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“The 355” delivers all the glammed-up action you want from a badass women spy flick

The fleet girls-with-guns flick, “The 355,” takes its title from the code name given to a woman who spied for George Washington. This globe-hopping action film, directed by Simon Kinberg (“X-Men: Dark Phoenix“), who cowrote it with Theresa Rebeck, features a handful of female spies, along with numerous betrayals, double crosses, and reversals of fortune, along with several thrilling action set pieces. It is pure catnip for fans of the genre of beautiful women fighting off the bad guys with aplomb — see “Ocean’s Eight,” “Charlie’s Angels,” and any of the many Charlize Theron action films, e.g., “Atomic Blonde,” or “The Old Guard.”

The film’s story is ridiculously simple. A data key that can access anything on the internet — it can cause planes to crash, or say, take out the entire power grid of Bogotá — ends up in the hands of Luis Rojas (Édgar Ramirez). He may be procuring it for Elijah Clarke (Jason Flemyng), a financier of international terror, who has nefarious plans. However, CIA operatives Mason “Mace” Browne (Jessica Chastain) and Nick (Sebastian Stan) meet Luis in Paris, where they hope to recover the dangerous device. Alas, things go sideways when German operative Marie Schmidt (Diane Kruger) intercepts and the first of many exciting chase scenes with gunplay begins. 

Without revealing what transpires, Mace is off to England to reconnect with Khadijah (Lupita Nyong’o), a cyber intelligence agent and former MI6 operative who has left the field. Of course, Mace will get Khadijah to leave her dreamy boyfriend Abdel (Raphael Acloque) and help her. And by the end of the next action sequence, the two women meet up with Marie and Graciela (Penélope Cruz), a psychologist. They eventually join forces, rather than keep botching each other’s ops. It is then off to Marrakesh for another action/chase/fight scene. Step and repeat. 

RELATED: “The Old Guard”: Gina Prince-Bythewood on superhero diversity, that ending and sequel possibilities

“The 355” is mindless fun as these take-no-prisoners women act tough and fight hard. An amusing scene has the teammates bonding over beers and swapping stories about their “first kill” while Graciela, a naïve stranger to all of this derring-do, looks on in amazement. 

The stunts are often impressive. Mace shoots a motorcycle causing the driver to tumble down the stairs of the Metro in Paris, or jumps between shipping containers, in hot pursuit of the device. Chastain is a gutsy protagonist, and her moxie is appealing, even if her dialogue is crummy. Kruger also proves to be a force to be reckoned with, and her character gets a backstory involving her father, who was also a spy. (Marion Cotillard was originally slated for Marie when the film was announced at Cannes back in 2018). But the real secret weapon here is Lupita Nyong’o’s Khadijah, who is smart, clever, and often dryly amusing. The sight of Nyong’o blasting away everyone in her path in one scene is highly enjoyable. (The film, which is rated PG-13, is mostly bloodless.)

Around the midway point, the data key ends up in an auction in Shanghai, where Lin Mi Sheng (Fan Bingbing) enters the picture. Her role — which includes making the film appeal to the Chinese market (though the actress was detained for tax evasion which jeopardized her participation) — becomes clear as the auction scene plays out. Apparently, Elijah Clarke has sent a proxy to do his bidding for the device using the dark web. 

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The auction sequence allows the women to get dressed up in fabulous clothes and elegant jewelry, which double as communication devices, natch. And “The 355” requires the spies to use their feminine wiles on unsuspecting men to procure information. While it is improbable that Penélope Cruz does not know how to flirt, as Graciela claims, it is delicious when she does. (See her work that cocktail straw). Of course, things do not go as planned, but the entertainment value here is watching the characters navigate each obstacle they encounter.

 “The 355” is not a deep or political film, but it does make the always salient point about how women do the work and men get the recognition. Moreover, this team of female spies “put themselves in danger so others are not,” which is laudable. And while Mace and Marie dabble in the macho game of one-upmanship, these frenemies do respect each other. (In contrast, Khadijah really seems to prefer being out of the spy game, and Graciela is only dipping her toe into espionage out of circumstance.) The girl power messages are welcome even if they are clunky. Surely, it comes as no surprise that the men are no match for them. 

As the film builds to its literally explosive finale, there are not unexpected plot twists, and some predictable moments — especially in the coda. But “The 355” leaves itself open for a sequel for these women to come back and kick ass again.

“The 355” is in theaters Jan. 7. Watch a trailer for it below, via YouTube.

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Democrats quietly consider using 14th Amendment to prevent Trump from running for office in 2024

Congressional Democrats are eyeing a little-known constitutional mechanism to prevent former President Donald Trump from running for office again, citing his responsibility for the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and subsequent attacks on American democracy.

According to a new report in The Hill, at least a dozen Democratic lawmakers have been quietly speaking, both publicly and privately, about whether or not it would be possible to use Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to permanently ban Trump — or anyone else who participated in the planning or execution of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack — from seeking elected office in the future. The post-Civil War clause bars anyone who has engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” against the United States from seeking public office, and reads:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

The theory gained credence in the days following the Capitol riot, but quickly fell by the wayside with the hope that Trump would eventually accept his election loss and disavow the violence of Jan. 6. With the one-year anniversary of the attacks now passed, and Trump’s false claims of a “stolen” election still at a fever pitch, it appears the idea is once again being discussed on Capitol Hill.

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“If anything, the idea has waxed and waned,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional expert at Harvard Law School who has spoken previously about the 14th Amendment. “I hear it being raised with considerable frequency these days both by media commentators and by members of Congress and their staffs, some of whom have sought my advice on how to implement Section 3.” 

He shared with The Hill the names of several lawmakers who have reached out in recent weeks for counsel on gaming out exactly how such a controversial tactic might be used. Those include Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the House select committee investigating Jan. 6; Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee; and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., who told the outlet: “I continue to explore all legal paths to ensure that the people who tried to subvert our democracy are not in charge of it.”

Neither of the other two Democrats spoke with The Hill about their inquiries, though Raskin gave an interview last February in which he expressed his support for the premise. 

RELATED: Laurence Tribe: If Garland doesn’t prosecute Trump, the rule of law is “out the window”

“The point is that the constitutional purpose is clear, to keep people exactly like Donald Trump and other traitors to the union from holding public office,” he told ABC News, adding that he planned to conduct “more research” on the matter before pursuing it.

It’s unclear exactly how the implementation of such a provision might work — it would likely be the first time in well over a century that Section 3 has been discussed in Congress, after the body waived enforcement of the clause for Confederate officials and some Ku Klux Klan members as a way to promote national unity during the Reconstruction era.

Constitutional scholars are split over how execution of the rule would work, with one group arguing that a simple majority vote in both chambers of Congress that found Trump guilty of fomenting the insurrection would be enough to bar him from holding future public office. 

Others, including Tribe, say that a “neutral” fact-finding body would have to determine whether Trump officially engaged in an “insurrection”  or “rebellion” — a task for either a Congressional panel or federal court.

RELATED: How Christian nationalism drove the insurrection: A religious history of Jan. 6

A separate stand-alone law proposed last year by Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., would give the U.S. Attorney General the power to argue that same case in front of a three-judge panel, though the bill itself has received little support thus far.

Liberal elections groups, such as “Free Speech For People,” have even been making the case that state-level election officials could use Section 3 on a state-by-state basis to take Trump’s name off their ballots if he were to run again in 2024.

All of these implementations would, however, face a major hurdle at the U.S. Supreme Court, which maintains a conservative majority after Trump appointed three justices to the bench during his four years in office.

Trump’s former spokesperson reveals that he was “gleefully” rewinding Capitol riot footage on Jan. 6

​Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said on Thursday that Donald Trump watched the Capitol riot unfold “gleefully” on January 6, proudly rewinding footage of the insurrection on his television. 

“All I know about that day was that he was in the dining room, gleefully watching on his TV as he often did, ‘look at all of the people fighting for me,’ hitting rewind, watching it again — that’s what I know,” Grisham told CNN’s “New Day.”

Her remarks, made on the anniversary of the riot, align with past reports about Trump apparently glued to the TV screen as the riot played out. Last year, Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig said in a CNN interview that the president was in the dining room of the Oval Office” during the insurrection, “watching it and almost giddy.”

But Trump’s glee was reportedly not unanimous amongst his inner circle, according to recent findings by the House committee charged with investigating the insurrection. Over the past several weeks, the panel unearthed a trove of text messages from numerous Trump allies – including Fox News hosts and members of his own family – pleading with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to have the president call off the insurgency. 

“He’s got to condemn this shit ASAP. The Capitol Police tweet is not enough,” Trump’s son, Don Jr., texted Meadows at the time. ​​”We need an Oval Office address. He has to leave now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand.”

REVEALED: Fox News hosts, Donald Trump Jr. bombarded Mark Meadows during Capitol riot

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On Wednesday, Grisham, who resigned immediately after the riot, met with the January 6 panel to discuss Trump’s complicity in the riot, telling reporters that she “fully cooperated” with the panel’s questioning. The meeting was in large part set up by select committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who reportedly privately called Grisham and encouraged her to meet with the committee, according to CNN. Grisham said that the committee was especially interested in the White House’s internal activities during the insurrection.

On Thursday, Grisham said that more than a dozen ex-Trump confidantes are planning to stage an intervention with the former president.

“Next week, a group of former Trump staff are going to come together, administration officials are going to come together and we’re going to talk about how we can formally do some things to try and stop him and also, the extremism, that that kind of violence, rhetoric that has been talked about and continues to divide our country,” Grisham told CNN’s “New Day.”

Grisham said that “about fifteen” of her former colleagues are involved in the scheme, some of whom have already had “informal chats” about it, according to CNN. Among them include White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci; Miles Taylor, a former top DHS official; and Olivia Troye, an ex-adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence.

RELATED: Trump abruptly cancels planned Jan. 6th anniversary speech, throws temper tantrum

Vaccines for the pregnant are no biggie: COVID shot doesn’t cause premature births, study finds

When the COVID-19 vaccines were first announced, some experts were concerned because the vaccine had not been tested on pregnant women. Besides the fear of unforeseen complications, the revelation underscored how patriarchal assumptions still define our health care industry.

As it turns out, the specific concerns about these particular vaccines appear to have been unfounded. A new study finds that pregnant persons do not need worry about the COVID-19 vaccine disrupting your pregnancy. In contrast, COVID-19 infection during pregnancy appears to be much, much more dangerous.

That was the conclusion reached by scientists in a report co-led by researchers from Yale University, which was published earlier this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In light of ongoing concerns about possible COVID-19 vaccine side effects, the researchers analyzed more than 40,000 pregnant individuals and found that there was no evidence of the vaccine being in any way harmful to a pregnancy.

By contrast, they cited existing data which proves that “pregnant women with COVID-19 are at increased risk for severe illness and adverse birth outcomes,” even though there remains significant vaccinate hesitancy due to concerns about issues during pregnancy.

The bottom line: A pregnant woman — like the rest of the population — puts herself and her unborn child at far, far more risk by not getting a COVID-19 vaccine than by getting one.

That alone is not new information. Previous studies have affirmed the dangers of being pregnant and unvaccinated during the pandemic. After comparing childbirth outcomes for more than 869,000 women between March 1, 2020 and February 28, 2021 — based on whether or not they had developed COVID-19 — researchers found that infected women were more likely to have premature births, require intubation and be admitted into an intensive care unit. They were also more likely to die during their childbirth experience: 0.1 percent of mothers who were infected died in the hospital, compared to 0.01 percent of mothers who were not infected.

In this latest study, researchers reviewed the medical information from the 40,000 patients, taking into account their varying levels of vaccination. Scientists found no evidence of any connection between whether someone had taken a vaccine and whether their baby had been born prematurely or been too small for its gestational age.

RELATED: “Irregular menstrual cycle” isn’t listed as a COVID-19 vaccine side effect — but many report it

“CDC recommends COVID-19 vaccination for women who are pregnant, recently pregnant, who are trying to become pregnant now, or who might become pregnant in the future,” the agency concluded.

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Like all vaccines, COVID-19 vaccines can cause side effects. Previously, there have been reports of people who menstruated, or used to menstruate, experiencing unexpected changes to their cycles after being given their shots. Some trans people who were on gender-affirming hormones, those using long-acting reversible contraception, or who were postmenopausal reported bleeding after having not had that happen in a while. Among “people who expected to menstruate,” the reports ranged from everything being normal to periods that were absent and late or heavy and early.

One of the challenges of vaccine testing is that clinical trials often do not adequately address potential women’s health concerns, as Salon previously reported.

“Anytime you’re including women in a clinical trial or a study design, it needs to be a part of the thinking,” Kathryn Schubert, President and CEO of the Society for Women’s Health Research, told Salon previously.” Standard questions are more along the lines of, ‘If you’re a person of reproductive age, are you on birth control?’ or ‘Could you be pregnant?'”

Because vaccines produce temporary inflammatory effects in the cells near the injection to induce an immune response, side effects typically include redness and tenderness in that area after you are given a shot. You can also experience soreness and stiffness around your muscles, as well as discomfort and swelling around the nearby lymph nodes. Sometimes a patient will even experience a fever as their body reacts to the shot. However, the most serious side effects — such as an allergic reaction or Guillain-Barré Syndrome, nerve damage due to inflammation — are much more rare.

“Getting vaccinated against COVID-19 is important for preventing severe illness in pregnant people,” Heather Lipkind, associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences at the Yale School of Medicine and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “With the increasing rates of COVID-19 in our community we are encouraging pregnant people to get vaccinated.”

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Ahmaud Arbery killers sentenced to life in prison

The three white men who chased and killed Georgia jogger Ahmaud Arbery last year were sentenced to life in prison Friday, reports said. 

In handing down the sentence, Superior Court Judge Timothy Walmsley denied the father-son pair of Greg and Travis McMichael any chance of parole — with the third man, William Bryan, forced to serve at least 30 years before earning a chance at release, according to the Associated Press. They were convicted of the crimes last month. 

In his statement, Walmsley denounced the brand of vigilante justice handed down by the three men, who maintained during the case that they suspected Arbery of burglarizing the neighborhood — though they had no positive proof of the crimes. 

“Ahmaud Arbery was hunted down and shot, and he was killed because individuals here in the courtroom took the law into their own hands,” the judge said, pausing at one point for a moment of silence. 

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“When I thought about this, I thought from a lot of different angles. I kept coming back to the terror that must have been in the mind of the young man,” he added.

Both Bryan and the McMichaels chased Arbery around the Brunswick, Georgia, neighborhood of Satilla Shores while Arbery was out for a jog, brandishing a shotgun that Travis McMichael eventually used to shoot Arbery during a scuffle. 

During the trial, one of McMichael’s attorneys acknowledged the decision to chase and confront Arbery was “reckless” and “thoughtless.” 

Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, said that the trial was especially hard to sit through as the trio’s lawyers attempted to make the argument that it was ultimately her son’s poor choices that led to his death.

RELATED: The NRA gave us Kyle Rittenhouse and Travis McMichael

“This wasn’t a case of mistaken identity or mistaken fact. They chose to target my son because they didn’t want him in their community. They chose to treat him differently than other people who frequently visited their community,” Wanda Cooper-Jones said. “And when they couldn’t sufficiently scare or intimidate him, they killed him.”

