Новости за 16.11.2017

With the recent rollout of yet another set of anti-harassment initiatives, it looks like Twitter is beginning to take its reputation as a haven for abuse seriously. While slurs, death threats, and stalking have been rampant on its platform for almost a decade, as Buzzfeed’s Charlie Warzel reported last summer, the 2016 presidential election became a major watershed moment for Twitter’s public image. Suddenly, the company that once considered itself “the free speech wing of the free speech party”... Читать дальше...

From the moment he entered the presidential race in 2015, Donald Trump was rightly seen as a moral test of the GOP. Would Republicans disavow someone who compared immigrants to rapists, called for banning Muslims from the country, lied with abandon, refused to release his tax returns, encouraged violence against minorities, was accused of sexual misconduct, and was caught boasting that his celebrity allows him to commit sexual assault with impunity? Time and again, with only a few notable exceptions, the Republicans failed this test. Читать дальше...

Eleven years ago, President George W. Bush nominated a former energy industry attorney to oversee air pollution in America. Bill Wehrum was a controversial choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Air and Radiation, for he had been paid for years by the chemical and utility industries that he would now be responsible for regulating. Resistance in the Republican-controlled Senate eventually forced Bush to withdraw the nomination, and Wehrum has been providing legal defense... Читать дальше...

It wasn’t one of President Trump’s most controversial appointments. Far from it. Last week, when he nominated Jerome Powell to lead the Federal Reserve, many on the left breathed a sigh of relief. Powell is seen as a mostly qualified and moderate choice. Compare that to Ben Carson, Jeff Sessions, or Betsy DeVos.