Post Reports

Congress notched a major legislative win last week by passing gun control legislation. But will a recent Supreme Court ruling on a concealed-carry law blunt the victory?

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One day before Congress sent a landmark piece of gun legislation to President Biden’s desk, the Supreme Court issued a ruling on New York’s concealed-carry licenses that could weaken the law. Then, the morning of the bill’s passage, the Supreme Court announced another landmark decision, overturning of Roe v. Wade. 

Leigh Ann Caldwell, anchor for Washington Post Live and the co-author of the Early 202 politics newsletter, joins us to talk about how those two rulings affected Congress. And she explains what’s in the new gun control bill that was signed by President Biden last week, and how Republicans in the Senate came on board for a genuinely bipartisan effort.

On Tuesday in a surprise hearing, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson gave the most damning testimony to date on President Donald Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021.

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It didn’t take long to find out why the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol chose to hold a surprise hearing on Tuesday: Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson provided what quickly became clear was the most damning testimony to date on President Donald Trump’s actions on Jan. 6.

Reporter Aaron Blake says her testimony is particularly important when it comes to just how much Trump cultivated and even desired the insurrection itself — and whether, crucial from a legal standpoint, his effort to overturn the election was corrupt.

Hutchinson stitched together repeated warnings — some involving Trump himself, including that he was warned that his Jan. 6 rallygoers had weapons — about what might happen. Despite these warnings, aides struggled to talk Trump out of a plan to march to the Capitol. And despite warnings about weapons in the crowd the morning of Jan. 6, Trump still directed people toward the Capitol in his speech.

Hutchinson, a former aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, said Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani had advocated for a march to the Capitol after Trump’s speech on the Ellipse. She said this prompted Meadows to worry “things might get real, real bad on Jan. 6.”

Follow all The Post’s coverage of the Jan. 6 hearings here.

After Brooke Alexander learned she was pregnant last August, she and then-boyfriend Billy High initially wanted an abortion. Just 18 and 17, the pair had been dating only a month. But Brooke and Billy live in Texas, where a state-wide abortion ban prohibited the procedure after about six weeks of pregnancy. Brooke was too far along, and this past spring, she gave birth to twins. 

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade Friday, ending the constitutional right to an abortion, it set off a cascade of abortion bans and restrictions. That means that more Americans are now facing the same conundrum as Brooke and Billy. 

National political reporter Caroline Kitchener recently spent a week with Brooke and Billy, to see how parenthood had upended their lives in ways they couldn’t have predicted. As we navigate a world without the protections of Roe, they give us a preview of what could be in store for other people who could be pushed into parenthood. 

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Read Caroline Kitchener’s profile of Brooke and Billy and see pictures of them and their twins here. 

On Friday, the Supreme Court overturned the fundamental right to abortion established nearly 50 years ago in Roe v. Wade. Today, we take you from a clinic in Houston to protests and celebrations outside the court, and explain what this decision means.

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The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was the most anticipated of the term. But while this was a stunning reversal — it wasn’t surprising. A draft of the decision was leaked in May, indicating that the majority of justices were prepared to take this drastic step. 

The decision has sent shock waves throughout the country, and in at least a dozen red states, trigger laws are already in place to ban virtually all abortions within 30 days. Caroline Kitchener reports from a clinic in Texas, which is one of the states where the news this morning meant abortion providers had to halt operations immediately.

Meanwhile in D.C., a crowd gathered outside the Supreme Court to celebrate, or protest, in an outpouring of joy and rage. 

Robert Barnes, who covers the Supreme Court for The Post, explains what this moment means for decades of conservative organizing around restricting abortion, and what the justices’ opinions could tell us about what happens next.

Today on Post Reports, we follow two union fights at Amazon warehouses with very different outcomes, and what they can tell us about what it takes to go up against a trillion-dollar company.