The three men also face a federal hate crimes trial set to begin next month — with jury selection slated for Feb. 7.

Sidney Poitier, considered Hollywood’s first Black matinee idol, has died at 94

Sidney Poitier has died at the age of 94, according to Eugene Torchon-Newry, acting director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Bahamas. Poitier was raised in the Bahamas, after being born in Miami in 1927.

The actor, director, and activist was the first Black actor to be nominated for any leading role Academy Award, for 1958’s “The Defiant Ones,” and the first Black Actor to win one, a best actor for “Lilies of the Field” in 1963. Many of his most well-known films dealt with racism and were considered ahead of their time, addressing issues that mainstream Hollywood mostly choose to ignore. In his 1967 film “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” he plays the love interest of a white woman (Katharine Houghton) in a positive representation of the interracial relationships that America still refused to acknowledge. Loving v. Virginia, the civil rights case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, was decided only that same year.

Poitier originally declined the role of Porgy, in Samuel Goldwyn’s adaptation of George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” objecting over the stereotypical way Black characters were written in the musical. After Goldwyn allegedly threatened his career, he did the role, skipping the film’s 1959 premiere. He agreed to the movie in large part to get to do “The Defiant Ones,” which dealt with racial politics. 

With his deep, booming voice (he had listened to the radio to lose his West Indian accent) and tall stature, Poitier was known as Hollywood’s first Black matinee idol. His many other films include “To Sir With Love,” where he plays a teacher at a London school, and “In the Heat of the Night,” where his character struggles for acceptance as a detective and must deal with a fellow lawman’s racism. Those two films, along with “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” were some of the top-grossing Hollywood movies of 1967. He also appeared on Broadway in “Lysistrata” and “A Raisin in the Sun,” and directed a Broadway production of “Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights.”

“He was the reason a movie got made: the first solo, above-the-title African American movie star,” Denzel Washington said at the 2002 Academy Awards, where Poitier was presented with an honorary Oscar. Poitier also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 from President Barack Obama.

But, as the New York Times wrote, “Throughout his career, a heavy weight of racial significance bore down on Mr. Poitier and the characters he played. “I felt very much as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made,” he once wrote.

In his 40s, he started directing and producing mostly mainstream films, like the Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder film “Stir Crazy” (1980). He also wrote three critically acclaimed memoirs. Poitier had six daughters, four with his first wife Juanita Marie Hardy, whom he divorced in 1965, and two with his second wife and former co-star Joanna Shimkus, who survives him.

In an 1995 interview with Oprah, Poitier talked about how his childhood in poverty shaped him, and helped him take on and develop the roles that he believed would matter: “I was taught that I had basic rights as a human being. I was taught that I was someone . . .We had no electricity and no running water – still, I was taught that I was someone.”

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“And Just Like That”: How “Sex and the City” sequel broadens the representation of 50+ women on TV

On the eve of release of the “Sex and the City” sequel, “And Just Like That,” I was excited. The show follows Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte as they navigate life at 50 in a world that has changed quite a lot from that in the 2000s.

I really wanted to see how Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte might navigate a different world after nearly 20 years. When it comes to TV narratives about older women, we, the audience, may still have hang-ups about their representation, and what we imagine their lives are supposed to be about. But in recent years those representations have evolved with shows such as “Grace and Frankie” — and now “And Just Like That.” These series give us the humour of “The Golden Girls” but a richer landscape of the interior lives of older women.

The age (and wealth) gap between myself and the characters in “Sex and the City” has not changed with “And Just Like That,” but I feel much closer to their age-related struggles now than I did in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I was pleasantly surprised to see that some of my earlier hopes were realized in the series.

Now there are comments on looks (to dye the grey hair or not to dye?) but they do come in a conversation about how a woman can be taken seriously no matter what she looks like. However, this is not what really gives me hope and joy about watching these seasoned Gen Xers living out loud in their 50s. There is a lot to celebrate — but for me it is Miranda’s story that resonates the most.

https://youtu.be/Cy8Zz7Q56dY

A lawyer at the top of her career with a loving husband and son, Miranda seemingly has the happy ending. But in “And Just Like That” she is setting herself down a new uncertain path. For her, her 50s are a time for rediscovery and learning as she returns to education to retrain as a human rights lawyer. There are also hints that she might start exploring her attraction beyond men. I just earned another university degree to support a change in career — and I, too, started exploring my queerness later in life.

While older women continuing to be sexual beings is not new for TV, a protracted look at how they grapple with emerging or latent queerness is breaking away from the usual tropes and a refreshing change from the focus on heterosexual middle and older age.

Don’t call me mother

Carrie’s childlessness-by-choice also resonates now in a way it did not when I was engaged to a man in the early 2000s, and naively thought having a child was an inevitable part of female adulthood and marriage. Older women are often portrayed as wives and mothers. If they are childless and divorced, their stories can often be tinged with sadness or desperation.

Over the past decade, childlessness among all women has increased for numerous reasons — prioritizing careers or concerns about the state of the future and the environment being just a few. It seems fitting that more stories reflect this increasingly common reality for older women.

Now that I am in my early 40s, “And Just Like That” highlights for me is that awkward fumbling is not just for teenagers. As adults we never stop awkwardly moving through life because it is always changing, and so are the rules.

Getting older with Frankness and Grace

“And Just Like That” still highlights, as “Sex and the City” did before it, that friendships with women are relationships that deserve attention and intention. Similar to when they were younger, maybe, romantic loss presents new opportunities and adventures for older women. Instead of familiar sad depictions of lonely divorcees and widows, older women can form new, non-romantic bonds and explore unchartered areas of their potential.

We see this new hopeful take on romantic ends in the Netflix series, “Grace and Frankie” (2015), which is about two retired women who become unlikely friends after their husbands announce they are in love with each other. Its premiere comes 30 years after NBC’s “The Golden Girls” (1985), which was also about how older women’s lives endure even when their marriages don’t, or their children fly the nest.

In their 70s, Grace and Frankie are living more boldly on TV now than Blanche and the other Golden Girls were in their 50s and 60s. That’s right, the Golden Girls were the same age as the “And Just Like That” characters are now. Take a moment. It threw me, too since they seem so much older. More importantly, as a show that centers the friendship of two septuagenarians, “Grace and Frankie” represents a changing portrayal of women in this age bracket. Whereas many women this age recede into the background in supporting roles, this series shows that older women are not just relevant, but can explore the kaleidoscope of their existence through different eras and different phases.

I had hoped this reboot would be more self-aware around the privileges of their whiteness and class positioning. I also really wanted Carrie and the girls to interact more meaningfully with women of color and younger generations. While it still has some work to do on this front it has fulfilled my hopes for how it represents 40+ women.

Both “Grace and Frankie” and “And Just Like That” remind us that women’s identities are not limited to wives, mothers or romantic interests. So what a time to be alive. To see older female characters portrayed with depth, authenticity, humor and shades of awkwardness in the ways we are now accustomed to seeing female characters in their teens, 20s and 30s. Now, if we could just broaden, with frankness and grace, the focus on older women outside of the white, upper middle-class, heterosexual range, I would be grateful. Please and thank you.

Kadian Pow, Lecturer in Sociology and Black Studies, Birmingham City University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Sayonara, Cyber Ninjas: Dubious “audit” firm shutting down after judge imposes $50,000 daily fine

Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based company hired to conduct a Republican-backed “audit” of the election results in Arizona’s Maricopa County, said Thursday it is shutting down after a judge imposed a $50,000 per day fine for failing to turn over records.

“Cyber Ninjas is shutting down. All employees have been let go,” Rod Thompson, a representative for the company, told NBC News.

Republican lawmakers released the results of the so-called “audit” of Arizona’s most populous county in September, showing that President Joe Biden had defeated former President Donald Trump by 360 more votes than previously reported. Trump supporters instead seized on findings of potential irregularities in the election, but the Republican-led Maricopa County Elections Department on Thursday released a 93-page report debunking the review’s “faulty and inaccurate conclusions.”

Cyber Ninjas has been locked in a legal battle with the Arizona Republic, a newspaper that sued for the release of the company’s records in the audit last summer. A Maricopa County judge on Thursday found the company in contempt of court and ordered it to pay a fine of $50,000 a day fine if fails to turn over the records, according to the Arizona Republic.

Cyber Ninjas’ attorney Jack Wilenchik said in court that the company is insolvent and has not even been able to pay his legal fees. Wilenchik tried to remove himself from the case on that basis, but Judge John Hannah refused and rejected the company’s claims.

“The court is not going to accept the assertion that Cyber Ninjas is an empty shell and that nobody is responsible for seeing that it complies,” Hannah said, adding that the newly-announced shutdown “adds to the body of facts suggesting here that there is an intention to leave the Cyber Ninjas entity as an empty piñata for all of us to swing at.”

Hannah said the company has presented no evidence that it is insolvent and noted that the company received millions of dollars in donations to conduct the review from Trump supporters.

RELATED: A second insurrection: The real mission behind Republicans’ absurd Arizona “audit”

The Republic’s lawyers asked the judge to impose a $1,000 per day fine against the company but Hannah said the number was “grossly insufficient” and ordered the firm to pay 50 times that amount. He said that the sanctions needed to be high enough to get the company to comply, adding that they are “intended to be coercive, but not punitive.” Hannah said he also wanted to “put Cyber Ninjas on notice” that if the company does not comply, he will issue orders directly against the individuals responsible for turning over the records.

“It is lucidly clear on this record that Cyber Ninjas has disregarded that order,” Hannah said. “I don’t think I have to find Cyber Ninjas is not acting in good faith. All I have to do is find they are not complying, and their noncompliance is not based on good faith and reasonable interpretation of the order. I think the variety of creative positions Cyber Ninjas has taken to avoid compliance with this order speaks for itself.”

Hannah repeatedly sparred with Wilenchik during Thursday’s hearing. Wilenchik accused the judge of being biased against him after he refused to allow him to withdraw from the case.

“There’s nobody to pay me. That’s just not the way the world of lawyers works, OK. I need to make a living,” Wilenchik said, before accusing the judge of smiling during his complaints.

“I’m smiling because I’m thinking of the accusations against me that you made in the motion to recuse me for cause that you did not appeal,” Hannah said. “Where you said I’m biased against conservatives and on information and belief a Democrat. I smile every time I think about it because I’m not a Democrat.”

Wilenchik continued to complain about Hannah throughout the hearing, arguing that Hannah’s August ruling did not actually order Cyber Ninjas to turn over the records and therefore the company could not be held in contempt.

“Mr. Wilenchik you’re, you really, you are trolling me, and it’s getting very close to direct contempt,” Hannah shot back.

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Hannah’s ruling came just three days after the Arizona Court of Appeals ordered Cyber Ninjas to pay more than $31,000 in legal fees to the Arizona Republic over its failed appeal of the earlier decision to turn over the records. Wilenchik on Thursday appealed to the Arizona Supreme Court to block Hannah’s order, but the motion was rejected.

Wilenchik also tried to remove himself as the company’s attorney in a different lawsuit brought by the government watchdog group American Oversight against the Arizona Senate and Cyber Ninjas for the company’s records. But Judge Michael Kemp, like Hannah, rejected his request.

“The Court will not consider granting a withdrawal until, at a minimum, the public records have been turned over to the Senate Defendants and CEO Doug Logan has been deposed,” Kemp wrote on Thursday, adding that, “there are no significant legal services necessary for counsel to oversee the transfer of public records to the Senate defendants and be present for the deposition of Doug Logan.”

Maricopa County officials, who are on the hook for nearly $3 million to replace voting machines officials decertified after they were seized by Cyber Ninjas in the “audit,” concluded on Thursday that nearly every claim made by Cyber Ninjas in its “audit” report was “demonstrably false,” misleading or based on “flawed or misstated analysis.”

 “After an in-depth analysis and review of the reports and presentations issued by the Senate’s contractors,” the county’s report said, “we determined that nearly every finding included faulty analysis, inaccurate claims, misleading conclusions, and a lack of understanding of federal and state election laws.”

Read more on the GOP snipe hunt for voter fraud:

I’m not vegan, but I can’t stop making these exceptional plant-based recipes

A couple years ago, I challenged myself to eat entirely plant-based meals for a month. That meant no yogurt, eggs, cheese, gelatin-laced foods — the works. Surely it wouldn’t be that big of an adjustment, I told myself. After all, I’m already a vegetarian, and pasta is generally plant-based, right? (Right!) I would be fine.

And fine I was, of course, but also a lot more thoughtful (and creative!) about my food choices. Where I’d usually throw in a soft-boiled egg or garnish with a few nubs of cheese, I pressed tofu, marinated tempeh, and roasted jackfruit — ahead of time. I carefully read labels, asked questions at restaurants, and went through a lot of nutritional yeast. And I actually didn’t eat that much pasta!

Thanks to a handful of powerful plant-based recipes — including many of the 18 below — I learned ways to make vegan meals flavorful and filling. I’ve gone back to eating cheese and eggs, but a fair few of these remain in my regular rotation because they’re pretty dang delicious.

Best plant-based diet recipes

1. Zucchini Verde Vegan Enchiladas

This is the recipe I could eat all summer (and I plan on it). Warm corn tortillas are filled with sweet, crunchy zucchini and smothered in a zingy salsa verde — not to mention a bunch of sliced avocado and ultra-rich cashew lime cream. (Psst: It’s gluten-free, too!)

2. Sushi Salad

Take hearty, nutty brown rice, top it with a bunch of veg and protein-packed edamame, pour on a highly addictive dressing, and get happy. Feel free to throw on some grilled or roasted tofu, tempeh, or seitan for even more heft.

3. Gingery Noodle Salad

OK, this is technically pasta, but it’s also fresh and gorgeously green and full of staying power that we’re going to count this as salad. Tofu, tempeh, or even a big handful of crushed peanuts wouldn’t feel out of place here.

4. Twice-Baked Potatoes with Creamy Chive Pesto

Cozy, comforting, and craveable — this dish is the plant-based trifecta. Cashews, once again, save the day here (and add protein, to boot), as they’re blitzed up with chives to make a luxurious pesto.

5. Stuffed Zucchini with Freekeh Pilaf and Currants

I can’t tell you how much I adore this dish — with rugged freekeh, toasty pine nuts, and chewy and sweet currants, it’s got basically every flavor and texture imaginable. The best part? It’s all big-batchable and can be made a few days ahead (or par-cooked and frozen!), making it a meal-prepper’s dream.

6. Boiled Potato on Rye Bread (Kartoffelmad)

When I’m at my laziest, this is the dish I turn to: nutty, dense Danish bread covered in an herby vegan remoulade, slices of perfectly boiled potatoes, and lots of alliums and herbs thrown on top. It’s outstanding, fills me up for hours, and couldn’t be simpler to throw together.

