Mark Berman, Lenny Bernstein, Dan Keating, Andrew Ba Tran and Artur Galocha , Reporters - The Washington Post
Stephan: There is no other nation in the developed world with these kinds of gun death statistics. That this goes on day after day, to a point where it has become normalized, by which I mean we constantly talk about it, but nothing ever gets done about it, tells the truth about America. Eliminating assault combat weapons is so obvious, and the evidence for this is so incontrovertible, that not doing it is a statement of this society's values. Guns are more important than people.
The spate of shooting attacks in communities such as Highland Park, Ill.; Uvalde, Tex.; and Buffalo has riveted attention on America’s staggering number of public mass killings. But the rising number of gun deaths in the United States extends beyond such high-profile episodes, emerging nearly every day inside homes, outside bars and on the streets of many cities, according to federal data.
The surge in gun violence comes as firearm purchases rose to record levels in 2020 and 2021, with more than 43 million guns estimated to have been purchased during that period, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal data on gun background checks. At the same time, the rate of gun deaths in those years hit the highest level since 1995, with more than 45,000 fatalities each year.
Guns account for most suicides and are almost entirely responsible for an overall rise in homicides across the country from 2018 to 2021, according to […]
Stephan: The United States has the largest number of incarcerated people in the world, and an estimated 58,000 pregnant women are sent behind bars each year. Think about that. This article gives you a sense of their lives. Are you ashamed for your country? You should be. I certainly am.
Mother Jones illustration, Getty
Things were already hellish for pregnant people in prisons and jails. With the Roe reversal, it’s about to get even worse.
The United States incarcerates more women than anywhere else in the world, disproportionately women of color, and most of them are of reproductive age. An estimated 58,000 pregnant people are sent behind bars each year—the vast majority of them to jail, which means that many are still waiting for trial and haven’t been convicted of a crime but are too poor to pay bail. Some of them are innocent. Most are accused of nonviolent offenses.
And many of them want abortions, for various reasons. A Johns Hopkins study published last year examined pregnancy outcomes in four jail systems that allowed abortion during a 12-month period in 2016 and 2017. The researchers found that a whopping 33 percent of non-miscarriage pregnancies within those jails ended with abortions—significantly higher than the 18 percent rate of abortions in the free world. “[P]regnant incarcerated individuals, at least those entering jails, may actually have an increased need for abortion access,” wrote Dr. Carolyn Sufrin […]
Stephan: Here is a very good assessment of the upcoming struggle to do something meaningful with environmental remediation programs, healthcare, and taxes, and this time Schumer and Manchin are working together. I hope this turns into good news, but McConnell is going to try to block this, considering Democratic success injurious to the Republican possibility to take over the Senate. Manchin I think is cooperating because of a political calculation. If the Republicans were to take over the Senate, and have a majority of two Manchin loses most of his leverage power. He becomes just another backbencher.
Sen. Joe Manchin and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer are working toward legislation that provides $1 trillion in new revenues, half of which would go toward deficit reduction and half of which would go toward energy and health spending. | Credit: Getty
Democrats are taking tangible steps towards a deal on their party’s signature spending bill, expecting the proposal to dominate the rest of July and hoping it could reshape their political fortunes after six months of stasis.
Talks between Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) are beginning to yield concrete results on a potential climate, tax and prescription drugs package. Schumer told Senate Democrats recently that if he can reach a deal with Manchin, the bill could be on the floor as soon as this month, according to a person familiar with the negotiations.
Negotiators are still ironing out key details, but Democrats are signaling that as soon as next week they will begin arguing their case to the Senate rules chief on why the package should pass with a simple majority in the chamber. […]
Stephan: Speaking as a journalist who once worked for two major papers that now no longer exist I mourn what is happening to newspaper journalism. The thing that made newspapers special is that they covered local news, not as it is covered on social media with all the partisanship and misinformation but from a perspective of objective data. Editorial pages were biased to be sure, but news reporting was supposed to be objective. Good editors drummed this into new reporters, and it became part of the culture. Now that local objective coverage is disappearing the oversight that kept politicians and business leaders more honest than they would otherwise have been is also disappearing, to the detriment of those local cultures.
Illustration: Annelise Capossela / Axios
Around two newspapers in the U.S. are closing every week, according to a new report, suggesting the local news crisis spurred by the pandemic will worsen in coming years.
Why it matters: Hyperlocal communities are being disproportionately impacted by the fall of local newspapers compared to bigger cities, deepening America’s economic divide.
The average poverty rate in a news desert, or a community without a local newspaper, in the U.S. is 16%, compared to the 11% national average, according to the new report from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications.
“This is a crisis for our democracy and our society,” said Penelope Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at Medill and primary author of the report, in a statement.
“[W]hile the economic decline in many communities was occurring prior to the rise of news deserts, the loss of a local news organization will leave local residents without the critical information to begin to address those problems,” Abernathy told Axios via email.
“At a minimum, the loss of local news worsens the […]
Abha Bhattarai and Rachel Siegel, Economics Correspondent | Economics Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan: You would think that cities and towns would realize that homeless people are an enormous drain on local resources, and that low cost housing was not only the most compassionate and humane strategy, it was also the cheapest option. But no, American culture punishes people in dozens of ways for being poor, and we all pay a huge price economically and socially because of that.
Sabrina Barger-Turner and her older son, Aiden Turner, 13, go through her to-do list on June 30 in Abingdon, Md. She was unable to pick up prints she had ordered from the Abingdon Public Library because they asked for a library card number, for which she is not eligible. Print sales are one of Barger-Turner’s sources of income. Credit: Maansi Srivastava / The Washington Post
The sheriffs arrived at 6 a.m. in early June to tell Josanne English what she already knew: She was being evicted.
She’d lost her job as a project manager near Sacramento in April, then fell behind on rent as $6-a-gallon gas and higher costs for food and utilities depleted her monthly budget. By the time she lost her home two months later, she owed $9,160 in rent and late fees, and her bank account was nearing zero.
She received $1,300 in housing assistance from the county, but that didn’t go very far in an area where the average asking rent has ballooned to nearly $2,800 a month. After a week in a […]
