The Total Report

US and British meddling transformed Somalia’s al-Shabaab into an extremist group, inflaming the humanitarian crisis that persists throughout the country. This July, the Biden administration picked up where Trump left off and...

Far from a failure, the sampling might actually offer tantalizing clues about the geology—and potential past life—of the Red Planet.Last week, NASA’s Perseverance rover shot for a new milestone in the...

New research found that several of the major gaming platforms are hosting extremist activity, from racist livestreams to open support for neo-Nazis. Since the online harassment campaign known as Gamergate, in which...

The school board for Williamson County, Tennessee, held a meeting on Tuesday night about taking steps to deal with the terrifying Delta COVID infection surge. After four hours of debate, the board voted to implement a temporary mask mandate for grammar school students and staff, said mandate being set to expire on September 21. Almost immediately, all hell broke loose. A clutch of infuriated parents mobbed mask advocates to their cars, where they bellowed through the driver’s side of one car window, “You can leave freely, but we will find you and we know who you are.” One mask advocate, a doctor named Britt Maxwell with children who attend school in the district, was called a “traitor” as he left the gathering. “I don’t see how anyone can say that when I’ve been on the frontlines of this pandemic since the beginning, treating patients in rooms, unvaccinated for the vast majority of it, hoping I wouldn’t take it home to my family. For someone to say that is mind blowing,” Maxwell told CNN.

A one-time 99% tax on billionaires’ massive pandemic wealth gains would raise enough revenue to pay for coronavirus vaccines for every adult on Earth — and provide each of the hundreds of millions of unemployed workers around the world with a $20,000 cash grant. So finds an analysis released late Wednesday by Oxfam International, the Fight Inequality Alliance, the Institute for Policy Studies, and the Patriotic Millionaires, progressive advocacy organizations that are pushing governments to tax billionaires to help fund critical pandemic relief measures.

In February of 2020, before the public knew the full extent of the coming pandemic but after senators were secretly briefed about the threat, Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Kentucky) wife bought stock in a company that manufactures an antiviral drug used to treat COVID-19. Now, 16 months after the stock reporting deadline for the buy has passed, Paul has disclosed the purchase.

A group of anti-war activists blockaded the entrances to a Raytheon facility in Portsmouth, Rhode Island on Thursday morning to protest the role the weapons-maker plays in the killing of civilians in Yemen, the occupied Palestinian territories, and elsewhere around the world. The demonstration was organized and live-streamed on Facebook by Resist and Abolish the Military Industrial Complex (RAM INC) and The FANG Collective, a direct-action organization based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. (Watch the stream here.) In a statement, The FANG Collective pointed to a 2018 CNN report revealing that Raytheon — the second-largest military contractor in the world and the largest producer of guided missiles — manufactured bombs and other munitions that the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition used to kill dozens of women, children, and other civilians in Yemen.

Looking at the state of the world, one is struck by the stark contradiction of progress being made on some fronts even as we are facing massive disruptions, tremendous inequalities and existential threats to humanity and nature. In this context, how do we evaluate the qualities of progress and decline? How significant is political activism to progress? In this exclusive interview, Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s greatest scholars and leading activists, shares his insights on the state of the world and the conundrum of activism and change, including the significance of the Black Lives Matter movement, the movement for Palestinian rights, the urgency of the climate crisis and the threat of nuclear weapons.

Congress just took a historic step forward for racial, economic and reproductive justice 45 years in the making. Every year since 1976, lawmakers have chosen to deny insurance coverage of abortion to people working to make ends meet by adding a policy known as the Hyde Amendment to federal spending bills. But now, for the first time since Hyde’s inception, the U.S House passed a budget without this harmful policy. The House vote marks a bold rejection of decades of injustice against women, people of color and people living paycheck to paycheck, among others targeted by Hyde. Now, we turn our attention to the U.S. Senate.