7. Spiced Peanut Sweet Potato Salad

Recipe writer and cookbook author Ella Mills (Woodward) writes that this is her favorite recipe in her recently released cookbook: “I’m completely addicted to it. The sweet potatoes are roasted with ginger, cinnamon, and cumin until they’re perfectly tender, then they’re tossed with sesame seeds, dates, parsley, and a smooth peanut butter dressing while still warm. They’re heaven!” Though they’re billed as a side, these sweet potatoes are hearty and satisfying enough to hold their own, especially with a heap of radicchio or leafy greens.

8. Spicy Miso Eggplant and Broccoli Salad

Another gem from Ella, this time with hardy, crunchy broccoli and miso-roasted eggplant. You could eat this with noodles or rice, or you could have a double helping as a main (I certainly would).

9. Indian Peanutty Noodles

Thick, chewy udon make an excellent bed for a creamy peanut chutney and a lot of crunchy veg. A hint of chile and cumin in the sauce gives this dish just the touch of pep it needs.

10. Baked Sweet Potatoes with Spiced Lentil Salad and Lemon Tahini Dressing

Followers of a plant-based lifestyle keep sweet potatoes near and dear — and this sweet potato recipe keeps them exciting. A warm green lentil salad, spiced with harissa and rounded out with tomatoes, gets heaped on some halved roasted sweets and is doused with an incredibly rich and creamy tahini–lemon dressing. This one keeps me full for most of the day.

11. Turmeric-Roasted Cauliflower with Pistachio Gremolata

This cauliflower dish seems uber-fancy for a weeknight, but really only takes about 20 minutes to whip up. Punctuated with sticky-sweet dates, crunchy pomegranate arils, and a nutty, herby pistachio gremolata, all this one-pan wonder needs is a big hunk of warm pita to pick it all up.

12. Crispy Roasted Shallot and Lentil Sheet Pan Mujadara

Another quick and simple sheet-pan supper, this time with spiced rice and lentils! A drizzle of tahini, good olive oil, and a tangle of herbs would be right at home.

13. Marcella Hazan’s White Bean Soup with Garlic and Parsley

This soup is a classic for a reason — it proves that simple is almost always the most satisfying. In this dish, creamy white beans are the real star of the show, as they swirl around with parsley and garlic in broth. Thick grilled bread is listed as “optional” here, but who are we kidding.

14. Vegan Cauliflower Alfredo Bake

Yes, “vegan Alfredo” is totally a thing. Here’s how: blend cauliflower, nondairy milk, garlic, and nutritional yeast into a creamy, tangy sauce that tastes miraculously similar to classic Alfredo sauce. Toss with pasta and breadcrumbs, then bake it until crispy. You will not miss heavy cream.

15. Rutabaga Laksa

This steaming bowl of rich laksa is in fact 100% meat- and dairy-free. With tender roasted rutabaga and crispy roasted shallot petals, not to mention the spicy, coconut milk-based broth and a big scoop of rice noodles, there’s simply no need for anything non-vegan here.

16. Instant Pot Black Bean Soup

It’s a well-established fact that you don’t need meat or dairy to make an excellent soup. But it’s important to point out that beans are a plant-based-eating hero. Make sure to use vegetable broth here, and this Instant Pot bean soup will be an instant classic in any vegan household.

17. Andrea Nguyen’s Vegan “Chicken” Phở

This pho tastes like it was made with chicken; but nope, not even close! The broth features sweet apple, cabbage, and a special trick with salty-cheesy-funky nutritional yeast (you’ll see). The “chicken” pieces floating in the pho are tofu, seasoned with soy sauce and fried until crispy.

18. Bhartha (Spicy Indian Eggplant)

A simple dish of well-seasoned (ginger! curry powder! cumin! turmeric! chili powder!) eggplant tossed with tomatoes and peas over a pile of your favorite grains makes for an excellent plant-based dinner. To — pardon the pun, vegans — beef it up with more protein, toss together a side with chickpeas or tofu (or fold them directly into this dish).

19. Vegan Cauliflower Alfredo

No heavy cream or cheddar cheese here. The plant-based cheese sauce for this vegan alfredo pasta calls for a combination of cauliflower, oat milk, plant-based Parmesan, and nutritional yeast. Oh, and did I mention that it comes together in 10 minutes? Dairy-based mac and cheese could never.

20. Maple-Mustard Tempeh with Black Rice

Tempeh skeptics will easily be won over with this mustard-maple-tamari preparation. The soy-based product easily takes on the sweet-sharp flavors of the sauce.

21. Can’t Believe They’re Vegan Meatballs

Instead of the usual blend of pork, beef, and veal, green lentils serve the role of “meat” in these plant-based meatballs. But don’t worry — you’ll still find the necessary ingredients like dried oregano, fennel seeds, garlic, panko, and nutritional yeast for that cheesy flavor.

22. Plant-Based Italian Sub

Remember those vegan meatballs? You could turn them into a grinder, or you could layer tempeh (again!) with plant-based cheese, sliced pepperoncini, tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, and onions for an Italian sub…or grinder or hero or hoagie, depending on what you call it.

23. Vegan Mashed Potatoes

Just because these potatoes are vegan doesn’t make them bad or bland. In fact, these are better than usual because they call for both a combination of russet and Yukon gold potatoes, plus a duo of vegan butter and rich, fruity olive oil.

24. Pasta with Silkiest Eggplant Sauce

“Let your eggplant go free. To avoid the texture struggles altogether, Lam harnesses eggplant’s affinity for oil and its talent for turning to mush, and makes pasta sauce out of it. You get all of the lovely eggplant flavor and silken texture, with none of the stress,” say our editors.

25. Tomato Soup with a Whole Head of Garlic

Yes, you can make a creamy, silky soup and no, you don’t need to use heavy cream. The secret? A pairing of coconut milk and vegetable stock.

26. Vegan Tofu Wontons in Chile Oil

Wonton wrappers are stuffed with tofu, cabbage, mushrooms, and carrots for veggie-packed morsels of goodness.

27. Cashew Milk–Braised Cabbage with Crunchy Chile Oil

“Here cabbage is deeply charred before braising with cashew milk, ginger, scallions, chiles, and garlic. The final garnish of cashew-flecked chile oil cuts through all the richness and adds crunch,” writes recipe developer Sohla El-Waylly.

28. Vegan Stuffed Peppers with Harissa-Tahini Dressing

This is the best-ever method for cooking stuffed peppers and it just so happens to be plant-based, thanks to a hearty filling of lentils and quinoa.

29. Just-So-Good Grilled Portobellos

I know what you’re thinking. Haven’t we moved past using portobello mushrooms as a burger sub? Nope, we haven’t but for good reason! Marinate the ‘shrooms in a combination of mustard, nutritional yeast, olive oil, and salty brine and you’ll see why we’re not quite over them.

30. Vegan Slow-Cooker Tomatillo Stew

Come summer, tomatillos finally have their moment to shine, but too often, they get overlooked in other seasons. Sure, they’re great for salsa but where they really wow is in this plant-based stew along with diced green chiles and jalapeños.

31. Vegan Pot Pie with Herby Biscuits

If you follow a plant-based diet and miss a slice of uber-comforting chicken pot pie, our veggie-packed version topped with dairy-free herb biscuits will fill the void.

32. Sheet-Pan Miso Tofu with Brussels Sprouts, Apple, and Arugula

An entire container of firm tofu, thinly sliced sprouts, apples, almonds, and arugula team up for the ultimate plant-based weeknight meal.

33. Autumn Chili Bowl with Roasted Sweet Potatoes and Quinoa

“This Autumn Chili Bowl with Roasted Sweet Potatoes and Quinoa is bound to bring you all the warming spices, grounding heartiness, and fall coziness you know and love — but with a few fun twists. With a base of savory, juicy, and meaty plant-based ground beef, the dish is kicked up a notch with hints of chili powder and a kick of peppery ginger,” say our editors.

Ted Cruz apologizes for Jan. 6 “terrorist attack” comment after enduring Tucker Carlson’s wrath

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tx., is now walking back his description of the Capitol riot as a “terrorist attack” a day after Fox News host Tucker Carlson berated the lawmaker for his word choice.

“The way I phrased things yesterday — it was sloppy, and it was, frankly, dumb,” Cruz said during a Thursday interview on Fox News.

Carlson quickly cut off the senator, expressing incredulity at the fact that Cruz, a trained lawyer, would be so imprecise. 

“I don’t buy that! Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I don’t buy that,” Carlson said. “You told that lie on purpose, and I’m wondering why you did.” 

RELATED: Ted Cruz blasted by Tucker Carlson, right-wing Twitter for calling Jan. 6 a “terrorist attack”

“What I was referring to are the limited number of people who engaged in violent attacks against police officers. I think you and I both agree that if you assault a police officer, you should go to jail,” Cruz said. “I wasn’t saying the thousands of peaceful protesters supporting Donald Trump are somehow terrorists. I wasn’t saying the millions of patriots across the country supporting Trump are terrorists.”

Continuing the verbal spar, Cruz reminded Carlson that he was one of the eight senators to challenge the Electoral College’s vote count in the 2020 election. 

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

“So of course, it would be ridiculous for me to be saying that the people standing up and protesting to follow the law were somehow terrorists. I was talking about people who commit violence against cops,” Cruz said. “It was a mistake to say that yesterday, and the reason is what you just said, which is we have now had a year of Democrats and the media twisting words and trying to say that all of us are terrorists. Trying to say you are a terrorist, I am a terrorist.”

“I guess I just don’t believe you,” Carlson said. “And I mean that with respect.”

The FBI has labeled the Capitol insurrection as an act of domestic terrorism, which the agency defines as “violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.” 

RELATED: Jailing Capitol rioters together could lead to a new “American terror group”: Expert

Though Carlson’s distaste for Cruz’s description of the riot is a recent development, the Texas senator made very similar remarks just a year ago, Politico noted. 

“The attack at the Capitol was a despicable act of terrorism and a shocking assault on our democratic system,” Cruz said in a statement at the time, applauding the Capitol police for protecting the legislature.

The exchange comes amid the senator’s potential presidential bid in 2024. Back in December, Cruz said that he would “run in heartbeat” next election, pointing out that he ended up placing second in a 17-candidate Republican primary in 2016. 

“There’s a reason historically that the runner-up is almost always the next nominee,” Cruz explained. “And that’s been true going back to Nixon or Reagan or McCain or Romney that has played out repeatedly. You come in with just an enormous base of support.”

How to make kombucha at home

I went from questioning kombucha, to loving kombucha, to brewing my own kombucha — with a few road bumps along the way.

Fear is born from ignorance, and before I understood what kombucha is or how it’s made, I was skeptical — if not terrified — not just of making it, but trying it.

At over four dollars a bottle at the grocery store, and more at the local corner bodega (do you know how many heirloom tomatoes that can buy?!), kombucha had never been something I was tempted to splurge on. I thought of it as a drink that was, mysteriously, appealing to both hippies and socialites. It often involved chia seeds, and I was absolutely not interested in that. Moreover, my friend Rebecca was brewing her own, and her SCOBY — the whiteish liver-like mass that is the yeast and bacteria “mother” of the fermented tea — looked more like an exhibit in a museum of medical mysteries than something that belongs in a beverage.

But when I finally decided to taste kombucha, I understood the fuss: With its sharply sweet vinegary flavor, kombucha is everything tart and delicious about shrubs but more sippable — and fizzy! (There are lots of purported probiotic health benefits, too, but I was less interested in that aspect and more interested in an improved taste, in saving money, and in having a pet project of my own.) 

I decided to go the DIY route and make my own kombucha at the Food52 offices. I was scared at first. Actually — fueled by my uncertainty about what to expect — I was scared throughout most of the process. And since I was embarking on a new project in front of my colleagues, the endeavor was particularly high-pressure. The editorial team watched me tear up when I had to throw away an entire SCOBY due to fly infestation; they dealt with my frantic text messages and emails, my constant sighing and head scratching. 

Was it worth it in the end? Yes. Not only for the bottles of kombucha in the refrigerator (which, for the record, taste much better than even the fanciest store-bought varieties), but for the feeling of accomplishment. This became “Sarah’s project” at the office — my legacy. Evidenced by the length of this post, I clearly learned more than I expected, including a whole new lexicon of words and phrases like “‘buch,” “starter,” and “second fermentation.”  

If you start searching for information on making kombucha, you might find yourself going down a rabbit hole. Hey, maybe you’ll see me down there! There are a million ways to brew kombucha and a million tips for how to get the healthiest, tastiest brew possible. I’m going to explain what worked (and didn’t work!) for me, but I’m sure I’ll be experimenting and refining in the future.

***

A few basics before you embark:

  • Kombucha is fermented tea with a history that dates back thousands of years. It’s made by adding a SCOBY (a symbiotic colony of yeast and bacteria — similar to the vinegar “mother”) to sweetened tea. 
  • Be prepared to spend some time and make an initial investment on this project. You’re in it for the long haul: Depending on the length of your fermentations, your first batch of kombucha will take around 1 1/2 to 2 weeks from starting to enjoying. And once you’ve started, you’ll (hopefully) have a viable SCOBY, which means you’ll want to start a new batch each time you’ve finished up the current one. Although none of the items or ingredients you’ll need for kombucha are prohibitively expensive, you will need to buy the proper jars, along with tea, sugar, and tea towels.
  • And, most importantly, you’ll either need to obtain a SCOBY from a source you trust — be it a reputable website or a kombucha-brewing friend — or make your own (instructions below!). Our SCOBY, which we named “SCOBY Doo,” came in the mail from the home of my good friend Rebecca in Cleveland, along with her instructions for brewing (pictured below), which I followed to the letter. I recommend brewing with a friend, so that you can ask them as many questions as possible at all hours of the day. I can be this friend. (I might even send you a SCOBY!)

* * *

Here’s how to make a SCOBY from scratch:

If you didn’t buy one online or inherit it from a friend, never fear — you can make your own:

1. Gather together your ingredients and tools: 7 cups of water; 1/2 cup of cane sugar; 4 bags of black tea (or 1 tablespoon of loose leaf tea, though the teabags work best and you won’t have to strain the tea when it’s done); 1 cup of plain unpasteurized store-bought kombucha (ideally with the little tangly bits of SCOBY floating around at the bottom of the bottle); a large, extremely clean and dry wide-mouth canning jar; a thin, clean, tightly-woven piece of fabric or tea towel (but not cheesecloth — more on this below); and a few sturdy rubber bands. 

2. Make the sweet tea by steeping the tea bags in boiling water for 20 minutes (or longer) and completely dissolving the sugar. Let the tea cool completely to below 90°F (or roughly room temp) and pour into a big canning jar. Otherwise, the cultures in your SCOBY to-be might be harmed or killed by the heat. 

3. Next, pour the cup of prepared kombucha (bits of SCOBY and all — that’ll help along your SCOBY to-be) into the canning jar and cover with the piece of fabric, then secure with a rubber band or two. 

4. Store your covered jar in a room-temperature area that’s out of direct sunlight. It helps to put it in a hard-to-reach kitchen cupboard that won’t get much traffic for a few weeks.

