You suspected that Maga had not conquered the Washington national cathedral when Bill Kristol was spotted at a men’s urinal conversing with Chris Wallace. You knew it for sure when James Carville, Anthony Fauci and Rachel Maddow were seen sitting close to one another in the nave.
The funeral of the 46th US vice-president, Dick Cheney, who died earlier this month aged 84, was a throwback to a less raucous and rancorous time. Ex-presidents and vice-presidents, Democratic and Republican, made small talk, but Donald Trump, who spent Thursday crying treason and calling for Democrats to be put to death, and his deputy JD Vance were not invited.
More than a thousand guests saw eight military body bearers place Cheney’s flag-draped casket on a catafalque as gently as lowering a baby in a crib. Then two hours of plangent music, solemn processions and tearful eulogies beneath stained glass and a soaring vaulted ceiling amounted to a requiem for the Republican party.
Cheney used to be known as its Darth Vader and, fittingly, the neo-Gothic church’s exterior boasts a hand-carved grotesque of the Star Wars character. Vader terrorised the galaxy but saved his son and renounced the dark side of the Force on his deathbed. Cheney had imperial ambitions of his own but gained a measure of redemption by defending his daughter and democracy from Trump.
The Trump administration on Thursday announced new oil and gas drilling off California’s and Florida’s coasts, setting the stage for a political showdown – including with Sunshine state Republicans who have largely opposed petroleum development in the Gulf of Mexico.
A federal judge on Thursday halted for now Donald Trump’s deployment of national guard troops to Washington DC, dealing the president a temporary legal setback to his efforts to send the military to US cities over the objections of local leaders.
Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist who participated in protests at Columbia University and was detained by Ice earlier this year, has filed a lawsuit demanding the Trump administration release its communications with anti-Palestinian groups he says contributed to his March arrest and efforts to detain him.
Cases of infant botulism tied to the ByHeart infant formula recall have nearly tripled across 15 states since the recall was first announced less than a month ago.
The Israeli military carried out one of the deadliest attacks on Gaza since the “ceasefire” took effect last month, killing over 30 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children, and wounding dozens more in a series of airstrikes late Wednesday and early Thursday. The dead and wounded arrived at hospitals in an endless stream, children were covered in dust and blood, men carried small bodies wrapped in shrouds, and wails of grief rose in the air
The U.S. Coast Guard will reportedly no longer consider swastikas, nooses, or the Confederate flag to be hate symbols, according to forthcoming guidelines obtained by The Washington Post, though the service branch denies changing its stance towards such imagery.
A fire forced an evacuation at the South American Brazilian venue for the COP30 climate summit, on Thursday, Nov. 20, but so far no one in attendance has been injured, according to multiple reports.
