Justice

As the highly contagious Delta variant continues to spread, many hospitals are reporting record numbers of children being hospitalized, especially in areas with low vaccination rates, including Arkansas, Florida, Missouri and Texas. Dr. Christina Propst, a pediatrician in Houston, says children under 12 who are still ineligible for COVID-19 vaccines are at risk. “They are currently our most vulnerable population, just as this highly transmissible variant is surging across the country,” Propst says. She says Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s order banning mask mandates in schools is a purely political decision that ignores science. ​​“What he is doing is a direct threat to the health and well-being of the children of Texas,” says Propst.

The real rumblings began last week. “The New York attorney general’s office said Tuesday that it is conducting a criminal investigation into former President Donald Trump’s business empire, expanding what had previously been a civil probe,” the Associated Press reported. The pivot from civil to criminal meant the investigations would now include the work of New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance. Attorney General Letitia James’s office also let it be known that they were squeezing the Trump Organization’s longtime finance chief and Man Who Knows Everything, Allen Weisselberg, for as much as he will give.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Massachusetts) proposals to raise and enforce taxes on corporations and the rich could raise more than enough to pay for the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation plan, according to a new op-ed by the senator. Warren writes in The Washington Post that, if Congress and the president were to adapt her plans to levy a wealth tax, create a tax on corporate profits and fund the IRS to catch rich tax cheats, they could raise $5 trillion in revenue. That could cover the Democrats’ spending bill and the bipartisan infrastructure plan, which proposes $550 billion in new spending, and still have nearly a trillion left over to expand either plan or put toward a future package.

On Sunday, many Arab, Muslim and Palestinian communities boycotted President Biden’s virtual Eid celebration. We play a statement of solidarity from legendary activist and scholar Angela Davis on Sunday for “Eid with Palestine: A Protest of the White House Eid Event.” Davis also co-wrote piece for The Nation with our guest Noura Erakat about how Erakat’s 26-year-old cousin Ahmad Erekat was shot by Israeli occupation forces after his car appeared to have accidentally crashed into a booth at a checkpoint in the occupied West Bank while he was on the way to pick up his mother and sister on her wedding day. Erakat says Israel still refuses to release his body to his family. “All Palestinians are deemed a threat for their mere existence,” says Erakat. “What we see happen to Ahmad has been a pattern.”

With the latest term of the Supreme Court having come to a close last week, Democrats appear anxious to know whether the Court’s current oldest justice, Stephen Breyer, plans to step down, a move that would allow them to confirm a replacement named by President Joe Biden in the near future. The anxiety is perhaps warranted, as Democrats do not want to see yet another Supreme Court seat fall to a judge nominated by a Republican president, especially after the death last fall of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg enabled former President Donald Trump the opportunity to further cement the right-wing ideological composition of the High Court.

A prosecution witness in the trial of Amber Guyger was shot to death, the Dallas District Attorney's Office confirmed Saturday. Guyger is a former Dallas police officer who was found guilty October 1 of murdering Botham...

Following a memorandum from the Department of Justice (DOJ) last week outlining why the Treasury Department should share former President Donald Trump’s tax returns with Congress, the former president’s lawyers filed a brief on Wednesday attempting to stop that action from taking place. Trump’s legal team submitted a filing in federal court in Washington, D.C. saying the decision from the DOJ was errant and that the House Ways and Means Committee had insufficient reasoning for wanting to see his taxes.

The former police officer filmed kneeling on the neck of an African-American man who later died has been arrested, Minnesota authorities said. The arrest comes after two days of riots and...

Linking the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol with a protracted effort by secretive right-wing groups and wealthy GOP contributors, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse on Friday called for investigating dark money organizations and influential donors who allegedly organized and funded the deadly attack in a failed bid to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. “The attack on the Capitol on January 6 was the culmination of a monthslong disinformation campaign designed to allow President [Donald] Trump to remain in office,” Whitehouse (D-R.I.) wrote in a letter (pdf) to Sen. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chair of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, also known as the commission. “Public reporting indicates that this campaign was organized and funded by dark money organizations and powerful donors, and aided and abetted by members of Congress and the Trump administration,” he continued.

The number of felony marijuana arrests in California continued to decline in 2019 in the age of legalization, but another trend remained unchanged: those arrests fell disproportionately on Hispanics and Blacks,...