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the first year of the Trump 2.0 administration. The nation’s premier public health agency lost a third of its workforce from March 2025 through April 2026, the union says. Those job losses include 100 percent of the staff at two CDC units, the Office of Health Equity and the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity, that we

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Two decades after the release of his groundbreaking documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore has admitted he was surprised by the ferocious, ongoing backlash from the fossil fuel industry and its political allies. But the former US vice-president insists he still has optimism the world will confront the climate crisis. At a New York event to mark the 20th annive

First, a confession: Before I read long-time Democratic strategist Tad Devine’s new book, How the Democrats Screwed Bernie, I rolled my eyes at the prospect of yet another post-mortem on the 2016 election (which was admittedly also the first presidential election in which I was eligible to vote). Not even halfway through his second term, President Trump has wreaked havoc on all the institutions that have sustained the United States, alienated our allies, started a pointless and dangerous war, an

Last year, arts organizations and cultural institutions across the US received an alarming message: Their federal grants had been canceled. The letters said their projects no longer aligned with new federal priorities and that money was being redirected toward the Trump administration’s agenda. The grants had funded museum exhibits, public art programs, historical research, and community arts initiatives.  jQuery(document).ready(function(){prx("https:\/\/play.prx.org\/e?ge=prx_149_162

The long and strange saga of Missouri’s redistricting battle is over. On Friday evening, the Supreme Court released a final opinion—with no noted dissents—that disallows Missouri Republicans’ ultra-gerrymandered congressional map ahead of November’s midterm elections. In 2025, at President Donald Trump’s urging, Missouri’s GOP-led legislature redrew its congressional map in an effort to give Republicans an additional seat by slicing up the heavily Democratic Kans

The Trump administration announced an arrangement with Venezuela last week that would see the US take control of 65 billion barrels worth of oil fields and a significant share of the country’s production of 800,000 barrels of oil per day—the latest development after an American strike on Caracas abducted the country’s president Nicolás Maduro in January. According to the White House statement, Venezuela will grant a firm called North American Blue Energy Partners, rights to 17 oil

“Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse,” Andrew Garfield, the actor playing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, says in the teaser trailer for Artificial. “And we get to be the ones to shepherd people into this new world.” The film’s set against the backdrop of the five days in November 2023 after Altman was ousted and then reinstated as CEO. The drama of that week is now the stuff of legend: text messages between Altman and then-interim CEO Mira Murati, later released in co

On Wednesday morning, in a Manhattan press room containing about 50 reporters and union members, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the US announced an agreement with Microsoft that, among other things, prohibits the tech company from tracking student use of its AI tools and applying student and teacher data to train AI models. The guidelines listed in the American Federation of Teachers’ deal with Microsoft apply to any school district “that desires the same principles” when

A massive immigration operation is happening in Memphis. It’s been underway for just under a year now—hundreds of arrests, streets filled with officers. But most people I talk with have never heard of it. Why? As I previously documented for this magazine, the occupation of one of America’s largest majority-Black cities began last September: ICE arrived in Memphis along with more than a dozen local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. Today, more than 1,200 officers are st

On September 8, the British government banned the import of goods from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.  Eleven other nations—Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden—signed a joint statement with the UK, saying they too plan to introduce sanctions prohibiting trade in goods with the settlements.  “The Government of Israel must immediately halt the expansion of settlements and civilian administrative powers, ensure ac

When an Israeli quadcopter drone dropped an explosive that didn’t immediately detonate, Walaa thought her family was safe. The 30-year-old mother of five and her family were sheltering in Gaza City after fleeing the Israeli army’s bombardment of their home in Beit Hanoun.  Without warning, the object exploded, killing Walaa’s husband, children, and six other relatives. Walaa was the only survivor. She suffered severe injuries and permanent physical disfigurements, and spent the next five

Sporting a pumpkin-orange button-­down and aggressively furrowed eyebrows, Jason Frazier approached the lectern at a Fulton County, Georgia, Elections Board meeting in March 2023. He was a regular at these once-dry sessions, which had grown increasingly contentious as he and other Donald Trump–aligned and self-styled “election integrity” activists hijacked them to allege rampant voter fraud. This time, Frazier had come to challenge the registrations of 5,001 fellow Georgians. “There are thous

The family of Pierre Damas Bel, a 20-year-old Haitian immigrant in Springfield Ohio, says he died by suicide August 31 after losing Temporary Protected Status. Bel, an avid soccer player and JROTC member, was beginning his freshman year as an honors neuroscience student at Wright State University. But in July, Bel became one of about 340,000 Haitians in the US whose Temporary Protected Status expired, after the Supreme Court ruled not to intervene. In late July, Immigrations and Customs Enfo

On Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit against the city of Jackson, Mississippi, which alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water.  The lawsuit, first filed in 2022, says the contamination violated Jacksonians’ constitutional right to bodily integrity. Donald Trump-appointed judge Kurt Engelhardt disagreed. “The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing,” Engelhardt said. “Defendants’ act

This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The world’s leading weather organization is sounding the alarm about this year’s super El Niño, issuing its most certain forecast in the history of the organization. In an update issued early Thursday, the World Meteorological Organization predicted a “nearly 100% likelihood” that the El Niño will last through February. The strong language from the WMO—the