You’ll keep the jar there for two to four weeks, checking the SCOBY every few days until bubbles form on the surface of the tea, a thin, whiteish, jelly-like film forms across the top of the liquid, and the film becomes almost fully opaque in color. The SCOBY is ready when it’s grown into a 1/4-inch-thick puck. If you see bubbles forming at the top of the liquid throughout the process, especially in the later stages of SCOBY-formation, that’s a good sign of carbon dioxide development, indicating that your SCOBY’s a healthy fermentor. 

5.  Your SCOBY is now ready to be used in your first batch of kombucha!

***

Kombucha glossary

Throughout this guide to making kombucha, there are a few keywords that you’ll commonly hear.

Carbonation

Part of what makes kombucha so fun to drink is that it’s bubbly, thanks to carbonation. Surely you’re familiar with the term carbonation when you picture soft drinks or sparkling water, but what should you expect from carbonation in kombucha? The air bubbles in kombucha are a result of the live cultures used to make it. As sugar is added to the beverage, the cultures eat it (because sugar is tasty and who doesn’t want to eat it). This causes a chemical reaction that produces carbon dioxide, thus creating carbonation.

Fermentation

Kombucha is just one of many fermented food and beverage products: Think yogurt, sauerkraut, pickles, and other gut-beneficial edibles. “Kombucha is sugar-sweetened tea fermented by a community of organisms into a delicious sour tonic beverage, sometimes compared to sparkling apple cider,” writes Sandor Ellix Katz in his book, “The Art of Fermentation.”

SCOBY

I’ve said it before but I’ll reiterate it here in my mini-kombucha dictionary: SCOBY stands for “symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast” and is an essential ingredient used in the fermentation process for kombucha. SCOBY is a key player, but what it is not is cute. Picture a rubbery flat disc. That’s SCOBY. It’s dense and opaque and smells like vinegar. Even kombucha-lovers will be a little skeeved out by SCOBY, but it’s all part of the process. 

Starter tea

Starter tea is kombucha! It’s kombucha used to make more kombucha. As long as your kombucha has live, active cultures in it, it’s usable for a new batch. If you drank all of your homemade kombucha (because why wouldn’t you), you can also use store-bought kombucha. In a few paragraphs, I talk about using a combination of SCOBY and store-bought kombucha to make my own.

* * *

Here’s how to make your first batch of kombucha:

The first steps are very simple — brewing, sweetening, and cooling tea.

1. Bring 4 cups of water to a boil in a 4-quart pot. Turn off the heat and add 6 to 8 tea bags. Steep for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

  • I didn’t use organic tea, and instead of loose tea — which might be easier to guarantee is high-quality — I went with a mixture of black and green tea bags. 
  • I even used a couple bags of Earl Grey when I was running low on other options. That worked, too! 
  • Herbal teas cannot be made into kombucha, but I am excited to experiment with oolong and caffeine-free rooibos — both of which work as base teas — in the future. There’s a lot of information available on all the different types of teas that can (and can’t) be used for brewing kombucha. I’ll read up for my future batches.
  • I didn’t use water that had been purified in any way and I didn’t see negative consequences. You’ll see resources online that will advise against using tap water, but I didn’t notice harmful effects.

2. Remove the tea bags and add 1 cup of organic cane sugar and a half-gallon (8 cups) of cold water. Stir to dissolve the sugar granules. 

  • I used organic cane sugar and turbinado sugar. Both worked, but finer sugar will dissolve more easily into the tea.
  • If you want to explore using other sweeteners — like brown sugar, honey, or agave — I’d recommend first referring to this chart, as some sugars are harder to work with than others.

3. Pour the cool tea into a glass brew jar (the biggest jar you can find — a 2- to 3-gallon jar is best), then add 1 to 2 cups of cold water. It’s important that your tea be close to room temperature by the time you add the SCOBY — warm tea might harm it. 

  • In addition to glass, you can also use ceramic, stainless steel, or wood.
  • Many resources will tell you not to clean your jar with soap, as it could harm the SCOBY. I did clean with soap, but I made sure to rinse very thoroughly before adding the tea. If you do not want to use soap, you can sanitize the jar (and any other equipment) with white vinegar and hot water.
  • Use a wide-mouth jar: It’s better for air circulation and it will make it easier to remove the SCOBY later on.

4. When the tea is below 90°F (which it almost surely will be at this point), pour in the SCOBY and 1 1/2 to 2 cups of the starter liquid that the SCOBY arrived with (or, if this is your second time around, that the SCOBY was stored in after you bottled the brew).

  • If your SCOBY didn’t come with enough liquid, you can supplement with plain/original-flavored store-bought kombucha (or leftover liquid from your homemade SCOBY). The first time I brewed, I used the liquid that the SCOBY came with as well as 1 1/2 cups of Health Ade Original Kombucha because I was nervous. The SCOBY seemed to grow very quickly with the help of the starter liquid.

  

Here comes the more nerve-wracking, nail-biting, and, ironically, hands-off part of the procedure!

5. Now that your SCOBY is in the tea, you have to cover the jar so that the precious SCOBY is neither vulnerable to contamination nor suffocation.

  • Rule #1: Do not, under any circumstances, use cheesecloth. With our first SCOBY, I secured two layers of fine cheesecloth over the top of the jar with rubber bands. Everything seemed fine; the SCOBY grew across the top of the tea nicely, forming a thick layer, and the whole jar gave off a sweet, vinegary scent. 

    The first time I unwrapped the cheesecloth to taste the brew, however, I noticed a fruit fly flit from the direction of the jar. I convinced myself that it had just come from somewhere nearby. The next day, I pulled back the cheesecloth and another fly emerged, straight from the SCOBY this time. When I examined the SCOBY surface, I saw squirming, the signs of fly larvae. The whole SCOBY had to be tossed, I cried, and Rebecca sent another one in the mail. (We named this second SCOBY “SCOBY Doo II,” and this is the SCOBY modeling in the photos.)

  • Fruit flies, as I learned firsthand, are the most common contaminants of kombucha, and you might see them circling your brew like evil vultures, eager to poison your SCOBY. To prevent flies, use a tea towel — or an old (but clean!) T-shirt — held in place by several sturdy rubber bands. The tea towel is woven much more tightly than cheesecloth and will therefore be more effective at keeping out flies. Store your jar in an environment that’s as fly-free as possible (not near the bowl of ripening stone fruit, for example). I kept the kombucha at the editorial desk, where I could act as a monitor, shooing flies away on the regular. 

6. Wait and watch. Once your SCOBY is in the sweetened tea — shrouded comfortably with a tea towel and living in a location that’s under 90° F with good air circulation and little direct sunlight — it will be 1 to 4 weeks until it’s ready to drink.

  • You’ll watch the SCOBY grow into a thick, leathery, white mass across the surface of the tea.
  • You also might notice some discolored spots (which you can see in the top-right photo below). When I noticed these dark spots, I had a panic attack. Mold is the second serious threat to your SCOBY.
  • Fortunately, it’s not that difficult to distinguish mold from natural dark spots (which result from normal dying yeast cultures). Mold will look like the green, fuzzy stuff you find on aging bread and cheese rather than brown strands or masses. If you suspect mold, you’ll have to throw out your SCOBY and start again. 

  
  
The two images on the left show the SCOBY once it was first placed in the brew jar. The two images on the right were taken 10 days later, once the SCOBY had grown across the top of the tea.

7. After one week, gently push the SCOBY aside with a straw and take a sip of the liquid. If it’s as tart as you’d like, you’re ready to proceed to the next step. If you want kombucha that is sharper and more vinegary, allow the tea to ferment for more time.

  • I found that I liked how our kombucha tasted after 10 days of fermentation.

8. When you’re happy with the flavor, move the SCOBY to another large jar with 1 1/2 to 2 cups of the brewing liquid (this will be the SCOBY’s home, and you’ll use that liquid to start the next batch). Cover with a tea towel and rubber bands, just as you did before, and set aside.

  • Now you’re wondering what to do with this SCOBY. The next logical step is to start another brew! Make more tea, then use that SCOBY in your second batch of kombucha — that’s the only road I’ve taken so far.
  • You can also separate the SCOBY layers and give one to a friend. It might not be what your friends wants for his birthday, but he’ll surely appreciate it, right? You’ll want to make sure that you gift the SCOBY with enough of the brewed tea so that it will survive and so that your friend has a starter for step #4. Be sure to bug your friend to make the kombucha as soon as he can. 
  • I don’t have any experience storing SCOBYs, but “The Noma Guide to Fermentation” recommends storing the extras in an open-top jar, submerged in twice its weight of kombucha or 20% sugar syrup (800 grams water and 200 grams sugar, brought to a boil, then cooled), where they will go into a dormant state. You’ll have to change the syrup or storage-kombucha every 2 to 3 weeks. You can also keep your SCOBY in the fridge to slow its metabolism, but then when you want to start brewing again, your SCOBY might be sluggish for the first few cycles (meaning that it might take some extra fermenting time to achieve the flavor you’re looking for). Learn more about taking a break from brewing here.

9. Now collect bottles. These should be glass bottles with plastic tops, such as old kombucha bottles or flip-top brew bottles. When the tea is transferred to smaller bottles, it enters a second fermentation and becomes “drier” (less sweet) and — this is fun — carbonated. 

  • It’s important not to use any bottles with metal tops in order to prevent the chance of any reaction between the kombucha and the metal.  If you want to use Ball jars, you’ll need to get plastic tops to cover them.
  • I also tried one glass-topped Weck jar, but it wasn’t sufficiently airtight. 
  • To gauge the cabonation levels in the bottles, I used one plastic bottle, as well. The plastic bottle is your guide to carbonation: It becomes increasingly solid and pressurized as the kombucha ferments; when it’s rock-solid, that’s an indication that the tea in the glass bottles will be bubbly. 

10. Once you have several suitable empty bottles, you’ll also want to think about flavors. Thrilled that the kombucha was fly-free, mold-free, and good-tasting, I was happy to leave it as is. But my colleagues helped me realize how fun it can be to play with flavors. 

It’s important to remember not to go too crazy with the add-ins: Introducing additional sugar in the form of fruit or fruit juice during this second ferment might result in too much pressure build-up and a consequent explosion.

Here are the flavors I’ve tried so far: 

  • Hibiscus: three or four dried flowers 
  • Grapefruit: about 2 tablespoons of grapefruit juice, with the pulp; this was delicious, though you will see online that many suggest using juice with no pulp to reduce the number of stringy bits that will be in the finished product
  • Ginger: a 1-inch piece, cut into matchsticks
  • Rhubarb lime: lime zest and diced rhubarb; too tart for my taste
  • Blueberry lavender: about 1 teaspoon dried lavender and 2 or 3 frozen blueberries
  • Rose petal: about 1/2 tablespoon of dried rose petals
  • Orange saffron: a pinch of saffron and a strip of orange peel
  • Cherry and jalapeño: an unseeded jalapeño half (cut lengthwise) and a few tablespoons of tart cherry juice concentrate

11. Add your flavorings of choice to the bottles, then use a plastic funnel to pour the tea over top. You’ll want to fill your bottles almost to the very top (in the picture below, I didn’t fill the bottles high enough). The fuller your bottles are, the more carbonated they will become. If you see your bottles are vigorously bubbling, you can “burp” them by opening the tops to release a bit of pressure. 

12. Once the plastic bottle is very firm — this took about 3 days for us — move all of the bottles to the fridge, where they’ll stop gaining fizz. (I prefer to err on the side of caution, so I was eager to refrigerate the bottles sooner rather than later.)

When you’re ready to drink the kombucha, open a bottle under a bowl or in the sink to avoid getting soaked from over-active carbonation. If you’re going to be unappetized by strands of SCOBY and bits of your flavorings (or if you’re serving this to people who have never tried kombucha before), you can strain the drink through a fine sieve to get a more homogenous beverage.

From left to right: hibiscus, grapefruit, and ginger kombucha.

Need more kombucha information? Here are the resources I found most helpful:

Photos by James Ransom and Bobbi Lin  

Biden just delivered the most forceful rebuke of Trump’s coup — but what will he do about it?

I don’t think anyone has ever said that Joe Biden is a great orator. In fact, he’s probably one of the least gifted presidential speakers I can remember. Maybe George Bush Sr. was equally mediocre, but that’s not saying much. However, yesterday, on January 6th, Joe Biden gave the best speech I’ve ever heard him give and I suspect it may actually be remembered as an important one. The speech marked a shift in both tone and substance on a matter of monumental importance that hopefully signals a new strategy to try and save our democracy.

Despite opening his campaign in 2019 with a strong condemnation of President Trump’s unprincipled behavior and a call to “restore the soul of America,” Biden hasn’t really talked much about the ongoing Republican threat to democracy since he’s taken office. And he has scrupulously avoided talking about Donald Trump because the White House reportedly felt feared further elevating the disgraced former president. But the anniversary of January 6th was the day they decided to put democracy at the top of the agenda — and it was none too soon.

Biden’s speech was fiery and rhetorically effective. Despite never using his predecessor’s name, he took the fight to Trump, something that simply cannot be avoided any longer whether the White House likes it or not. Biden went right for the jugular, evoking Trump 16 times in the speech, calling him a “defeated former president” (emphasis on the word defeated), declaring that Trump’s outsized ego won’t allow him to admit he lost. And that’s the truth – Donald Trump is the greatest sore loser in the history of the world.

The former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election. He has done so because he values power over principle. Because he sees his own interest as more important than his country’s interest, than America’s interest. And because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our Constitution. He can’t accept he lost.

Biden almost certainly had some real hope that he could bridge the bipartisan divide when he took office and he was determined to give it the old college try. He’s thrown in the towel. He made it clear that the Republican Party is just as guilty as Trump. While praising those who have stood up for democracy (which we can count on one hand), he said this about the rest:

Too many others are transforming that party into something else. They seem no longer to want to be the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, Reagan, the Bushes.

They don’t even want to be the party of the prince of darkness, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who showed up in the Capitol for the commemoration and stood next to his daughter, the only two Republicans to attend. (Right-wing media immediately went for his throat, of course.)

RELATED: Democrats embrace Dick Cheney during Jan. 6 remembrance event

He didn’t let the MAGA cult off either, which I think was gutsy:

Those who stormed this Capitol, and those who instigated and incited, and those who called on them to do so, held a dagger at the throat of America and American democracy. They didn’t come here out of patriotism or principle. They came here in rage — not in service of America but rather in service of one man.

You cannot love your country only when you win. You can’t obey the law only when it’s convenient. You can’t be patriotic when you embrace and enable lies.

Naturally it was instantly slammed by Republicans fatuously clutching their pearls and claiming it was “divisive” (nothing new in that) and whining that Biden was “politicizing” Jan. 6, which is hilarious. Nobody but former House Speaker Newt Gingrich had the brass to evoke Lincoln to slam Biden, however — and mess it up so badly:

Gingrich needs to read that speech again:

Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”

Basically, it was “we can put the country back together but if you think we’re going to go back to the way things were you’ve got another thing coming.” Interestingly, in response to a reporter’s question, Biden did echo Lincoln’s famous words “let us strive to bind up the nation’s wounds” when he said, “the way you have to heal, you have to recognize the extent of the wound,” which is something Lincoln, after four years of bloody civil war, already knew, but he would certainly have appreciated Biden’s understanding of the situation.

