Новости за 04.01.2017

Since Rodrigo Duterte was elected president of the Philippines last June, he has waged a brutal crackdown on drug dealers and addicts. Nearly 4,000 people have been killed by government forces, and Duterte has invoked the Holocaust to describe the scope of his ambition. “Hitler massacred three million Jews,” he declared in September. “Now there is three million drug addicts. There are. I’d be happy to slaughter them.”

Diversity is under siege in Donald Trump’s America. The nation’s first black president is being replaced by a white nationalist. Trump’s proposed cabinet has only one African American member, a neurosurgeon awkwardly shoehorned into the Housing and Urban Development slot. Education Secretary John King, who has championed efforts to increase socioeconomic and racial diversity in schooling is giving way to Betsy DeVos, who has backed private school vouchers, which have increased segregation in country after country where they’ve been tried. Читать дальше...

There’s nothing more consistent in national politics than the clockwork-like inconsistency of Republican budget deficit alarmism: They scream about the deficit when a Democrat occupies the White House, and go quiet when a Republican does.

Donald Trump is often described as an unconventional politician, but there is at least one surprising way he’s following in the footsteps of his most recent predecessors. Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama began their presidencies with high hopes of improving U.S.-Russian relations. At a 2001 summit in Slovenia, Bush met with Vladimir Putin and famously said, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him very straightforward and trustworthy—I was able to get a sense of his soul.” In 2009 in Geneva... Читать дальше...

John Berger died on Monday, a few weeks after turning 90. Our grief has been poured out widely, in proportion to his great generosity. Berger’s career was simply so much. It spanned the second half of the long twentieth century and at least six different jobs (art historian, novelist, playwright, critic, teacher, painter). He began teaching painting in 1948, and published his last book of essays, Confabulations, only last year.