A Yemeni child looks out at buildings that were damaged in an air strike in the southern Yemeni city of Taez, March 18, 2018.
AHAMAD AL-BASHA / AFP / Getty

“America is now aiding and abetting the use of child soldiers.”

That was how Ari Rabin-Havt, deputy policy director for US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), responded to a New York Times report on Friday detailing Saudi Arabia’s use of Sudanese child soldiers as young as 14 years old to wage its vicious assault on Yemen, which has resulted in the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.

According to the Times, “Five fighters who have returned from Yemen and another about to depart said that children made up at least 20 percent of their units. Two said children were more than 40 percent.”

“To keep a safe distance from the battle lines,” the Times noted, “their Saudi or Emirati overseers commanded the Sudanese fighters almost exclusively by remote control, directing them to attack or retreat through radio headsets and GPS systems provided to the Sudanese officers in charge of each unit, […]

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Caitlyn Taussig mending fences in Kremmling, Colo.
CreditAmanda Lucier/The New York Times

Hundreds of years before John Wayne and Gary Cooper gave us a Hollywood version of the American West, with men as the brute, weather-beaten stewards of the land, female ranchers roamed the frontier. They were the indigenous, Navajo, Cheyenne and other tribes, and Spanish-Mexican rancheras, who tended and tamed vast fields, traversed rugged landscapes with their dogs, hunted, and raised livestock.

The descendants of European settlers brought with them ideas about the roles of men and women, and for decades, family farms and ranches were handed down to men. Now, as mechanization and technology transform the ranching industry, making the job of cowboy less about physical strength — though female ranchers have that in spades — and more about business, animal husbandry and the environment, women have reclaimed their connection to the land.

At the same time, the brothers, sons and grandsons who would have historically inherited a family ranch have, in the last decade, […]

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Carbon industry lobbyist, and now EPA head, Andrew Wheeler

In the six months since he stepped in to oversee the Environmental Protection Agency following Scott Pruitt’s resignation last summer, Andrew Wheeler has gutted fuel efficiency standards, rolled back carbon emissions rules for coal plants, and moved to allow more mercury emissions—and President Donald Trump made his approval known Wednesday as he nominated Wheeler to officially head the agency.

Wheeler has served as acting EPA administrator since July, having served as Pruitt’s second-in-command. Before his career in the Trump administration, he was a lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry and an aide for vehement climate denier Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.)—resumé items whose influence has been apparent in his actions as acting administrator and will likely to continue to sway his decision-making if he’s confirmed.

“The only thing Wheeler is going to protect at the EPA is the profits of polluters,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), in a statement. “I’m sure corporate board rooms will celebrate this nomination. But […]

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Credit: Shutterstock

The biggest untold story about how we pay for government involves a big switcheroo by America’s wealthy.

Decades ago, wealthy Americans financed the federal government mainly by paying taxes. Their tax rate was far higher than what it is today.

Now, wealthy Americans finance the federal government mainly by lending it money, and collecting interest payments on those loans, profiting when the rest of us pay them back.

Follow the money: As the debt continues to grow, interest payments are becoming huge. Taxpayers could soon be paying more in interest on the federal debt than we spend on the military or on Medicaid.

Interest on the debt is expected to hit $390 billion next year, nearly 50 percent more than in 2017, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Who’s receiving these interest payments? Mostly Americans, not foreigners. And most of these Americans are wealthy investors who park their savings in treasury bonds held by mutual funds, hedge funds, pension funds, banks, insurance companies, personal trusts, and estates.

The richest 1 percent of Americans now owns […]

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Planet Earth is alive. Deep beneath its skin, its life blood — rivers of molten iron — pulse around its core. And this mobile iron is what generates the magnetic field that causes auroras — and keeps us alive.