The modern Republican Party’s undisputed leader, Donald Trump, himself issued a flurry of hysterical statements in which he said Biden “used my name today to try to further divide America,” and claimed that listening to him was “very hurtful to many people.” (He also went through his usual litany of lies about the 2020 election in tedious, obsessive detail, as he does most days.)

Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., and his pal Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., held a little press conference that nobody watched in which they threw out conspiracy theories about the FBI starting the insurrection and otherwise babbled incoherently.

Biden said that we are at an inflection point in history and I agree. Our politics are not normal and they aren’t getting any better. If anyone thought that Trump leaving office would “break the fever” they need a new thermometer. The question now is what is he — and what are we — going to do about it?

Biden is headed to Georgia next week to talk about voting right legislation and the desperate need to shore up our electoral system. Will he be able to rally the two Senate divas, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, to the cause and persuade them to allow an exception to the filibuster to save our democracy? At this point that really is the only question, isn’t it? 

We saved the puffins. Now a warming planet is unraveling that work

I stepped onto the battlefield of climate change, sidestepping carcass after carcass. In the grass were the remains of Arctic terns, common terns, and roseate terns. Along the boulders, researchers pointed out dead puffin chicks. As other climate war zones smolder with wildfire embers, are strewn with flattened homes, or marked by bleached coral, the signature of conflict on a seabird island in the Gulf of Maine is a maddening quietude.

I began visiting these islands 35 years ago. Until this past summer, every walk to a bird blind meant going through a gauntlet of angry, dive-bombing birds pecking at my head, pooping on my shoulders, and screeching at a deafening pitch as I passed by their chicks darting at my feet. Even in the blind, the cacophony of birds swirling about obliterated all other sound. This year, with so much nest failure and so few chicks to protect, I heard the lapping ocean a football field away.   

My heart ached that this can’t be. My head said of course it is. This is exactly what scientists said would happen with uncontrolled warming. No matter how high or how far they can fly, seabirds are climate change prisoners. Our inaction makes us the executioners.

I was on islands managed by National Audubon’s Project Puffin. I have co-written and photographed two books with its founding ornithologist, Steve Kress. In an effort that began nearly a half-century ago, Kress directed the world’s first restoration of a seabird to an island where humans massacred them into local extinction.

Atlantic puffins, which historically bred on many islands off the coast of Maine, were nearly wiped out in the 1800s for their meat and eggs as hunters annihilated herons, egrets, terns, and gulls for millinery feathers. By 1901, puffins were down to a final pair on a sole island, Matinicus Rock, an island 25 miles out to sea from the coastal town of Rockland.

Early conservationists protected those last puffins on Matinicus Rock. But they were so disrupted, they rebounded to only a few dozen pairs by the 1970s. Puffins never returned to any other islands. The destruction of 19th century biodiversity was compounded by 20th century carelessness. Islands were overrun by omnivorous, aggressive gulls, fattened significantly by landfill garbage along the coasts and fishing industry waste. Other bird species that dared to attempt to breed near gulls could have their chicks gulped down like popcorn.   

An island where puffins were eliminated was Eastern Egg Rock. It was eight miles out from an Audubon summer camp on Maine’s mid-coast. For decades, campers circled the rock on cruises with no knowledge that puffins were once there. They were happy to see the gulls.

Kress came to the camp in 1969 as a bird instructor. One day in the camp library, he came upon a 1949 book that said puffins had resided on the rock. He was filled with visions of restoration. The appeal was obvious. Puffins are particularly colorful seabirds with orange and yellow beaks and human-like mannerisms. Mates intimately nuzzle their beaks. In tuxedo-like plumage, puffins often waddle amongst each other as if they were at a black-tie reception.

In my first interview with Kress in 1986 for Newsday, he deadpanned that his interest in puffins had little to do with the bird’s beauty. “I’m a scientist,” he told me. “As a scientist, your reasons for research have to go deeper than that. But yeah, I suppose they’re cute.”

In 1973, he began years of bringing hundreds of puffin chicks down from Newfoundland. As U.S. Fish and Wildlife experts brought gulls under control, Kress and colleagues raised puffin chicks in makeshift burrows until they hopped into the ocean. He hoped that when it was time to breed two or three years later, his birds would select Eastern Egg Rock instead of Newfoundland as their home. He used decoys and mirrors to create the illusion that the rock was prime puffin real estate.    

Puffins began returning in 1977 and started breeding in 1981. In 2019, Eastern Egg Rock hit a record 188 pairs of puffins. Project Puffin spread to other islands, resulting today in 1,300 breeding pairs of puffins across islands in the Gulf of Maine.

The project has also revived tern populations and cousins of the puffin — common murres and razorbills. The project is iconic in the world of conservation for righting wrongs of the 19th and 20th century. Kress’s methods of translocating chicks and using decoys, mirrors, and taped calls for social attraction helped reviveand relocate more than 130 of the world’s approximately 350seabird species in more than 40 countries from mortal dangers such as volcanoes, oil spills, and other animals.

Back in our first interview, Kress thought the biggest threat to his work was that gulls might outfox him to retake the islands. In retrospect, 21st century human threats were already building on a global scale. Amid his efforts, the world’s seabird populations were in the process of dropping 70 percent from 1950 to 2010. The causes included plastic trash, oil, gas, and chemical industry pollution, agricultural runoff, overfishing and fishing gear, commercial coastal development, military operations, brightlights, power lines, and water warmed by climate change’s heat-trapping gases from fossil fuel emissions.  

Over the last decade, warmer waters have slammed into the Gulf of Maine as forcefully as a hurricane. For cold-water sea life, the temperatures are their wildfire.

The gulf, cupped between Cape Cod and Nova Scotia, is heating up faster than nearly every other ocean system on Earth. The last five years (2015-2020) have been the warmest on record, with 2020 bringing the hottest single day of sea-surface temperature, nearly 70 degrees Fahrenheit. The average summer sea-surface temperature has risen from 57 degrees to 61.

Climate change is altering the currents. Melting Arctic freshwater is slowing down the Labrador Current, allowing the warm Gulf Stream to expand its presence. For humans the water is still bone-chilling. For many North Atlantic fish, I often make the analogy — approved by scientists I’ve interviewed — that a 4-degree difference is like bundling up in winter to fly from frigid Boston to tropical Miami, but unable to shed the parka on South Beach.

Such fish respond by fleeing to colder water that is too deep or far out for seabirds to reach to feed their chicks. That phenomenon was fully evident in the summer of 2021. Heatwaves that delivered record temperatures to Maine cities resulted in puffins finding fewer fish and desperate terns bringing only moths, butterflies, and flying ants.      

Then a relentless wave of storms delivered record rainfall, including a 3-inch deluge from Hurricane Elsa, to parts of Maine. On the islands, the increase in rain and the timing of intense rain events from climate change was fatal to birds in multiple ways.

The first death blow was the flooding of nests with unhatched eggs. The second came to many of the chicks that hatched and then starved because of the heat wave. A third hit came with the rains. Chicks died in a death spiral of hyperthermia as they were too big for parents to cover them up, had no energy reserves to stay warm, and were too flightless to escape either the rain or the sopping vegetation that grows faster and thicker when increased rain mixes with the natural fertilizer of bird guano. Other weak birds can be snatched up by predators emboldened during heavy rains by the absence of researchers who are hunkered down in cabins and tents.

Many tern chicks that survived the onslaught grew so slowly that it took nearly six weeks to fledge, compared to the normal three. So many puffins grew so slowly that researchers nicknamed them “micro-puffins.” Such birds have a very uncertain chance of survival as they must fend for themselves way out at sea for two to three years until breeding instincts bring them back to the islands. 

This took the worst mental toll on island researchers that I’ve ever seen. Most seabird islands are managed in the summer by buoyant young adults, who generally range in age from their late teens to late 20s. They relish the challenge of contorting their bodies into pretzels to “grub” under the boulders to find puffins to measure and band. They are undaunted by three months of isolation and sleeping in tents, often waking up before dawn to count birds in cold, soaking fog. Universal among crews is a deep caring for the planet and a cheerful optimism that their work on a speck in the ocean matters.

This summer, their caring over the carnage turned into a primal scream for action on climate change. One example in Project Puffin is Seal Island, more than 20 miles out into the Atlantic Ocean from the nearest major coastal town of Rockland, Maine. Much bigger than Eastern Egg Rock, Kress replicated his puffin project to restore the bird after a century’s absence. Today there are more than 500 breeding pairs of puffins.

On this island, it was the absence of other birds, not puffins, that drew notice. The number of Arctic tern and common tern chicks were among the lowest ever recorded. When researchers went out to band, they encountered fields of dead tern chicks. 

“The chicks we found should have been big enough to band, but they weren’t,” said research assistant Elaine Beaudoin. “They’re fighting for their lives on death’s door.”

Keenan Yakola was the staff ecologist on Seal Island this summer. “We as a society are throwing everything at them and they’re doing everything they can do to survive,” he said. “It’s hard not to feel angry.”

Coco Faber was the supervisor for the Seal Island crew. “It’s like we’re all out here screaming to get attention,” she said. “It’s hard not to feel rage that it seems like no one is listening or caring.”

On Matinicus Rock, which grew from that final pair of puffins in 1901 to more than 500 pairs today, researchers observed some of the lowest number of chicks per nest for terns and razorbills. During particularly warm periods, puffins were bringing in butterfish, a species usually more common in mid-Atlantic waters. Butterfish are usually too large and oval for small chicks to swallow.

“It was hard to come in and eat dinner after a day of watching puffin after puffin coming in with butterfish for a chick,” research assistant Alyssa Eby said. “You knew that chick was starving.”

On Stratton Island, south of Portland, Maine, in Saco Bay, higher and higher tides washed out tern nests. Along the coast of Maine, Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge reported high abandonment of seabird habitat from the volatility of cold rain, beach erosion, and heatwaves. On Petit Manan Island, managed by U.S. Fish and Wildlife, only 12 tern chicks survived out of 150 monitored eggs and only 9 puffin chicks fledged out of 87 observed burrows. 

Back on the “mother” island of Eastern Egg Rock, researchers witnessed the biggest percentage drop in puffins in the project’s history, from 188 pairs in 2019 to 140 this summer. There were also crashes in tern chicks.       

As island supervisor Kay Garlick-Ott told me: “People keep talking about that this will eventually become the long-term pattern. That pattern is normal.”

It is so normal that Maine’s puffins and terns have overnight become some of the most important “climate canaries” in the animal world. In 2015, the International Union for Conservation of Nature upped the threat level for Atlantic puffins to “Vulnerable” globally and “Endangered” in Europe. 

We’re already creating plenty of conflicts of scarcity for seabirds. Herring, once a prime prey for puffins in Maine, have been overfished. Puffins are resourceful and have switched — when the waters are cool — to fish that have rebounded with strict federal management, such as haddock, hake, and redfish. But when warm waters drive off even those fish, the sight of a puffin with a shimmering large butterfish can send gulls into a frenzy of thievery. On Eastern Egg Rock I watched helplessly from the blinds as laughing gulls pounced on puffins bringing in fish for a chick. Terns coming in with fish for a chick were also mercilessly dive-bombed.  

Unmanaged climate change creates Las Vegas odds of finding the right fish, with puffins and terns losing a fortune of chicks. One of the most painful sights of being in the blinds is seeing unlucky puffin parents bringing only the dreaded butterfish to the burrows. On Eastern Egg Rock, I was led to burrows where I twisted around underneath until I could see the rotting, rejected butterfish that led to chicks starving to death.

The question is whether the public cares about the odds we’ve stacked against the birds. It is not too late to reverse them. They are still displaying a remarkable resiliency even though climate change has made 5 of the last 10 years, including 2021, the worst on record for Project Puffin’s islands. The number of breeding puffin pairs on Eastern Egg Rock still hit its all-time high just three summers ago. Tern populations on the islands are either stable or increasing. Kress, now 76, said the bad years statistically remain the exception. He said he remains “hopeful” for the future of puffins if they “can put a face on climate change that makes people care.”

Clearly, birds touch something in us when we pause to admire them. Birdwatching in the United States boomed during the COVID-19 pandemic. After a half century where the United States lost 3 billion birds, avian life surged in cities calmed by lockdowns. Up in Maine, thousands of people circled Eastern Egg Rock on packed tour boats, enthralled by the color of the birds, their mannerisms, and the story of why they are here. As I once heard Kress narrate on a tour boat, “Every puffin out here is a miracle.”

Up close on the islands, miracles and jaw-dropping mysteries still abound amid climate chaos. For several years Eastern Egg Rock was home to one of the oldest puffins in the world, a 35-year-old bird that disappeared in 2013. This summer, the Matinicus Rock team grubbed a 32-year-old puffin — one of the original birds in Project Puffin, brought down from Newfoundland as a chick and raised on Seal Island. The team also resighted a Leach’s storm petrel banded there 31 years ago.

The miracles include the efforts of the researchers themselves. In one instance this summer on Eastern Egg Rock, researcher Emily Sandly saw a herring gull swoop down to snatch a young tern. She scrambled over treacherous boulders to harass the gull into dropping the tern, which flew to safety. That rescue is part of the of the periodic capturing or shooing away a host of predators for chicks and eggs, such as great horned owls, black-crowned night-herons, peregrine falcons, even mallard ducks. 

They are protecting the birds in the face of the nation’s wild inconsistency in protecting wildlife or fighting climate change. We are just coming out of four years where the Trump administration gutted century-old federal migratory bird rulesthat held fossil fuel and chemical companies liable for bird deaths from disasters. Even though the Biden administrationrestored those rules, the U.S. and other rich nations are not yet dealing with the biggest threat yet to all life on Earth, refusing to commit concretely to drastic reductions in fossil fuel burning at COP26.  

The researchers can try to physically protect the chicks. But what they really want is for you to listen to their pleas for help. They know they cannot stop what is happening to the birds alone. Our lack of commitment was on gory display this summer on the seabird islands of Maine. For all that Project Puffin and efforts like it have restored, climate change is coming at the birds with the speed of a 19th century plume hunter’s bullet. The next bullet comes for us.  

Imagine another America: One where Black or brown people had attacked the Capitol

As you have been repeatedly reminded in recent days, one year ago, thousands of Donald Trump’s followers launched a lethal attack on the U.S. Capitol as part of a larger coup attempt whose obvious goal was to overturn America’s multiracial democracy and install their Great Leader as de facto dictator. Several people would died during the Capitol assault. More than 150 police officers and other law enforcement agents were injured.

Many in Trump’s attack force were armed, including with guns. Explosives were found nearby, with other deadly weapons cached not far away.

It’s a mistake to call Trump’s attack force a “mob” or to describe them as engaging in a “riot.” Knowingly or not, they were part of a coordinated effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and overthrow American democracy.

In the year since then, we have begun to learn the scale of the larger fascist plot against democracy: It was nationwide, and conducted both by legal and extralegal means. At moments, a military coup appeared possible. Fox News and other right-wing propagandists systematically lied about the coup attempt, both as it was occurring and ever since. Right-wing street thugs and militias were activated. At least 1,000 Republican public officials were involved in planning and coordinating the coup, including members of Congress who volunteered to help facilitate a nullification of the 2020 election and a potential government takeover. There were detailed step-by-step plans as to how Vice President Mike Pence, in conjunction with Republican officials on the federal and state level, would reject the people’s will and keep Donald Trump in power. 

