“If You’re Getting a W-2, You’re a Sucker”

There are many differences between the rich and the rest of us, but one of the most consequential for your taxes is whether most of your income comes from wages.

ProPublica

Crypto Gaming ‘Landlords’ Upset They Can’t Keep Exploiting All The Players Quitting

Axie Infinity is the crypto-backed Pokémon clone in which cute little creatures that double as NFTs battle for fun and profit. It’s also a pyramid scheme that relies on cheap labor from countries like the Philippines to fuel its growth. Now, fictional inflation, combined with a historic crypto heist allegedly committed by North Korea, have plunged the Axie economy into chaos, and its high rollers are freaking out as the ones below them bail on the scam.

Kotaku

Professor points out the double standard Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law misses

Uju Anya, Ph.D., is a professor of second language acquisition at Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Modern Languages. She researches applied linguistics, critical sociolinguistics, and critical discourse studies through the lenses of race, gender, sexual, and social class identities, according to her website. And in just 45 words, she exposed the hypocrisy of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law and other legislation of its ilk.

Queerty

Steampunk: How this subgenre of science fiction challenges the beliefs of civilisational progress

Steampunk is a response to growing estrangement with the interpretation of modernity and the ruthless rupture from the past as the precondition for progress.

Scroll.in

Kamala Harris keeps traveling to unconventional places. Here’s why.

She’s taken a swing through the Delta and done a drop by in the bayou. It’s not quite the usual treks that a veep makes.

Politico

Rotting fruit, spoiled vegetables: How Texas just made the supply chain even worse

A weeklong protest by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott against President Biden’s recent immigration policy reached a resolution on Friday, but the gridlock it created has resulted in hundreds of millions of lost dollars and delays in shipments of everything from avocados to automobile parts that will have a longer-term impact.

CNN

Biden Weighing Student Loan Cancellation or Moratorium Extension

The Biden administration will take action to extend the moratorium on student loan payments or decide whether he plans to cancel student debt through executive action in the coming months, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said.

Bloomberg

A Milwaukee man spent 24 years in prison for crimes he didn’t commit. Now a state board says he should get $1 million.

A Milwaukee man who spent 24 years in prison for crimes he did not commit should be awarded $1 million for his wrongful conviction, a state board has decided.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

How Pandemic Profiteers Got Rich Off Taxpayer Money While Millions Suffered

In an excerpt from his book Pandemic, Inc., J. David McSwane details how greedy capitalists took advantage of a discombobulated government during the height of Covid-19

Rolling Stone

Solving student-debt crisis requires a ‘New Deal moment,’ former education secretary under Obama says

“We have an opportunity to make this a New Deal moment,” said John B. King Jr., who served as education secretary under former President Barack Obama, during a summit on the topic hosted by the Student Debt Crisis Center.

CNBC

Black D.C. Is Gone? The Truth Is Always More Complicated

A longtime Washingtonian takes us on a tour of rapidly gentrifying Logan Circle — where things are not always as they seem.

Politico

A Man Was Arrested For An Arson Attack On An LGBTQ Nightclub That Injured 2 People

Surveillance video captured the suspect dousing the floor of the bar with a canister of gasoline, before igniting it and running away from the ensuing fireball.

Buzzfeed News

Civil rights groups sue Texas county over alleged ‘discriminatory’ map

A coalition of civil rights groups in Texas filed a federal lawsuit Thursday against Galveston County, alleging that the county’s redistricting plan intentionally discriminates against a growing minority population in the Gulf Coast community.

CNN

Census undercount risks funding for Native American reservations

The federal government distributes $1.5 trillion annually based on census results, which missed 5 percent of Native Americans this time

Roll Call

Polls spell trouble for Biden with Hispanic voters

President Biden has been mired in a stretch of disappointing polls, but recent surveys suggest he’s having particular trouble keeping the support of Hispanic voters.

The Hill

What The Hell Is Happening Here, Tucker Carlson?

This week, Carlson dropped the trailer for his upcoming documentary “The End of Men,” which I guess is supposed to be a montage of all of the things we are missing out on by murdering masculinity all the time.

