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–A Texas law banning most abortions in the state took effect at midnight, but the Supreme Court has yet to act on an emergency appeal to put the law on hold. If allowed to remain in force, the law would be the most dramatic restriction on abortion rights in the United States since the high court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion across the country in 1973. The Texas law, signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in May, would prohibit abortions once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, usually around six weeks and before most women even know they’re pregnant. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Abortion providers who are asking the Supreme Court to step in said the law would rule out 85% of abortions in Texas and force many clinics to close. Planned Parenthood is among the abortion providers that have stopped scheduling abortions beyond six weeks from conception. At least 12 other states have enacted bans on abortion early in pregnancy, but all have been blocked f...

(NEW ORLEANS) — Hundreds of thousands of Louisianans sweltered in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida on Tuesday with no electricity, no tap water, precious little gasoline and no clear idea of when things might improve. Long lines that wrapped around the block formed at the few gas stations that had fuel and generator power to pump it. People cleared rotting food out of refrigerators. Neighbors shared generators and borrowed buckets of swimming pool water to bathe or to flush toilets. “We have a lot of work ahead of us and no one is under the illusion that this is going to be a short process,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said as the cleanup and rebuilding began across the soggy region in the oppressive late-summer heat. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] New Orleans officials announced seven places around the city where people could get a meal and sit in air conditioning. The city was also using 70 transit buses as cooling sites and will have drive-thru food, water and ice distributi...

Soon after the last U.S. plane departed Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport in the prep-dawn hours of Aug. 31, marking the end of America’s longest war, a Taliban spokesman posted a video message hailing “the result of 20 years of our historic sacrifices.” “We left a historic chapter behind,” said Mohammed Naeem, according to a translation by CBS News. “The coming chapter is important.” While U.S. officials broadcast the immediate security threats to efforts to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies in the chaotic final days of the war, they have been tight-lipped about what dangers may lie ahead. President Joe Biden defended his decision to pull U.S. troops from the conflict in a defiant address to the nation on Tuesday, noting that the terrorist threat to the U.S. has “metastasized across the world well beyond Afghanistan.” But the violent and harrowing withdrawal was a gift to terrorist groups looking to regroup there, experts say. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”tru...

Sequential Brands Group Inc., the parent company of brands including the Jessica Simpson fashion collection and Joe’s Jeans, filed for bankruptcy protection after the apparel industry was upended by changing consumer habits and the coronavirus pandemic. The owner and licensor of brands such as Gaiam yoga filed its Chapter 11 petition in Wilmington, Delaware with plans to hold an auction as part of a deal with so-called Term B lenders. Sequential listed debts of $435 million and assets of $443 million in court papers. The company said it has arranged a $150 million loan to help fund its reorganization. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] That loan and the rules for the proposed auction must be approved by the judge overseeing the case. Sequential shares plunged as much as 62% to $4.59 after the filing, spurring a trading halt. Retailers across the country have struggled with plunging revenues as Covid-19 precautions led to temporary shutdowns of physical stores and kept consu...

America’s longest war may have ended, but the accountability battles for President Joe Biden’s Administration are just beginning. Questions about the Biden Administration’s chaotic exit from Afghanistan —which resulted in a gruesome terror attack that left 13 U.S. service members dead—are setting up the first big congressional oversight probe of the current White House. The Biden Administration had been fielding questions from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle about the Afghanistan withdrawal since the August 31 deadline was set back in April. But the requests for documents and testimony ratcheted up after the Taliban took control of Kabul on August 14, and intensified further after the deadly suicide bombing at the Hamid Karzai airport on August 26. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The push for accountability is coming from both political parties, but differences in approach between Democrats and Republicans are already setting the stage for a pitched partisan battle...

“The baby boomers’ turn is over,” said Marine Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller in a video this past Friday. “I demand accountability, at all levels. If we don’t get it, I’m bringing it.” His post, which quickly went viral, was in response to the previous day’s suicide bombing at Kabul International Airport , which killed 13 U.S. service members and over 150 Afghans. In his nearly five-minute-long post, Scheller laments the Biden Administration’s handling of our withdrawal from Afghanistan and calls out senior military leaders, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, Commandant of the Marine Corps General David Berger, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. “People are upset because their senior leaders let them down, and none of them are raising their hands and accepting accountability or saying, ‘We messed this up.’” But Scheller’s remarks go one step further than a simple demand for accountability. He goes onto quote Thomas Jefferson who said...

More than a million people across Louisiana and Mississippi, including much of New Orleans, remained without power on Tuesday morning after Hurricane Ida tore across the coastal states on Sunday into Monday. By Monday afternoon, it was clear that New Orleans’ levees would hold, sparing the city the worst of the devastating flooding experienced when Hurricane Katrina hit exactly 16 years ago. But the damage from the Category 4 Hurricane Ida—one of the most powerful storms to ever hit the region—has been extensive. At least four people have died and ten people have been injured by the storm; on Monday, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said the death toll could grow “considerably.” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Emergency response teams have fanned out across coastal communities suffering from the dangerous storm surge and subsequent flooding, rescuing hundreds of people. Thousands more remained in shelters, and in addition to the widespread power outages, more than 300,000 ...

The latest installment of Ryan Murphy ’s FX anthology American Crime Story is not exactly well timed. Impeachment , which revisits the investigation that threatened to end Bill Clinton’s presidency, was originally intended for release before the 2020 election. Instead, it premieres on Sept. 7—months after the twice-impeached Donald Trump left office, taking the immediacy of the title with him. The season is based on a nonfiction book whose author recently faced his own extremely public sex scandal . And it follows years’ worth of high-profile reconsiderations of the Clinton impeachment, from Monica Lewinsky ’s reclamation of her good name in a 2014 Vanity Fair essay to A&E docuseries The Clinton Affair and a buzzy season of the podcast Slow Burn , both tied to the 20th anniversary of the story in 2018. There may always be an appetite for content around this salacious tale of sex, politics and media, but what is there to say about it that hasn’t been said before? [tim...

Rising extreme heat will make it increasingly hard for workers to do their jobs, shaving hundreds of billions of dollars off the U.S. economy each year. That’s according to a report published Tuesday by the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, a Washington D.C.-based think tank focused on climate adaptation. It’s a stark warning about the costs of failing to act on climate change. Productivity losses due to heat currently cost the U.S. an estimated $100 billion a year, the report claims. As days of extreme heat become more frequent in the years ahead, that figure is projected to double to $200 billion by 2030—around 0.5% of GDP. By 2050, annual losses are projected to hit $500 billion, around 1% of GDP. These national losses are expected to come primarily from the southeast and midwest. But the effects will be felt across most of the country, with annual losses of at least 0.5% of economic activity projected for 62% of U.S. counties. [t...

Whether you know it as vacation season, hurricane season or wildfire season, August is a time when our natural surroundings can take on outsize importance in our daily lives. The same is true of this month’s best new TV shows, each of which conjures a vivid sense of place, from the brick edifices and manicured lawns of East Coast academia to the flat expanses of an Oklahoma reservation to desolate, gray beaches in France’s Nantes region. There are also two very different takes on a city that contains multitudes: New York. For more suggestions, here’s some of my favorite TV from July , June and the first half of 2021 . [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The Chair (Netflix)   N etflix’s perceptive black comedy The Chair opens at what should be the proudest moment of Professor Ji-Yoon Kim’s career. She has just been named the first-ever female Chair of the English Department at venerable (and fictional) Pembroke University, where she’s also one of very few nonwhite fa...