As is abundantly obvious from many kinds of evidence and testimony, Trump’s attack force was driven by white supremacy, racial authoritarianism, Christian nationalism and the worship of violence that is foundational to such beliefs.

RELATED: How Christian nationalism drove the insurrection: A religious history of Jan. 6

In a new essay for the Guardian, Michael Harriot locates Trump’s coup attempt and the Capitol attack in the history of the color line and questions of patriotism and national belonging:

There is a more accurate term than insurrectionists to describe the people who stormed the US Capitol building on 6 January, forever smearing the seat of the American republic with fear and fascism.

Although their activities inspired terror and were planned in part by members of white supremacist groups, they object to being labeled as “terrorists” or “white supremacists.” Calling them “rioters” doesn’t quite capture the political motivations of the pro-authoritarian mob of Maga fanatics. Perhaps we should view them as historical re-enactors. After all, they were only recreating the effort to undermine democracy, freedom and the US constitution that has repeated itself for centuries. Yet, if you asked them, they would undoubtedly say they were “patriots”….

There is nothing more unpatriotic than someone who calls themself a “patriot.” The flag-waving hypocrites who proudly proclaim their loyalty to their country are determined to kill America. Since the 2020 election, at least 19 states have passed 33 laws that make it harder to vote. These legislative acts of voter suppression are largely introduced and passed by adherents to Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement that now includes a considerable share of the GOP’s constituency. Although these “America first” acolytes claim to want to make their country great again, their real end game is to destroy any semblance of a government where white people’s voting power is equal to their share of the electorate. In other words, the principal goal of the so-called Patriot Party is the opposite of democracy….

This historically inaccurate, mathematically incorrect caricature of patriotism is white nationalism wrapped in a star-spangled banner.

If the American empire ever falls — and it will — we can thank the patriots for the demise of democracy. Ultimately, these fanatical jingoists are the least patriotic people in America. They detest democracy and loathe any prospect of a more perfect union. They have pledged their allegiance to the flag, but not the republic for which it stands. Patriotism as performance is their only protection because a country that provides liberty and justice for all is too unbearable a thought.

They’d rather kill it first.

Yet a full year after Trump’s coup attempt, many members of the chattering class and the commentariat — the vast majority of whom are white — still describe the events of that day as “unimaginable,” “unbelievable” or “shocking.” Such language, and such patterns of thought, reveal a deep unwillingness to grapple with and accept the truth about American’s centuries-long history of white-on-Black (and white-on-brown) political violence.

Too many of these public voices have chosen to remain ignorant of their own country’s history, and in doing so have passed along that ignorance to the very public they supposedly serve. This denial also explains why so many members of the media and political class refuse to comprehend the existential threat to American democracy represented by Republican fascists and the larger right-wing movement.

RELATED: With fascism coming, America responds: LOL who cares? Let’s Netflix and chill

To properly confront the origins and implications of Trump and the Republican fascists’ assault on democracy would demand an interrogation of white privilege and white identity — and asking hard questions about the relationship between what it means to be “American” and what it means to be “white.” Such questions require disrupting and challenging the big and little lies that sustain whiteness as an identity, and the assumption that those who embrace it are inherently good, noble and innocent. 

Last Jan. 6, and in the weeks and months followed, I and others publicly asked the following question: What would have happened if a “mob” of thousands of Black people (or Muslims, or Latinos) had attacked the Capitol?  

The answer is obvious: There would have been no such attack, because law enforcement and national security forces would have prevented it from ever happening — or even coming close to happening.

But if we suspend disbelief, and imagine a version of America where such an attack somehow took place, those Black or brown or Muslim “protesters” would have been gunned down in large numbers. Those not shot would have been beaten into submission. The Capitol and its surroundings would have literally been bathed in blood.

What would that America be like now, one year after such a hypothetical event?

The national security and surveillance state would have expanded even more than it has already, likely in ways surpassing the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. A new COINTELPRO-style program would be attempting to destroy Black and brown civil society organizations. The full force of the national security and law enforcement apparatus would have come crashing down upon Black and brown America.

Black and brown people would be viewed as de facto enemies of the state. Their constitutional, civil and human rights would be sharply restricted. Those deemed to be “suspicious” or a “security threat” or supportive of “terrorism” would be disappeared into the country’s vast network of detention facilities, with or without hard evidence and with little or no due process. We would have seen mass arrests, interrogations, harassment and (more) police thuggery and violence directed against Black and brown communities.

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There would indeed be a bipartisan Jan. 6 committee, with both Republicans and “moderate” or even “liberal” Democrats focusing on issues of “Black crime,” “radicalization” and “terrorism.” Its hearings would be televised daily. The Department of Justice would have ordered thousands of arrests, in all probability most of them would target people who were in no way implicated in the attack. 

These Black and brown “terrorists” (and very likely their white “collaborators”) would have faced the most severe punishments available under American law, perhaps amplified by special “emergency” statutes. Some would face death sentences or life without parole for treason, insurrection and sedition.

This alternate reality would be quite different from our current reality, in which many participants in the Jan. 6 assault have been treated with great restraint. Black and brown and other people charged with crimes after our hypothetical version Jan. 6 would not, we imagine, be allowed to go home on their own recognizance, travel to weddings, take vacations abroad, pay minor fines or community service sentences, or be collectively treated as though they had done nothing seriously wrong.

The Democratic Party would feel pressured by the news media and “responsible” public voices (and of course by the Republicans) to distance itself as much as possible from Black and brown people — its largest and most consistent base of voter support. In that imaginary America, the Democrats might face an internal split, and might (at least for a time) cease to be competitive on a national level.

RELATED: Why Donald Trump exalts Kyle Rittenhouse: Nothing gets the base going like violence

There would be (more) white right-wing violence and hate crimes directed against Black and brown people. Militias and other paramilitary organizations would expand and gain even more influence over the Republican Party and the conservative movement than they have at present. Imagining themselves as “defenders” of “law and order” and true “patriots” — as in fact they imagine themselves now — these thugs and enforcers would attempt to engage in ethnic cleansing campaigns or pogroms against Black and brown people, Muslims, Jews, “socialists” and others deemed to be the enemy. As terrorism experts warn us today, the United States could face a sustained period of right-wing insurgency or a localized state of civil war.

Fox News and the rest of the right-wing disinformation machine would feature 24/7 coverage of these alternate-history Jan. 6 events, endlessly regurgitating memes about “Black hate” and “Black treason” and “illegal aliens” and other “toxic elements” that are poisoning or polluting the body politic and must be purged in order to “keep us safe.” There would be no need to default to stochastic terrorism: The threats and encouragements to violence would be outright and direct. In many ways, of course, that would not be terribly different from the themes Fox News and the right-wing hate media are circulating now.

There would be a record increase in gun ownership on both sides of the color line.

Christian nationalist organizations and right-wing evangelical churches would see large increases in membership and financial support. White Christianity would become even more extreme, fascist, authoritarian and racist than it is now. The “conservative” movement and white right would become even more emboldened in their campaign to take away Black and brown people’s rights.

RELATED: Religion scholar Anthea Butler on “White Christianity” and its role in fueling fascism

Such efforts would be supported not just by Trump-supporting Republicans and right-leaning “independents” who believe in the Big Lie and “voter fraud,” but by many white Democratic voters as well (especially those fabled “college-educated voters” in the suburbs, much obsessed over by America’s mainstream pundits). In total, the white backlash politics that would follow our imaginary attack on the Capitol would radically redraw the American electoral map for years and decades to come.

If we return to the world as it exists, Black and brown Americans have — with rare and isolated exceptions — never engaged in acts of political violence or terrorism against white America. Historically and through to the present, Black and brown folks have wanted to improve American democracy for the benefit of all people on both sides of the color line.

Like many other Black people, as I watched Trump’s attack force of rage-filled white people attack and defile the Capitol one year ago, I said to myself, “Thank God they’re not Black. Lord only knows the hell we would pay.”

How many white folks said anything like that to themselves or each other? “Oh no! They’re nearly all white! What’s going to happened to white people now? We’re in big trouble!” That number is somewhere between almost no one and literally no one. That is the hypocrisy, the double standard and the fundamental unfairness that sustains white privilege and white supremacy, in a society that claims to be a democracy where we are all supposed to be equal before the law. And it is that hypocrisy that fuels the rising neo fascist tide which is threatening to drown American democracy. 

After Jan. 6, secularism is the crucial “guardrail” — and it’s fatally weak in America

The free exercise of religion — or, more precisely, the free exercise of conservative Christian religions — is increasingly assuming the cultural, and even legal, stature of an inalienable American right. In the name of “religious freedom,” county clerks, doctors and bakers openly discriminate against LGBTQ citizens. Our rightward-charging judiciary lets worshippers congregate during a pandemic; religious devotion, apparently, trumps public safety.  

To understand where this free-exercise fundamentalism may lead us, we need look no further than the insurrectionists of last January and their boundless sense of religious entitlement. Michael Sparks, who was among the first to breach the Capitol, enthused on Facebook: “We’re getting ready to live through something of biblical purportions [sic] be prayed up and be ready to defend your country and your family.” Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon Shaman, intoned a prayer about the rebirth of America — on the floor of the Senate, whose evacuation he and his co-rioters had just triggered.

On Jan. 6, 2021, a mob filled with religious extremists, among others, nearly upended one of the world’s oldest and stablest liberal democracies. Could any comparable display of free exercise have occurred in France or Canada or Uruguay or India, or any country with clear constitutional guidelines about the relation between government and religion?

RELATED: How Christian nationalism drove the insurrection: A religious history of Jan. 6

This unfortunate instance of American exceptionalism has many explanations. I call attention to one: the weakness of secularism in the United States. “Secularism” is a term that has been so relentlessly maligned by its enemies that its meaning is difficult to discern. Having just written a primer on the subject, let me note that political secularism, at its core, is a philosophy of governance.

Far from being equivalent to atheism, as its critics allege, secularism’s origins may be traced to medieval Christian disputes about the papacy’s expanding powers. During the Protestant Reformation, the terms of the debate shifted. The dilemma no longer involved curtailing the authority of the church, but rather how a government could prevent unfathomable violence between churches. Enlightenment thinkers concluded that religions — those force-multipliers of human passions — needed to be governed.

In “A Letter Concerning Toleration” (1689), John Locke outlined secular protocols of governance. The state must let citizens believe anything they wish about the divine (this is known as “freedom of conscience”). It must never establish, favor or ally itself with one or more faiths (this is often referred to as “disestablishmentarianism” or “state neutrality”). It must treat all religions and religious citizens equally (I call this the “equality” principle).

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Naturally, a secular state must permit citizens the free exercise of their religious beliefs. Yet here Locke added one crucial caveat. The right to free exercise, he insisted, is not absolute. Free exercise cannot diminish or endanger the rights of others, or the security of the state.

This position was neither controversial nor original. It was common sense. The 1663 Charter of Carolina granted free exercise as long as persons “do not in any wise disturb the peace.” After a similar grant, the 1776 constitution of North Carolina warned: “nothing herein contained shall be construed to exempt preachers of treasonable or seditious discourses, from legal trial and punishment.”

Which brings us to the First Amendment, whose relevant clauses simply read: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Our Constitution fails to acknowledge what was abundantly clear to lawmakers a century earlier, not to mention almost every subsequent constitution in secular countries: Namely, there must be a limit on free exercise of religion.

Why James Madison omitted this obvious proviso is beyond my comprehension. I simply observe that his omission undercuts secularism’s governing function. It thus leaves American democracy vulnerable to the types of ructions we witnessed last January.   

American secularism must confront the poor hand dealt to it by the Constitution and chart a new legal course. Secularists might invoke the “equality” principle mentioned above. Letting the 14th Amendment interrogate the First, secularists could argue that unchecked free exercise deprives religious minorities of equal protection under the law.

Latter-day Saints were prohibited from practicing bigamy in the 1878 Reynolds case. Native Americans’ free-exercise right to ingest peyote was denied in the 1990 Smith decision. As for “nones” — those with no religious affiliation — can they even possess free exercise rights?

For right-wing Protestants (and, increasingly, right-wing Catholics) free exercise has been a godsend. Via the Supreme Court, conservative Christian theological prerogatives are poised to shape every aspect of everyone else’s life on issues ranging from reproductive freedoms to education to gun legislation. Free exercise, as currently practiced, is a boon to the majority.

Secularists should steward a more sophisticated discussion of “religious freedom.” Politicians and assorted intellectuals lazily depict public expressions of faith as providing exponential benefits for the commonweal. Prayer circles at football games, candidates who do “God talk” on the campaign trail, Latin crosses on federal property — all of it is assumed to make our nation stronger.

Perhaps, but the January insurrection reminds us of a craggy secular intuition: Religious passion has a dark side, a volatility that only the state can contain. Much is made of the condition of our democracy’s “guardrails”; the time has come to recognize a functioning, re-energized secularism as a crucial defense against what happened last Jan. 6.  

Read more on the current state of America’s religious wars:

Seattle cops planted fake reports of Proud Boys on police radio to scare BLM protesters

On Wednesday, The Seattle Times reported that during the protests last year, Seattle police improperly spread fake reports that Proud Boys were on the move on police radio transmissions in an effort to intimidate the demonstrators.

“At a crucial moment during 2020’s racial justice protests, Seattle police exchanged a detailed series of fake radio transmissions about a nonexistent group of menacing right-wing extremists,” reported Daniel Beekman. “The radio chatter about members of the Proud Boys marching around downtown Seattle, some possibly carrying guns, and then heading to confront protesters on Capitol Hill was an improper ‘ruse,’ or dishonest ploy, that exacerbated a volatile situation, according to findings released Wednesday by the city’s Office of Police Accountability.”

The protests were some of many around the country in the summer that flared in response to multiple high-profile police brutality cases, including the murder of George Floyd.

“The ruse happened on the night of June 8, 2020, hours after the Police Department had abandoned its East Precinct on Capitol Hill and just as protesters were starting to set up the zone that was later called the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, or CHOP,” said the report. “The officers who participated described a group gathering by City Hall and moving around downtown. They delivered reports such as, ‘It looks like a few of them might be open carrying,’ and: ‘Hearing from the Proud Boys group. … They may be looking for somewhere else for confrontation.'”

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According to OP Director Andrew Myerburg’s report, the fake broadcasts “improperly added fuel to the fire,” as social media posts warning about the nonexistent Proud Boys caused CHOP demonstrators to arm themselves and create barricades.

The Proud Boys are a far-right group of self-described “Western Chauvinists” infamous for their street brawls and linked to white supremacists. Many of their members were involved in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol to try to stop the counting of electoral votes for President Joe Biden.

You can read more here.

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Republican legislatures want to jam through more voting restrictions ahead of 2022 midterms

After Republican legislators in 19 states passed 34 laws restricting ballot access in 2021, largely fueled by Donald Trump’s election lies, more than a half-dozen more states are gearing up to go even further ahead of this year’s midterm elections.

