THE PHONE CALL came out of the blue. A few days beforehand, Monica McGuirk had made the decision to take a break from one sport. This was at the start of 2018. An accomplished goalkeeper in the Women’s National League [WNL] at the time, she was stepping away from the top-flight of women’s soccer on these shores. Temporarily, anyway. “I just decided, ‘Look, I’m just giving soccer a break. I just maybe need to reset and look at it again in a year or two,’” she explains ahead of today’s mouth-watering Division 1B league meeting with Dublin, a repeat of last year’s All-Ireland final. “I hadn’t decided to focus on…

THE ALL-IRELAND CLUB camogie final is coming at a good time for Eoghan Rua forward, and Irish hockey international, Katie Mullan. Eoghan Rua’s Katie Mullan. If the season had been any longer, she might not have been able to keep committing to both teams. On the day she speaks to the media — one week out from her Derry club’s junior A decider against Clanmaurice of Kerry — she’s in the middle of a training camp with the Ireland hockey team. The Green Army has a hectic few months ahead as they prepare for the women’s hockey world cup in July. It’s a tight operation, no doubt, but Mullan is…

President Donald Trump seemed to have very different things to say about Covid-19 when he spoke in public — at press conferences and TV appearances — than when he spoke to journalist Bob Woodward one-on-one. In public comments, Trump took a tone that downplayed the coronavirus — making it seem like the virus would go away quickly, and emphasizing the need to reopen the country to try to get the economy going again. With Woodward, Trump warned about the risks of the virus in frank and scary terms, calling it “the plague,” acknowledging it’s deadlier than the flu, and saying it could spread by air. This was, apparently, deliberate. As…

President Donald Trump on Wednesday suggested that if you excluded blue states, America’s high number of Covid-19 deaths wouldn’t look bad compared to other countries. “If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at,” he said at a White House press conference. There are plenty of problems with this. It implies that the deaths of Americans who live in blue states don’t matter as much to Trump. It suggests that he doesn’t take any responsibility for deaths in the states that have a different political party in charge. And it’s generally absurd for Trump to act as…

Pauline Binam, a 30-year-old former detainee at Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, had been in custody for about two years when she started having irregular menstrual bleeding. She feared that confinement was taking its toll on her body. Binam, who came to the US from Cameroon when she was 2 years old, was being held at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center while awaiting deportation. According to her attorney, Van Huynh, she consulted with medical staff at the facility who told her that the condition could be treated by a minor surgical procedure in which a doctor dilates the cervix and scrapes off the lining of…

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. Several books on the Green New Deal have been released in the past year or two, but none boasts a more illustrious set of authors than Climate Crisis and the Green New Deal, out Tuesday from Robert Pollin and Noam Chomsky. Pollin teaches economics and co-directs the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has been writing about climate economics and green growth for years, as well as consulting with various nonprofits and governments (he advised Obama’s Energy Department for a few years) on policy and poverty…

As America, and even his own administration, woke up to the threat of Covid-19, President Donald Trump still didn’t seem to get it. Within weeks of suggesting that people social distance in mid-March, the president went on national TV to argue that the US could reopen by Easter Sunday in April. “You’ll have packed churches all over our country,” Trump said in March. “I think it’ll be a beautiful time.” The US wasn’t able to fully and safely reopen in April. It isn’t able to fully and safely reopen in September. The virus rages on, affecting every aspect of American life, from the economy to education to entertainment. More than…

Imagine a dog. She spends her entire life in an iron crate so small that she cannot turn around. Her tail has been cut off so that other dogs in cages jammed up against hers won’t chew it off in distress. When she has puppies, the males are castrated without painkillers. They are left close enough for her to nurse, but too far away for her to show them any affection. Fortunately, this dog is a fictional creation. We have laws preventing people from treating pets this way. Unfortunately, we are doing this to animals that are very similar to dogs. This is an all-too-real description of how we treat…

The Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, which was first identified in China in December, has had sweeping effects in the public health, business, and travel sectors, among others. And while the repercussions for the entertainment industry may seem to pale in comparison to the clear threat the virus poses to human life, the ripple effects do have implications for the people around the world who make a living producing and distributing movies, music, and more. The immense and lucrative Chinese film industry was hit almost immediately as movie theaters across the country were closed and major releases were delayed. Hollywood soon began to feel the effects, too, and as time passes, the…

During the peak of the recent wildfires, cities like Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, suffered some of the dirtiest air in the world, making breathing the air like smoking a pack of cigarettes in a day. The smoke from these fires has shrouded millions of people in dirty air, as you can see in this map of air quality from Esri, a geographic information software firm: But even after the flames are snuffed out, the harm from this dirty air may linger. Evidence is emerging showing that the health effects from wildfire smoke can last for a long time. How long? “Well, I guess unfortunately the short answer is potentially…