Catholic priests can now bless same-sex couples, the Vatican announced on Monday, a notable shift toward creating a more open atmosphere in the Catholic Church. 

The move, outlined in a new document, expands on a letter published in October from Pope Francis to conservative cardinals in which he hinted that same-sex unions could receive blessings, as long as they are not considered the same as heterosexual marriages. The document warned against “doctrinal or disciplinary schemes, especially when they lead to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism whereby instead of evangelizing, one analyzes and classifies others, and instead of opening the door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying.” The text can be read as a response to conservatives, both inside the US and around the world, who dogmatically oppose even tepid inclusion for LGBTQ Catholics. 

While the document lists several requirements for the blessings—queer couples can’t invoke the clothing and gestures traditionally associated with a wedding—it states that requests for these blessings should not be denied. The message here from the Vatican, which has been echoed through Pope Francis’ previous rhetoric on the topic, is that although the church still thinks that individuals engaging in extramarital sex and “irregular” unions are living in sin, those individuals should not be barred from having a relationship with God. “Even when a person’s relationship with God is clouded by sin,” the document reads, “he can always ask for a blessing, stretching out his hand to God.”

Monday’s announcement is certain to have global implications for priests and parishioners around the world. Yet the scope is still unclear. As the Associated Press notes, the Vatican did not signal any plans to “regulate details or practicalities about same-sex blessings, or respond to further questions about them, leaving it to individual priests to work out.” It’s also possible that some American Catholics may not even experience these changes due to the staunch ideological divides between local and global doctrine, as well as the fierce opposition some conservative Catholics in the US have toward reform. 

I reported in depth on these divides back in October when hundreds of delegates gathered in Rome for the pope’s “Synod on Synodality,” a meeting to discuss the future of the Catholic Church, part of a multi-year process that will culminate in 2024 with Francis’ decisions on topics that could include celibacy and divorce. As expected, the lead-up to October’s synod was filled with warring ideas about how liberal the meeting could get. Some of the contentions reflected a growing push among prominent members of the far-right in recent years, who identify as Catholic, to oppose inclusion for those who have been historically left out of the religion.  

In a earthshaking decision on Tuesday evening, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution bars former President Donald Trump from holding federal office again—disqualifying the Republican frontrunner from the 2024 presidential ballot in Colorado.

Trump is expected to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court. If the justices were to affirm the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision, Trump could be wiped off ballots nationwide.

“We do not reach these conclusions lightly,” the Colorado Supreme Court wrote in its decision. “We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.”

The decision overturns the ruling of a federal court in Denver last month.  As I reported then:

In the days after the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, some legal experts began to speculate that a little-known constitutional provision might be used to block President Donald Trump from ever serving a second term. The 14th Amendment, passed after the Civil War, included a portion, called Section 3, that was designed to keep former Confederate leaders out of Congress. But could the section, which disqualified officials who had engaged in “insurrection or rebellion,” also be used to block Trump from running for president again, based on his actions supporting for the Capitol riot?

Almost three years ago, during his first week in office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order instructing the Justice Department to stop renewing its contracts with private prison companies. The news was like a glimpse of blue sky for critics of the controversial sector—especially after four years of Donald Trump, who had fostered a cozy, mutually lucrative relationship with the private prison industry.

The order restored an Obama-era policy first announced in 2016—and later suspended by Trump administration—after a damning federal report found that private federal prisons were less safe and less secure than their publicly run counterparts. No longer would the Bureau of Prisons sign deals with corporations to lock up people serving federal prison sentences. Nor would the US Marshals Service, in charge of detaining people while they await trial on federal criminal charges, enter or renew contracts with those same companies. 