Georgia Republicans, who last year passed a sweeping set of restrictions that Democrats likened to Jim Crow-era laws and led to widespread corporate condemnation and boycotts, have introduced a torrent of new voting bills that go well beyond the limits in last year’s legislation. Missouri Republicans have pre-filed multiple bills that would impose stricter voter ID requirements for in-person and mail ballots, after their previous attempts were rejected by courts. At least four states have already pre-filed seven bills that would “initiate or allow illegitimate partisan reviews” of election results, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. Republicans in multiple states have also pre-filed at least seven bills that would restrict access to mail voting.

Even those numbers only scratch the surface. Republicans introduced more than 400 bills with provisions to restrict voting last year. Of those, at least 88 bills in nine states will carry over into the new legislative session, according to the Brennan Center. Democrats have described this onslaught of legislation as an extension of the Capitol riot last January, when Trump supporters hunted lawmakers through the halls of Congress in a failed effort to block the certification of Joe Biden’s win.

“There can be no doubt that the events of January 6th were inspired by, and designed to promote, the Big Lie of mass voter fraud, which Donald Trump and the GOP have used to justify racist voter suppression laws in states across the country,” Rep. Mondaire Jones, D-N.Y., who was first elected in 2020 and sworn in days before the attack, said in a statement. “It was clear then, and is clear now, that the modern-day Republican Party is more interested in preserving the rule of its authoritarian leadership than in preserving our democracy.”

RELATED: “What voter suppression looks like”: Rejected ballot requests up 400% after new Georgia voting law

Republicans have defended the nationwide push by claiming it is necessary to ensure “election integrity” and to assuage their constituents’ concerns about election security — concerns that have been stoked for more than a year by Trump and his allies. Democrats and voting rights groups argue that many of the restrictions are attempts to suppress votes, especially those of people of color, who have disproportionately backed Democratic candidates. Some of the bills may go even further than that — and could allow Republican-led legislatures to subvert elections.

“The attack on our democracy continues in the form of a victorious nationwide wave of voter suppression and subversion of our electoral systems,” Leah Greenberg, the co-executive director of the Indivisible Project, a progressive nonprofit, said in a statement. “Republicans in state legislatures across the country have introduced and passed hundreds of bills to limit participation in democracy — targeting Black and brown voters in particular — and make it easier for partisan officials to remove election officials from their posts and subvert legitimate election results. And every day since, Senate Republicans have blocked federal voting rights and democracy reform legislation that would restore faith in our democratic processes.”

Georgia state Sen. Butch Miller, a Republican now running for lieutenant governor, is pushing a bill to ban absentee ballot drop boxes entirely, just months after supporting a provision in the state’s exhaustive Senate Bill 202 that already restricted their use. State House Speaker David Ralston has proposed a bill that would move election investigations from the secretary of state’s office to the state bureau of investigations. It’s the latest in a series of measures aimed at undercutting the power of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who rejected Trump’s attempts to “find” enough votes to help him overturn his Georgia margin of defeat. The GOP last year removed Raffensperger as chair of the State Election Board and banned him from entering any election lawsuit settlements without approval from the legislature.

Another new Republican proposal would restructure the government of Georgia’s Gwinnett County, where Biden won by 18 points, and allow the GOP-dominated legislature to pack the Democratic-led county commission with its own appointees. Nicole Hendrickson, the Democratic chairwoman of the county commission, has said the proposal “removes our voice as a board of commissioners and disenfranchises our citizens who did not have a say in any of this.”

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Florida Republicans, who last year passed a wide-ranging law restricting mail-in voting and drop boxes while empowering partisan poll-watchers, have also unleashed a tide of new proposals ahead of the next election cycle. Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has called to create a massive new law enforcement unit to investigate voting “irregularities.” State lawmakers have introduced proposals to make it a felony for any third party to submit more than two ballots and to increase “maintenance” of voter rolls, which critics argue too often amounts to a “purge” of valid voters, according to the advocacy group Voting Rights Lab.

Republican legislators in five states, including Florida, Tennessee and Oklahoma, have all introduced bills that would launch partisan reviews of the 2020 election, although no recount or “audit” in any state — including those conducted or ordered by Republicans — has found any evidence of significant voter fraud.

A New Hampshire Republican bill would eliminate vote-counting machines and require all ballots to be counted by hand, which Democrats worry could lengthen the time it takes to tally ballots and create an opening for bad actors to challenge the legitimacy of the election. Republicans in the state have also proposed creating stricter residency requirements to vote, which appears to be a continuation of the GOP’s aim to restrict voting by college students.

Republican legislators in five states, including Florida, Tennessee, and Oklahoma have all introduced bills that would launch partisan reviews of the 2020 election.

Many of the bills that Republicans have already introduced will also carry over from last year. At least 57 of the 88 carryover bills would restrict mail voting, including limiting the time voters have to apply or deliver a mail ballot, according to the Brennan Center. Seven others would expand voter purges, five would impose criminal penalties for election officials who send out unsolicited mail ballots or people who assist voters in returning their ballots, and 23 others would impose or expand voter ID requirements.

“The Capitol attack was just the beginning of the campaign to overthrow our democracy,” Andrea Waters King, president of the progressive think tank Drum Major Institute, said in a statement. “White supremacists failed to steal the presidential election, so now they’re trying to steal it in the states. Dozens of voter suppression bills have passed around the country since the insurrection — these attacks on our democracy are less visible but no less insidious. We must fight against these anti-democratic laws as fervently as we condemn the insurrectionists.” 

Many of the bills were written with the help of deep-pocketed conservative groups. Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action for America, sister organization to the powerful Heritage Foundation, last year bragged in a leaked video obtained by Mother Jones that in some cases the organization has prodded lawmakers to craft voting restrictions.

“In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” she said in the video. “Or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.”

Anderson recalled that the group was able to “quickly” and “quietly” help Iowa lawmakers draft bills and gather public support for a slew of new voting restrictions.

“Honestly, nobody even noticed,” she said. “My team looked at each other and we’re like, ‘It can’t be that easy.'”

Democrats have renewed their push to pass voting rights legislation before this year’s midterm elections in response to the new voting restrictions. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has vowed to hold a vote on changing the chamber’s filibuster rules by Martin Luther King Jr. Day if Republicans continue to block the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. It’s unclear whether he can convince Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., to support filibuster changes they have long opposed.

“We’re running out of time,” Schumer warned earlier this week. “What these legislatures have done in 2021 and are now beginning to do in 2022, if you wait much longer, you won’t be able to undo them in time for the 2022 elections. Even if the legislation says what they did is wrong, the courts may say it’s too close to the primary season, we can’t change it. So we have to move quickly.”

Read more on the continuing fight for voting rights:

Trump aides consider “legal action” to get his help paying Jan. 6-related legal bills: report

On Thursday, Maggie Haberman of The New York Times reported that associates of former President Donald Trump are considering “legal action” to force the former president to cover legal expenses related to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, as he has indicated he is unwilling to do so voluntarily.

Numerous current and former aides to Trump are being targeted by House investigators for information relating to their activities, or knowledge of Trump’s activities, on January 6.

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This comes, ironically, as the Republican National Committee is ponying up $1.6 million to pay for Trump’s personal legal expenses relating to the New York State investigation into his business practices — an arrangement that has drawn furious criticism from at least one Republican donor.

The former president has a lengthy pattern of refusing to pay legal expenses for allies, even when their legal problems are related to their association with him. For the past several months, Trump has spurned pleas from Rudy Giuliani to help his legal expenses as he faces investigations and threats of disbarment.

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Everyone is backing away from Chris Noth, as “And Just Like That” cuts him from the finale

Apparently, killing off Chris Noth’s character wasn’t enough.

The actor’s cameo in the finale of “And Just Like That” has reportedly been removed after several women accused the actor of sexual assault, according to Variety. Noth’s character — John James Preston, a.k.a. Mr. Big — had already died in the series’ first episode from a fatal heart attack after exercising on his Peloton. He was dead but apparently not forgotten.

In the show’s finale, Noth was slated to appear in a fantasy sequence alongside Sarah Jessica Parker — who plays onscreen wife Carrie Bradshaw — during her visit to the Pont des Arts bridge in Paris, where she scatters his ashes.

According to the show’s creative team, the desired footage of Noth for the season finale wasn’t significant enough in furthering or adding to his narrative. The actor’s scenes were ultimately cut out entirely.

The recent news succeeds Noth’s sexual assault allegations, which first came to light in December 2021 when two women came forward with their stories to The Hollywood Reporter. The actor denied both accusations in a public statement, claiming, “The accusations against me made by individuals I met years, even decades, ago are categorically false. These stories could’ve been from 30 years ago or 30 days ago — no always means no — that is a line I did not cross. The encounters were consensual. It’s difficult not to question the timing of these stories coming out. I don’t know for certain why they are surfacing now, but I do know this: I did not assault these women.” When a third woman accused Noth of sexual assault — a few days later — he also denied the allegation.

RELATED: Despite male hysteria, #MeToo didn’t “go too far” – it hasn’t gone far enough

That same month, Noth was dropped from his lead role on the CBS crime series “The Equalizer.”

Noth joins a list of actors who were recast or replaced shortly after accusations against them were made public. In August 2020, stand-up comedian Tig Notaro replaced Chris D’Elia in Netflix’s “Army of the Dead” after D’Elia was accused of engaging in predatory behavior with underage girls. Comedian Louis C.K. stopped being involved as a producer on FX’s “Better Things,” and was replaced by Patton Oswalt as the voice of Max in the “Secret Life of Pets” sequel after admitting to several incidents of sexual misconduct in 2017. Christopher Plummer replaced Kevin Spacey in the 2017 film “All the Money in the World.” Spacey, who was accused of sexual assault, also lost his starring role on Netflix’s “House of Cards” that same year. And according to Deadline, Armie Hammer, who was accused of emotional and sexual abuse, was replaced by Will Arnett in the upcoming sports comedy-drama film “Next Goal Wins.” Hammer, however, is still featured in the 2022 mystery thriller “Death on the Nile” despite previous talks about reshooting his scenes.  

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Although Noth is no longer starring in the “Sex and the City” revival, it’s still unclear whether his role as Carrie’s primary love interest will be assigned to a new character. According to Insider, the show’s major twist was “seemingly planned” by its writers. So perhaps, a new addition to the cast (or another familiar face) is expected very soon.

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Food writer Alison Roman defeats so-called cancel culture by landing a new cooking show

More than a year-and-a-half after her disparaging comments against Netflix’s Marie Kondo and television personality Chrissy Teigen, Alison Roman is officially securing a larger platform in 2022 with a newly launched CNN+ cooking program.

The cookbook author and former New York Times columnist will host episodes that highlight an assortment of prepared dishes both in and out of the kitchen, according to Variety. The show — which doesn’t have a name yet — will also delve into the ingredients, people and stories behind Roman’s recipes.

“I could not be more thrilled to be partnering with CNN+ on this project,” said Roman in a recent CNN+ press release. “I’ve been dreaming about bringing a new sort of cooking and food show to life for years and I can’t think of any place better to make it a reality.”

RELATED: Chrissy Teigen and Alison Roman’s fight reveals a deep well of women’s insecurity about cooking

The upcoming show is Roman’s first major deal following her publicized downfall in 2020, according to Forbes. During a May 2020 interview with The New Consumer, Roman criticized Marie Kondo — the host of Netflix’s reality television series “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo” — for her personalized line of home goods. Roman said that Kondo had “f**king sold out immediately” and that her brand was “antithetical” to Kondo’s KonMari Method.

In the same interview, Roman also threw jabs at Teigen, saying “what Chrissy Teigen [had] done is so crazy to me.”

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“She had a successful cookbook. And then it was, like: Boom, line at Target. Boom, now she has an Instagram page that has over a million followers where it’s just, like, people running a content farm for her,” Roman added. “That horrifies me and it’s not something that I ever want to do. I don’t aspire to that. But like, who’s laughing now? Because she’s making a ton of f**king money.”

The scuffle quickly escalated on Twitter before Roman issued an apology to both Teigen and Kondo. Some critics subsequently accused Roman of racism after she targeted two women of color — both Teigen and Kondo are of Asian descent — and food appropriation, particularly for her viral and whitewashed rendition of chickpea and coconut milk stew. 

Roman has since produced “Home Series,” her own cooking show on YouTube and kickstarted the Substack newsletter, “a newsletter.” She previously worked as an editor at Bon Appétit magazine and as a pastry chef at places such as Quince in San Francisco and Momofuku Milk Bar in New York.

More information on Roman’s show will be released in the upcoming weeks, according to CNN+. 

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“Women of the Movement,” though imperfect, gives life to Emmett Till’s story

The six-part “Women of the Movement” is built around a distinct awareness that most of what we know about Emmett Till is encompassed in two or three images. One is a handsome photograph of the 14-year-old proudly sporting a stylish hat. Another shows the teen beaming brightly beside his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, her arm draped around his shoulders.

The other, sadly seared into the common consciousness of anyone familiar with the Civil Rights movement, is the photo of his corpse – a body mutilated beyond recognition; his tortured flesh distended after spending three days at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. Taken by a photographer from Jet Magazine which made history by publishing the heartrending pictures, that one has been reprinted scores of times.

Mamie Till-Mobley’s decision to show the world what white racists did to her son drew national attention to Civil Rights Movement, expanding its base of support beyond the South. But the photo’s wide circulation also meant that eventually Emmett became a symbol and a victim instead of remaining what he was: a boy sadistically ripped away from his mother.

RELATED: Justice for Emmett Till: DOJ reopens case

All of this makes series creator Marissa Jo Cerar’s decision to open the series with sound of Mamie (Tony Award-winner Adrienne Warren) weeping especially poignant, because these tears aren’t caused by Emmett’s 1955 murder. They’re an accompaniment to birthing pangs.

As the title implies “Women of the Movement” primarily focuses on Mamie and her inspirational power, first as a mother and later as a material witness to crimes against mothers and children across the nation. And Warren is an apt custodian of Mamie’s persona. evoking despair and hope simultaneous throughout these episodes in ways that hold you close.

She turns up the heat precisely where it needs to be in the moments to meet any insult to Emmett’s legacy with a maternal sword and shield, centering her easy affection and genuine elation. Portraying a woman who never planned to become an activist requires such agility, and Warren gracefully traverses leagues of psychological territory within these hours.

Before we make that journey with her, Cerar and director Gina Prince-Bythewood take care to establish more about Emmett’s personality and spirit that most accounts reveal. This is the highest service “Women of the Movement” performs, conveyed with assured sweetness by Cedric Joe.

Soon after scenes from his first minutes in this world, we settle in with Joe’s performance of Emmett as charismatic Chicago boy who passes the time singing Motown hits outside his apartment building to impress the neighborhood girls. We see how close Emmett and Mamie are, how he’s highly protective of her. When he pulls rank as the man of the house in reaction to Mamie’s boyfriend Gene (Ray Fisher) dropping hints about proposing, not even his grandmother Alma (Tonya Pinkins) tries to correct him.