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In early April, the labor movement saw a huge victory: Workers voted to unionize an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island. Our reporter Greg Jaffe went up to New York to meet Chris Smalls, the charismatic leader of a new kind of worker-led movement. Greg had one big question: Could this movement spread?

There would be another test just a few weeks later, at a second Staten Island facility across the street. Despite high-profile support, the workers would learn that replicating a truly grass-roots organizing effort would be even more challenging than they thought.

Colombia has elected its first leftist president. Unthinkable a decade ago, his victory signals a dramatic shift in the pandemic-wracked region. Plus, the powerful testimony from election workers whose lives were upended by Donald Trump’s false claims. 

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For the first time in its 200-year history, Colombia will have a leftist president: More than 50 percent of voters chose Gustavo Petro, a former guerilla fighter and mayor of Bogatá, to lead the country. 

Petro is one of several new left-wing leaders in Latin America, as voters kick out leaders who they feel failed them during the pandemic when inequality in the region soared. Now, Petro says he aims to work with a coalition of left-wing presidents to tackle climate change and issues affecting women and Indigenous people. We checked in with the Post’s Bogatá bureau chief, Samantha Schmidt, to talk about what this moment could mean for Latin America, and whether the United States could be taking a back seat in the region. 

And, yesterday’s hearings on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol included powerful testimony from former election workers in Georgia who described how their lives were derailed after Trump targeted them.

Today on Post Reports, the rogue Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life – and the dangers of artificial intelligence that impersonates humans. 

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Nitasha Tiku covers tech culture for The Post. Recently, she broke the story about the Google engineer who concluded his company’s chatbot generator “LaMDA” was sentient. But even as Google and outside experts disagree, this case raises questions about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence that closely mimics humans.

As the Supreme Court seems poised to strike down Roe v. Wade, we explore some of the fissures in the antiabortion movement.

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What does it mean to identify as “pro-life” in 2022?

When Karen Swallow Prior, a longtime antiabortion activist, first heard about the Supreme Court’s leaked draft opinion suggesting that Roe v. Wade would be overturned, she was thrilled. But she quickly realized her feelings on the “pro-life” movement had become a lot more complicated over the decades.

Religion reporter Michelle Boorstein and Post Reports producer Rennie Svirnovskiy visited with Prior as she grappled with what it means to be “pro-life.”

Fifty years ago today, five men broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, located in the posh Watergate building in D.C. Nobody knew it at the time, but the break-in was the first in a series of events that spiraled into the Watergate scandal, and eventually, the downfall of President Richard M. Nixon. 

For many people, their memories of this event have become encapsulated in a movie: the iconic 1976 film “All the President’s Men.” Based on the book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the film follows the pair as they dig into the break-in and crack open the scandal, tracing the source of the burglary back to the White House. 

Ann Hornaday, The Post’s film critic, calls the movie a metonym for Watergate — a stand-in for this entire period in history — “that from the moment it opened seemed to fuse seamlessly with private memory and collective myth.”

Today, guest host and media reporter Elahe Izadi talks with Ann about what it means for a film to function in this way. And, we hear a dramatization of a deleted scene from an early draft of the screenplay, as Ann reveals that the classic we know almost didn’t exist. 

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Film critic Ann Hornaday explains how “All the President’s Men” went from buddy flick to masterpiece in her Washington Post Magazine story.

On Wednesday, independent advisers to the Food and Drug Administration recommended the agency authorize coronavirus vaccines for children under 5. What this move means for families and how it will affect where we are in the pandemic.

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It’s finally happening: The Food and Drug Administration  seems poised to sign off on coronavirus vaccines for children younger than 5 years old. Parents are celebrating the news after waiting for approval for almost a year and a half. But why did it take so much longer for this, while adults have already had vaccines for over a year? And what does this development mean for our fight against the pandemic?

Anita Patel, a critical care pediatrician at Children’s National Hospital in D.C., on why this vaccine was so delayed and how they’re developed for children, and Patel gives advice for parents who might be concerned about the vaccine.