Новости за 14.07.2017

All Emin Agalarov ever wanted was fame. Like most pop stars, he sought the largest limelight he could find—in Moscow and St. Petersburg, at the Miss Universe pageant, as a participant in the gaudy spectacle of EuroVision. A sort of Russian Robin Thicke, he surrounded himself with swimsuit models, established a faux-Rat Pack, and even put together a hirsute alter ego. All of it, all of his costumes and crooning, in pursuit of an international audience.

Donald Trump, it appears, has never met an international agreement he wasn’t prepared to trash. On June 1, the president stepped to the podium in the Rose Garden and announced his decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. This followed on the heels of his reluctance to reaffirm America’s commitment to defend its NATO allies, an obligation dating back seven decades, and his decision to walk away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the largest multilateral trade deal in a generation. The... Читать дальше...

A decommissioned nuclear bunker “deep inside a granite mountain” in Switzerland has been put up for sale, according to the Financial Times. Fully hardened against an electromagnetic pulse, the 15,000-square-foot military facility sleeps 1,500 people and features “vehicular tunnels, reservoirs and ‘limitless’ digital bandwidth”—and though the price is secret, the amount is surely obscene. “Your casual nuclear bunker enthusiast,” Judith Evans writes, “need not apply: potential purchasers must demonstrate... Читать дальше...

The closest President Barack Obama came to fully breaking faith with progressives was in 2011, when he and then-House Speaker John Boehner inked a plan to cut trillions of dollars in Medicare and Social Security spending in exchange for a relatively trivial tax increase on wealthy Americans. Boehner ultimately scuttled the deal when he realized his fanatical GOP conference would likely depose him over it, and Obama ended up pocketing his tax increases for free after winning re-election. 

People who are not from Los Angeles often treat the city the way they might treat an attractive woman: from far away they gawk at pictures of her, and given the opportunity to touch they’re eager to sit in her sunshine, or get a taste of the pert California produce. Either way, they call her stupid. They want Los Angeles to pay a price for being so glamorous, and so they imagine it as treacherously empty-headed and unsettled, all of those earthquakes just proof that the city is a place where nothing... Читать дальше...