Monica Potts

Earlier this year, two great environmental blogs shut down one after another: The Wall Street Journal’s Environmental Capital and The Christian Science Monitor’s Bright Green blog. While the WSJ didn’t comment on why they shut their blog down, it might have been the result of the same challenges laid out in The Climate Desk’s — […]

If you’ve been paying any attention, you know that the premise of a new Nebraska anti-abortion law that fetuses feel pain at 20 weeks is totally bogus. Now, the real danger is that this standard will hold anyway, replacing the current standard that only allows states to prohibit abortions after the fetuses are viable. If […]

New York City has reached an agreement to stop paying teachers who are sitting in a “rubber room” doing no work while they contest their firing. The city will also require principals and administrators to file charges against teachers within certain time frames, and pledges to speed up the hearing process. The teachers will still […]

Via the Nation Institute, a new study shows that minority employees of newspapers have been disproportionately hit by the drastic layoffs in that industry, according to the American Society of Newspapers and Editors. About 800 lost their jobs last year, which brings their representation in newsrooms to just about 13 percent of all positions. It’s […]

Yesterday, The New York Times‘ Denise Grady wrote about a study published in the Lancet that described a sharp decline in worldwide maternal mortality rates. In the middle was a seemingly uncorroborated claim from a Lancet editor, Dr. Richard Horton that advocacy groups had tried to pressure the journal into holding off on the study’s […]

A judge has ordered a Mississippi school district to comply with a 40-year-old desegregation order, one that the school district got around by allowing white students to transfer to a majority white school or group them within a smaller number of classrooms at other schools, according to the Christian Science Monitor. Lawyers from the Justice […]

Last week, I wrote about an odd Associated Press story that seemed to imply that 47 percent of American households were freeloading. That’s the percent of American families who either make so little or qualify for enough tax credits that, for now at least, they owe nothing in income tax. But that analysis ignores the […]

Out of fear that there might be an incident of violence, North Carolina state officials are preventing a group of Tea Party activists from bringing flags or signs with long poles to an event on Thursday. The fear comes partly after recent events have escalated and spawned some particularly ugly behavior. The ban doesn’t violate […]

A couple of months ago, I blogged about how the residents of Colorado Springs were taking their aversion to taxes so far that the city was going to have to stop some basic services, like shutting down streetlights. Now, WSJ tells us that some residents were actually begging for their services to be cut. And, […]

Yesterday, Nebraska’s Legislature finally approved, and the governor is poised to sign today, a retrograde law that would ban abortions after 20 weeks, based on the idea that fetuses feel pain, and would also require extensive screening of women seeking abortions. Among the conditions screened for are mental health problems, but the bill also precludes […]