Author: Reporter

The infighting was so intense a year ago that Democrats who controlled both the White House and Congress could not win support for a sweeping social spending package that was the party’s top legislative priority. President Joe Biden, meanwhile, was viewed skeptically enough that some of his fellow Democrats questioned the wisdom of him seeking reelection. What a difference a year makes. Speculation about Biden’s political future has quieted after Democrats outperformed expectations during the November midterm elections. His toughest critics on the left are signaling they would work to help him secure a second term. And perhaps most...

Wisconsin Republicans planned to vote on January 12 to again allow therapists, social workers, and counselors to try to change their LGBTQ clients’ gender identities and sexual orientations, a practice known as conversion therapy. A ban on conversion therapy was passed in 2020 by a state board within the Democratic governor’s administration overseeing licensing for mental health professionals. But a committee in the Republican-controlled Legislature temporarily blocked it then and was poised to do so again Thursday. LGBTQ rights advocates have decried the scientifically discredited practice of trying to “convert” LGBTQ people to heterosexuality and traditional gender expectations as...

House Republicans on January 11 opened their long-promised investigation into President Joe Biden and his family, wielding the power of their new majority to demand information from the Treasury Department and former Twitter executives as they laid the groundwork for public hearings. The Republican-led committee sent a series of letters requesting financial information from the Treasury Department about financial transactions by members of the Biden family that were flagged as suspicious activity. Those reports are routine, with larger financial transactions automatically flagged to the government, and are not evidence on their own of misconduct. Lawmakers also requested testimony from...

As thousands of children were taken from their parents at the southern border during a Trump administration crackdown on illegal crossings, a federal public defender in San Diego set out to find new strategies to go after the longstanding deportation law fueling the family separations. The resulting legal defense that Kara Hartzler would help draft in the coming years, work that continued even after a judge halted the general practice at the Mexico-U.S. border in June 2018, was unprecedented. It exposed Section 1326 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which makes it a crime to unlawfully return to the...

Sherlock Holmes is finally free to the American public in 2023. The long-running contested copyright dispute over Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of a whipsmart detective — which has even ensnared Enola Holmes — finally come to an end as the 1927 copyrights expired on January 1 include Conan Doyle’s last Sherlock Holmes work. Alongside the short-story collection “The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes,” books such as Virginia Woolf’s “To The Lighthouse,” Ernest Hemingway’s “Men Without Women,” William Faulkner’s “Mosquitoes” and Agatha Christie’s “The Big Four” — an Hercule Poirot mystery — will become public domain as the calendar turns...