Women who accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual misconduct were stunned by the Thursday decision by the New York Court of Appeals to overturn his 2020 felony conviction, again speaking out about the former Hollywood mogul’s behavior. Both survivors and legal experts said the court’s ruling points to issues with how difficult it can be for survivors of sexual violence to be believed and how the criminal justice system works.  The state’s highest court, in a 4-3 decision, said that “the trial court erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons othe ..read more

Knife is Salman Rushdie’s account of how he narrowly survived an attempt on his life in August 2022, in which he lost his right eye and partial use of his left hand. The attack ironically came when Rushdie was delivering a lecture on “the creation in America of safe spaces for writers from elsewhere”, at Chautauqua, in upstate New York. A man named Hadi Matar has been charged with second-degree attempted murder. He is an American-born resident of New Jersey in his early twenties, whose parents emigrated from Lebanon. Prosecutors allege the assault was a belated response to ..read more

Last July, Truthdig reported on extreme heat in Texas prisons. Many of the facilities are not air-conditioned, and cells can reach 149 degrees Fahrenheit on the heat index, a measure of temperature combined with humidity. One inmate memorably described the summer months in the facility as being “baked in a concrete oven.” With summer again looming, a lawsuit filed against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is using similar language about cooking humans to death. Filed Monday by the Texas Prisons Community, it asserts that extreme heat in prison is tantamount to cruel and unusual punishme ..read more

Four months to the day after 9/11, on Jan. 11, 2002, the United States Naval Station in Cuba opened the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, known around the world as “Gitmo.” Nearly 800 men and boys, all of them Muslim, were brought there in handcuffs and shackles. The fact that these “unlawful combatants” were called “detainees” hid the fact that Gitmo is not a detention center; it’s a prison. Its inmates were never entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions. They were interrogated, tortured and otherwise dehumanized within an inch of their lives, some for as long as 20 years. Many of t ..read more

Students across the United States are rising up against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, bringing to memory the student movements of the 1960s. From Columbia to Brown, from Yale to Harvard, students are staging sit-ins, hunger strikes, class walkouts, and interfaith prayers, demanding an end to U.S. support for Israel and the complicity of their academic institutions in the ongoing genocide. While some U.S. institutions are treading a delicate path, the Columbia University administration, led by President Minouche Shafik, has violently cracked down on its own students, summoning the N ..read more

In the annals of decarbonization, few tales of progress are as chipper as the one New York City has told about its newly minted partnership with the hydropower industry. The keystone in the partnership is the Champlain Hudson Power Express, a 339-mile privately owned high-voltage transmission line to provide the city with electrons from the sprawling hydropower complexes of Canadian energy company Hydro-Québec. With the CHPE now under construction and slated to become fully operational by the spring of 2026, it has been celebrated as part of New York City’s grand transition to renewables — a ..read more

The following is an adapted excerpt from “Petroleum 238: Big Oil’s Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It,” published this week on Karret Press. Every day across the U.S., billions of pounds of toxic and radioactive waste is produced by oil and gas wells. My journey into this topic started when an Ohio community organizer told me that someone had used radioactive oil field waste to make a liquid deicer for home driveways and patios — one that was supposedly “Safe for Pets” and that he’d been selling at Lowe’s. Unraveling how that came to be turned into a 20-month Rolling Stone ma ..read more

One, erratic and often unhinged, blew up the U.S.-Iran accord that was the landmark foreign policy achievement of President Obama’s second term. He then ordered the assassination of a top Iranian general visiting Iraq, dramatically raising tensions in the region. The other is a traditional advocate of American exceptionalism, a supporter of the U.S.-Iran agreement who promised to restore it upon taking office, only to ham-handedly bungle the job, while placating Israel. In November, of course, American voters get to choose which of the two they’d trust with handling ongoing explosive tensions ..read more

With its unparalleled purchasing power and exacting demands, fast food has long shaped agricultural systems in the United States, Europe, and China. But as major American fast food brands, like KFC, expand into so-called “frontier markets,” taxpayer-funded development banks have made their global expansion possible by underwriting the factory farms that supply them with chicken, a DeSmog investigation has found.  In all, the investigation identified five factory-scale poultry companies in as many countries that have received financial support from the International Finance Corporatio ..read more

This month, Wisconsin joined 27 other states that have banned or restricted local governments’ use of private donations to run cash-strapped election offices, buy voting equipment or hire poll workers for Election Day. All of the state laws came in the past four years, pushed by conservative lawmakers and activists who claim that Democratic voters disproportionately benefited from hundreds of millions of dollars in grants primarily funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, during the 2020 presidential election. Courts and federal regulators have rejected those cl ..read more