Opinion

President Donald Trump is an unrepentant and unrelenting liar. It's hard to think of a more basic and fundamental fact about American politics, and yet somehow, many news outlets often refuse to state outright when Trump is deceiving the public.

I was giving a talk at a conference in Oklahoma about the public health dangers of industrial animal farming, or “factory farming” as it is commonly called. Each year, more than 64 billion animals are raised and killed for food globally. In the United States alone, 1 million animals are slaughtered every hour. Largely because of increased demand for cheap animal products, intensive animal operations have replaced most traditional farming practices world- wide. The transformation of animal agriculture is so dramatic that it has been dubbed the “livestock revolution.” This unprecedented change in the human relationship with animals has led to not only more animal suffering than ever before in human history but also to devastating harms to human health.

As a new homeowner, my strategy for finding a house was probably a little different than most: I looked for the one with the smallest lawn I could find.

The United States Supreme Court is expected to rule shortly in the case of Department of Commerce v. New York—a critical legal battle over the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 U.S. census. The Trump administration and Republican Party have pushed hard on the idea of collecting citizenship information from U.S. residents, claiming the move is not intended to be harmful and that it simply represents a bid to return the census to an earlier status quo. In fact, proponents have gone as far as to claim that such information would help enforce protections for minority voters under the Voting Rights Act.

The latest jobs report showed a lackluster gain in jobs in May that was worse than economists had predicted.

Imagine if anti-abortion protestors found themselves confronted with the Bible and Christianity’s highest values. At regular intervals throughout the year, the most conception-obsessed members of the Religious Right will be gathering at Evangelical and Catholic churches, loading teenagers into busses and cars, and surrounding Planned Parenthood with protest signs. Some will pray and sing church songs or shout Bible quotes or carry pictures of the Virgin Mary. But most will carry signs that say things like “abortion stops a beating heart” [so does oyster-eating] or “aren’t you glad your mother didn’t have an abortion?” [Yes; glad also that she didn’t have a headache that night] or “it’s a baby” [an acorn is an oak tree?] or “one life ended, one destroyed” [actually, factually not]. Some may carry “fetal squish” pictures—not  images of common early abortions but of the rare fetus that dies or is aborted late in gestation. In other words, they will try to sway the rest of us by speaking our language—the language of science, human rights and secular ethical values; and they will appeal to our moral emotions: compassion, love of life, and disgust.

‘Rape fantasies,’ says M, an American kink educator, ‘are one of the most common fantasies for women.’ Studies attempting to quantify just how common yield wildly different results, likely thanks to their limited sample sizes, varied methodologies, and the risk of response bias when answering questions about taboo subjects such as sex and desire. But the research suggests that up to 62 per cent of women experience fantasies about some sort of non-consensual sexual encounter at least once in their lives, 14 per cent of them have these fantasies at least weekly, and 9 to 14 per cent consider them their most frequent or favourite fantasies. Some women, such as M, play out these fantasies with their partners; part of M’s work is teaching people how to do so in negotiated, safe and comfortable scenarios. 

Though he died before his grandson Charles was even born, Erasmus Darwin anticipated the theory of evolution through natural selection, albeit in poetic form. In his posthumously published The Temple of Nature (1803), he writes of how:

The latest jobs report showed a lackluster gain in jobs in May that was worse than economists had predicted.

In a new piece adapted from an upcoming book, Yahoo News correspondent Alexander Nazaryan reported that President Donald Trump has told him, "There are those that say we have one of the finest Cabinets."

President Donald Trump knows what buttons to push when it comes firing up his far-right base, and one of them is decrying “socialism” and insisting that the Democratic Party has become fully “socialist” in its ideology. Meanwhile, the term “democratic socialism” is a badge of honor for Sen. Bernie Sanders and his ally, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York City. But context is crucial. The “socialism” that Sanders and AOC champion is really a revival of New Deal/Great Society liberalism, and while both of them are left-of-center by U.S. standards, neither would be embraced by actual Marxist-Leninists or Maoists — in fact, communist websites have attacked them for not being true leftists.

President Donald Trump knows what buttons to push when it comes firing up his far-right base, and one of them is decrying “socialism” and insisting that the Democratic Party has become fully “socialist” in its ideology. Meanwhile, the term “democratic socialism” is a badge of honor for Sen. Bernie Sanders and his ally, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York City. But context is crucial. The “socialism” that Sanders and AOC champion is really a revival of New Deal/Great Society liberalism, and while both of them are left-of-center by U.S. standards, neither would be embraced by actual Marxist-Leninists or Maoists — in fact, communist websites have attacked them for not being true leftists.

Although House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is all in favor of aggressive investigations of President Donald Trump in the House of Representatives, she has maintained her opposition to impeachment — stressing that even if Trump were impeached in the House, he wouldn’t be convicted by a GOP-controlled Senate. Nonetheless, Pelosi has made it clear that she considers much of Trump’s behavior wildly unethical, and according to a report by Politico’s Heather Caygle, the speaker believes that Trump belongs in prison.