Or, at least, that was the idea. And over the last three years, the Bureau of Prisons has indeed ended its use of private prisons—moving the roughly 14,000 people it previously held in private facilities into government-owned ones as of last December. But the Marshals Service is a different story. Among the roughly 63,000 people held in USMS custody each night, the ACLU has found that about 1 in 3 still go to sleep in a detention center run by a private prison company. “As far as we can tell, the numbers remained about constant,” says Kyle Virgien, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project. 

So what gives? That’s the question at the heart of a new letter sent by nine Senate Democrats to Marshals Service Director Ronald Davis and Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday, seeking more information on two workarounds USMS has been using to avoid moving its detainees out of private prisons. “The Marshals Service must end its abuse of loopholes to circumvent the order, which allow these private jails to operate unsafe facilities and profit from mass incarceration,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the letter’s lead signatory, said in a statement to Mother Jones. “We have a basic responsibility to keep detainees safe.”

The letter notes several ways in which USMS has continued to house people in private prisons. First, the agency has been using municipalities as go-betweens to avoid directly hiring private prison companies. USMS has long made deals with town or county governments to keep USMS detainees in their local jail. But in some cases, that local government then turns around and hires a private prison company as a subcontractor. This pass-through mechanism allowed USMS to keep detainees in the 2,016-bed Northeast Ohio Correctional Center, owned and run by CoreCivic, one of the country’s largest private prison operators. When USMS’s contract with CoreCivic expired in May 2021, USMS signed a new contract with Mahoning County, which in turn signed a deal with CoreCivic. 

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. 

The Environmental Protection Agency announced last week that vinyl chloride would be among five chemicals to begin the process for risk evaluation prioritization under the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA, an early step toward potentially banning the chemical.  

The news comes after environmental groups campaigned this summer for the chemical to be banned, visiting EPA offices in Washington in July and gathering thousands of petition signatures. Vinyl chloride is a colorless gas that is used to make PVC, a common material in construction products like flooring, siding, pipes, and roofing. Vinyl chloride has been known as a human carcinogen since the 1970s. 

“The announcement is very significant because EPA announced that they’re only going to look at five chemicals for a new evaluation,” said Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator and the president of Beyond Plastics, an organization working to end plastic pollution. 

Enck was part of the team that traveled to Washington this summer. She brought a large vinyl rubber ducky to the EPA meeting to illustrate the fact that PVC is used to make children’s toys. 

Rudy Giuliani filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, a step he said was unavoidable after he was ordered to pay $148 million to two former Georgia election workers he defamed by falsely accusing them of election fraud. The former New York mayor’s Chapter 11 filing was no surprise. It came the day after federal district court judge Beryl Howell ordered Giuliani to immediately pay Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss before entering an appeal regarding the award.

A Giuliani spokesperson, Ted Goodman, cast the filing as a tactical move. “No person could have reasonably believed that Mayor Rudy Giuliani would be able to pay such a high punitive amount,” Goodman said in a statement Thursday. “Chapter 11 will afford Mayor Giuliani the opportunity and time to pursue an appeal, while providing transparency for his finances under the supervision of the bankruptcy court, to ensure all creditors are treated equally and fairly throughout the process.” 

The man once known as “America’s mayor” has now become arguably the country’s best-known debtor. Among the debts cited in Giuliani’s filing today are legal bills going back to his role as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, in the former president’s first impeachment, along with mounting legal fees from his involvement in Trump’s effort to use election fraud lies to steal the 2020 election. Obviously, Giuliani is unable to pay Moss and Freeman $148 million. His personal lawyer and friend, Robert Costello, is suing Giuliani for $1.4 million in unpaid legal fees. Giuliani also reports about $3.5 million in additional debts to lawyers.

Giuliani faces substantial additional expenses from his Georgia indictment for trying to interfere in the counting of votes during the 2020 election. He’s also an unindicted co-conspirator in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Despite Trump’s assurance in August that he would help his former lawyer pay off additional legal debts, Trump’s Save America PAC only has helped Giuliani pay some $340,000 in legal expenses.

