Новости за 05.12.2017

Making his first presidential visit to Utah on Monday, Donald Trump went out of his way to praise the state’s octogenarian senior senator, Orrin Hatch. “You are a true fighter, Orrin,” Trump said before a crowd at the state capitol in Salt Lake City. “You meet fighters and you meet people you thought were fighters but they’re not so good at fighting. He’s a fighter. We hope you will continue to serve your state and your country in the Senate for a very long time to come.”

“Bitcoin is the World’s Hottest Currency, but No One’s Using It,” the Wall Street Journal proclaimed on Saturday. The day prior, the digital currency had surged past $10,000 per coin—and then past $11,000, too. But despite Bitcoin’s value, the paper explained, brick and mortar stores have been slow to accept it as a method of payment. Thus, some observers are becoming pessimistic about whether this tech-hipster cryptocurrency, which everyone has heard of but most people don’t truly understand, will ever replace traditional currency. Читать дальше...

From the outside, the Louvre Abu Dhabi announces grand ambitions. Jean Nouvel’s design for the museum is intricately otherworldly. Its domed roof, crisscrossed with a geometric pattern, hovers above the 55 rooms that house the art. Built at the water’s edge, the museum seems to float on the sea like a saucer that has just landed. Inside, the collections tell a global history of art, assembling paintings, sculptures, and artifacts from all over the world, and arranging them around themes like early man or the rise of world religions. Читать дальше...

Liberals are rightly despairing after the Senate last week passed a sweeping rewrite of the tax code. The rushed bill included some huge drafting errors, so a conference committee with the House will have to iron out the kinks, with final votes in each chamber providing a final opportunity for resistance. But House and Senate Republicans share the same agenda: shovel handouts to aristocrats and owners of capital and large corporations, while punishing virtually everyone else. Chances are, they’ll... Читать дальше...

Amid a stream of revelations, arrests, and plea bargains from Robert Mueller’s investigation of Donald Trump campaign’s connections with Russia, liberals are becoming giddy at the prospect of impeaching the president. “Can Democrats finally start talking about impeachment, Nancy Pelosi?” Errol Louis asked in a column for CNN, referring to the House minority leader. On The View, Joy Behar bubbled with delight when she was handed the news, now revealed to be inaccurate, that former National Security... Читать дальше...

It was Donald Trump’s “Mission Accomplished” moment. Trump had been elected on the back of a right-wing populist surge, and he arrived at the Carrier plant on November 30, 2016, to declare victory for the 1,100 workers at the Indianapolis furnace manufacturer. Their jobs would not be going to Mexico, he told them. They were saved.

The sickening spectacle of the Senate, at nearly 2:00 am Saturday morning, passing a bill on essentially party lines, the full contents of which almost none of them knew, its assumptions about how much it would increase the U.S. debt based on sheer fantasy, its cynical abandonment of Republicans’ supposed concern about deficits, its dimly understood sweeping policy implications, its likely trove of potential scandals in the form of special provisions for particular interests or individuals, represented the nadir of the legislative process. Читать дальше...