And these are the traits the series foregrounds, establishing Emmett as an innocent jokester with a stubborn streak. A kid who wasn’t spoiled, but underestimated the difficulty of the field work his great-uncle Mose (Glynn Turman) expected of him during that trip to Money, Mississippi, a place that sparked his curiosity enough for him to beg Mamie to let him go down South for a visit.

Mamie did her best to prepare him on how to behave so he’d stay safe. But he was a goofball and a bit of a performer around his friends. Knowing these personality details layers more tragic coloring atop the crime that came after from Emmett’s brief transaction with Carolyn Bryant (Julia McDermott) at the local market.

The precise events are disputed to this day, but the disproportional violence that resulted from Emmett allegedly whistling at Carolyn Bryant is fact. Eventually an episode shows the boy’s mangled body, doing so respectfully. But long before that we connect to who Emmett was and the young man he was becoming.

Warren’s portrayal keeps us focused on Emmett as a boy and a son. This, along with Joe’s lightsome delivery and comportment, makes enough of an impression to cement his presence in scenes even when Emmett is only present in spirit and memory.

Since Emmett Till’s story is one of justice denied, depicting the murder trial and media coverage surrounding the case is necessary. But this is also where “Women of the Movement” squanders a great deal of its momentum, since the focuses shifts away from Warren’s Mamie and her family to take us inside discussions between reporters covering the case, including one played by Dan Byrd, as well as the attorneys involved (played by Timothy Hutton and Gil Bellows).

Not helping matters is the fact that every white actor playing a southerner sees fit to bust out unfortunate interpretations of regional accents that should come in a greasy bucket with a side of slaw and mashed potatoes. Regardless of this, the minutes spent with these characters in engaging in deep strategy meetings or jury deliberations draws the focus away from Mamie.

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The time may have may have been better spent with the movement allies and supporters like Medgar Evers (Tongayi Chirisa) and his Regional Council of Negro Leadership Dr. T.R.M. Howard (Alex Désert), seen here in his capacity as a safe house host for Black journalists and witnesses connected to the case.

There’s more to Evers, Howard and other known names featured in “Women of the Movement” than what we see here. Granted, there’s no way to adequately cover the whole of their biographies within subplots written through these six hours, but discovering more of what they were like as people – details that have been amply chronicled over the years – would have been more aligned with the spirit of the overall theme.

These are small distractions, though, not enough to dilute the impact of muscular performances by Warren, Turman, Price and other core performers, augmented by surefooted directing by Prince-Bythewood, Kasi Lemmons, Tina Mabry and Julie Dash. Choosing Black women to visually sculpt another Black woman’s story yields dividends witnessed in details, like Prince-Bythewood’s immersive depiction of Mississippi’s land, fields and waters in the opening episode, all warmed by a sunny golden filter.

Her lens reminds us that the alluring beauty of the place cannot be denied, regardless of Jim Crow laws and racist violence. Lemmons, Dash and Mabry maintain that sense of intimacy in their hours, even within courtroom scenes and backroom settings lit to accentuate the stifling air and actions unfolding within.

Although ABC asked reporters to tread lightly in going into details about the plot, people have been saying Emmett Till’s name for nearly three quarters of a century because the history of his murder and the courtroom proceedings remains a common one. His case is the root of the reason people doubted the men who hunted and murdered Ahmaud Arbery would be found guilty. Like Alma tells Mamie, getting an indictment in Emmett’s case was a miracle. But convictions don’t happen, she said, for people like us.

Tragically that been proven time and again. Last month, the Department of Justice closed its cold case investigation into his murder after reopening it in 2017. “The Blood of Emmett Till” was published in that year, and within it author Timothy Tyson wrote that Bryant recanted her courtroom claim that Till made aggressive sexual advances toward her. Later, she denied having recanted to the FBI. She’s still living in Raleigh, N.C. and has never been charged in this case.

Past ABC projects glimpsing at chapters in America’s long, continuing struggle for justice and equality have been content to take that approach. “Women of the Movement” could have adopted the same didactic tones throughout, and at times it does, losing some of its winning dimensionality at a result. More frequently, it fulfills its aim of restoring Emmett Till’s boyhood. And if this is the first effort of a planned anthology, it should make viewers optimistic to see what comes next.

The first two hours of “Women of the Movement” debut Thursday, Jan. 6 on ABC and streams the next day on Hulu. Watch a trailer for it below, via YouTube.

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Flu, coronavirus, or all of the above? More unlucky Americans are catching both at the same time

Last week, an alarming report emerged of an unvaccinated pregnant woman in Israel who tested positive for COVID-19. That alone wouldn’t be too unusual, but that wasn’t the only virus she had in her system: she also tested positive for influenza.

She’s not the only person recently to have contracted “flurona,” a neologism to refer to the joint infection with the seasonal flu and the rapidly-spreading novel coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2. Reports of her and other patients’ flurona prognoses splashed across headlines over the last few days.

Though it sounds scary, flurona isn’t a new variant that will soon replace the highly contagious omicron variant. Rather, it’s simply a catchy phrase to describe when an unlucky person has both the coronavirus and the flu. In medicine this is what is known as a co-infection.

Following the news of a flurona case in Israel, patients with the co-infection have been seen in Brazil and Hungary. In the United States, there have been reports of flurona infections in California, Florida and Texas.

But is this new or unexpected — and actually something to be concerned about? 

Doctors say not exactly. Co-infections aren’t a new thing, and these viruses don’t hitch a ride on each other’s back. Rather, these patients just happen to be unlucky.

In fact, back in 2020, before the word “flurona” came into the picture, doctors already knew that a co-infections of the flu and coronavirus were occurring. At the time, the scenario was being described as a “twindemic,” of both flu and coronavirus.

“Limited data suggests that is possible, but much more work needs to be done,” Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist, ABC News Medical Contributor and Boston Children’s Hospital’s chief innovation officer, told ABC News in August 2020.

Co-infections with coronavirus may be quite common among those hospitalized for COVID-19. Indeed, a study published in 2020 in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 20% of patients studied were infected with another respiratory virus in addition to COVID-19, including one who had the flu. A separate study conducted at Tongji Hospital in Wuhan, China, found that an estimated 12% of the 544 patients infected with COVID-19 also had influenza. 

In 2020, doctors suspected that a “twindemic” would be kept at bay because of the preventative measures people were taking at the time, which was before the vaccines existed.

“There is a potential silver lining,” Brownstein said, “that the current efforts around social distancing and mask wearing may have an impact on influenza transmission as well.”

Fast forward to 2022, and flurona is becoming more widely observed in the general public. Recently, Alec Zierlein, a 17-year-old high school student in Texas, detailed his experience to ABC 13 in Houston, Texas. “I ended up getting tested the day before Christmas for strep throat, flu and COVID,” said Zierlein. “I didn’t think I had any of the three. It felt like a mild cold.” Fortunately, he had a mild case. 

But Dr. Janak Patel, the director of the Department of Infection Control & Healthcare Epidemiology at UTMB, told ABC 13 people shouldn’t be scared of flurona. 

“We know how to take care of both of these illnesses,” Patel said. Symptoms of flurona are similar to those of both the coronavirus and the flu— coughing, fatigue, runny nose, sore throat, diarrhea, and body aches.

That being said, experts say flurona is becoming more common now, mostly because both COVID-19 cases and influenza cases are on the rise. Last year, before vaccines and the delta variant wave, people were completely hunkered down and lockdowns still existed. Now, as people are going out in public and gathering more often, viruses like the flu are becoming common again. Hence, we are seeing more cases of co-infections with both the coronavirus and influenza.

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“Everybody was basically hunkered down — we shuttered our windows and closed our doors. We masked up. Schools were out and daycares went down,” Dr. Frank Esper, a physician at the Cleveland Clinic Children’s Center for Pediatric Infectious Diseases, told Time. “So all the viruses took a nosedive.” Esper added: “We’re seeing many, many people who have the coronavirus as well as a second or even third germ at the same time.”

The rise in flu may be related to something else, too. Indeed, there is some evidence that this year’s flu shot doesn’t match the circulating strain, which could be increasing the likelihood of this co-infection. Still, the public is being advised to get their flu shots, as some protection is better than none.

Unfortunately, doctors say that people who are high-risk for either the flu or the coronavirus are more likely to have worse symptoms with flurona. “High-risk” groups includes those who are immunocompromised or older people. 

Doctors say treating the dual infection will depend on the severity of a person’s illness. Treatments may include Tamiflu, an antiviral, or COVID-19 specific treatments — such as monoclonal antibodies or oxygen.

Doctors are also reporting that having both viruses at the same time doesn’t make either one worse than the other in non-high risk patients. While data is still pouring in, historically those who have co-infections don’t experience more severe infections than if they only had one virus. 

“Everybody knows flu is bad; everybody knows coronavirus is bad,” Esper told Time magazine. “You put the two together, you think you’re even worse. For the most part, virus-wise, we don’t see that.”

Read more influenza stories:

Sorry, drinkers: Scientists say there is no hangover cure that stands up to scrutiny

Beyond chronic disease, infection or viruses, hangovers are some of the most miserable afflictions known to humankind. This is why, for centuries, every culture which imbibes alcohol has also sought a way to cure hangovers. Hence,  there are hundreds, if not thousands, of so-called hangover remedies — some grounded in folk wisdom, others purportedly backed up by science. 

Unfortunately for drinkers, a new review study reveals that the research on hangover cures is so inconclusive that it is difficult to make any legitimate scientific conclusions about what actually works. This is not to say that any “cures” is without merit; rather, the problem, the researchers wrote, is that the quality of the scientific studies on possible hangover treatments is very poor.

The paper is a type of study called a systematic review, in which existing studies of a niche topic are scrutinized and analyzed as one to make greater conclusions. This review study started with analyzing 46 full texts about hangover cures, though 25 had to be discarded from further analysis because they did not have a placebo group or had used a study design that violated protocol.

The stakes are higher than one might suppose. As the authors note, hangovers are not simply an inconvenience to their sufferers. The various ways that you feel ill during a hangover take a toll on your body, and even on the economy in terms of lost working hours. If there were a theoretical way to make it possible for a person to drink all night without feeling like God is punishing them the next day, that would have an undeniable benefit to society.

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That left 21 studies for consideration about ways to do precisely that. This included research on supposed hangover cures like Korean pear juice, clove extract, and red ginseng. Unfortunately, none of these studies were exactly up to snuff either, often because of small or exclusionary sample sizes. (In order to be broadly applicable, such studies need to be repeatable and include as many people in as many different demographics as possible.) As the authors write, “A third of all included studies were conducted in Japan or South Korea, eight were conducted exclusively with male participants and no studies were conducted which included adults aged over 65, the majority including only people aged below 40.” In addition, the studies they analyzed were never independently verified.

This does not mean that the existing body of hangover cure knowledge is entirely worthless. The scholars said that there was “evidence of statistically significant improvements” for a number of substances commonly used to treat hangovers, including “clove extract, tolfenamic acid, pyritinol, Hovenia dulcis fruit extract, L-cysteine, red ginseng and Korean pear juice.” Yet the evidence itself was “very low quality” by the rigorous standards of legitimate scientific research, as was the research which indicated certain substances might not be effective.

The authors suggest a number of changes to the way research is conducted, such as by having more women involved as participants in research and using validated scales for hangover symptoms.

A few of these supposed hangover remedies showed promise — or at least, warranted further study. These included clove extract, tolfenamic acid (an anti-inflammatory painkiller) and pyritinol (an over-the-counter drug used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, cognitive disorders and learning disorders).

There is one tried and true hangover prevention method, however: If you have had a night of heavy drinking, the best medical advice is to stay hydrated, get lots of sleep, eat foods that you can digest comfortably and avoid situations that hurt you (such as rooms where there are bright lights). Hangovers are believed to be caused by congeners, chemicals produced by the alcohol termination process that are present in drinks from wine and beer to hard liquor. When you suffer from a hangover, your body is dehydrated and has lowered blood sugar, and the alcohol’s depressive effect on your brain cells causes you to feel weak and uncoordinated. It can also irritate your digestive tract.

Read more on the science of hangovers:

Democrats embrace Dick Cheney during Jan. 6 remembrance event

It would have been an odd scene just a few years ago: Congressional Democrats lining up to greet and exchange kind words with former vice president Dick Cheney, who along with his daughter, Rep. Liz Cheney, were the only two Republican members present for an event held at the U.S. Capitol Thursday to commemorate the attempted Jan. 6 insurrection.

Asked why he decided to show up, Cheney told ABC, “It’s an important historical event. You can’t overestimate how important it is.”

He added: “I’m deeply disappointed we don’t have better leadership in the Republican Party to restore the Constitution.”

The scene was so unusual for its remarkable cordiality in an age of hyper-polarization. Indeed, even during his years as President George W. Bush’s No. 2 — an era in American governance that despite its own simmering horror, seems calm and friendly by today’s standards — Cheney was a larger-than-life liberal boogeyman, described by many as a dark force driving American policy from the background of the West Wing.

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Despite their past denunciations, several Democrats even went out of their way to praise him Thursday with House Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro telling reporters he “cares deeply about this country.”

“This isn’t about partisanship,” she added. “This is about, you know, what this citadel of democracy represents, for him, for me, for Liz Cheney, for all of us here.”

“In this fight, he’s an ally,” Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., added following the event. “And this fight, for the soul of America, is the only one that matters.”

Liz Cheney is in the middle of ramping up a bitterly contested primary campaign to hold onto her Wyoming congressional seat in the face of opposition from pro-Trump forces who have labeled her as an enemy for publicly opposing the former president’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results. The Wyoming Republican Party even voted to stop recognizing the political scion as a member of the GOP last November, a firm rebuke as she faces a crowded primary against Trump-endorsed attorney Harriet Hageman, among others. 

RELATED: Liz Cheney: Not the Republican hero that we needed in 2022

But there are some bright spots to the publicity for the younger Cheney — namely, an influx of donations from Democratic-aligned donors in recent months. These donors include Democratic investors Ron Conway and Ted Janus, as well as John Pritzker, the wealthy brother of Democratic Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, according to CNBC.

During a Thursday interview with The New York Times’ “The Daily” podcast, she doubled down on her criticism of current Republican Party leadership and made headlines for confirming a long-known rumor about the way she chewed out fellow GOP Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Oh, for his role in laying the groundwork for Jan. 6.

“Get away from me, you f—ing did this,” she allegedly told Jordan as they were both being escorted to a safe room within the Capitol that day. She confirmed to host Michael Barbaro that the interaction took place, and added some extra context for her remarks.

“I was in the aisle and [Jordan] came over to me and basically said, we need to get the ladies away from the aisle. And, you know, I had watched for the months since the election what was going on and the lies that have been told to people,” Cheney told Barbaro.

RELATED: Jan. 6 committee heats up as Liz Cheney takes center stage

“And it was both that I, you know, certainly didn’t need his help, and secondly, I thought clearly that the lie that they had been spreading and telling people had absolutely contributed to what we were living through at that moment,” she added.

The Cheneys weren’t the only mid-2000s-era liberal villains to reappear for the one-year anniversary of the Capitol riot. Former Bush adviser Karl Rove wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal: “Republicans’ Jan. 6 Responsibility.”