The IRS in August filed a $549,435 tax lien against Giuliani for the 2021 tax year, and his bankruptcy petition says he now owes a total of about $989,000 in unpaid taxes. He also cites “unknown potential obligations” to Dominion and Smartmatic voting machine companies who have sued him for defamation, and to Hunter Biden, who has sued Giuliani for violating his privacy by “hacking into, tampering with, manipulating, copying, disseminating, and generally obsessing over” material on Hunter’s laptop. He also cites potential obligations to Noelle Dunphy, a former employee who has sued Giuliani for “sexual assault and harassment, wage theft,” and “rape.”He denies those allegations and well as claims in other suits against him.

Donald Trump’s long history of telling on himself continues with the admission of his authoritarian aspirations. 

The startling confession came on Tuesday during a town hall with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, during which the former president was asked whether he’d seek revenge on his political enemies if elected again to the White House. Trump responded that he would not be a dictator—”except for day one.”

Hannity asks Trump for a second time if he has plans to abuse power. Trump admits he plans to do some dictatorial things on "day one" of his second term. pic.twitter.com/51b9I8bIJ7

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 6, 2023

President Biden condemned accounts of rape and sexual violence reportedly perpetrated by Hamas against Israeli girls and women, stating that “the world can’t just look away at what’s going on.” 

Biden made the comments at a campaign fundraiser in Boston on Tuesday, according to the Associated Press, adding that the world must condemn “without equivocation” and “without exception” the “horrific accounts of unimaginable cruelty” shared by survivors over the past few weeks. 

“Reports of women raped—repeatedly raped—and their bodies being mutilated while still alive—of women corpses being desecrated, Hamas terrorists inflicting as much pain and suffering on women and girls as possible and then murdering them,” Biden said, according to the AP. “It is appalling.”

Hamas has denied allegations of sexual assault.

Biden’s comments come as evidence of sexual atrocities perpetrated by Hamas mounts and officials increasingly demand an investigation.

For the first time since Roe was decided in 1973, a pregnant adult is asking a court to step in so she can have an abortion.

In late November, Kate Cox received the confirmation she’d been dreading: her fetus likely wasn’t going to survive. Cox, who lives in Texas, is 20 weeks pregnant. Doctors told her continuing the pregnancy could threaten her life.

Cox is now asking a judge to grant a temporary restraining order to halt the enforcement of Texas’ near total ban so she can terminate her pregnancy. “Kate Cox needs an abortion,” reads the first line of Cox’ petition, “and she needs it now.” 

Cox is represented by the Center for Reproductive Rights. The organization is currently arguing in the Texas Supreme Court that pregnant people with medical complications have not been receiving proper care in the state. As I have previously reported, that case is about situations like the one Cox is experiencing right now in which vague exceptions to abortion bans undermine clarity of care:

[Texas’] law calls for “reasonable medical judgment” and permits abortion if the patient could die or if they’re at “serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.” The lawsuit argues this language is too vague and dangerous for pregnant people and providers. 

Chris Christie said the quiet part out loud at the fourth Republican debate Wednesday night. The dominant figure in the Republican Party—former President Donald Trump—isn’t on the debate stage, and when the debate began, nobody talked about him despite his dominance in the polls.

When the former New Jersey governor finally wrestled some airtime from his three opponents—Vivek Ramaswamy, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—he noted that none of them had taken on Trump directly.

“We’re 17 minutes into this debate and…we’ve had these three acting as if this race is between the four of us,” Christie said. “The fifth guy, who doesn’t have the guts to show up and stand here, he’s the one who, as you just put it, is way ahead in the polls.”

“The fact is that when you go and say the truth about somebody who is a dictator, a bully, who has taken shots at everybody…then I understand why these three are timid to say anything about it,” he added, calling Trump “Voldemort, he who shall not be named.”