Wonkette

Some state lawmakers calling it quits, can’t afford to serve

Lawmakers in other states, often those with part-time “citizen” legislatures, have raised similar complaints. In Oregon, where the base pay is about $33,000 a year, three female state representatives announced in March they are not seeking reelection because they can’t afford to support their families on a part-time salary for what’s really full-time work. They called the situation “unsustainable” in a joint resignation letter.

AP News

The Danger More Republicans Should Be Talking About

White-supremacist ideology is harmful to all, especially the naive and defenseless minds of youth.

The Atlantic

Migrant arrivals along U.S. border soared to 221,000 in March, the highest tally since 2000

The number of migrant arrivals along the U.S. southern border soared in March to the highest levels since 2000, surpassing 200,000 for only the third time during the Biden administration, according to government statistics submitted to a federal court Friday.

CBS News

Wisconsin Supreme Court adopts GOP-drawn legislative maps

The state court reversed itself after the U.S. Supreme Court said Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ maps were incorrectly adopted.

NBC News

A missile struck a humanitarian kitchen in Ukraine run by celebrity chef José Andrés, wounding four workers

The community kitchen based in Kharkiv, one of Ukraine’s largest cities, was run by the World Central Kitchen, a non-profit governmental organization set up by celebrity chef José Andrés. The Spanish-American Michelin-star chef, who owns at least a dozen restaurants in several locations around the world, created the charity more than a decade ago to provide meals to people in disaster and war zones. 

Insider

Exclusive: Zelensky says Ukraine won’t give up territory in the east to end war with Russia

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told CNN that Ukraine is not willing to give up territory in the eastern part of the country to end the war with Russia, and Ukraine’s military is prepared to fight Moscow’s military in the Donbas region in a battle he says could influence the course of the entire war.

CNN

Ukrainian governor says city of Mariupol ‘wiped off the face of the earth’

“The enemy may seize the land Mariupol used to stand on, but the city of Mariupol has been wiped off the face of the earth by the Russian Federation, by those who will never be able to restore it,” he said. “To restore Mariupol, that is something only Ukraine can do.”

The Hill

Eyeing green vote, Macron vows to exit oil, coal and gas

President Emmanuel Macron promised on Saturday to make France the “first great nation” to stop using oil, coal and gas as energy sources, in a pitch to young and green voters he fears could abstain in next week’s election runoff.

Reuters

Clashes erupt again near flashpoint Jerusalem holy site

Israeli police on Sunday entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem’s Old City to secure the way for Jewish visitors to the flashpoint holy site, fueling clashes that left 17 Palestinians wounded, according to Palestinian medical workers.

AP News

No 10 parties: PM’s lockdown fine constitutional crisis, says historian

Mr Johnson has since said it “did not occur” to him at the time that the “brief” gathering in the Cabinet Room to mark his birthday in June 2020 could be in contravention of Covid lockdown rules.

BBC

Who’s next? Lithuanians prepare for potential Russian aggression

Lithuanians are anxiously following events in Ukraine. Many are preparing for a worst case scenario and some are training to take up arms against Russia.

Deutsche Welle

Taiwan says China’s threats will only increase support for island

China’s military threats against Taiwan will only increase support for the island from the United States and other democracies, the foreign ministry said after China conducted drills nearby as U.S. lawmakers visited Taipei.

CNBC

Shanghai’s lockdown protests reveal tensions over zero-Covid

Online, many residents are not only questioning the way the outbreak is being dealt with, but also Beijing’s official narrative, which emphasises the collective good. Footage of localised protests have been uploaded to Chinese social media. They have been taken down by the censors, but have reappeared on western platforms such as Twitter and Facebook – both of which are blocked in China.

The Guardian

The Amazon Rainforest Can’t Survive 4 More Years Of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro

Far-right Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro has presided over record deforestation of the Amazon. As his reelection campaign begins, the fate of a critical global ecosystem is on the ballot.

Huffington Post

Unrest sparked by far-right demos continues in Sweden

Unrest broke out in southern Sweden late Saturday despite police moving a rally by an anti-Islam far-right group, which was planning to burn a Quran among other things, to a new location as a preventive measure.

AP News