During his first time speaking in tonight's GOP debate, Chris Christie criticized his debate competitors and moderators for not bringing up Donald Trump or clearly denouncing the former president's falsehoods and recent comments about being a “dictator.” https://t.co/kN48tKlMMu pic.twitter.com/3aNfIwvXYK

The four GOP candidates competed over many things at the Republican debate Wednesday night—support for Israel, fitness to lead, and how they felt about Donald Trump. But one recurring theme was which one could claim to be most anti-trans of them all.

Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sparred over who took a more draconian stance on so-called bathroom bills, which prevent transgender people from using bathrooms aligned with their gender identity.

Haley pointed out that while running for governor in 2018, DeSantis once dismissed legislating the “bathroom wars” as not “a good use of our time.” DeSantis clapped back, noting that he signed a bathroom bill as governor and took Haley to task for refusing to do so herself. She claimed such a bill was unnecessary and voters weren’t asking for it.  

“I stood up for little girls,” DeSantis declared. “You didn’t do it.”

Vivek Ramaswamy falsely claimed “transgenderism” is a “mental health disorder,” adding that he wants to impose a federal ban on gender-affirming care for minors. 

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When Greta Thunberg posted a photo of herself holding a “stand with Gaza” sign on Instagram in October, the backlash in Israel and Germany came hard and fast.

An Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson initially told Politico that “whoever identifies with Greta in any way in the future, in my view, is a terror supporter,” although later retracted his comments. The official X account of Israel said “Hamas doesn’t use sustainable materials for their rockets” and told Thunberg to speak up for its victims. The Israeli education ministry said it would strike any reference to the Swedish climate activist from its curriculum.

In Germany, politicians and pundits across the political spectrum demanded that the national branch of Fridays for Future, the student protest movement that Thunberg started in 2018, distance itself from her views. The group put out a statement underlining its support for Israel’s right to exist and, in the weeks that followed, explicitly distanced itself from social media posts made by the international group. Germany’s leading news magazine Der Spiegel ran a lengthy article with personal comments on Thunberg’s childhood character and appearance under the headline: “Has Greta Thunberg betrayed the climate movement?”

The violence in Israel and Gaza since October 7 has become an unexpected flashpoint for climate activists in rich countries. As world leaders meet for the Cop28 summit in Dubai, the loose collection of movements, many of which have built their support around inclusivity and global justice, are divided on whether or how to take a stand on the conflict.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

New Mexico will invest $500 million into purchasing water from controversial sources, including treated oilfield wastewater, as a means to bolster the state’s water portfolio. The purchases are the latest in a long-running series of deals dipping into untapped waters to shore up dwindling supplies as climate change and decades of overconsumption drive aridification of the Southwest. 

The water would come from two sources: brackish saltwater, from aquifers deep underground, and produced water—wastewater from oil and gas wells. Neither source, but particularly the latter, is immediately fit for most consumptive purposes. But as traditional water supplies like rivers and groundwater aquifers are depleted in the Southwest, local and state governments are increasingly investing in new water sources to keep up economic and population growth, despite skepticism from environmentalists and water experts. 

“In arid states like ours, every drop counts. A warming climate throws that fact into sharper relief every day,” said Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham in a press release Tuesday. “This is innovation in action: We’re leveraging the private sector to strengthen our climate resiliency and protect our precious freshwater resources.”

Critics are calling the plan a handout for the fossil fuel industry that will only incentivize further drilling for oil and gas in New Mexico, where the produced water comes from, driving increased emissions of greenhouse gases to further warm the climate and dry out the region. 

On Friday, a federal judge in San Diego approved a settlement that prohibits the separation of migrant families for crossing the border illegally. The settlement was the result of a 2018 lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union to block the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, which separated more than 5,000 children from their parents, with no plan to reunite them.

“It does represent, in my view, one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country,” said Judge Dana M. Sabraw, a George W. Bush appointee, before approving the settlement. Some families were separated for months or years. Sixty-eight children who were separated from their parents under the policy have yet to be located, according to the plaintiffs’ lawyers. 

Under the settlement, illegally crossing the border will not be grounds for family separation for the next eight years—a move that would block Trump from resurrecting the policy if he’s reelected. Children may be separated from their families under limited circumstances, including when the adult poses a threat to the child or to national security. The settlement also makes available certain kinds of aid to families who were separated under the policy. They may apply for work permits and humanitarian protection, as well as assistance with housing, medical care, and counseling. Those who were deported under the policy may apply to come back and their immigration records will be cleared.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has said the settlement reflects efforts to address “the prior Administration’s cruel and inhumane policy, and our steadfast adherence to our nation’s most dearly held values.”

The Trump administration eventually halted the separations after the policy sparked international outcry, but the former president defended the policy as recently as last month. “It stopped people from coming by the hundreds of thousands,” he told Univision. “When you hear that you’re going to be separated from your family, you don’t come.” 

“I know you don’t like to admit it,” New York Mayor Eric Adams told reporters last month. “But I know you get on your knees and pray every night, ‘Thank God Eric is the mayor of our city.'” 

Chuckling with smug self-satisfaction, Adams delivered these remarks roughly two weeks before federal authorities raided the home of his chief fundraiser in an explosive investigation into whether his mayoral campaign accepted illegal donations from Turkey. The probe—which has since expanded to include the seizure of Adams’ personal phones—and mounting reports revealing Adams’ intensive ties and travel to Turkey, comes as the mayor proposes billions in cuts to city programs. Those cuts include slashing the NYPD, food and housing services, the sanitation department, library hours, and a litany of major cultural institutions. 

It’s against this gloomy backdrop that Adams’ standing with New Yorkers—or from his perspective, the supplicants who thank God every day for delivering him to Gracie Mansion—has nose-dived, according to a new Marist poll. With only 37 percent approving of his job performance, a staggering 72 percent of those polled believe Adams’ mayoral campaign is guilty of wrongdoing in its dealings with Turkey; New Yorkers appear split on whether such malfeasance was illegal or merely unethical. 

Perhaps the most prominent person watching this flood of bad news for the embattled mayor? Andrew Cuomo. The former New York governor, who resigned in 2021 over sexual harassment allegations, is reportedly considering a run to replace Adams in 2025 should a federal investigation effectively irreparably damage his political career. All of which is certain to put the ongoing effort among progressives to identify a formidable challenger into overdrive, should New Yorkers not have an appetite to watch a tortured battle between two ignominious men. 

As for the ongoing FBI investigation, when asked on Tuesday whether he’d be willing to disclose details of his personal trips to Turkey, Adams offered a one-word reply: “Maybe.”

Hamas and Israel will free hostages and prisoners in a deal brokered by American, Qatari, and Egyptian officials that will include a four-day ceasefire to allow more humanitarian aid to reach Gaza, officials announced late Tuesday. 

The negotiations come after six weeks of brutal fighting that has killed more than 11,000 Palestinians—more than half of whom were women and children—and 1,200 Israelis, according to the latest numbers published by the Associated Press.

Here’s what to know about the agreement: 

What are the details of the release of the hostages and prisoners? 

According to Qatar’s government, 50 women and children held hostage by Hamas in the Gaza Strip will be released. Those hostages are part of a group of 240 people kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7. The freed hostages will likely include at least three Americans—two women and a child—National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on the “TODAY” show Wednesday. Israel has also agreed to extend the ceasefire for 24 hours for every additional 10 hostages released, Sullivan confirmed. 

Henry Ford may be known for revolutionizing the automobile industry, but there’s another thing he mass produced: antisemitism.

That’s one thing my colleague Dan Schulman explains in his new book, The Money Kings: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America. The book tells the Gilded Age saga of a collection of German-Jewish financial dynasties—including the families who founded Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers—who profoundly influenced the 20th century. At the heart of the story is Jacob Schiff, a renowned financier and philanthropist who rivaled J.P. Morgan as the leading investment banker of that era. Though Schiff is not well remembered today, his legacy can be found in many aspects of modern life, including in the thriving Jewish community that his philanthropy helped to nurture.

There was also a tragic aspect of the story of Schiff and his allies, who would become leading characters in antisemitic conspiracy theories that persist to this day.

I recently got to chat with Schulman about some of the ways Schiff’s legacy persists today, and he filled me in on something that I found particularly interesting: Henry Ford’s obsession with German-Jewish bankers, which contributed to the automaker’s methodical, years-long dissemination of antisemitic propaganda via his weekly newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. Over seven years, “this paper relentlessly attacked Jews—it blamed Jews not only for wars and financial panics but things like wrecking American baseball,” Schulman notes. Schiff and his partners in the investment bank of Kuhn Loeb were frequent targets.

Now, here’s where things take a turn. The Dearborn Independent collected its anti-Jewish writings into four volumes titled The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. Millions of copies were published throughout the world, including in Germany. And when a New York Times reporter visited an up-and-coming politician named Adolf Hitler in 1922, he noticed a portrait of Ford on the wall of Hitler’s office and a stack of copies of The International Jew. “Hitler and the Nazis were distributing millions of copies,” Schulman tells me. “In a very real way, Henry Ford was a Nazi muse.” It’s through the Indepedent‘s attacks on Schiff and other Jews that Ford not only helped to plant the seeds of modern antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish power but also influenced Germany’s genocidal leader. With antisemitism once again surging, it’s more important than ever to understand the origins and history of this hatred and bigotry.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Elon Musk was once lauded as a sort of green Tony Stark—the genius inventor who leads a double life as superhero Iron Man—for single-handedly tackling the climate crisis one Tesla at a time, helping to forge a clean energy future and pushing for new taxes to drive down fossil fuel use.

But the climate credentials of the world’s richest person have become clouded by his embrace of rightwing politicians, some of whom dismiss global heating, as well as by his management of X, formerly known as Twitter, during which many climate scientists have fled the platform amid a proliferation of misinformation about the climate crisis.

Those contradictions run deeply through his work and life. The man who sometimes seems to think of himself as a spartan-living, green thinker is actually one of the elite 1 percent of the world’s population who, according to a new Oxfam report, produce as much carbon pollution as the poorest two-thirds of humanity, comprising 5 billion people. Where does the reality lie?

In 2020, Musk vowed to get rid of “almost all physical possessions” and he has since jettisoned a number of mansions, opting instead to occasionally sleep on the couch of friends’ homes and, more recently, to move into a $50,000 modular home in Boca Chica, Texas, near the testing and development site of SpaceX, his space tourism venture. And unlike many billionaires, Musk does not own a superyacht, which tend to be highly polluting.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In the beginning, parking lots were created to curb chaos on the road. But climate change has turned that dynamic on its head.

Since the 1920s a little-known policy called parking minimums has shaped a large facet of American life. In major cities, this meant that any type of building—apartments, banks, or shopping malls—needed to reserve a certain amount of parking spaces to accommodate anyone who might visit. 

But transportation makes up almost one-third of carbon emissions in the US and cars represent a significant portion of those emissions. As the country attempts to aggressively cut carbon emissions, reducing dependence on fossil fuels will also mean rethinking what transportation and public space look like, especially in cities.

Earlier this month, the city of Austin, Texas, became the latest community to eliminate parking minimums and is now the largest city in the US to do so. “If we want half of all trips to be in something other than a car, then we can’t, as a city, in my opinion, mandate that every home or business have at least one parking space for each resident or customer,” said Zohaib Qadri, the Austin city council member who introduced the measure.

After one year, with more than 2,500 lawsuits filed, New York’s Adult Survivors Act expired Friday. The act lifted the statute of limitations for civil claims by adult sexual assault survivors, providing New Yorkers a one-year “lookback window” to sue their offenders or the institutions that enabled them.

For the last year, survivors’ high-profile cases against powerful individuals have made national headlines, sometimes decades after they were assaulted. In May, a federal jury found Donald Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation in a case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll under the act. The rapper Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs has been sued three times under the act. Cases have also been brought against performers Russell Brand, Bill Cosby, and Jamie Foxx. 

But, of course, not every case was brought against a famous person—and many reveal the complicity of powerful institutions in New York state. As the act was set to expire, Anna Kull, a partner at trial law firm Levy Konigsberg LLP, told the Financial Times that of the nearly 630 cases she filed, 600 were “cases filed on behalf of formerly incarcerated women who were sexually abused by correctional officers.” The Survivors Law Project, a collaboration between lawyers Carrie Goldberg and Susan Crumiller, filed suit against the New York Police Department under the act, alleging  “a pervasive and long-standing custom and practice of transferring and/or demoting female police officers in retaliation for making complaints of sexual harassment.”

The Survivors Law Project also worked with Maggie Cruz to bring a suit on behalf of her mother, a developmentally disabled woman who was raped and impregnated in 1985. Through a DNA test, Cruz identified her father as a caretaker who worked at the facility where her mother had lived. “My mother has had a hard life,” said Cruz in a statement. “I hope this lawsuit will help her get the care that she deserves after [the New York State Office for People With Developmental Disabilities] failed to protect her from her attacker 37 years ago.”

Evelyn Yang, the wife of former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, used her platform to help pass the act, inspired by her own experience being sexually assaulted by her OB-GYN while pregnant with her first child. Earlier this year, she spoke to my colleague Maggie Duffy about her experience:

Retail workers are walking out during  the busiest shopping day of the year, Black Friday, leveraging a weekend of huge profits for retailers to demand better pay and working conditions. 

Amazon workers in more than 30 countries are striking this weekend as part of the worldwide “Make Amazon Pay” campaign, protesting the retailer’s labor practices, low wages, and high emissions. The strike would amount to “the largest day of industrial disruption in Amazon’s thirty-year history,” according to Amanda Gering, an organizer with the UK’s GMB union, which began strikes at Amazon earlier this month. This Black Friday marked the fourth year globally that Amazon workers have planned strikes for this shopping weekend—an effort that began during Covid, when Amazon made record profits as workers struggled and, in some cases, died.

In Washington, about four hundred Macy’s employees from three different stores went on strike, beginning their picket at 3:00 AM on Black Friday. Their union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, says that Macy’s isn’t doing enough to address safety threats like violent shoppers and shoplifting, and that pay is not keeping up with the cost of living. “Workers don’t feel safe in our store, and now they are scared of retaliation so they’ve stopped calling for help when they see a threat,” explained sales associate Liisa Luick in a release from UFCW 3000. Azia Domingo, who has worked for Macy’s for 21 years, said, “Macy’s is making billions of dollars and paying their CEO $11 million a year, but most of us workers are struggling to make ends meet…We shouldn’t have to question whether we can afford to have health insurance and go to the doctor.”

These Black Friday strikes cap off a historic year of labor action. In September, the United Auto Workers launched a historic strike at the country’s three largest automakers. (Mother Jones’ rank-and-file staff, including the author of this post, are represented by UAW Local 2103.)  In October, the largest health care strike in US history took place when 75,ooo Kaiser Permanente workers across five states and Washington, DC, walked out. Hollywood actors and writers spent almost half the year away from sets and writer’s rooms, demanding better pay and protections around the use of artificial intelligence. 

“Workers know that it doesn’t matter what country you’re in or what your job title is,” said General Secretary Cristy Hoffman of UNI, an international union federation which has workers taking part in this weekend’s Amazon strike.  “We are all united in the fight for higher wages, an end to unreasonable quotas, and a voice on the job.”